Fatah leader mulls complementary strategies to resist Israel

Hawkish strongman Mahmoud Aloul, who was elected as vice chairman of Palestinian ruling Fatah Party, stresses popular resistance and diplomatic endeavor as two complementary strategies to pressure Israel.

"The more the Israeli aggressions, pressures and the crimes of the occupation, the more there will be resistance in confronting it," the 67-year-old Fatah strongman said.

On the relations between popular resistance and international diplomacy, Aloul said they are complementary.

"It is not a duality, it should be viewed as two complementary things, as it is also a form of resistance in political and diplomatic field when you go to UN agencies, the Security Council or the International Criminal Court," he said.

He said he is deeply affected by the power of the people in raising awareness and pushing for more demonstrations.

After years in exile, Aloul returned to Palestine against Israel's objection in the wake of the Oslo Accords signed between the Palestine Liberation Organization and Israel in 1993.

The man's elder son was shot by Israeli forces during a demonstration in the second intifada in Sept. 2000, when he served as the governor of northern West Bank city Nablus.

Following the death of his son, Aloul launched local networks of rehabilitation of destroyed buildings and providing aid to families of victims during confrontations between Palestinians and Israeli forces.

Aloul joined Fatah movement in the 1960s and was imprisoned by Israel in 1968 for three years, and then he was exiled to Jordan.

He had a significant role in financial and military areas during the first Palestinian popular intifada (1987-1993) as an aide to Fatah party's then top military leader Jihad Al-Wazir.

In 2007, he was appointed as Minister of Labor during the short lived national unity government formed by the Islamic Hamas movement, shortly before the internal rift took a deeper cut.

Speaking about international efforts to resume peace talks, Aloul criticized U.S. President Donald Trump for not offering concrete vision for peace and derailing the peace proposals by former U.S. leaders.

Trump's statement last week in a joint press conference with visiting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu aroused outcry among Palestinians.

"I'm looking at two states and one state, and I like the one both parties like," he told reporters.

The statement was interpreted as United States' intention to drop the two-state solution, a long-standing bedrock of the Middle East policy embraced by successive U.S. administrations and the international community.

"We are surely very cautious about anything proposed, because sometimes they refer to one state with very different interpretations, not one state where people live in a democracy with equal rights for all, but a state with two systems that would lead to apartheid," warned Aloul.

"The only option is the two states, and now we are not questioning our faith in the two-state solution, but whether it is possible or not due to the humongous obstacles Netanyahu has put in its way," he added.

Aoul, however, also stressed that the two states is actually not the ceiling of what the Palestinians demand.

The ultimate goal the Palestinians are seeking "is independence and liberty for the people, sovereignty for the people, achieving by establishing a Palestinian state on the borders of 1967, with East Jerusalem as its capital," he noted. Endit