Things are sounding rough for the Palestinian Fatah party right now- where in most political parties there is furious competition and debate over who should be the leader and, if in a democratic system, who should be the candidate for president, current Palestinian President Abbas has ignited the opposite reaction by saying that he will not seek re-election after his term ends at the end of this year. No one else in the party is stepping up to say that they want to run for the open spot on the ticket. For now it seems like the party basically just doesn’t believe Abbas that he will not run again.

This has the potential to be a very influential and problematic decision in the ongoing Middle East Peace talks- for one, Abbas has been an ally for the United States around brokering a peace deal between all of the parties that have power in the Palestinian-Israeli regional issues. Abbas represents one part of the Palestinian power structure, where the political branch of the Hamas party currently runs the Gaza Strip.

Negotiations are difficult and have come to a standstill lately, with Obama’s attempts at brokering a peace deal seeming to make little headway. Much of the current controversy swirls around Israeli construction of settlements in the West Bank. Palestinians, notably President Abbas, have been insistent that before talks move forward for any kind of peace deal that Israel halt all new settlement building. Israel says that they are merely expanding to accommodate the expanding population and that the new settlements are completely necessary.

Obama, though he originally supported that move, has not been as insistent that Israel actually stop. He’s been hedging in the middle, and the Palestinians are upset.

It’s interesting to note that the American conservative media has been assailing Obama with claims that he is pro-Palestinian, while Palestinian leadership is upset with him and one of Abbas’ complaints is that he is siding with Israel. As if it weren’t difficult enough to broker a peace deal, now all sides seem to be unsure of where the peace deal broker’s intentions and loyalties are. Or perhaps it is all in the media, that this is pretty much how the peace negotiations have always gone, and we are just seeing more of the rifts and ruptured seams than we have in the past. It may even be a political hardball move by Abbas to try and get his point across to Washington that he will have no more of their hedging. Whatever it is, Obama’s Nobel is looking more and more like a symbolic gesture than an earned one.

The most telling quote I found, though, speaks volumes about how the peace process operates. Ori Nir of Americans for Peace Now expounds:

"President Abbas' announcement today underscores that the peace process has only two gears -- forward and reverse. There is no neutral. Absent progress, it is inevitable that moderates like President Abbas will lose heart."

Absent progress, people lose heart. And there certainly seems to be no neutral- and right now, there seems to be only reverse.