How a French-Saudi Scheme Tricked Palestinian Abbas into Fatally Provoking Iran

By a single covert meeting with Tehran’s arch-enemy, the Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas aka Abu Mazen put himself at the top of Iran’s list of targets for removal.
That meeting took place in Paris on July 30 with President-elect Mrs. Maryam Rajavi of the “Iranian Resistance Movement” – Mojahedin Khalq, which the Iranian Islamic Republic regards as its most dangerous adversary.
DEBKA Weekly’s intelligence sources, which discovered this extraordinary get-together, also disclose that Saudi Arabia and French President Francois Hollande were behind it. The former used it as a maneuver to isolate Shiite Tehran from yet another Sunni Arab entity; the latter’s motivation was more complicated.
Hollande is keen to get his Palestinian-Israeli peace initiative going. He hoped to overcome Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s firm objections by proving that the Palestinian leader was capable of bold steps, even one that got him in hot water in Tehran and threatened thereby to tip his Fatah party into a violent showdown with its rivals, the Palestinian extremist Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
The French president also hoped to convince the Obama administration that his initiative was on the right track because Abbas was now amenable to a peace accommodation with Israel for the West Bank and forego the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, for the time being.
This is far from true, as US Secretary of State John Kerry discovered when he met the Palestinian leader in Paris this week.
Tehran regards Mojahedin Khalq as a terrorist organization and for ten years has hurled against it every possible allegation, including acting as the Israeli Mossad’s operational arm for such actions as assassinating a series of senior Iranian nuclear scientists and sabotaging nuclear and ballistic missile programs.
In 2013, a Mojahedin Khalq officer was first to break the news to Washington of the underground nuclear site Iran had established clandestinely at Fordo, not far from the Qom religious center.
When she met Abbas, Maryam Rajavi accused Iran of being the principal fomenter of sectarian discord, fundamentalism and terrorism across the Middle East, in particular in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and Palestine.
Abbas did indeed stick his neck out by seeing her; up until then, no head of state, minister or high official in the world had risked being caught in a meeting with a high-up of the Iranian resistance group, least of all its leader.
Tehran’s reaction was predictably harsh.
“Abbas’s record and the approaches he has adopted clearly prove that he is a US hireling,” Iranians officials said on Aug 1. “The documents attesting to his collaboration with the US were discovered in the Spy Nest-the US embassy in Tehran, from which it was obvious that he is a CIA agent. The people will see that Mahmoud Abbas has secret links with terrorist groups and Israelis now that he has been exposed.”
After the rhetoric, real punishment is reported by our Iranian sources to have been the subject of hectic discussions in Tehran.
Its initial reaction was to pump large sums of money to Gaza City as funding for stepped-up operations against Abbas and his Fatah party. Next, Iran is looking into reviving weapons shipments to Gaza and fully activating al-Sabirin, the new pro-Iranian terror organization that Hizballah officers established in the Gaza Strip.
Abbas had earlier unknowingly played into his enemy’s hands by a recent call for municipal elections in the Palestinian-ruled towns of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Hamas announced it would participate. Tehran may now use this opening to pour cash into the Hamas campaign for defeating Abbas’ candidates and getting Hamas and Islamic Jihad officers installed in Palestinian towns as municipal potentates.
This takeover would pose a grave challenge to the US and Israel and their policies of maintaining a manageable measure of stability in the Palestinian regions of the West Bank.