If you’re interested in the Middle East and aren’t yet reading Foreign Policy’s Middle East Channel, this article is a good place to start.

In particular, Mark Perry — the article’s author — highlights the seeming weakness of Mahmoud Abbas’ grasp on power in the Palestinian Authority (as evidenced by a crackdown on free speech by those who oppose him). To make his point, Perry uses the violent disruption by non-uniformed officers of the Palestinian General Intelligence Service of an August 25 meeting in Ramallah that was meant to discuss and protest Abbas’ decision to participate in direct peace talks:

While the disruption of the Ramallah meeting remained virtually unmentioned in the American media, its impact reverberated through Palestinian society, sparking broad-based outrage with Mahmoud Abbas and the security and intelligence services. “People lived in fear here before the incident,” a Palestinian journalist says, “but after August 25 it’s much worse. If Abu Mazen’s goal was to destroy freedom of speech, he accomplished it.” The Ramallah confrontation was only the most recent in a series of incidents aimed at circumscribing dissent — though it stands as undoubtedly the worst.

But, of course, the crackdown of this particular meeting also demonstrates the growing strength of the non-Hamas opposition to Abbas and the impact on the current peace initiative of that growing opposition:

The cumulative political impact of the breakup of the Aug. 25 Ramallah meeting — and the killing of the Hebron settlers just six days later — cannot be dismissed. While the actions of Mahmoud Abbas’s security services were intended to block the emergence of a united non-Hamas opposition to his rule, the two incidents have forged an unprecedented unity among disparate (and often feuding) political currents. The emerging consensus among the groups (the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Palestine Peoples Party, the Palestinian National Initiative and a welter of NGO representatives, leaders of civil institutions, businessmen and respected independent voices), poses a challenge not simply to Mahmoud Abbas, but to the U.S. strategy for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

At bottom, what Perry describes is one of the major problems facing the on-going Israeli/Palestinian peace process: Palestinians do not speak at the bargaining table with a single voice that can assure the Israelis that any set of negotiations will yield a just and lasting peace. Nor do they all necessarily have any real desire to do so.