Eli Lake, Columnist

Palestinian President Shows the World Who He Really Is

That wild speech is indeed a product of recent events. But it also fits a telling pattern.

January 16, 2018 at 5:50 PM UTC

Eli Lake is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering national security and foreign policy. He was the senior national security correspondent for the Daily Beast and covered national security and intelligence for the Washington Times, the New York Sun and UPI.

1516124286_GettyImages-850215216 — Photographer: Kevin Hagen/Getty Images

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There are two ways to understand the two-and-a-half hour rant Sunday from the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, in which he called for discarding past agreements with Israel.

The first way is straightforward: He means it. As Maya Angelou famously said, "when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time." In the case of Abbas, he has been showing us who he is for a while now.