Wealth & Money Quote by Mahmoud Abbas

Abbas is doing something more strategic than recounting events: he is assigning legal authorship. By repeating "by a unilateral action", he frames Israeli control not as a messy consequence of failed talks or security emergencies, but as a deliberate, one-sided reassertion of power. The phrase works like a drumbeat. It denies the listener the usual escape hatches - mutual blame, symmetrical responsibility, the comforting fiction of an even match.

The context is the post-Oslo architecture of partial Palestinian self-rule, which was supposed to make occupation recede into the background of a transition. Abbas punctures that storyline. "Reoccupied" and "reestablished" are verbs that insist the occupation is not a static historical condition but a renewed, chosen policy, updated for a new era.

Then he lands on the most intimate register of sovereignty: who gets to live where. The line about determining whether a Palestinian "has the right to reside" turns territorial control into administrative control over the body - the permit regime, residency revocations, movement restrictions, the everyday bureaucracy that decides whether family life and civic belonging are possible. Subtext: a state is not just flags and borders; it is the power to make residency ordinary rather than conditional.

It is also a diplomatic message aimed outward. Abbas speaks in the language of rights and jurisdiction rather than revenge, inviting international actors to treat occupation as an ongoing, attributable act - not an unfortunate stalemate - and therefore something that can be pressured, sanctioned, or adjudicated.