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06 February 2011 By
Jonathan Cook With the 18-year-long
Middle East peace
process finally pronounced dead, is the
Palestinian Authority finished too? That is the question being asked
by Palestinians in the wake of a week of damaging
revelations that Palestinian negotiators secretly made
major concessions to
Israel in talks on
Jerusalem,
refugees and borders. The PA -- the Palestinians'
government-in-the-making, led by
Mahmoud Abbas
-- was already in crisis before the disclosure of
official Palestinian documents by
Al Jazeera television
last week. Now, said George Giacaman, the
head of the Ramallah-based research centre Muwatin,
which advocates greater Palestinian democracy, the
PA's "back is to the wall". The question of the PA's
survival, and the future direction of Palestinian
politics, has gained added urgency as the wider
Middle East
is rocked by unrest, from Tunisia to
Yemen.
Mahdi
Abdul Hadi, the director of the
Jerusalem think-tank Passia, said the Palestinians
were "at a crossroads". Although the streets had
remained largely quiet until now, he said it was only
a matter of time before Palestinians started to make
clear their revulsion at their leadership. "It is now much clearer to
Palestinians that they are living in a prison and that
the PA leaders are there only to negotiate the terms
of our imprisonment," he said. He, like many other Palestinian
analysts, declared the negotiations for a
two-state solution
over. That sentiment appears to be
shared by a majority of Palestinians. A survey in
December, before the leak of 1,600 official documents,
by the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey
Research showed that 71 per cent of Palestinians
believed they would not have a state within five
years. The percentage is likely to have risen
sharply. In a sign of the mounting panic
in Ramallah, Palestinian leaders frantically launched
a rearguard action last week. Initially, they claimed
the documents were fabricated, and suggested that
Al Jazeera
was siding with Mr Abbas's political rivals, the
Islamic party
Hamas, to bring down the PA. But several officials have
confirmed the papers' authenticity, and the PA has
redirected its main attention to discovering who was
behind the leak. Mr Abdul Hadi said Palestinians
would increasingly draw the conclusion that their
intended future was living in "one binational state
under an apartheid regime" administered by Israel. "At the moment Abbas has his
followers out on the streets but the
Palestinian people
are awakening to the reality of their situation," he
said. Samir Awad, a politics professor
at
Birzeit University,
near
Ramallah,
agreed that Israel was imposing a de facto one-state
solution. "The fight for national independence is over
and, if it is to survive, the PA must quickly reinvent
its role. Palestinians are now in for the long haul: a
struggle for their civil and political rights in a
single state," he said. Asad Ghanem, a politics professor
at
Haifa
University in Israel and an expert on Palestinian
politics, warned, however, that, as the PA faltered,
Israel and the US would intensify their efforts to
strengthen the authority's security forces and its
repressive role. With politics stifled inside the
occupied territories,
said Mr Ghanem, it was crucial that outside
Palestinian leaders step in to redefine the
Palestinian national
movement, including Palestinians
such as himself who live inside Israel and groups in
the diaspora. Mr Giacaman said the PA had long
ago outlived its official purpose. It was created by the
Oslo accords
as a temporary administration in the transition to
Palestinian statehood, proposed as a five-year period
during which Israel was supposed to withdraw from the
West Bank and Gaza
in stages. Since the
Camp David negotiations
ended in deadlock in 2000, the PA has clung to power,
with limited control over less than 40 per cent of the
West Bank
as Israel has continued to build settlements in the
area under its rule. Mr Abbas has threatened on
several occasions to dissolve the PA, most recently in
December, when he warned: "I cannot accept to remain
the president of an authority that doesn't exist." But Mr Giacaman said such threats
were hollow, designed to put pressure on Israel to
return to negotiations out of fear that it would
otherwise have to take on the heavy financial burden
of direct military reoccupation. The PA, however, was in much
deeper trouble after the leaking of the documents, Mr
Giacaman said. "Without a peace process, it needs to
justify its continuing existence." The most likely immediate focus,
he said, was intensifying international action through
the United Nations, by pushing for a resolution at the
Security Council against the settlements. He also thought the PA would
consider changing its position and actively
championing the
Goldstone
Report, the findings of a UN commission that suggest
Israel committed
war crimes
during its attack on
Gaza
in late 2008 and early 2009. One of the leaked papers revealed
that Mr Abbas had agreed under US pressure to shelve
the report rather than take it to the UN General
Assembly. "The problem for the PA is that
it needs to generate diplomatic crises to get the
international community to intervene. But this will
put it in confrontation with Israel and the United
States. Israel can always threaten to cut the $60
million taxes it transfers every month to the PA," Mr
Giacaman said. The PA's threat to unilaterally
declare statehood and then seek recognition at the UN,
he added, would not change the reality on the ground.
"Even if most countries recognise the state, it will
still be a state under occupation," Mr Giacaman said. In the meantime, the diplomatic
vacuum was likely to be filled by Israel. It could
promote a plan similar to the one being advanced by
Avigdor Lieberman,
the far-right foreign minister, to recognise a
Palestinian state in temporary borders. Or it could
continue its separation policies, withdrawing from
more of the West Bank and encouraging the Palestinians
to take over what was left behind. Mr Awad said the collapse of the
PA held out many dangers for the Palestinians. One was
the possibility of a convulsive civil war between the
Fatah party of Mr Abbas and Hamas. Another, he said,
was the "Aghanistanisation" of the occupied
territories, as tribal warlords took limited control
of the territorial enclaves Israel was not interested
in. Jonathan Cook is a writer and
journalist based in
Nazareth, Israel. His latest
books are "Israel and the Clash of Civilisations:
Iraq,
Iran
and the Plan to Remake the Middle East" (Pluto
Press) and "Disappearing
Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair" (Zed
Books). His website is
www.jkcook.net. A version of this article
originally appeared in The National (www.thenational.ae),
published in Abu Dhabi. |
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