Was there any logic, or perhaps some hidden strategy, behind the PLO’s maneuvers at the UN Security Council last week? If there was, it escaped those of us whose business it is to follow the news and make sense of it.
With prospects for a two-state solution having grown ever so dim, and with Israel steadily expanding its colonies in occupied land, President Mahmud Abbas, whose credibility has plummeted considerably among his people in recent years, had opted to force a resolution at the Security Council that would have set a deadline for establishing a Palestinian state and the withdrawal of Israel’s occupation forces from the West Bank by 2017.
At face value, that would not have been a bad move. The colonization of the West Bank by Israel has progressed steadily, with no one even slapping its wrist for violating every tenet of the Geneva Conventions in this regard, and the dream of Palestinian independence has by the day receded into oblivion. Something had to give. Some drastic, even desperate, step had to be taken. But the step the Palestinians took was no step: They elected to submit a resolution before the international body that they knew beforehand would at best be vetoed by the US and, at worst, not pick up the required nine votes needed to pass in the 15-member Security Council. As it turned out, with help from Australia’s “no” vote, it was the latter, a devastating blow to Palestinians.
So what propelled Abbas to seek a confrontation at the UN that he and his cohorts must have known in advance they would lose? Search me.
But the following day, Abbas moved swiftly to join the International Criminal Court, a venue through which the Palestinians could bring charges against Israeli war criminals — there are a lot of these folks buzzing around — and against Israel’s brazen colonization project in the national territory of the people of Palestine. To justify this move, and rebut US accusations that it was a “provocation,” Abbas explained: “There is aggression practiced against our land and our country, and the Security Council let us down — where shall we go?”
Let’s be blunt. It was not the Security Council that let us down — given the nature of the beast, either a US veto or lack of the requisite majority for passage was expected there — but the Palestinian Authority itself. It is time for this institution to unsaddle itself of its responsibilities, lift anchor and sail away to a safe port somewhere in exile from whence, again reintegrated into the PLO, it can serve its people freely.
For the last 20 years or so, the US and Israel — the former using its leverage as a major international donor to the group and the latter its leverage as a conduit for Palestine’s tax revenue — have looked to PA functionaries as the folks to go to for outsourcing their dirty work, from clamping down on political dissent to suppressing free speech and assembly.
The Palestinians, both at home and in exile, have become frustrated with meaningless “peace negotiations” that always ended in failure, while Israel’s creeping annexation of their land went on unimpeded. I say let the people in occupied Palestine have their say. Let them be the only determining force in their political destiny, freely defining it and living it, while Palestinian leaders, equally freely, guided them from exile, unhampered by fear that the US Congress would cut off their subsidies. And we’ll take it from there. The status quo is untenable.
The last time — perhaps the only time in their modern history — Palestinians were left to their own devices; they showed incredible elan, a teleological grasp of history and its workings. That was evident in their Intifada in late 1987.
As I wrote a decade later in an academic journal, reflecting on the ethos of those events, the Intifada came about as a consequence of the repeated failure of the PLO to address the needs of the people it was leading. My reflections, written almost 20 years ago, remain the same. The collapse of national hope then, as now, had left a reservoir of turbulent energy, a corrosive sense of disenfranchisement, a feeling that one’s political destiny had gone absurdly awry, and that people were thus on their own. History making was now to be everyman’s milieu. By taking your life into your own hands, hampered by no laws other than those that govern the inward preoccupations of your soul, you live through a dizzying sense of total possibility, a passionate adventure of spirit. No wonder then that the word Intifada became naturalized by every major language in the world.
People are not dumb. The mass sentiment of any human community has a way about it, always, of coalescing into a whole — unless it is held back by a cajoling or a repressive leadership afraid of its own shadow, hanging out in Ramallah, waiting for Godot.
What does the PA have to gain by clinging on to power in the occupied territories? What do the Palestinians lose by following the advice of a graffiti writer; I read on the wall during a visit I took in the West Bank in 1988, “Burn the ground under the feet of the occupier?” Never mind that Palestinians barely possess a wet match, but when you’ve got nothing, you’ve got nothing to lose.
