At a tie when the West — along with the United States, where a Republican frontrunner is causing a storm by provocatively calling for a ban on all Muslims entering the country — is distracted by acts of terror by Daesh “sympathizers,” something of great import is passing largely unnoticed: The potential collapse of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA).
If the collapse comes to pass, US Secretary of State John Kerry warned in a speech at the Brookings Institution in Washington last week, that collapse “would force Israel to assume all governance in the West Bank and accept a one-state solution that would compromise Israel’s future as a Jewish state.”
Condemning calls from Israeli politicians to let the PNA wither away and die, he added that without a two-state solution Israel would be drawn into an unsustainable situation of “perpetual occupation,” a situation clearly rejected not only by the Palestinians but by “most, if not all, the international community.”
Then he went on to equally condemn the fact that Israel continues to expand its colonies in occupied lands while denying Palestinians construction permit to build on their own. “We understand there was only one Palestinian building permit for all of Area C for all of last year.” Area C, it will be recalled by those who followed the odious and now defunct Oslo Accord, comprises 60 percent of West Bank lands, where 300,000 Palestinians live and is now under the full and exclusive control of the Israeli entity, where its functionaries act as both lord and landlord.
Area A, under PNA control, comprises a mere 18 percent and includes all of the Palestinian cities and most of the population centers, while Area B comprises 22 percent and encompasses the large rural areas where Israel retains security control and the PNA civil control. No, the situation is not, most decidedly not, sustainable. It has gone on for too long. And the PNA, with little authority to exercise, has been unable to do anything about it.
There was a time, in recent weeks, when the US considered allowing the UN Security Council to pass a resolution outlining the terms of a potential solution, but the administration retrenched at the last minute since that would have provoked a confrontation with pro-Israeli members of Congress (beholden to AIPAC), which President Obama has opted to avoid following the nasty battle he had waged recently over the Iran nuclear deal.
It is not just Kerry, but also everybody and his uncle, who is warning us about the imminent and seemingly inevitable collapse of the PNA, including Democratic presidential aspirant Hillary Clinton who, also in a speech last week, chose to resort to hyperbole by claiming that the alternative to (President Mahmoud) Abbas could be the black flag of Daesh.” Far-fetched? Unquestionably. But when a group that represents you shows itself, sadly, to be irrelevant, ineffective or unresponsive to your aspirations, it loses its footing.
When your hopes are dashed, your leaders are helpless and your future is bleak, anything can happen. What is clear, however, is this: The PNA, albeit indirectly, has empowered the occupation by clamping down on the Palestinian people’s right to resist those who have used the rule of the gun to lord it over them for close to half a century. Though the PNA has done its job all these years, maintaining calm in the territories since 1993 — by silencing dissenting voices when they were raised and hitting uppity heads when they were lifted — it got nothing in return to show its people, nothing to alleviate the grind that the community it represents suffers daily.
At Brooking that night while delivering his speech, Kerry told it like it is, explaining that “Palestinian hopes are being dashed by what they see everyday.” And he did not need to elaborate on what these long tormented people were seeing “everyday” — the checkpoints, the curfews, the house demolitions, the land grabs and, well, the choke hold that an occupier traditionally has around his victim’s neck. He also told his audience, almost in a narrative style, that he had earlier had a meeting with President Abbas in Ramallah, where the Palestinian leader “spoke more despairingly, my friends, than I have ever heard him, about the sense of hopelessness that the Palestinian people feel.”
It is time, I say, that these very people are left to determine the direction of their own history, their own political road map and their own approach to how they will confront their enemy — and to do it their own way.
The Palestinians have to confront, and break, the law that their brutal occupiers have imposed on them, without fear of retribution at the hands of their leaders.
Perhaps it is time the PNA lifted anchor and sailed away, and stopped helping maintain a status quo in occupied Palestine that is becoming increasingly unsustainable with the passing of every day.
