Sad state of a stateless people

The decision by the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, 19 years ago this month, to send to Oslo a handful of men not in the least versed in the intricacies of international law, in order to sign, off the cuff, a draft agreement with a bunch of wily Israeli negotiators who knew how to hoodwink the unwary, carried a melancholy lesson for us all: You sow the wind, and you harvest the whirlwind. The French, however, have a more telling proverb: Si l’on est un lapin, on n’invite pas un renard a diner (if one is a rabbit, one does not invite a fox over for dinner).
The long and short of it is that there were so many loopholes in the agreement (later formalized on the White House Lawn on Sept. 1, 1993) that Israel was able to continue its occupation practices without letup, albeit under a different guise.
Almost two decades later, the Palestinian Authority is in deep trouble, having gained for the people it represents neither statehood nor freedom. As you read this today, Sunday, donor nations will be meeting at the UN to consider the current financial disarray of the aid-dependent Palestinian Authority. On their minds will be not only its stability but its survival as well.
Since 2004, Mahmoud Abbas, who succeeded Yasser Arafat as president and who, with help from his US-trained security forces, has ensured that the territories — at least in the West Bank — remained calm, in time built the institutions and launched the sound fiscal policies needed for running a state. But no state materialized. Worse than that, the PA is now effectively insolvent. Its insolvent status is so dire that it has been unable to meet payroll obligations to its employees, of whom there are 180,000. Considering these employees’ families, who are dependent on PA salaries to survive, we are talking about a quarter of the population in the territories. Unemployment in the West Bank stands at 19 percent. In Gaza, 40 percent of the residents live off international charity, or under the subsistence level.
Was it mismanagement, corruption, inefficiency, perhaps a combination of all three that brought about this sorry state of affairs? At first blush, this would have been one’s first reaction. But in reality it is a web of suffocating restrictions Israel has imposed on the Palestinians all these years that is to blame, restrictions that the Zionist entity claims are its right to impose by virtue of several annexes in the Oslo Agreement.
And these restrictions are indeed draconian. Palestinians control a mere 39 percent of the West Bank — itself a mere 18 percent of historic Palestine — while the rest of the territory, known as Area C, representing 61 percent, is where Israeli colonies are located, and where you find most of the Palestinian people’s water resources, best farmland and land reserves. All Palestinian initiatives are subject to Israeli approval. That approval, however, is rarely given.
Take, if you wish, the Jordan Valley, the fertile strip of land along the Jordan River in Area C. The Valley holds great potential for Palestinians in agricultural and agro-industry projects, yet it is off limits to them. Israeli leaders insist that that strip of Palestinian land, in any future statehood agreement, must remain under Zionist control for “strategic reasons.” Today, large swaths of territory there are either designated “military zones” or kept for the exclusive use of Zionist settlers ensconced in several colonies across the Valley.
Last Wednesday, ahead of the donors’ UN meeting, Mariam Sherman, the World Bank’s country director for the West Bank, wrote in a chilling report that the movement of people and goods into and out of the territory has been severely constrained by a “multi-layered system of physical, institutional and administrative restrictions.” The report added in detail: “The continuous growth in the size of land that is allocated for [Israeli] settlement activity within the West Bank has fragmented the territory into smaller and more disconnected enclaves ... Economic cohesion is not achievable when the areas in which people have to operate and go about their business are crisscrossed by impediments.”
So one has to ask here: What is the point of donors donating money to the PA when Palestinians have no way out, round or through their dilemma as an occupied people, a people kept in the margin of history? To what end will the donations be put to use? Subjection and poverty develop in close-knit reciprocity.
I say let the PA , along with its sundry security forces, who have unwittingly kept the peace for Zionist occupiers in the West Bank, lift anchor and sail away. And let instead the people of Palestine, as they rely on their teleological spirit of history to guide them, determine how to deal with their tormentors. For Palestinians, the image of their 78-year-old president standing there at the UN, like a mendicant with hat in hand, asking donors for a handout of chump change, is all but unbearable. We empty of their humanity those to whom we deny self-determination.