No matter how far right Israel moves, Abbas stays the course - Palestinian leader’s gradualist strategy, blocking nonviolent protest against occupation, is endlessly adaptable to Israeli radicalization.
By Amira Hass | Dec. 5, 2014 |Haaretz
▻http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/.premium-1.630120
The growing extremism in Israel and the assumption that the next government will be even more rightist and extreme than the outgoing one are not likely to change the Palestinian leadership’s positions and tactics. Nor is the prevalent assumption that the caretaker government will take a harsher line against the Palestinians expected to encourage the leadership in Ramallah to change the rules that have developed over the 21 years of the Oslo process.
Since Yigal Amir murdered Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, the Palestinian leadership has distinguished between the Israeli government and the public, believing Israelis to be peace seekers. Now the Palestinian leadership recognizes that most Jewish Israelis have rightist or extreme rightist inclinations. This constitutes a dramatic change in the discourse at the top.
Palestinian Authority Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki predicted that the changes in Israel will bring other states or parliaments to recognize the Palestinian state. In an interview with the official daily Al Ayyam this week, Maliki said the Palestinian leadership will continue efforts to have the UN Security Council set a timetable to end the occupation.
Palestinian official Saeb Erekat, who attended a debate organized by Masarat – the Palestinian Center for Policy Research and Strategic Studies in Ramallah, also spoke of the diplomatic UN track. This includes bringing the occupation to UN votes and getting the nearly 200 states that have signed the Geneva Convention to take up the Palestinian issue.
He said Palestinian officials were engaged in talks with France about advancing the latter’s initiative to set principles for ending the occupation and concluding peace negotiations within two years.
According to the Masarat report, participants noted the contradiction between setting a schedule to conclude the negotiations and setting a schedule in the United Nations to end the occupation. The two senior officials in fact spoke of contradictory tracks. The Palestinians see negotiations as synonymous with preserving the status quo, postponing any decisions and giving up on real international pressure on Israel.
On the other hand, the diplomatic route – “setting a timetable to end the occupation” – as is practiced by the Palestinian leadership, excludes other ways of defying the occupation that would bind the leadership and public.
The policy led by PA President Mahmoud Abbas is based on several foundations. These include running the PA and its institutions as the “state in progress”; dependence on international – mainly Western – assistance and faith in the United States’ support for establishing a Palestinian state; an authoritarian government that restricts criticism; opposing any military escalation and the use of arms against the occupation; paying lip service to an unarmed popular struggle while in fact restricting it and promoting a diplomatic strategy in the United Nations and the world.
These foundations fit in with the Palestinians’ adjustment to living in the enclaves (areas A and B in the West Bank and Gaza) and bolster the de facto renunciation of East Jerusalem and Area C (which includes the settlements). Combined, the foundations are conducive to a high level of adjustment – of both the official leadership and the public – to any Israeli right-wing radicalization.
The Palestinian public is skeptical about its leadership’s goals and intentions. The question always hovering in the air is whether Abbas’ diplomatic strategy is intended to end the occupation, or to prolong the PA life and justify its existence, with all the perks for the ruling strata that this involves.
The same questions were posed regarding the leadership’s long-standing adherence to the negotiations with Israel, even after reaching the conclusion that Israel was using the talks not to reach an agreement but to expand the annexation and thwart a Palestinian state.
Pinning hopes on diplomacy, UN
Indeed, the Palestinian leadership is pinning its hopes on diplomacy and the United Nations. It is striving to take the “Palestinian cause” (rather, the problem of Israeli occupation and oppression) out of the bilateral Israeli-Palestinian route and return it to the international arena. So every ceremonial vote on recognizing its statehood is presented as a great Palestinian achievement.
The leadership believes the diplomatic course is working and advancing the Palestinians toward statehood. At the same time, the diplomatic strategy is a substitute for unarmed civilian rebellion in the occupied territories.
Advancing a diplomatic strategy while maintaining ambiguity about resuming the negotiations with Israel enables the PA to continue to receive international assistance, albeit reduced. The assistance balances and neutralizes the economic and humanitarian disasters caused by the occupation and its draconian restrictions on freedom of movement between the West Bank and Gaza and the use of Palestinian territory and natural resources.
The financial assistance softens and contains the impact of poverty and unemployment. The money also enables the Western states to make do with verbal warnings to Israel, while refraining from actually imposing sanctions on it.
The international funds maintain the Palestinian middle classes and public sector that are directly and indirectly affiliated with the PA. Like the official leadership, these groups know full well that civilian rebellion will bring an end to their lifestyle, which includes freedom of movement in the West Bank and travel abroad, leisure activities, study options, social and political gatherings, limited economic enterprises and more.
Such a way of life is based on basic human rights. But since the PA is in fact a protectorate that depends on Israel, Israel holds this way of life hostage, seeing these human rights as “gestures” that depend, as in prison, on the prisoners’ good behavior.
Any changes the Palestinians can make in the long overdue Oslo agreements to reflect their resistance to the occupation will evoke immediate Israeli retaliation against the Palestinian leaders and the normal lifestyle of the middle class, which is the authority’s backbone. Such changes by the PA may include ending the security coordination with the IDF and Shin Bet, building in Area C, drilling for water in the western areas of the West Bank or organizing mass processions to Jerusalem headed by Palestinian elders.
So the PA leadership’s declarations about continuing the diplomatic course in the United Nations should be seen in the shadow of a collective Israeli revenge and the prospect of the PA’s collapse. The UN diplomatic course indicates that even when an extreme-right wing is taking over in Israel, the Palestinian leadership is still adhering to the reality created by the Oslo process.