NOVANEWS
By Gloria Caleb
Next month, the Palestinian National Authority (PA) takes to the United Nations its case of recognition of a broken up rump Palestine as a state. It might appear as an attractive solution at first glance, but for many Palestinians it is apparently not.
Out on the streets of Beirut, which I visited in the last week of July, and particularly in and around the crowded Palestinian refugee camps, you frequently see flag-waging Palestinians chanting slogans, and waving their national flag. I was told that such demonstrations are held particularly on occasions commemorating Palestinian martyrs. No matter what the occasion, however, these gatherings always reiterate the Palestinian people’s UN-recognized right of return to their homeland from which they were expelled on the creation of Israel six decades ago.
During my stay in the Lebanese capital, where I attended the Viva Palestina Arabia conference at the American University of Beirut, I found little enthusiasm among the Palestinians I met for the idea of UN membership for the bits and pieces of Palestine that remain of the West Bank after its occupation by Israel in the 1967 war. This “Bantustan” is rendered mostly non-contiguous by Israeli settlements and the criss-crossing roads and military checkpoints, and lately by the Israeli wall. The tiny Gaza Strip is entirely cut-off from the West Bank.
Among some of the other parts of Lebanon I visited was the tense Israeli border to the South.
Palestinians generally view the move for UN-sanctioned statehood as a desperate move by PA president Mahmoud Abbas as a safeguard against a popular uprising similar to the Arab Spring that swept away many long-ruling autocratic regimes in the Middle East. The PA was created as an interim governing body in Gaza and the West Bank under the 1993 Oslo Accords, and has since completely lost steam, especially after it lost the January 2006 legislative and municipal elections to Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank. Abbas and his administration have already introduced a series of other measures to gain acceptance, including an offer of unity talks with Hamas and announcement of elections in January.
Hamas is highly suspicious about the move for UN membership. “We have to see what happens at the UN General Assembly,” a Hamas official told me. He pointed out that the PA has no plans as to what it would do if the UN deferred the membership application for future consideration, or if the United States vetoed it.
Undermining the importance of international resolutions without the will to support the resistance and the Palestinian right of return, Haj Abu Imad Rifa`i, Lebanon representative of the Palestinian Harkat-ul-Jihad al-Islami, emphasized the importance of unity talks between Fatah and Hamas. The sharp differences between the two major political groups are a serious impediment in progress in Palestinian efforts for genuine statehood—i.e., a state comprising the West Bank within its 1967 borders, with Arab East Jerusalem as its capital. The sometimes violent rivalry between Fatah, which dominates the PA, and Hamas have dimmed all prospects of actual Palestinian statehood and the Palestinian people’s right of return, which also applies to the 78 per cent of historic Palestine which now forms Israel in what were the pre-1967 borders of the Jewish state.
They are losers,” Mohammad Jihad Mowad, a Palestinian who runs a small shop outside the Sabra Shatila Refugee Camp in west Beirut, remarked angrily, in reference to the two rivals. The 32-year-old, who was born during Lebanon’s 15-year civil war, feels that he will die there too. “I have no hopes of going back to my land,” he says.
With anger and lack of confidence in the PA administration making them impatient, talks and negotiations make little sense to the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. “We’ve seen it all,” says Ali Ahmed Ayoub, manager of the Social Sports and Cultural Centre at the Borj el Barajneh Refugee Camp in west Beirut. Referring to major international agreements that have achieved nothing so far, he cites the example of Resolution 181 of the UN General Assembly, on the basis of which a Palestinian state was declared by the Palestine Liberation Organization under Yasser Arafat in 1988. “None of these helped Palestinians, so why should the same goals be pursued again?” For Ayoub, the Palestinian right of return is sacred, which makes it essential for all means to be employed for its achievement. “Civil revolt or armed resistance, we don’t care.”
Among the most prominent sceptics about the idea of a premature state is Leila Khaled, who herself is a refugee from the Palestinian port of Haifa, her birthplace, which is in Israel since its creation in 1948. Ms Khaled, 67, a leader of the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, is an icon for Palestinians since her hijacking of a TWA airliner in August 1969. She is a member of the Palestinian National Council, the legislative body of the PLO which is an umbrella organization of Palestinian parties and groups.
For Ms Khaled, whose family became refugees in Lebanon in 1948, armed resistance to Israel is an inalienable right. “People who support negotiations, must identify whom the Palestinians must negotiate with,” she said in an address at the Viva Palestina event. For her the United States’ repeated use of its veto power in favour of Israel is mainly responsible for the stalled progress on the road to the solution of the Middle East dispute. As recently as last February, the US vetoed a Security Council resolution against the expansion of Israeli settlements. “Theirs was one vote against that of 14 council members,” she said.
Dr Ghada Karmi, a leading Palestinian activist and writer has for decades been an ardent supporter of a civil revolt as opposed to armed resistance. She, however, was severely critical of the insistence of Abbas’s Fatah group on talks with Israel—especially despite Israel’s continuing killings in Gaza. “They (Fatah) have closed all doors,” said Ms Karmi, 74, who was born in Jerusalem. She was referring to the President’s position that negotiations are the only means for a solution. “That means that there is no possibility of an armed struggle or any other kind of resistance,” she added. “Once your enemy knows that carrying out (futile) talks is all you are capable of, he won’t care. You can talk for as long as you like and they (the Israelis) will build settlement upon settlement,” she added.
The US insistence on a mediatory role between the two parties is inconsistent with its policies in the Middle East which are hostile to the Arabs. Armed intervention in the name of democracy in Iraq and its support to the Western-backed Libyan rebels makes Palestinians understandably wary of the prospect of Americans being interlocutors in any contacts or negotiations with Israel.
Initially the US threatened to stop all funding to the PA in the event of a Fatah-Hamas unity deal—a crucial step for Palestinian reconciliation.
Far from helping it, the PA’s bid for UN recognition for rump Palestine has worsened its political crisis. Palestinians point out that it is meaningless for towns, villages and refugee camps surrounded by Israeli walls to be presented as a sovereign state. “Sovereignty requires that Palestine enter direct negotiations on such issues as distribution of water, security and settlements with Israel,” said Osama Hamadan, the representative of Hamas in Lebanon, such a demand would be “lethal” under the envisaged rump state because Israel has the capacity to block all water and electricity supply to Palestinian areas if the Palestinian side takes a stand on an issue.
Israel may also withhold tax revenues it collects on behalf of the PA, thus rendering this administrative entity bankrupt. At the same time, any kind of resistance against Israel by the new state for the easing of the Israeli stranglehold on Palestinians would be considered a violation against a neighbouring country under Security Council Resolution 242 of November 1967. The Hamas representative summed up the position of his party and the Palestinian sceptics in the following words: “Unless a Palestinian state actually exists on the ground, any resolution recognizing its sovereignty is pointless.”
