Palestine faces another 'historic'
crossroads By Ramzy Baroud
Palestine became a "non-member state" at
the United Nations as of November 29. The draft of
the UN resolution passed with an overwhelming
majority of General Assembly members: 138 votes in
favor, nine against and 41 abstentions.
It
was accompanied by a passionate speech delivered
by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.
But decades earlier, a more impressive and
animated Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, sought
international solidarity as well. The occasion
then was also termed "historic".
Empowered
by Arab support at the Rabat Arab League summit in
October 1974, which bestowed on the Palestine Liberation
Organization (PLO), the
ever-opaque title "the sole legitimate
representative of the Palestinian people", Arafat
was invited to speak at the UN General Assembly.
Despite the fervor that accompanied the newly
found global solidarity, Arafat's language singled
a departure from what was perceived by Western
powers as radical and unrealistic political and
territorial ambitions.
In his speech on
November 13 that year, Arafat spoke of the growing
PLO legitimacy that compelled his actions: "The
PLO has earned its legitimacy because of the
sacrifice inherent in its pioneering role and also
because of its dedicated leadership of the
struggle. It has also been granted this legitimacy
by the Palestinian masses... The PLO has also
gained its legitimacy by representing every
faction, union or group as well as every
Palestinian talent, either in the National Council
or in people's institutions...". The list went on,
and, despite some reservations, each had a
reasonable degree of merit.
The same,
however, can hardly be said of Abbas' Palestinian
Authority (PA), which exists as a result of an
ambiguous "peace process" that started nearly
20-years ago. It has all but completely destroyed
the PLO's once functioning institutions and
redefined the Palestinian national project of
liberation around a more "pragmatic" - read
self-serving - discourse that is largely tailored
around self-preservation, absence of financial
accountability and a system of political
tribalism.
Abbas is no Yasser Arafat. But
equality important, the Arafat of 1974 was a
slightly different version of an earlier Arafat
who was the leader of the revolutionary Fatah
party. In 1974, Arafat made a statehood proposal
that itself represented a departure from Fatah's
own previous commitment to a "democratic state on
all Palestine". Arafat's revised demands contained
the willingness to settle for "establishing an
independent national state on all liberated
Palestinian territory".
While the
difference between both visions may be attributed
to a reinterpretation of the Palestinian
liberation strategy, history showed that it was
much more. Since that date and despite much
saber-rattling by the US and Israel against
Arafat's "terrorism" and such, the PLO under
Arafat's Fatah leadership underwent a decade-long
scrutiny process, where the US placed austere
demands in exchange for an American "engagement"
of the Palestinian leadership. This itself was the
precondition that yielded Oslo and its abysmal
consequences.
Arafat was careful to always
sugarcoat any of his concessions with a parallel
decision that was promoted to Palestinians as a
national triumph of some sort. Back then there was
no Hamas to stage a major challenge to the PLO's
policies, and leftist groups within the PLO
structure were either politically marginalized by
Fatah or had no substantial presence among the
Palestinian masses. The field was virtually empty
of any real opposition, and Arafat's credibility
was rarely questioned. Even some of his opponents
found him sincere, despite their protests against
his style and distressing concessions.
The
rise of the PLO's acceptability in international
arenas was demonstrated in its admission to the
United Nations as a "non-state entity" with an
observer status on November 22, 1974. The Israeli
war and subsequent invasion of Lebanon in 1982 had
the declared goal of destroying the PLO and was in
fact aimed at stifling the growing legitimacy of
the PLO regionally and internationally. Without an
actual power base, in this case, Lebanon, Israeli
leaders calculated that the PLO would either fully
collapse or politically capitulate.
Weakened, but not obliterated, the
post-Lebanon War PLO was a different entity than
the one which existed prior to 1982. Armed
resistance was no longer on the table, at least
not in any practical terms. Such change suited
some Arab countries just fine. A few years later,
Arafat and Fatah were assessing the new reality
from headquarters in Tunisia.
The
political landscape in Palestine was vastly
changing. A popular uprising (Intifada) erupted in
1987 and quite spontaneously a local leadership
was being formed throughout the occupied
territories. New names of Palestinian
intellectuals were emerging. They were community
leaders and freedom fighters that mostly organized
around a new discourse that was created out of
local universities, Israeli prisons and
Palestinian streets.
It was then that the
legend of the Intifada was born with characters
such as children with slingshots, mothers battling
soldiers, and a massive reservoir of a new type of
Palestinian fighter along with fresh language and
discourse. Equally important, new movements were
appearing from outside the traditional PLO
confines. One such movement was Hamas, which has
grown in numbers and political relevance in ways
once thought impossible.
That reality
proved alarming to the US, Israel and of course,
the traditional PLO leadership. There were enough
vested interests to reach a "compromise". This
naturally meant more concessions by the
Palestinian leadership in exchange for some
symbolic recompense by the Americans. The latter
happily floated Israel's trial balloons so that
the Israeli leadership didn't appear weak or
compromising.
Two major events defined
that stage of politics in 1988: on November 15,
the PLO's National Council (PNC) proclaimed a
Palestinian state in exile from Algiers and merely
two weeks later, US ambassador to Tunisia Robert H
Pelletreau Jr was designated as the sole American
liaison whose mission was to establish contacts
with the PLO.
Despite the US' declared
objection of Arafat's move, the US was in fact
pleased to see that the symbolic declaration was
accompanied by major political concessions. The
PNC stipulated the establishment of an independent
state on Palestinian "national soil" and called
for the institution of "arrangements for security
and peace of all states in the region" through a
negotiated settlements at an international peace
conference on the basis of UN resolution 242 and
338 and Palestinian national rights.
Although Arafat was repeatedly confronted
by even more American demands - that truly never
ceased until his alleged murder by poison in
Ramallah in 2004 - the deceleration was the real
preamble of the Oslo accords some few years later.
Since then, Palestinians have gained little aside
from symbolic victories, starting in 1988 when the
UNGA "acknowledged" the Algiers proclamation. It
then voted to replace the reference to the
"Palestine Liberation Organization" with that of
"Palestine".
And since then, it has been
one symbolic victory after another, exemplified in
an officially acknowledged Palestinian flag,
postage stamps, a national anthem and the like. On
the ground, the reality was starkly and
disturbingly different: fledgling illegal Jewish
settlements became fortified cities and a
relatively small settler population now morphed to
number over half a million settlers; Jerusalem is
completely besieged by settlements, and cut off
from the rest of the occupied territories; the
Palestinian Authority established in 1994 to guide
Palestinians towards independence became a
permanent status of a Palestinian leadership that
existed as far as Israel's would permit it to
exist; polarization caused by the corruption of
the PA and its security coordination with Israel
lead to civil strife that divided the Palestinian
national project between factional and
self-serving agendas.
The support that
"Palestine" has received at the United Nations
must be heartening, to say the least, for most
Palestinians. The overwhelming support, especially
by Palestine's traditional supporters (most of
humanity with few exceptions) indicates that the
US hegemony, arm twisting and Israeli-US
propaganda was of little use after all. However,
that should not be misidentified as a real change
of course in the behavior of the Palestinian
Authority, which still lacks legal, political and
especially moral legitimacy among Palestinians who
are seeking tangible drive towards freedom, not
mere symbolic victories.
If Abbas thinks
that obtaining a new wording for Palestinian
status at the UN will provide a needed political
theater to justify another 20 years of utter
failure, then it is surely time to prove him
wrong. If the new status, however, is used as a
platform for a radically different strategy that
revitalizes a haggard political discourse with the
sole aim of unifying the ranks of all Palestinians
around a new proud national project, then, there
is something worth discussing. Indeed, it is not
the new status that truly matters, but rather how
it is interpreted and employed. While history is
not exactly promising, the future will have the
last word.
Ramzy Baroud
(ramzybaroud.net) is an internationally syndicated
columnist and the editor of
PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book is My
Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story
(Pluto Press, London).
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