Foreign Policy In Focus

For President Mahmoud Abbas, the vote was a last-ditch attempt to boost his increasingly diminished relevance.

When the State of Palestine was declared a non-member state at the UN General Assembly last week, it was hailed by the Palestinian leadership as key victory for the Palestinians in their struggle to establish their state. The vote at the UNGA where 138 countries voted in favor of Palestine with only nine states against it was an important moral and symbolic victory for the Palestinians, and perhaps, unfortunately, nothing more.

For President Mahmoud Abbas and his Palestinian Authority ( PA), this vote was not a necessary part of a national strategy to achieve real statehood for the Palestinians -- in the absence of any peace process with Israel -- rather a last-minute attempt to boost his increasingly diminished relevancy and to cover for the Palestinian leadership historic failures. This political victory is also significant in terms of its political and historic ironies.

By the time the Jewish settlers in Palestine, the “Yishuv,” declared their state of Israel in 1948, they had by then an established and experienced army numbered over 60,000 men and immediately after that an air force. For the Palestinians on the other hand, by the time the UN declared their statehood, last week, they have abandoned all of the military capabilities they had in the past and ended up making themselves helpless and defenseless.

In reality, moreover, the new status of Palestine as state is meant to compensate for the failure of the “peace process” with Israel that was supposed to lead to the same conclusion. More importantly, however, it exposes the Palestinian national-secular movement failure to address in reality the continuing statelessness of its people, the issue of Palestinian refugees and their right of return, and what will become of the Palestinians who ended up becoming Israeli citizens after the establishing of Israel in 1948 and the fate of the Palestinian diaspora.

It is worth noting ,meanwhile, that the new Palestinian “victory” and the new status at the UN came only after President Abbas failed last year to submit an application for Palestinian statehood to the UN Security Council under pressure from the US. Abbas could have submitted the application for the UNSC, last year, which would have been denied anyway, but he could have turned to the General Assembly to force it to act in place of the Security Council, and to hold a vote for full membership to the UN in which case he would have won .

But president Abbas did not use that strategy for fear of full confrontation with the US and Israel. This explains why he opted to submit an application for a non-member observer status, a watered-down status from a full-member state.

To sell this “victory” to Palestinians, PA officials have argued publicly that with this new status, Palestine can join the International Criminal Court ( ICC) and other UN agencies, thus threatening to punish Israel over its war crimes and violations of international law. Although this is all true, to activate the ICC investigation, the Palestinian leadership is required to make a declaration to accept the ICC jurisdiction as it did in 2009 and also can join the ICC on an ad-hoc basis.

But this is easier said than done. If and when the Palestinian leadership decides to take Israel to the ICC for its war-crimes violations against Palestinian civilians as per the findings of the Goldstone Report, Israel can at the same time lodge a complaint against Hamas officials accusing them of committing war crimes against its citizens. In this albeit unlikely scenario, the Palestinians will risk having Hamas leaders being prosecuted by the ICC alongside Israeli leaders.

Palestinians ended up in this political limbo ever since the late Yasser Arafat started this “peace process” with Israel over 20 years ago. In order to stay relevant in the regional politics, the Palestinian secular nationalist movement, represented by the PLO, abandoned all of its military means in the hope that negotiating peace with Israel would alone deliver them the state of Palestine on the 1967 borders. 
 
This strategy has proven itself to be self-destructive for the secular nationalists as evident by this hollow victory. At the end of the day this new status changes nothing for Palestinians, while Palestine as envisioned by the UNGA resolution and president Abbas, is increasingly disappearing from the map due to constant illegal Israeli settlement building.

As for Hamas, while labeled as a terrorist organization by most of the world major powers, all that it has to do is to present itself as a credible alternative to the secular nationalist model, especially in light of its recent victory in Gaza, while waiting for the PLO to eventually self-destruct.

Hamas's victory last month against Israeli attempts to destroy its military capabilities in Gaza shows that Hamas political thinking stands a better chance of establishing a Palestinian state if it shows political flexibility and moderation. Needless to say, Hamas cannot win an outright war with Israel, but maintaining a military capability that in itself can create both deterrence and a leverage against Israel, can be a winning formula to achieve a real statehood for the Palestinians. With those elements in mind, it would not be far-fetched to imagine a deal between Hamas and Israel whereby Palestinians can establish their real state under better conditions.

Ali Younes is a writer and analyst based in Washington D.C. He can be reached at: aliyounes98@gmail.com and on Twitter at @clearali.

Former Hamas leader Meshal envisions himself replacing the aging Mahmoud Abbas as head of the Palestinian Authority.

The news that Hamas leader Khaled Meshal is resigning his leadership post is an ominous sign that Hamas is heading toward more confrontation with its Palestinian rival Fatah and the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the near future.  Meshal is reported as seeking a bigger role for himself within the PLO even perhaps as its leader replacing the ageing and discredited Mahmoud Abbas.

As a leader of Gaza-based Hamas, Meshal should have been leading his organization from Gaza, which is free of Israeli control, and work to improve the lives of the people of Gaza, which his organization has been controlling since 2007. Instead Meshal has opted to place himself in the mold of the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat taking comfort in hoping from this Arab capital to one day replace Arafat as a “symbol” of the Palestinian struggle against Israel albeit with very little results.

Even though Meshal lacks the personal charisma Arafat enjoyed for over 40 years, which later proved to be a disastrous trait for Palestinians leaders, he might find the regional alignment in his favor, especially in Egypt and Iran, should he decide to pursue plans to lead the PLO later on.

In order to respond to overwhelming Israeli power Palestinians need political managers skilled in statecraft and clean-handed politicians, not charismatic leaders who will inevitably turn into corrupt dictators and stay in power for decades. Neither Meshal nor Abbas can be described as clean-handed or competent.

Palestinians, much like their Arab brethren in the Arab States have yet to produce the kind of leadership that will hold itself accountable to the people and to the law. This is perhaps one of the key differences between Israeli and Palestinians whereas Israelis were able to develop an able pool of diverse leaders who acted in the best interest of their state and citizens even before they established their state in 1948. Palestinians on the other hand were stuck with the same leaders for generations who led them from one disaster to another.

Meshal, who has been leading Hamas since the mid-nineties, might have come to see himself as a leader of all of the Palestinian people as part of larger strategy by Hamas to control the overall Palestinian leadership. This could be a plausible scenario given the deteriorating conditions within the Palestinian territories and the discredited leaders of the PA and the relentless Israeli occupation of the West Bank.

Ever since its inception in 1987, Hamas has played the spoiler in the now defunct “peace process” and as a competitor to Fatah in its quest to lead the Palestinian people in their struggle to achieve their independence and end the Israeli occupation.

Helping Meshal in his goal is the rise of Islamic leaders in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab World who he sees as his natural allies and who obviously share his ideological background.

The problem with Meshal and Hamas, however, is that they behave much like other Palestinian organizations, past and present, by being beholden to the interests of their pay masters and political allies in Iran, Qatar, Egypt and Syria. Hamas's continued control of Gaza strip and its refusal to relinquish its grip on power there is also part of a regional struggle that involved the same regional and international actors who pay money to both Hamas and the PA

Acting as pawns of other Arab states and its leaders has been the story of the Palestinian leaders even before 1948. Clan-based Palestinian leaders of the Husseini and Nashasheebi families of the 1930s and 40s were more consumed with fighting and plotting against each other than fighting off the British and the Zionists at that time.  As a result they were caught off-guard and totally unprepared militarily and politically when Zionist leaders declared their state of Israel in 1948 in what was once Palestine.

Arab states meddling and corrupting the Palestinian leaders and organizations continued even when they founded the PLO to function on their behest against each other. Hamas is no different than other more secular organizations. 

 In July of 1967 a mere month after Arabs were defeated and lost the West Bank and Gaza along with Sinai and the Golan Heights, Israeli cabinet member Yigal Allon proposed the “Allon Plan” offering the Palestinians (then under the control of Jordan)  autonomous populated areas within the West Bank and Gaza while Israel retained much of the West Bank and Jerusalem and  overall military, political and economic control

The fact that both Hamas and Fatah organizations have resigned themselves, and fighting each other at the same time, to control different semi- autonomous parts of the West Bank and Gaza while remaining under an overall Israeli military, political and economic  control -- exactly like the “Allon Plan” -- shows how shameless, irresponsible and incompetent  those leader are. Palestinians simply deserve better leaders.

Ali Younes is a writer and analyst based in Washington D.C. He can be reached at: aliyounes98@gmail.com and on Twitter at @clearali.

Cross-posted from Mondoweiss.

A protest against police brutality in Ramallah at the start of this month was met with truncheons by the Palestinian Authority's (PA) security forces. Unsurprisingly, there was an Israeli precipitant to this reaction: the Washington Post’s Benjamin Gottlieb explained that this was actually the second confrontation between demonstrators and police in Ramallah that weekend. The first clash occurred when the PA invited Israeli VP Shaul Mofaz to come to Ramallah, the PA’s capital in the West Bank, to meet with President Mahmoud Abbas.

Because of the protests, the visit was put off as the police moved in to contain the demonstrators. The now-postponed visit, and the reactions to it by Palestinian activists, stand as apt reminders of the tension inherent in the Palestinian Authority's very existence.

The Israeli veep was invited by the PA because after joining his political party, Kadima, with Netanyahu's governing coalition to form a unity government, he was appointed to serve as "minister without portfolio" on the stalled peace process. Huwaida Arraf, one of the founders of the International Solidarity Movement, was one of those who criticized the PA for even inviting Mofaz in the first place because he served as IDF Chief of Staff, and then Defense Minister, at the onset of the Second Intifada.

Gazan blogger Mohammed Suliman summed up the unequal relationship between Ramallah and Jersualem in his coverage of the protests: "An intricately designed hierarchy where Abbas's [sic] placed underneath Israel yet extends his hand upwards to them forming the PA-Israel alliance." Indeed, despite its close cooperation with the IDF since 1994 in arresting suspected militants, the PA does not even have total control of its own funds or its security forces, whose training and equipping have for the past eighteen years been finalized by the American, Israeli, Jordanian and Egyptian governments. The training and arming of these security forces, who have been accused of torturing detainees and vigilantism, has been asore point for years among Palestinians.

Several demonstrators and reporters were injured during the weekend protests, and critics charged the PA with trying to impose a media blackout on the day's events. The PA is often suspect of members of the press, even those at state outlets, and this past year -- after failing to secure settlement building freezes, difficulties in making progress in much-trumpeted unity talks with Hamas, or win international recognition as a state through the UN -- has apparently stepped up its efforts to censor the press. Concerns have been growing over the years that the PA is using charges of incitement or collaboration with Hamas to quash criticism of its actions (Hamas, for its part, will also harass critical individuals and outlets on spurious charges of collaboration or undermining their authority).

One of the most notorious cases this year has been that of Yousef Shayeb, a reporter working for the Jordanian daily Al-Ghab. He had reported early this year that officials at the General Delegation of Palestine in France were engaged in corrupt financial practices, nepotism and were passing information about Muslim organizations in France on to Mossad. He named several high-ranking members of the PA/PLO serving in the EU in this report, which prompted Ramallah and several of those named in it to charge Shayeb with libel. As the authorities in Ramallah detained Shayeb and built their case up against him, all the while pressing him to reveal his anonymous sources, Al-Ghab disavowed itself of Shayeb's reporting and fired Shayed, saying he had improperly vetted his sources. Shayeb has not yet been tried for libel, but may face further jail time and a significant fine if convicted by a Palestinian court.

Reports on other actions against reporters suggest that Shayeb's detention and interrogation came at a time this past spring when the PA was increasingly cracking down on online criticism of Abbas. West Bank journalist Tariq Khamis told Electronic Intifada that when he was brought in for his alleged ties to a man who had called for Abbas's overthrow, the Palestinian police interrogated him about a story he'd written a West Bank paper about Palestinian youth groups critical of Ramallah's negotiating track with the Israelis. George Hale has reported that Palestinian ISPs have been ordered to block websites critical of Abbas, even though Palestinian media officials have said there is no law authorizing Ramallah to make these move, and at least one top media official subsequently resigned in protest.

Israel continues to exert even greater pressure on Palestinian and international journalists in the West Bank, but sometimes, these Israelis actions actually benefit the PA too, since as the Committee to Protect Journalists has noted, West Bank media outlets like Wattan TV targeted by the IDF have also "been a thorn in the flesh of the PA for most of its existence". In fact, this marks the sixth time Wattan TV has been shut down -- the first five times it was forced to suspend its broadcasts, it was due to the Palestinian Authority’s actions.

Social media is helping Palestinian activists dissatisfied with both the Fatah and Hamas's governance reach wider audiences. So in Ramallah, there can be few Palestinian protest chants more unnerving these days than those that end with SCAF comparisons.

At IPS Special Project Right Web, Samer Araabi writes:

For decades, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been mired in stalemate. Countless peace overtures over the past 30 years have fallen apart for one reason or another, and the basis for many of these negotiations—the division of the territory into two distinct states—is becoming increasingly impossible as a result of demographic changes both inside Israel’s 1948 borders and in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Frustrated by the failure of international players—and the United States in particular—to act as neutral and effective arbiters, the Palestinian Authority recently put in motion a plan to unilaterally declare statehood. Despite the fact that this objective is in line with long-standing U.S. foreign policy, the response by many Washington pundits and policymakers has been remarkably vitriolic.

Washington has come down hard on the idea of an independently pursued statehood bid, attacking not only the Palestinian Authority but the United Nations itself, while implicitly supporting the increasing militarization of Israeli settlements. Washington’s reticence to acknowledge the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people could severely compromise the potential for future peace.

To read the piece in its entirety, visit Right Web.