SPECIAL DELIVERY

A cry for radical change in Palestine (Rami G. Khouri, 8/27/03, The Daily Star )

As Israel-Palestinian mutual military and political violence increases, we are likely to see the most visible consequences of this within Palestinian society. The tensions between President Yasser Arafat and Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas are the most obvious, but not the only, signs of this. Two prevailing Palestinian power structures are slowly falling apart - the one established 40 years ago when Yasser Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas and others in the mid-1960s founded Fatah and quickly took control of the Palestinian national movement after the 1967 war debacle, and the more recent self-governing Palestinian National Authority that was established after the 1993 Oslo accords, also dominated by Fatah and its partners. Both these Palestinian leaderships are slowly collapsing in a heap of unfulfilled expectations and self-inflicted incompetence.

These problems are not the sole making of the Palestinians. Israel has been miserly and inconsistent in agreeing to a fair and comprehensive peace based on ending its colonization of occupied Palestinian lands. It has consistently made progress toward a negotiated two-state solution dependent primarily on Israel’s a priori demand for ironclad security, rather than the more politically realistic attempt to fulfill Palestinian and Israeli security requirements simultaneously.

The United States is also an erratic third-party mediator. Its occasional dramatic gesture (President George W. Bush’s June trip to the region) is negated by two chronic failures: It has not used its power to push both sides to implement the peace-making dynamics that it has fostered and, more often than not, it lands closer to the Israeli than the Palestinian side on key controversies (e.g.: Washington just signed a $9 billion loan guarantees foreign aid package with Israel without carrying through on its recent threat to deduct from it part of the cost of Israel’s separation wall in the West Bank; and it has been much more explicitly understanding of Israel’s security concerns and right to retaliate and protect itself than it has been of the corresponding Palestinian viewpoint). The other “Quartet” sponsors of the current “road map” peace plan - Russia, the EU, the UN - seem to have washed their hands of the matter or are on an extended political vacation.

The US and Israel gambled when they pressured the Palestinians to name Abbas as prime minister. His impossible mission comprised the American-Israeli demand to crack down on Palestinian terror and legitimate armed resistance against Israel and the Palestinian popular demand to end the Israeli occupation. Abbas has not satisfied any of his four key constituencies - the Palestinians under occupation, the other 4 million Palestinian refugees abroad, the Israelis, and Washington.

Abbas will struggle now to dig himself out of this hole, where his failure to deliver translates quickly into irrelevance and oblivion. The Americans and Israelis hand-picked him in haste, and will drop him just as swiftly if he proves useless to them.

Mr. Abbas is not required to deliver anything, only to accept delivery of statehood, which will then make him appear to have delivered for the Palestinian people. If we can keep him alive that long. Posted by Orrin Judd at August 27, 2003 12:22 PM