Palestinians’ UN Gamble Could Backfire

The Palestinian people betrayed

The leaked papers published by Al Jazeera show how craven Palestinian leaders are and how willing they were to sell out their people’s rights. Yet all they had to offer wasn’t enough for Israel.

By Saree Makdisi
January 27, 2011

A massive archive of documents leaked to Al Jazeera and Britain’s Guardian newspaper offers irrefutable proof that years of negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians have been an empty sham. The papers make clear that the time has come for Palestinians and anyone interested in the cause of justice to abandon the charade of official diplomacy and pursue other, more creative and nonviolent paths toward the realization of a genuine, just peace.

The leaked documents, assuming they are genuine — and both Al Jazeera and the Guardian say they have authenticated them — are behind-the-scenes notes from a decade of negotiations between the Palestinians and Israel. On issue after issue, they show Palestinian negotiators eager to concede ground, offering to give up much of Jerusalem, to accept Israel’s illegal settlements in the West Bank, to collaborate with Israeli occupation forces in suppressing dissent in the occupied territories — including killing fellow Palestinians — and even to forgo the right of return for most Palestinians driven from their homes by Israel in 1948.

The papers give the lie to Israel’s claim that it yearns for peace but lacks a Palestinian “partner.” And they reinforce the sense that Israel has gone along with these negotiations only to buy time to expropriate more Palestinian land, demolish more Palestinian homes, expel more Palestinian families and build more colonies for the exclusive use of Jewish settlers in militarily occupied territory, thereby cementing new realities on the ground that would make a Palestinian state a geophysical impossibility.

Anyone who doubts this has only to skim through the leaked papers, which show Israel spurning one gaping Palestinian concession after another. And this was Israel not under Benjamin Netanyahu but under the supposedly more liberal Ehud Olmert and his foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, who claimed they were committed to the peace process. In shameless abjection, the Palestinian negotiators prostrated themselves and surrendered essentially every major objective for which their people have struggled and sacrificed for 60 years, only for the imperious Israelis to say again and again, no, no, no.

Clearly, all that the Palestinians have to offer is not enough for Israel.

The major revelation from the documents, indeed, is the illustration they furnish of just how far the Palestinian negotiators were willing to go to placate Israel.

Men like Saeb Erekat, Mahmoud Abbas and Ahmed Qurei — the lead Palestinian negotiators in all these years — are of a type that has come forth in every colonial conflict of the modern age. Faced with the overwhelming brute power with which colonial states have always sought to break the will of indigenous peoples, they inhabit the craven weakness that the situation seems to dictate. Convinced that colonialism cannot be defeated, they seek to carve out some petty managerial role within it from which they might benefit, even if at the expense of their people.

These men, we must remember, were not elected to negotiate an agreement with Israel. They have no legitimacy, offer zero credibility and can make no real claim to represent the views of Palestinians.

And yet they were apparently willing to bargain away the right that stands at the very heart of the Palestinian struggle, a right that is not theirs to surrender — the right of return of Palestinians to the homes from which they were forced during the creation of Israel in 1948 — by accepting Israel’s insistence that only a token few thousand refugees should be allowed to return, and that the millions of others should simply go away (or, as we now learn that the U.S. suggested, accept being shipped away like so much lost chattel to South America).

The documents also show Palestinian negotiators willing to betray the Palestinians inside Israel by agreeing to Israel’s definition of itself as a Jewish state, knowing that that would doom Israel’s non-Jewish Palestinian minority — the reviled “Israeli Arabs” who constitute 20% of the state’s population — not merely to the institutionalized racism they already face but to the prospect of further ethnic cleansing (the papers reveal that Livni repeatedly raised the idea that land inhabited by portions of Israel’s Palestinian population should be “transferred” to a future Palestinian state).

All this was offered in pursuit of a “state” that would exist in bits and pieces, with no true sovereignty, no control over its own borders or water or airspace — albeit a “state” that it would, naturally, be their job to run.

And all this was contemptuously turned down by the allegedly peace-seeking Israeli government, with the connivance of the United States, to whom the Palestinians kept plaintively appealing as an honest broker, even as it became clearer than ever that it is anything but.

What these documents prove is that diplomatic negotiations between abject Palestinians and recalcitrant Israelis enjoying the unlimited and unquestioning support of the U.S. will never yield peace. No agreement these callow men sign would be accepted by the Palestinian people.

Fortunately, most Palestinians are not as broken and hopeless as these so-called leaders. Every single day, millions of ordinary Palestinian men, women and children resist the dictates of Israeli power, if only by refusing to give up and go away — by going to school, by farming their crops, by tending their olive groves.

Refusing the dictates of brute power and realpolitik to which their so-called leaders have surrendered, the Palestinian people have already developed a new strategy that, turning the tables on Israel, transmutes every Israeli strength into a form of weakness. Faced with tanks, they turn to symbolic forms of protest that cannot be destroyed; faced with brutality, they demand justice; faced with apartheid, they demand equality. The Palestinians have learned the lessons of Soweto, and they have unleashed a simultaneously local and global campaign of protests and calls for boycotts and sanctions that offers the only hope of bringing Israelis — like their Afrikaner predecessors — to their senses.

Unconscionable. Offensive. Hurtful. Bigoted. Terrible. Hateful.

These are the words being used to describe Helen Thomas’ recent comment about Israel and Palestine. Editorialists across the country have condemned her statement that Jews should “get the hell out of Palestine” and “go back” to Europe.

Let’s agree that she should not have said those things, and that a just and lasting peace in the Middle East fundamentally requires reconciliation between Palestinians and Israeli Jews. We need also to agree on a formula that allows them both to be at home in the same land (I have long advocated the idea of a single democratic and secular state for both peoples; a state that treats all citizens as equals). Insisting that either people does not belong is not merely counterproductive; it lies at the very root of the conflict.

If, however, it is unacceptable to say that Israeli Jews don’t belong in Palestine, it is also unacceptable to say that the Palestinians don’t belong on their own land.

Yet that is said all the time in the United States, without sparking the kind of moral outrage generated by Thomas’ remark. And while the nation’s editorialists worry about the offense she may have caused to Jews, no one seems particularly bothered by the offense felt every day by Palestinians when people — including those with far more power than Thomas — dismiss their rights, degrade their humanity and reject their claims to the most elementary forms of decency.

Are we seriously to accept the idea that some people have more rights than others? Or that some people’s sensibilities should be respected while others’ are trampled with total indifference, if not outright contempt?

One does not have to agree with Thomas to note that her remark spoke to the ugly history of colonialism, racism, usurpation and denial that are at the heart of the question of Palestine. Part of that history involves vicious European anti-Semitism and the monumental crime of the Holocaust. But the other part is that Palestinians were forcibly removed from their homeland in 1948 to clear space for the creation of a state with a Jewish identity.

Europeans and Americans were, at the time, willing to ignore or simply dismiss the injustice inflicted on the Palestinians, who, by being forced from their land, were made to pay the price for a crime they did not commit.

But this callous carelessness, this dismissal of — and refusal even to acknowledge in human terms — the calamity that befell the Palestinians, and of course the attendant refusal to acknowledge their fundamental rights, did not end in the 1940s. It continues to this very day.

Mainstream politicians, civic leaders, university presidents and others in this country routinely express their support for Israel as a Jewish state, despite the fact that such a state only could have been created in a multicultural land by ethnically cleansing it of as many non-Jews as possible. Today, Israel is only able to maintain its Jewish identity because it has established an apartheid regime, both in the occupied territories and within its own borders, and because it continues to reject the Palestinian right of return.

Where is the outrage about that?

Where was the outrage in 1983 when Israeli Gen. Rafael Eitan looked forward to the day that Jews had fully settled the land, because then “all the Arabs will be able to do about it is scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle”? Or when Alan Dershowitz suggested in 2002 that Israel summarily empty and then bulldoze an entire Palestinian village as a punitive measure each time it was attacked? Or when New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman claimed in 2006 to have discovered a “pathology” that caused some Arabs to “hate others more than they love their own kids”? Or when Avigdor Lieberman (who now serves as Israel’s foreign minister) said in 2004 that Palestinian citizens of Israel should “take their bundles and get lost”? Or when Israeli professor Arnon Sofer, one of the country’s leading demographic alarmists, said that to preserve the Jewish state, Israel should pull out of Gaza, though that would require Israel to remain at the border and “kill, and kill, and kill, all day, every day”?

An endless deluge of statements of support for the actual, calculated, methodical dehumanization of Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular goes without comment; whereas a single offhand comment by an 89-year-old journalist, whose long and distinguished record of principled commitment and challenges to state power entitles her to respect — and the benefit of the doubt — causes her to be publicly pilloried.

To accept this appalling hypocrisy is to be complicit in the racism of our age.

To many observers, Israel’s deadly assault on a civilian ship in international waters came as a final confirmation of a developing international consensus that Israel is a state that stops at no limit, recognizes no law, defers to no power and bows to no authority.

This consensus was largely consolidated by the bombardment of the Gaza Strip in 2008-2009, in which Israel killed one out of every thousand residents, damaged or destroyed thousands of family homes and other buildings, targeted schools, hospitals and ambulances, and reduced to rubble much of the territory’s agricultural, industrial and communications infrastructure — already broken by years of isolation and siege.

The consensus was only reinforced last spring, when Israel dismissed the Obama administration’s call for it to freeze its illegal colonization of the West Bank and East Jerusalem; and again this spring, when it seemed to taunt Vice President Joe Biden by greeting his visit with an announcement of yet more settlements.

The new consensus was further strengthened by Israel’s vehement denunciation of the United Nations inquiry into the Gaza war, chaired by the South African jurist Richard Goldstone, which found that it had committed war crimes and possibly crimes against humanity in the conduct of its assault on the civilian population of that territory.

Because Israel refuses to relinquish its control over Gaza, as last month’s tragic events so clearly illustrated, it remains an occupying power there, and international law holds it accountable for the welfare of the population.

Gaza Siege

Israel has subjected Gaza’s people — most of whom are children — to indiscriminate bombardments and a cruel and illegal siege, severely limiting the supplies of construction materials, medicines, schoolbooks, and food, and thereby putting the entire population on what a senior Israeli official once only half-jokingly called “a diet.”

It was in order to break this siege and bring urgently needed supplies to Gaza that the so-called Freedom Flotilla set sail, only to end in a bloody shambles.

Immediately, a well-oiled publicity machine went into high gear. Israel and its supporters in the U.S. have been doing everything possible to counteract the widening recognition of the dismal reality that Israel stands for.

Ugly Truth

An army of volunteers scours the Internet looking for stories to post on. Hasbara (Hebrew for “explanation”) organizations — like the media monitoring outfit Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, whose clumsily literalist retorts are unintentionally comical — try in vain to mask the ugly truth.

Scholarly criticism of Israeli policy is met by orchestrated campaigns of vilification and intimidation. A wave of new Israel studies centers is being established on college campuses, often as little more than fronts for propaganda.

And, according to the New Yorker magazine, one defender of Israel — the Hollywood mogul Haim Saban — has embarked on a plan to simply buy up media outfits, apparently in order to stanch the flow of unflattering stories about Israel.

But it is far too late for such maneuvers. People around the world now see Israel for what it is. No propaganda machine, no matter how well-oiled, can convince decent people that it’s acceptable for children to be forcibly malnourished and live unschooled and amid unreconstructed ruins, as in Gaza.

State Piracy

Hardly anyone took seriously Israel’s carefully crafted excuses for the lethal outcome of an assault by heavily armed, albeit bungling, commandos on an unarmed ship sailing on a humanitarian mission in international waters. People around the world saw the raid as essentially an act of state piracy on the high seas.

It was to no avail that the Israelis tried to spin the story, even to turn it on its head, presenting the raiders as innocent victims and the humanitarian volunteers as villains trying to “kidnap” and “lynch” them.

Only an ever-narrower and largely self-indoctrinating audience in the U.S. continues to takes this kind of desperate spin at face value.

True, the Obama administration fell back on the default script — quietly using its veto power in the UN to protect Israel — even though the attack involved U.S.-made military equipment paid for by billions of taxpayer dollars that could be put to far better use in saving California’s schools or Louisiana’s coastline.

This default mode is getting old, and it is under severe strain as more and more Americans, including many in positions of power and influence, join countless others around the world in questioning their government’s unlimited support for a nuclear-armed state that, by refusing to heed any kind of law — while periodically going berserk — endangers not merely its neighbors, but the stability and security of the whole world.

A change of policy, as well as of perceptions, is now only a matter of time.

[Originally published by Saree Makdisi in The Los Angeles Times, 12 February 2010]

The Simon Wiesenthal Center’s plan to construct an outpost of Los Angeles’ Museum of Tolerance atop the most important Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem is temporarily in disarray. This presents an opportunity to call on the center to abandon this outrageous project once and for all.

The site in question is Ma’man Allah, or the Mamilla Cemetery, which had been in continuous use for centuries until 1948, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were expelled or driven into flight and their private property, including Ma’man Allah, was handed over to Jewish users.

Like Muslim and Christian sites throughout Israel — which, as a 2009 State Department report pointed out, implements protections only for Jewish holy sites — the cemetery has long been threatened. Parts of it have been used as a roadway, parking lots, building sites and Israel’s Independence Park. Among the trees in the park, Palestinian tombstones can still be seen, eerily and all too appropriately.

In 2002, the Wiesenthal Center — which had been given part of the cemetery by the city of Jerusalem — announced that architect Frank Gehry would design a complex to be called the Center for Human Dignity-Museum of Tolerance Jerusalem. Ground was broken in 2004. Palestinian and Muslim concerns were ignored until a lawsuit led to the suspension of excavation in 2006. In 2008, the Israeli Supreme Court — dismissing the appeals not only of Palestinians with relatives buried there but also the protests of Jews appalled by desecration of any cemetery — cleared the way for the project.

The center claims to see nothing wrong with erecting what its leader, Rabbi Marvin Hier, calls “a great landmark promoting the principles of mutual respect and social responsibility” on top of what remains of another people’s cemetery. It has resorted to endless dodges to support its claim.

To those protesting construction on ancient cemetery land, the center says it’s merely using a part of the site that has been a parking lot for years. To Jews outraged at desecration, it says, in effect, that different standards apply to Muslim cemeteries than to Jewish ones. To Muslim clergy and legal scholars who insist on the inviolability of cemeteries in Islam, the center disagrees, in essence claiming that it knows more about Islamic jurisprudence than they do. To those who protest today, the center asks where they were in 1960, when an Islamic judge approved Israel’s construction of the parking lot (it does not, however, mention that he was a state employee, nor that he was subsequently removed from office for corruption).

To archaeologists who say the site should be spared construction, the center says that only a couple hundred bodies needed to be moved. And with reference to Palestinians who have filed legal actions and persisted in expressing anxiety over their families’ remains, Hier had this message just last month: “The case is over; get used to it.”

That was his paraphrase of the high court’s dismissal of a final appeal made by Palestinian families based on the testimony of Gideon Suleimani, the chief archaeologist at the museum site. Suleimani said that the Israel Antiquities Authority withheld from the court his opinion that construction should not be approved, and that the site still contains four layers of Muslim graves dating from the 12th century. “We’re talking about tens of thousands of skeletons under the ground there,” noted Suleimani.

Last month, Gehry announced that he had decided to pull out of the project, citing other commitments. At the same time, the center said it was scaling back the museum; it is short of its original $200-million fundraising target. Now the center lacks an architect and a plan. Hence the opportunity to stop this project.

This week, moreover, Palestinians with relatives buried in the cemetery made a last-ditch effort to end its continued desecration. They appealed directly to the United Nations, pointing out that the desecration violates international conventions forbidding discrimination and protecting cultural heritage, the manifestation of religious beliefs and the right to culture and family.

Protecting the cemetery should never have become a legal issue. This project is something that any decent human being should recognize as wrong. And it can still be reversed — if the Wiesenthal Center can be persuaded to turn “tolerance” and “human dignity” into principles for action, not just empty slogans.

For all its sanctimoniousness, the center now presides over a big hole from which scores of bones have been unearthed. Those remains were disinterred without respect. As Suleimani put it: “The Muslim dead have no one to defend them.” It is not, however, too late to safeguard the rest of those as yet undisturbed.

In wanting to lay the dead to rest, however, we should think also of the living. Displacing living people — something Israel does every single day — is hardly any better than displacing dead ones. And this disgraceful episode is only part of a much longer history of displacement and dispossession dating to 1948.

The real lesson of Ma’man Allah and the museum project is this: Peace will come to Palestine/Israel only when the blind insistence on displacement ends and both peoples are allowed to belong to the same land.

The announcement that Mahmoud Abbas has decided not to stand for re-election as head of the Palestinian Authority should come as a relief to all Palestinians. In fact, Abbas’s departure will open a much-needed opportunity to take stock of where things stand and assess the future course of the Palestinian struggle.

Never an appealing or charismatic figure, Abbas has been losing popular support since his first day in office five years ago (his term technically expired in January 2009). Since the 1993 Oslo Accords, in which he played a prominent role, the official Palestinian leadership has been pursuing a formula for peace — the two-state solution — that has yielded nothing more than the intensification of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory. Those 16 years have been characterized by the further immobilization and immiseration of the Palestinian people, and an ever-growing list of civilian casualties, most recently in Gaza.

We are left with no other conclusion than this: that the so-called peace process with which Abbas has been indelibly associated, albeit as the Israelis’ junior assistant, was calculated to produce exactly these results. The very first step of the Oslo process, undertaken with Abbas’s assent in 1993, was to fragment and separate the occupied territories into shards of land, disconnected from each other and from the outside world, under total, institutionalized Israeli domination. Take one look at a map and you can’t miss the separation of Gaza from the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and the further internal splintering of the West Bank, all of which is the direct result of Oslo.

Today, the Palestinian Authority (PA) over which Abbas presides is seen as a puppet. It has become the manager of the day-to-day burdens of military occupation, responsible for the hassle and expense of administering a restless population. All this is done on behalf of the Israelis, who have meanwhile gone on expropriating Palestinian land, bulldozing Palestinian homes, and building exclusively Jewish settlements in violation of international law (doubling the population of settlers since peace talks began). To all Palestinians other than the tiny clique who benefit from this arrangement, the sight of Abbas’s U.S.-trained and Israeli-armed PA militiamen cooperating with Israeli forces — if not taking direct orders from them — is nothing short of grotesque. And when Abbas recently succumbed to Israeli and U.S. pressure and dropped his support for the Goldstone report, a U.N. Human Rights Council-mandated investigation into last year’s Gaza incursion, many Palestinians saw it as the last straw both for Abbas — and for the PA itself.

What, then, are the alternatives?

Hamas stands for nothing other than, at best, defiance for the sake of defiance. It has no blueprint, no formula, no vision capable of unifying Palestinians and moving them closer to the achievement of their goals. Moreover, its religious rhetoric repels those Christian and secular Palestinians who have always been in the vanguard of the national movement and has little to offer to Muslim Palestinians either.

But to get bogged down in a discussion of other alternative candidates for the PA presidency, whether from Fatah or other parties, is to miss the point: The PA is irrelevant to the future of the Palestinian people as a whole.

To really grasp this, we have to remember something that the language packaging the peace process since the early 1990s has taught us to forget: Only a minority of Palestinians  live under occupation. It is that minority on whom the world’s imagination has been focused since Oslo.

The single largest component of the Palestinian people consists of those who were driven from their homes during the 1948 creation of Israel and their descendants. They were never, even theoretically, addressed or represented by the PA. Nor were the 1.5 million Palestinians who live as second-class citizens in Israel and who suffer from systematic and institutionalized discrimination because they are non-Jews inhabiting a state that wants to be Jewish.

As PA president, Abbas never represented the majority of Palestinians — he never even claimed to, and no successor would either. Nor does the current, PA-pursued two-state solution offer anything to the majority of Palestinians (and to the minority it offers only an illusory “autonomy”). The vast majority of the Palestinians, who do not live in occupied territories, would not be eligible to vote if and when Israel allowed elections to be held.

Peace will only come when the rights and needs of all Palestinians (not only the minority who suffer under occupation) and all Israeli Jews are fully addressed. The demise of Abbas, and with him, hopefully, the PA and the illusion of the two-state solution, opens up the possibility that Palestinians will once again embrace the one-state solution and demand the creation of a single, democratic, and secular state in which Israeli Jews and Palestinians live as equals. That is the only way to a just and lasting peace. Abbas’s departure is a start.

This is what I had to say.

Change Washington’s useless Mideast policies

President Obama would deserve the Nobel Peace Prize if he made a serious effort to help bring peace to the Middle East. He could begin by changing U.S. policies that uselessly embitter people and offer zero benefit to the United States.

In my grandparents’ time, people throughout the Arab and Muslim world looked to America as a beacon of light and hope: the great antithesis of the European empire builders. That attitude changed only when it became clear, after the destruction of Palestine in 1948, that America’s values are one thing and its policies quite another.

All Obama has to do is bring America’s policies in the greater Middle East into alignment with our values.

In Pakistan, he should end the catastrophic population displacements and immense human degradation and suffering that are a direct result of these policies, which are not President George W. Bush’s but his own.

In Afghanistan, he should end the war now — beginning with the absurd missile attacks and air raids that have killed hundreds of innocent men, women and children since he came to office — and contribute as much to help rebuild the country as he had been planning to spend on expanding the carnage.

And in Palestine and Israel — the source of much of the region’s unrest — he should end the shell game of trying to split a tiny piece of land into ethnic islands and instead bring about the creation of a single democratic and secular state for both Palestinians and Israelis that treats all of its citizens equally: the greatest of all American values.

]]> http://sareemakdisi.net/2009/10/18/obamas-nobel-peace-prize/feed/ 0 sareemakdisi http://sareemakdisi.net/2009/10/05/last-straw-for-the-palestinian-authority/ http://sareemakdisi.net/2009/10/05/last-straw-for-the-palestinian-authority/#comments Mon, 05 Oct 2009 00:31:46 +0000 sareemakdisi http://sareemakdisi.wordpress.com/?p=91 ]]> If there were any lingering doubts concerning the status and integrity of the Palestinian National Authority—and its so-called President, Mahmoud Abbas (“so-called” because his term of office, such as it was, expired almost a year ago)—they were surely dispelled once and for all by its decision to drop its support for a UN resolution that would have referred the Goldstone Report on Israel’s post-Christmas 2008 attack on Gaza to the UN Security Council.

The 575-page Report of the UN Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, which was led by South African judge Richard Goldstone, confirmed the already densely documented reports published by human rights organizations, including Amnesty International.  Those reports had, in turn, systematically confirmed Palestinian claims that Israel had, for example, recklessly and indiscriminately used white phosphorous on the packed residential districts of Gaza; indiscriminately targeted civilian objects including UN schools (as documented by the widely circulated—other than in the US—photographs of an Israeli phosphorous strike on a UN school in Gaza); used Palestinian civilians as human shields; and collectively punished the population of Gaza by imposing on them a suffocating siege, cutting off vital supplies of food, medicine, and fuel (not just during the recent assault and on to this day, but, to a greater or lesser extent, since 2005, and even, arguably, since 1991, when the Israelis first methodically sealed off the hapless territory from the outside world).

The Amnesty report, published in July, found that “hundreds of civilians were killed in attacks carried out using high-precision weapons—air- delivered bombs and missiles, and tank shells. Others, including women and children, were shot at short range when posing no threat to the lives of the Israeli soldiers. Aerial bombardments launched from Israeli F-16 combat aircraft targeted and destroyed civilian homes without warning, killing and injuring scores of their inhabitants, often while they slept. Children playing on the roofs of their homes or in the street and other civilians going about their daily business, as well as medical staff attending the wounded were killed in broad daylight by Hellfire and other highly accurate missiles launched from helicopters and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, and by precision projectiles fired from tanks.”

The Goldstone report (though it remarkably reserves its strongest language for Palestinian rocket attacks that killed 3 Israeli civilians, compared to the 1,400 Palestinians killed in Gaza, the vast majority civilians, and a third of them children) reiterates many of the same conclusions, and reports on case after case where Israeli forces launched “intentional attacks against the civilian population and civilian objects,” including “the shooting of civilians while they were trying to leave their homes to walk to a safer place, waving white flags and, in some of the cases, following an injunction from the Israeli forces to do so. The facts gathered by the Mission indicate that all the [latter] attacks occurred under circumstances in which the Israeli forces were in control of the area and had previously entered into contact with or at least observed the persons they subsequently attacked, so that they must have been aware of their civilian status.”  These incidents—all of which constitute war crimes—indicate, according to the Goldstone report, “that the instructions given to the Israeli forces moving into Gaza provided for a low threshold for the use of lethal fire against the civilian population.”

Indeed, among its other findings, the Goldstone report corroborates the well-documented reports (all of them summarily dismissed by the Israeli army, which considers itself “the most moral army in the world“) that Israeli soldiers themselves admitted to the brutality of the bombardment of Gaza, and left behind them—as unmistakable evidence of their officially-encouraged attitude towards Palestinians—both racist slogans (e.g., “We came to annihilate you; Death to the Arabs; Kahane was right; No tolerance, we came to liquidate”) and human feces smeared on the walls of the Palestinian homes they looted and vandalized.   “You feel like an infantile little kid with a magnifying glass looking at ants, burning them,” one Israeli soldier confessed of the prevailing Israeli army attitude toward the Palestinians of Gaza, which was fueled in part by the proclamations of the army’s rabbinical corps, which compared Palestinians to the biblical Philistines and urged that Israeli soldiers “show no mercy.”

None of the conclusions of all these reports ought to come as a surprise. The Israeli army itself had openly proclaimed, months before the bombing even started, that its strategy in both Lebanon and Palestine has been premised since 2006 on the sweeping and indiscriminate use of massive firepower: the so-called “Dahiyeh Doctrine,” referring to the Dahiyeh, or southern suburb of Beirut, which the Israelis razed to the ground in their 2006 war on Lebanon, as they also did to many villages in the south of that country.  ”We will wield disproportionate power against every village from which shots are fired on Israel, and cause immense damage and destruction,” one Israeli general (Gadi Eisenkot) announced—with contemptuous disregard for the law of war.  ”From our perspective, these are military bases,” he added. “This isn’t a suggestion. This is a plan that has already been authorized.”

Other than planning for—and attempting (to its own satisfaction at least) to legitimate—the massive and necessarily indiscriminate use of force, the Israeli military legal establishment had specifically authorized premeditated attacks, such as the one that killed dozens of unarmed Gaza policemen parading in their graduation ceremony, with which Israel kicked off its bombardment on 27 December 2008, that inherently involved manifest violations of the principles of proportionality and discrimination that are the pillars of international humanitarian law.

Moreover, not only the Amnesty and Goldstone reports but Israeli commanders themselves openly said that overwhelming and indiscriminate force was used—deliberately, and in a premeditated fashion—again, in total disregard for the principles of proportionality and discrimination.  ”At the start of the ground offensive, senior command decided to avoid endangering the lives of soldiers, even at the price of seriously harming the civilian population,” one Israeli media report revealed.  ”This is why the IDF [Israeli army] made use of massive force during its advance in the Strip.  As a Golani brigade commander explained, if there is any concern that a house is booby-trapped, even if it is filled with civilians, it should be targeted and hit, to ensure that it is not mined—only then should it be approached. Without going into the moral aspects, such fighting tactics explain why there were no instances in which there was a need to assault homes where Hamas fighters were holed up.”

Ultimately, all that these inquiries, including Goldstone’s, have done is merely to confirm Israel’s own (repeatedly flaunted) contempt for international humanitarian law.

Needless to say, from the beginning, Israel utterly refused to cooperate with the Goldstone inquiry, dismissing it—as it has dismissed all previous attempts to investigate its conduct or to hold it accountable to the principles of international humanitarian law—as “unfair” and “unbalanced” (as though there were anything “balanced” about the conflict between the sheer force of an occupying power and an essentially defenseless occupied people).  Among the many previous investigative commissions which Israel has either summarily dismissed or refused to cooperate with are the investigation led by Archbishop Desmond Tutu into the Israeli killing of 19 members of a Palestinian family in Gaza in 2008; the commission appointed by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in 2002 to investigate the indiscriminate destruction of civilian areas in the Israeli assault on Jenin refugee camp that spring (the actions of which a separate investigation, by Amnesty International, found amounted “to grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention and are war crimes”); and the UN investigation of the Israeli artillery massacre of over a hundred Lebanese civilians huddling in a shelter at a UN compound in Qana, Lebanon in 1995, which found that “it is unlikely that the shelling of the United Nations compound was the result of gross technical and/or procedural errors,” as the Israeli army said at the time—as, indeed, it always says is the case when its soldiers kill dozens of civilians: not once has Israel actually held any of its officers or soldiers accountable for such crimes.  In all previous cases, Israel’s adamant refusal to be held accountable to the law has been upheld by the US, and the Obama administration proved that it had no intention of breaking that particular tradition this time either.

Nevertheless, as Professor Richard Falk (the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights Situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories) points out, the Goldstone report could have provided a basis for referring Israel’s conduct durng the war in Gaza to the International Criminal Court or other international courts, or to the establishment of a war crimes tribunal along the lines of those established after the catastrophes of Bosnia and Rwanda.  That would have been the best way to finally hold Israel accountable for its grave breaches of international humanitarian law, its war crimes, and its crimes against humanity (not least the sealing off an entire civilian population from the outside world, denying it the ability to flee to safety, and then subjecting that same, defenseless, shelterless population—most of it composed of children—to an indiscriminate round-the-clock bombardment).

The process of referral depended, however, on obtaining a vote within the UN to have the Goldstone report referred to the Security Council for further deliberation, the creation of a war crimes tribunal, and so on.  And all of that depended in turn on the support of Palestinian diplomats appointed by and accountable to Mahmoud Abbas.

But it is now clear that the Palestinian team representing Mahmoud Abbas at the UN (for they certainly do not represent the Palestinian people) has, on his instructions, dropped its support for the resolution that might have set the legal machinery of the international judicial system in motion.  Other states can hardly be expected to stand up to US pressure and support a resolution on behalf of Palestinian rights that the Palestinian delegation itself is unwilling to support—why should Venezuela or Nigeria or Pakistan be more Palestinian than the Palestinians?

Reports have been circulating in the Arab, Israeli and European media that Abbas and his associates may have been prompted to take this extraordinary action because Israel had been threatening, had they continued with their support of the UN resolution, to withhold its release of a share of the radio spectrum that would have allowed the creation of a new Palestinian mobile phone company, Wataniyya: the product of a joint venture between Qatari investors and the Palestine Investment Fund, to which Abbas himself and one of his wealthy sons have personal connections. Palestinians have suggested that simple corruption and cronyism may have motivated Abbas’s decision.  The PA and the circle of officials attached to it have certainly had their share of corruption charges—most shockingly, perhaps, when Ahmed Qureia, then the so-called Prime Minister of the PA (again, “so-called” because Prime Ministers usually have countries to govern, and the PA is anything but a country), was accused of selling cement to the Israelis to build their wall in the West Bank.  The corruption of the PA and the narrow circle of Fateh party officials running it, clinging to it, and benefiting from it, is one of the main reasons why Fateh was swept from office in the 2006 Palestinian elections in favor of Hamas: most people then were voting against Fateh and its corruption and general hopelessness, rather than for Hamas (which had, and has, little to offer other than simply not being Fateh: a credit which goes only so far).

It’s possible, of course, that corruption and cronyism were not the motivating factors for Abbas’s decision to withdraw Palestinian support for the Goldstone report.  There are two other possibilities.

One of these is simple incompetence: that Abbas and his associates are so lacking in intelligence, imagination and political skill that they just bungled the whole affair.  This is certainly not out of the question: Abbas himself is an extraordinarily unprepossessing and profoundly compromised man, and his circle of associates—including men like Mohammad Dahlan and Saeb Ereikat—hardly inspire any more confidence than Abbas himself.  Quite apart from their sheer disregard for Palestinian suffering in Gaza (seeking redress for which ought to be their main priority), it ought to be clear that a party to a negotiation that wantonly throws a rarely-held card out of the window while attempting (or at least claiming) to negotiate is, to put it mildly, not qualified to negotiate in the first place, let alone to claim to “lead” a defiant and unvanquished people like the Palestinians.  If the Ramallah leadership is really as hopelessly incompetent as this scenario would have it, that’s reason enough for their removal from office, if not the dissolution of the PA itself.  (It’s difficult, though, to “dismiss from office” someone like Abbas who is not actually in office in the first place—he is there because the Israelis and the Americans want him to be there, because the election for his successor after his term expired has been deferred at the behest of Washington and Tel Aviv, and not because he holds any legitimate mandate from the Palestinian people themselves, the overwhelming majority of whom have no faith in him whatsoever, as opinion polls have regularly found).

Another—and I think more likely—possibility is that Abbas, the PA and the essentially defunct PLO are not (and never were, at least since the time of Yasser Arafat’s death) interested in serious negotiations with Israel that could have led to the creation of a genuine Palestinian state in the occupied territories.  After all, one of the main criticisms of the Oslo Accords of 1993-95 which created the PA, is that, far from ending Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory, they merely served to shift the day-to-day burden and cost of administering the occupation to the newly-established PA, while allowing Israel to go on demolishing Palestinian homes, expropriating Palestinian land, and building Jewish colonies in the occupied territories in contravention of international law.  Oslo formally separated the three main chunks of Palestinian territory that Israel has occupied since 1967 (Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem) from each other and the outside world, and, additionally, broke the West Bank itself into Areas A, B and C.  It was only in Area A (about 18 percent of the total) that the PA had any kind of practical presence on the ground, and in Area C (60 percent of the West Bank), the PA had no role or presence at all—and that’s where Israel was (and still is) busy demolishing, expropriating and building.  Oslo and the PA, in other words, far from ending the occupation and laying the basis for the creation of an independent Palestinian state, actually allowed Israel to consolidate the occupation and further cement its grip on Palestinian land.  Which is exactly why the population of Jewish colonists in the West Bank and East Jerusalem doubled during the period of Oslo and has been increasing ever since—and today numbers almost half a million.

As this latest episode so amply demonstrates, the PA serves Israel by facilitating the occupation—which is why Israel invented it in the first place, just as, historically speaking, colonial powers have always attempted to create or coerce local elites into helping them deal with the population at large: an approach perhaps most gracefully summarized in Macaulay’s Minute on Indian Education of 1835 (“We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect”).  Why would the PA want to bring to an end an arrangement from which it benefits?  As the French scholar Regis Debray points out, the status quo provides the PA elites in Ramallah “with a living, status, dignity and a raison d’être,” and probably (e.g., if the mobile phone contract rumors prove to be true) much more in the way of emoluments besides that.

Even if one were to grant the PA and Abbas and his associates the benefit of the doubt, and say that they really have their people’s best interests at heart, it still remains the case that the PA, even under the best-case scenario, can claim to represent only a minority of the Palestinian people, since only a minority of Palestinians live in the occupied territories: the majority live either in the exile imposed on them by force during the creation of Israel in 1948, or (in the case of those Palestinians who survived that year’s ethnic cleansing and remained in their homes) as second-class, non-Jewish citizens of the would-be Jewish state, which systematically discriminates against them simply because they are not Jewish.

These, then, are the possibilities before us: not only does the PA not represent the Palestinian people, it is also, on top of that, either corrupt to an almost unimaginable level; or it is profoundly incompetent and guilty of squandering the rights and hopes of a people that it is unentitled to claim to lead; or it is interested not in its people’s rights and hopes but rather in perpetuating its own status as the day-to-day caretaker of a permanent Israeli occupation—in which case it is no less collaborationist than the Vichy “government” of Nazi-occupied France in the 1940s.  Corruption; incompetence; collaboration: ah, the agony of choice.

In the unlikely event that Abbas and his associates were to declare the “independence” of a Palestinian state in the occupied territories, as has been suggested by the current so-called Palestinian Prime Minister, Salam Fayyad (another man whose claim to office has no legitimacy, since his arbitrary appointment, by Abbas, to replace the legitimately elected Hamas leadership—whatever one thinks of it—was never confirmed by the Palestinian Legislative Assembly, many of the members of which are in Israeli jails), it ought to be clearer than ever that such a “state” would offer Palestinians only more of the same choices (corruption, compromise, collaboration), while continuing to serve Israel’s interests, if not actually to take direct orders from Washington and Tel Aviv.

In any case, the Palestinian cause is a struggle for freedom and justice, not for the creation of a statelet in the occupied territories that would, as I said—even in the best circumstances—only address the interests of that minority of the Palestinian people who live there.

What, then, are we to conclude from all this?

Above all, that no Palestinian ought to look to the official leadership as a source of guidance and direction: it has betrayed the people and proved itself totally unworthy of their trust—indeed, many Palestinians, including Abdelbari Atwan, editor of the newspaper al-quds al-arabi, are demanding that those behind this recent decision be apprehended and put on trial.  And of course with a leadership this corrupt, inept or collaborationist, Palestinians can hardly expect better treatment from Washington and Tel Aviv than they are getting from Ramallah. And the Hamas opposition and its alternative leadership has little more to offer in the long run other than resistance for the sake of resistance, which is not, in itself, a blueprint for freedom and justice, and in any case has nothing to offer to Christian or secular Palestinians (and hardly much more than that to offer Muslim ones either, for that matter).

The second immediate conclusion to be drawn from this experience is that, as more and more Palestinians are demanding, the PA ought to be dissolved once and for all—the sooner, the better. This latest action really ought to be the last in a long and dismal record proving that the PA has not only not served the interests of the Palestinian people, but that, on the contrary, it fundamentally serves the needs and requirements of Israel.

Bereft of any credible or legitimate leadership, the Palestinian people will have to look to themselves to continue their struggle for freedom, justice and equality.  Indeed, their struggle has been at its best, for example, during the first intifada of the 1980s, when the official leadership—at the time in exile in Tunis—was actually least involved in it.  No wonder, then, that the Israeli response to the grassroots autonomy of the first intifada was to usher the official leadership back into Palestine; the first intifada then stalled, and things have gone downhill ever since.

In looking for a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, then, we should once and for all stop looking to governments and officials (elected or otherwise), in the US, Israel, or among the Palestinians themselves.   As the Obama administration has already demonstrated, the US government, in the present political conjuncture, will never put peace and justice in Palestine ahead of internal domestic pressures and politics; the Israeli government will not for one moment back down from its continually expanding colonization plan in the West Bank and East Jerusalem until it is compelled by outside pressure to do otherwise; and the Palestinian government—well, there is no such thing.  There is a people living partly under military occupation; partly in enforced exile; and partly as a racialized and discriminated-against minority inside Israel.  What they need is to refocus their struggle in ways that they can all identify with, collectively and equally, and, moreover, in ways that people of good will around the world—who have repeatedly demonstrated in their tens of thousands in support of justice for Palestine.

Indeed, the Palestinians are not alone: they have the support of people around the entire world.  And it is to that reserve of good will and good faith among ordinary people around the world that the Palestinians must also look, then.  As the struggle against Apartheid in South Africa demonstrated, governments not only can, but do, act, when ordinary people of good will make them act.  In fact, even as governments have dithered, a vibrant global campaign to boycott, divest from, and impose sanctions on Israel in order to bring it into compliance with international law and in order to realize the rights of the Palestinian people (all of it) has been recording one success after another, reminding us all that boycotts really do work.

This is the direction in which all Palestinians, bereft of leadership, must now throw themselves.  And their demand must be something that addresses and unifies the rights of all segments of the Palestinian people, not just those suffering under occupation, as well as addressing and recognizing the rights of Jewish Israelis—something that most decent people in the world can readily identify with: justice, equality, one-person-one-vote: in other words, the creation of one democratic and secular state in which Palestinians and Israelis can live equally in a just and lasting peace.  For without justice there will be no peace.