Why the Palestinian Authority Should
Be Shuttered
By DIANA BUTTU MAY 26, 2017
CreditChristina
Hägerfors
RAMALLAH, WEST BANK — President Trump’s meeting
this week with the president of the Palestinian
Authority, Mahmoud
Abbas, was pitched as an effort by the author of “The Art of the
Deal” to restart the United States-sponsored peace process, long stalled. But
as next month’s 50th anniversary of the Israeli occupation approaches, this
much is certain: The process is worse than stalled. In the face of an
intransigent right-wing government in Israel,
which doesn’t believe Palestinians should
have full rights, negotiations are futile.
Where does this leave Mr. Trump and the American
policy of propping up the Palestinian Authority and Mr. Abbas? Given the abject
failure of talks built on a bankrupt framework that heavily favors Israel, more
and more Palestinians are debating the need for new leadership and a new
strategy.
Many now question whether the Palestinian
Authority plays any positive role or is simply a tool of control for Israel and
the international community. The inescapable logic is that it’s time for the
authority to go.
Established in 1994 under the Oslo Accords, the
Palestinian Authority was intended to be a temporary body that would become a
fully functioning government once statehood was granted, which was promised for
1999. The authority’s jurisdiction has, therefore, always been limited. It is
in charge of a mere 18 percent of the West Bank (divided into eight areas).
Compared with Israel’s overall control of the occupied West Bank and the Gaza
Strip, the Palestinian Authority’s powers are paltry.
To many Palestinians, however, the establishment
of their own government was a dream realized. Finally, those who had lived
under occupation since 1967 would be free from repressive Israel’s military
rule to govern themselves. Palestinians clamored to assume posts in the new
body and took pride in establishing institutions despite the obstacles imposed
by Israeli rule. As the negotiations dragged on under Oslo, these blocks became
only more entrenched.
After more than two decades, the talks have
produced no progress. I spent several years involved on the Palestinian side of
the negotiations and can attest to their futility. Palestinian delegates, who
needed permits to enter Israel to participate in talks, were routinely held up
at Israeli checkpoints. When we spoke of international law and the illegality
of settlements, Israeli negotiators laughed in our faces.
Power is everything, they would say, and you
have none.
As time went on, it became clear that the
authority’s budget and its priorities were primarily geared toward ensuring
that Palestinians remained one of the most surveilled and controlled people on
earth. In effect, the Palestinian Authority served as a subcontractor for the
occupying Israeli military. The overwhelming focus on security, we were told,
was necessary for the duration of peace talks. Today, fully a third of the authority’s roughly $4
billion budget goes to policing, more than for health and education combined.
These security forces do not provide a normal
police service to Palestinians, but instead aid the Israeli Army in maintaining
the occupation and Israel’s ever-expanding settlements. The internationally
lauded “security cooperation” between Israel and the Palestinian Authority has
resulted only in the arrest and imprisonment of Palestinians, including nonviolent human rights activists,
while armed and violent Israeli settlers are allowed to terrorize Palestinians
with impunity. The Palestinian Authority has no jurisdiction over the settlers,
and the Israeli Army almost always looks the other way.
The raison d’être of the Palestinian Authority
today is not to liberate Palestine; it is to keep Palestinians silent and quash
dissent while Israel steals land, demolishes Palestinian homes, and builds and
expands settlements. Instead of becoming a sovereign state, the Palestinian
Authority has become a proto-police state, a virtual dictatorship, endorsed and
funded by the international community.
Look at its leader. Eighty-two years old, Mr.
Abbas has now controlled the authority for more than 12 years, ruling by
presidential decree for most of that time, with no electoral mandate. He has
presided over some of the worst days in Palestinian history, including the
disastrous, decade-long split between his Fatah party and Hamas, the other
major player in Palestinian politics, and three devastating Israeli military
assaults on Gaza.
Under his presidency, the Palestinian Parliament
has become moribund and irrelevant. Many Palestinians have never voted in
presidential or parliamentary elections because Mr. Abbas has failed to hold
them, even though they are called for in the Basic Law governing the
Palestinian Authority. The latest opinion polls show that his
popularity is at its lowest ever, with two-thirds of Palestinians so discontent
that they want him to resign.
An equally
high number no longer believe that negotiations will secure
their freedom. The Palestinian Authority institutionalizes dependency on
international donors, which tie the authority’s hands with political
conditions. As a result, even using the International Criminal Court to hold
Israel accountable for its illegal settlement-building has to be weighed
against the likely financial repercussions of such a simple act.
To remove this noose that has been choking
Palestinians, the authority must be replaced with the sort of community-based
decision making that predated the body’s establishment. And we must reform our
main political body, the Palestine Liberation Organization, which Mr. Abbas
also heads, to make it more representative of the Palestinian people and their
political parties, including Hamas. Hamas has long indicated that it wants to
be part of the P.L.O., and its revised charter, recently released in Doha,
Qatar, affirms this aspiration.
With the negotiation process dead, why should
Palestinians be forced to cling to the Palestinian Authority, which has only
undermined their decades-long struggle for justice and helped to divide them?
Given that there are about 150,000 employees who
depend on the authority for their salaries, I am under no illusion that closing
it down will be easy or painless. But this is the only route to restoring our
dignity and independent Palestinian decision making. A reformed P.L.O., with
its credibility renewed, will be able to raise funds from Palestinians and
friendly nations to support those living under the occupation, as it did before
the Oslo process.
To some, this may sound like giving up on the
national dream of self-rule. It is not. By dismantling the authority,
Palestinians can once again confront Israel’s occupation in a strategic way, as
opposed to Mr. Abbas’s merely symbolic bids for statehood. This means
supporting the community-based initiatives that organize nonviolent mass
protests and press for boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel, like
those that helped to end apartheid in South Africa.
This new strategy may mean calling for equal
rights within a single state, an infinitely more just and attainable outcome
than the American-backed process that pretended peace could come without
addressing the rights of Palestinian refugees and the Palestinian citizens of
Israel. Already, more than one-third of Palestinians in
the occupied territories support a single-state solution, without any major
political party advocating this policy.
By dismantling the Palestinian Authority and
reforming the P.L.O., the real will of Palestinians will be heard. Whether the
endgame is two states or one state, it is up to this generation of Palestinians
to decide.
Diana
Buttu is a lawyer and a former adviser to the negotiating team of the Palestine
Liberation Organization.
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A version of this op-ed appears
in print on May 27, 2017, on Page A21 of the New York edition with
the headline: The Deplorable State of Palestine.
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21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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