We must remove noose that chokes Palestinians
President Mahmoud Abbas meets with Israeli correspondents at the Muqata, the headquarters of the Palestinian National Authority in Ramallah, on January 21, 2016. Photo by Yonatan Sindel/Flash90
Why the Palestinian Authority Should Be Shuttered
By Diana Buttu, NY Times
May 26, 2017
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 favours 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 clamoured 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.
a third of the authority’s roughly $4 billion budget goes to policing, more than for health and education combined.
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 co-operation” 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.
Petain and Abbas bring shame to their people. But do they save them? See Avnery below
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.
The Palestinian Authority institutionalizes dependency on international donors
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.
This is the only route to restoring our dignity and independent Palestinian decision making
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.
By Uri Avnery, Gush Shalom
June 03, 2017
A FEW days ago, a not so well-known Palestinian woman received an unusual honour. An article of hers was published on top of the first page of the most respected newspaper on earth: New York Times.
The editors defined the writer, Diana Buttu, as: “a lawyer and a former adviser to the negotiating team of the Palestine Liberation Organization”.
I knew Diana Buttu when she first appeared on the Palestinian scene, in 2000, at the beginning of the second intifada. She was born in Canada, the daughter of Palestinian immigrants who tried hard to assimilate in their new homeland, and received a good Canadian education.
When the struggle in the occupied territories intensified, she returned to her parents’ homeland. The Palestinian participants of the negotiations with Israel, which started after the Oslo agreement, were impressed by the young lawyer who spoke excellent English – something rare – and asked her to join the national endeavour.
When the negotiations died clinically, Diana Buttu disappeared from my eyes. Until her dramatic reappearance last week.
THE LOCATION and the headline of the article demonstrate the importance which the American editors saw in her argument. The headline was “Do we need a Palestinian Authority?” and further on, in another headline, “Shutter the Palestinian Authority”.
The argument of Diana Buttu seduces by its simplicity: the usefulness of the Palestinian Authority has passed. It should be liquidated. Now.
The Palestinian Authority, she says, was set up for a specific purpose: to negotiate with Israel for the end of the occupation and the creation of the hoped-for Palestinian state. By its very nature, that was a task limited in time.
According to the Oslo agreement, the negotiations for ending the occupation should have reached their goal in 1999. Since then, 18 years have passed without any movement towards a solution. The only thing that has moved was the settlement movement, which has reached by now monstrous dimensions.
In these circumstances, says Buttu, the Palestinian Authority has become a “subcontractor” of the occupation. The Authority helps Israel to oppress the Palestinians. True, it employs a large number of educational and medical personnel, but more than a third of its budget – some 4 billion dollars – go to “security”. The Palestinian security forces maintain a close co-operation with their Israeli colleagues. Meaning, they co-operate in upholding the occupation.
Also, Buttu complains about the lack of democracy. For 12 years now, no elections have taken place. Mahmoud Abbas (Abu-Mazen) rules in contravention of the Palestinian Basic Law.
Her solution is simple: “it’s time for the authority to go.” To abolish the authority, to return the responsibility for the occupied Palestinian population to the Israeli occupier and adopt a “new Palestinian strategy”.
What strategy, exactly?
Up to this point, Buttu’s arguments were lucid and logical. But from here on they become unclear and nebulous.
BEFORE GOING on, I have to make some personal remarks.
I am an Israeli. I define myself as an Israeli patriot. As a son of the occupying nation I don’t think that I have the right to give advice to the occupied nation.
True, I have devoted the last 79 years of my life to the achievement of peace between the two nations – a peace that, I believe, is an existential necessity for both. Since the end of the 1948 war I preach the establishment of an independent State of Palestinian side by side with the State of Israel. Some of my enemies in the extreme Israeli Right even accuse me of having invented the “Two-State Solution” (thus deserving the title of “traitor”.)
In spite of all this, I have always abstained from giving the Palestinians advice. Even when Yasser Arafat declared several times publicly that I am his “friend”, I did not see myself as an adviser. I have expressed my views and voiced them many times in the presence of Palestinians, but from that point to giving advice, the distance is great.
Now, too, I am not ready to give advice to the Palestinians in general, and to Diana Buttu in particular. But I take the liberty to to make some remarks about her revolutionary proposal.
Reading her article for the second and third time, I gain the impression that it contains a disproportion between the diagnosis and the medicine.
WHAT DOES she propose that the Palestinians do?
The first step is clear: break up the Palestinian Authority and return all the organs of Palestinian self-government to the Israeli military governor.
That is simple. But what next?
Diana Buttu voices several general proposals. “Non-violent mass protests”, “boycott, divestment and sanctions”, “addressing the rights of Palestinian refugees” (from the 1948 war) and the “Palestinian citizens of Israel”. She mentions approvingly that already more than a third of the Palestinian people in the occupied territories support a single-state solution – meaning a bi-national state.
With due respect, will these remedies – all together and each one separately – liberate the Palestinian people?
There is no proof that it will.
Experience shows the it is easy for the occupation authorities to turn a “non-violent mass protest” into a very violent one. That happened in both intifadas, and especially in the second. It started with non-violent actions, and then the occupation authorities called in snipers. Within a few days the intifada became violent.
The use of boycotts? There is now in the world a large movement of BDS against Israel. The Israeli government is afraid of it and fights against it with all means, including ridiculous ones. But this fear does not spring from the economic damages this movement can cause, but from the damage it may cause to Israel’s image. Such an image may hurt, but it does not kill.
Like many others, Buttu uses here the example of South Africa. This is an imagined example. The world-wide boycott was indeed impressive, but it did not kill the apartheid regime. This is a western illusion, which reflects contempt for the “natives”.
The racist regime in South Africa was not brought down by foreigners, nice as they were, but by those despised “natives”. The blacks started campaigns of armed struggle (yes, the great Nelson Mandela was a “terrorist”) and mass strikes, which brought down the economy. The international boycott played a welcome supporting role.
Buttu has high hopes for “Palestinian boycotts”. Can they really hurt the Israeli economy? One can always bring in a million Chinese workers.
Buttu also mentions the international court in the Hague. The trouble is that Jewish psychology is hardened against “goyish justice”. Aren’t they all antisemites? Israel spits on them, as it spat on the UN resolution at its time.
WHAT IS left? There is only one alternative, the one Buttu wisely refrains from mentioning: terrorism.
Many peoples throughout history started wars of liberation, violent struggles against their oppressors. In Israeli jargon that is called “terror’.
Let’s ignore for a moment the ideological aspect and concentrate on the practical aspect only: does one believe that a “terrorist” campaign by the occupied people against the occupying people can, under existing circumstances, succeed?
I doubt it. I doubt it very much. The Israeli security services have shown, until now, considerable ability in fighting against armed resistance.
If so, what remains for the Palestinians to do? In two words: Hold on.
And here there lies the special talent of Mahmoud Abbas. He is a great one for holding on. For leading a people that is passing a terrible ordeal, an ordeal of suffering and humiliation, without giving in. Abbas does not give in. If someone will take his place, somewhere in the future, he will not give in either. Not Marwan Barghouti, for example.
As a young man I was a member of the Irgun, the underground military organization. During Workd War II, my company organized a “trial” for Marshal Phillip Petain, who became head the French government after the French collapse. This “government” was located in Vichy and took orders from the German occupation.
Much against my will, I was appointed counsel for the defence. I took the job seriously, and, to my surprise, discovered that Petain had logic on his side. He saved Paris from destruction and made it possible for most of the French people to survive the occupation. When the Nazi empire broke down, France, under Charles de Gaulle, joined the victors.
Of course, Diana Buttu does not refer to this emotion-laden historic example. But one should remember.
Habayit Hayehudi MK Bezalel Smotrich at a rally in support of the Amona outpost. Photo by Tali Mayer
A FEW days before the publication of Buttu’s article, a leader of the Israeli fascist right, Bezalel Smotrich, a deputy chairman of the Knesset, published an ultimatum to the Palestinians.
Smotrich proposed to put to Palestinians a choice between three possibilities: to leave the country, to live in the country without citizenship rights or to rise up in arms – and then the Israeli army “would know how to deal with them”.
In simple words: the choice is between (a) the mass expulsion of seven million Palestinians from the West Bank (including East Jerusalem), Israel proper and the Gaza Strip, which would amount to genocide, (b) life as a people of slaves under an apartheid regime and (c) simple genocide.
The unclear proposal of Buttu constitutes, in practice, the second choice. She mentions that many Palestinians approve of the “one-state solution”. She shies away from a clear-cut statement and hides behind a formula that is becoming fashionable these days: “two-states or one state”. Rather like: “swimming or drowning”.
This is suicide. Dramatic suicide. Glorious suicide. Suicide none the less.
Both Buttu and Smotrich lead to disaster.
After all these years, the only practical solution remains as it was at the beginning: two states for two peoples. Two states that will live side by side in peace, perhaps even in friendship.
There is no other solution.