Whatever Its Faults, This Palestinian Leadership Will Not Surrender
By: Rima Najjar
Tags: Israel, Trump, Bahrain, Uae, Palestine

Palestinian-American legal scholar Noura Erakat says Trump’s “peace” agreements are a sham. Democracy Now! https://www.democracynow.org/2020/9/16/noura_erakat_trump_israel_middle_east

Neither Netanyahu nor Trump mentioned the Palestinians in their remarks as Israel “inked historic deals” normalizing relations with the leaders of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain in a White House ceremony on Sep 15, 2020.



But without Palestinian engagement “everything they have achieved will remain under threat, which is why they will now continue the policy of the carrot and the stick to persuade the Palestinian people and their leadership to join the ranks [of Arab normalizers with Israel], or work to bypass it with an Arab solution without the Palestinians, and strive to replace the Palestinian leadership and find a leadership ready to surrender.” (My translation)

The above is Hani Al Masri’s voice, writing on his Masarat Center blog from Ramallah on the day of the ceremony.

“Whatever its faults, and they are legion, this Palestinian leadership will not, cannot, surrender. If jumping on the US-led bandwagon provides the Bahraini monarchy continued protection against its own people, jumping on that bandwagon would provide the Palestinian Authority with immediate collapse.”

Anticipating the ceremony and in response to the news that Bahrain was also jumping on the normalization bandwagon, the Palestine Liberation Organization: Department of Public Diplomacy & Policy published a statement by Hanan Ashrawi dated Sep 11, which says:

The Bahrain-Israel announcement is not a peace deal. It is US President Donald Trump playing to his base in the wake of elections and a reward to Israel’s escalating aggression and impunity. Normalization has been taking place between Bahrain and Israel surreptitiously. The US administration has used all its political and economic might to extort, pressure, and bully Arab and other states to normalize Israeli colonization and trample on foundational principles of international law, including the tacit endorsement of the war crime of annexation. The path to real peace must be founded on mutual respect and adherence to international law. By contrast, the false promise of prosperity and peace based on the US-Israeli approach will prove itself a destructive mirage that will only further destabilize the region. Normalization of states in the region with Israel will not change the essence of this conflict, which is the systemic denial of the Palestinian people’s inalienable right to freedom and sovereignty. The US administration can continue to exercise its power of coercion in the region to serve its electoral needs while applying cruel pressure on the Palestinian people. However, such an arrogant and ignorant approach will not bring the Palestinian people to their knees. The Palestinian people remain deeply rooted in their homeland and determined to secure their fundamental rights to a reality of freedom, dignity, and sovereignty. We will not surrender our agency nor abdicate our responsibility to deliver a genuine and just peace to our future generations. Justice in Palestine is a moral and legal imperative that can neither be ignored nor denied.

Dr. Hanan Ashrawi is a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Executive Committee

“The road to Jerusalem remains paved through the triumph of peoples against their authoritarian governments in the Arab world.”

Outside Ramallah, in the United States, Democracy Now! and NBC news amplified Ashrawi’s and Al Masri’s voices with a clear, unblinking analysis of the normalization deal by Noura Erekat, author of Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine: “This is not a peace agreement but rather an accord to join forces to suppress struggles for freedom. We should be watching this moment from the front row — but to protest, rather than applaud.”

A few days earlier, Erekat had posted the following “Quick thoughts on normalization between Bahrain and Israel” on her Facebook page:

1. This is better understood as another step in the U.S.’s bid for hegemonic influence in the Middle East as opposed to bilateral peace. Trump made the announcement to boast U.S. imperial success — not peacemaking. 2. This is not a rupture in a history of Arab support for Palestinians. The Bahraini people remain steadfast in their support for freedom and their government is as much a threat to them as it is to Palestinians. The road to Jerusalem remains paved through the triumph of peoples against their authoritarian governments in the Arab world. 3. The official Palestinian leadership was lagging; it is now all but irrelevant. It needs to catch up rapidly or just hand over the reins to a new generation of Palestinian leaders ready and able to overcome the diplomatic intransigence and the sovereignty trap within which they continue to suffocate us.

“We will not surrender our agency nor abdicate our responsibility to deliver a genuine and just peace to our future generations.”

Palestine lives in its people generation after generation. Wearing the same t-shirt, left: my granddaughter Karma; right: my niece employment-law attorney Rima Kapitan as a child.

So, what will the Palestinians do now? There continues to be a lot of agonized debate, discussion and soul-searching on this question among Palestinians in and out of zoom gatherings. Al-Adab organized a webinar (among several others) on “27 years of the Oslo accords and the future path for Palestine” with Dr. Abed al-Zuraie and Dr. Rabab Ibrahim Abdulhadi. Another was a workshop , also in Arabic, held on the day of the ceremony by Palestine Forum titled “Scenarios for the Future in Light of the Failure of the Palestinian National Project.”

What will the Palestinian leadership do? It is still waiting on reports/recommendations from the secretary generals of the various political parties with whom Mahmoud Abbas met on Sep 3rd. Let’s hope that they are listening to what Hani Al Masri says they must do:

It is not enough to threaten to dissolve or collapse the Palestinian Authority, nor are unity and popular resistance sufficient. We must complete the steps to liberate ourselves from the chains of the Oslo Accords and withdraw our recognition of Israel. We must rebuild and not just patch the existing PLO institutions, strengthen the foundations that shore up our continued existence on our land, our sumoud, steadfastness and productive resistance. We must get rid of the strategy of biding our time, of being reactive, of betting on others and on Biden’s success or the fall of Netanyahu. We must adopt an initiative capable of acknowledging new developments and realities, not in order to detach ourselves from reality, but rather to change that reality and refuse to submit to it. (My translation)

On Democracy Now! Noura Erekat had this to say about the Palestinian Authority (PA):

Again, this is an opportunity to revisit that history. The 1993 Declaration of Principles never promised a Palestinian state. There was no promise for a two-state solution, and that needs to be clear. Israel has been a state since 1948 and has been recognized by Palestinians as a state in 1988 and again in 1993. There is nothing in the Declaration of Principles that even promises that the outcome of it will lead to an independent Palestinian state, and yet that is what has been sold to us. Instead, this is an autonomy agreement for permanent, derivative sovereignty, whereby Palestinians can live in Bantustans and reservations with the blessing of Israel, but never as a people, never with national independence. The 1993 Declaration of Principles, Oslo, in my eyes, has been dead since the besiegement of Yasser Arafat in the presidential compound in Ramallah in 2001 and his death in 2002. And yet we continue on with the farce of the peace process now into 2020. And the responsibility for that lies squarely on the official Palestinian leadership. This is a moment of accountability. Unless the Palestinian leadership can look at this record and account for where they failed to take opportunities, what junctures they did not turn on, what moments they did not reassess this failed strategy, there is no moving forward with them in any kind of capacity as representative of the Palestinian people. If nothing else, this is a moment of reckoning, to understand and to deliberate about a radical rethinking about the Palestinian movement for freedom. And Palestinians, the world over, have been doing that work as they overcome and surmount diplomatic intransigence to advance the Palestinian cause for freedom through campaigns like Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, which has, in effect, kept the Palestinian struggle alive, created new alliances across the globe. It’s why we see solidarity protests in Pretoria, South Africa. It’s why we see now members of Congress who are standing up to explain that this is not about democracy, peace and freedom. That’s precisely because there has been a shadow Palestinian movement in place of the Palestinian official leadership. And hopefully we’ll see more of that as we move along, where the base is mobilizing the top.

Whatever its faults, and they are legion, this Palestinian leadership in the form of the PA will not, cannot, surrender. If jumping on the US-led bandwagon provides the Bahraini monarchy “continued protection against its own people,” as Mouin Rabbani, co-editor of the Jadaliyya publication, says, jumping on that bandwagon would provide the Palestinian Authority with immediate collapse.

Masarat, the Palestinian Center for Policy Research & Strategic Studies, has announced “A brainstorming meeting — the wave of Arab normalization” on Sep 19.

Masarat Center’s announcement of “A brainstorming meeting — the wave of Arab normalization” on Sep 19.

Palestine lives in its people generation after generation.

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Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem and whose mother’s side of the family is from Ijzim, south of Haifa. She is an activist, researcher and retired professor of English literature, Al-Quds University, occupied West Bank.