Palestinians win one…maybe
By Max J. Castro
The Palestinians are a people that lose even when they win, a nation that is punished whether it brandishes an AK-47 or whether it seeks to attain sovereignty and self-respect by peaceful and democratic means.
Recollect the extremely harsh sanctions that Israel, the United States and much of the international community imposed on the entire Palestinian people in 2006 for having the audacity to choose the wrong party – the militant group Hamas – in the free and fair elections upon which the Bush administration had long insisted.
Watch right now as Israel and a new U.S. administration mete the Palestinians a new dose of verbal invective and real punishment for having the temerity of going before the United Nations to request recognition as a “non-member observer state” and, by winning 138 to 9, showing just how diplomatically isolated Israel and its American ally are on the issue of the proper road to a Palestinian state.
The embarrassment of losing by a ratio of 15 to 1 is decidedly aggravated by which countries chose to vote with the United States and Israel and which countries declined to do so. None of the four permanent members of the UN Security Council that, along with the United States, hold a veto followed the Washington lead, including U.S. allies such as the United Kingdom and France.
Still, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wasted no time in denouncing the Palestinian initiative as “unfortunate and counterproductive.” She said it posed new obstacles in the way of the peace process.
What peace process?
Notwithstanding the fact that the peace process is a sham daily negated by Israel’s creation of new “facts on the ground,” including more settlements in violation of international law, the Obama administration may follow Clinton’s words with economic pain. And the huge unconditional pro-Israel faction in Congress surely will demand even more punitive measures.
Israel’s instant reprisals were not merely verbal but include expansion of Jewish settlements on Palestinian land and the withholding of tax revenues the Palestinian Authority desperately needs to function and to which Palestinians are entitled but which Israel controls.
It’s been a while since the majority of Palestinians heeded the call of the international community, led by the United States, to opt for democracy and diplomacy. After the death of Yasser Arafat of a mysterious illness, Palestinians eschewed autocratic rule by a messianic figure. They chose as their leader Mahmoud Abbas, unlike the bombastic and mercurial Arafat, a reasonable and moderate man eager to reach a fair resolution with the Israelis through peaceful means.
Israel finally had the partner for peace it always claimed to be searching for. But Israeli intransigence undercut Abbas at every turn. Israel gave Abbas less than nothing with which to justify his leadership to his own people. Thus, in the free and fair multi-party parliamentary election demanded by the United States, the Palestinian people gave the opposition – the militant group Hamas – a resounding victory. They got swift and harsh punishment.
For decades, Palestinians were assailed for practicing terrorist atrocities in their fight against Israel. And indeed there were numerous acts that Palestinian fighters carried out – from the murder of Israel athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics to the numerous suicide bombings of civilian targets in Israel – that merited strong condemnation. But now when the Palestinians are practicing diplomacy and gaining the approval of the vast majority of nations, they are rewarded with at best a Bronx cheer from Washington and retaliation from Jerusalem.
How can they win? It won’t be easy. Perhaps it will be impossible. After all, a united front comprised of the world’s only superpower and the only country in the Middle East with nuclear weapons against a stateless people lacking economic or military power is hardly a fair contest.
The hope that the United States could act as a fair broker defies history and reality. The double standard the United States practices is so evident that it is generally ignored, taken as a given, the initial and natural state of things. The Israeli people can choose to be ruled by a coalition of Zionist zealots, religious fanatics, proponents of a Greater Israel, and outright Arab-haters and the spigot of U.S. aid is never even slightly interrupted. But if the Palestinians choose to be led by Islamist fundamentalists, all hell breaks loose. Nobody bats an eyelash.
What the Palestinians are hoping now is that they can parlay their mainly symbolic victory at the UN into a measure of leverage vis-à-vis Israel. They also foresee the possibility of bringing Israeli officials before the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, although they also have made it clear that they are not threatening to do so any time soon.
It is a very thin reed indeed upon which to hang a people’s hopes. Notwithstanding Clinton’s remarks, the real obstacle in the way of a Palestinian state is that today’s Israeli leaders don’t want a Palestinian state any more than the Republicans want a welfare state. At least not anything like the kind of sovereign state that Palestinians, like any people, aspire to, could identify with, and would be willing to fight to preserve against the maximalists and fanatics among their own ranks.
What the Israelis may be willing to offer at best, besides delaying tactics and endless talk about a supposed peace process, is a resolution of the conflict that reflects the differences in power between the two sides. Needless to say, given the enormous asymmetry, the result would be a very raw deal for the Palestinians.
An even more fundamental problem beyond the recalcitrant nature of the current Israeli leadership is the configuration of political forces within Israel – regardless of who heads the government. Even the best intentioned and most progressive Israeli leader imaginable would be hard pressed to offer the Palestinians a square deal. During the last two plus decades, a number of forces, especially massive immigration and expansion of settlements, have produced a decided rightist turn in the Israeli body politic. The political monster these processes have created would try to prevent any solution remotely acceptable to the Palestinians, and by any means necessary. Yitzhak Rabin, the last Israeli leader to even propose such an idea suffered vilification and assassination. The political climate in Israel today is worse.
The Palestinian recourse to the United Nations, as well as the appeal to international solidarity through such phenomena as the flotillas and the campaigns for divesture or economic boycott, reflect the failure of all other strategies. But Israel, as long as it can count with the triple U.S. shield – military, economic, and diplomatic – is not nearly as vulnerable to international pressure as, for instance, apartheid South Africa.
That leaves the Palestinians one last best hope: the demographic time bomb. So far, this threat, the rapid growth of the Palestinian population, much more serious if more long term than the mostly ineffective missiles launched from Gaza, does not seem to have persuaded the Israelis to change their thinking one bit. Instead, they are betting on their vastly superior force, the endless complaisance of the United States, and the development of novel schemes for fencing themselves off from and controlling an ever-larger and angrier Palestinian population.
