Mahmoud Abbas surprised even his critics on September 23 by giving a
stirring and emotional speech to the UN General Assembly as part of the
Palestine Liberation Organisation’s highly publicised bid for UN
recognition of Palestinian statehood. Abbas, who is the chair of the PLO
and who continues to be touted by Israel and the USA as the president
of the Palestinian Authority (PA) despite the fact his electoral mandate
expired more than two and half years ago, spoke with dignity and
compassion of the aspirations of the Palestinian people.
In his 40-minute speech, Abbas recalled the forcible removal of
Palestinians in 1948, saying that he and hundreds of thousands of
Palestinians “were forced to leave their homes and their towns and
villages, carrying only some of our belongings and our grief and our
memories and the keys of our homes to the camps of exile and the
Diaspora ... one of the worst operations of uprooting, destruction and
removal of a vibrant and cohesive society that had been contributing in a
pioneering and leading way in the cultural, educational and economic
renaissance of the Arab Middle East”.
Abbas went on to talk about Israel’s expanding settlements, noting
not only that they “embody the core of the policy of colonial military
occupation of the Palestinian people” but also that the building of
Israeli colonies on Palestinian territory violates both international
humanitarian law and United Nations resolutions.
The most surprising part of Abbas’ speech came when he described
Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories, the building of the
apartheid wall, the demolition of Palestinian homes and the displacement
of Palestinian owners and residents as “a multi-pronged policy of
ethnic cleansing aimed at pushing them away from their ancestral home”.
It is hard to recall any previous occasion when Abbas described Israel’s
occupation and apartheid policies in such a way.
While there was much to applaud in Abbas’ speech, there were equally
as many flaws and problems, most of which were an articulation of the
flaws and problems in the PLO’s political strategy in relation to the UN
statehood bid and in its broader strategy for winning national
liberation.
Negotiations strategy
For almost two decades, the primary strategy of the PLO leadership
has relied on negotiations and has relegated other political activity,
such as mass mobilisations, to being a secondary tactic. As Abbas noted
repeatedly before his UN speech, “Our first, second and third priority
is negotiations ... No matter what happens at the UN, we have to return
to negotiations.”
This strategy reflects the fact that the leaders of the PLO and the
PA are bourgeois nationalists. Their aim is to establish a Palestinian
state, but one that will accommodate a capitalist economy and privilege a
moneyed elite. While they will use mass mobilisations as a tactic, they
do not see them as a way of winning national liberation. Rather, they
see mass mobilisations as something they can turn on and off at will in
order to impact on the atmosphere for negotiations. In addition, Abbas
and other leaders of the PA and PLO know that ongoing organisation for
mass mobilisation could develop a grassroots independent base that might
challenge their leadership.
Criticisms
This is why more and more Palestinian activists and commentators, as
well as solidarity supporters, have criticised the PLO UN statehood bid
as doing little to challenge reality on the ground for Palestinians. In
the wake of Abbas’ speech, a range of Palestinian commentators noted
that not only was the speech riven with contradictions, but it also
failed to break free of the fruitless “peace process”, which for the
last two decades has resulted only in a further entrenchment of Israel’s
occupation and apartheid policies.
As Saree Makdisi noted during his October 5 Edward Said Memorial
Lecture hosted by the Palestine Center in Washington, DC, Abbas’ speech
sought to “tactically reframe rather than strategically transform the
pointless negotiations game that he and his associates have been
embarked on for two decades now”. Makdisi, the nephew of the late
renowned Palestinian academic Edward Said, went on to note that “the
statehood gambit at the UN carries enormous political risks for the
entire Palestinian people that Mr. Abbas and his associates have entered
into without even consulting them”.
Palestinian refugee and development economist Raja Khalidi noted in
his September 12 article for the independent Arabic web journal
Jadiliya: “[A] wide swath of Palestinian activists consider the
statehood initiative problematic from legal and representational angles,
because of its primary focus on statehood rather than the panoply of
denied Palestinian rights”. According to Khalidi, “For them [Palestinian
activists] the bid for state-recognition is better abandoned or
possibly reformulated, as it might lead to either an even more complex
situation or hollow diplomatic victory”.
The divisions within the Palestinian national liberation movement
around the statehood bid have manifested primarily along geographical
and generational lines. While there has been a range of dissenting
voices emanating from the occupied Palestinian territories, particularly
as the date of the bid came closer, the strongest opposition was
initially voiced by Palestinians in exile. What is noticeable about the
dissenting voices, from within the occupied territories and from the
diaspora, is that they have been overwhelmingly young.
Those opposed to the PLO bid raised two main objections. The first is
that the majority of the Palestinian people were excluded from the
decision making process — both those living in the occupied territories
and those living in Israel or exile around the world. The second main
objection raised by critics has centred on the fact that the whole
statehood bid is disconnected from the reality experienced by most
Palestinians.
Ali Abunimah, a co-founder of Electronic Intifada, noted in a
September 19 Foreign Affairs article: “The opposition, and there is a
great deal of it, stems from three main sources: the vague bid could
lead to unintended consequences; pursuing statehood above all else
endangers equality and refugee rights; and there is no democratic
mandate for the Palestinian Authority to act on behalf of Palestinians
or to gamble with their rights and future”.
Unforeseen results
However, many critics, both Palestinians and solidarity activists,
have noted that the bid brought two unforeseen achievements. Firstly, it
all but marked the death of the Olso Accord, revealing that after
almost 20 years of fruitless negotiations the Palestinian people were no
closer to liberation or statehood. Secondly, the PLO’s bid
categorically discredited the USA as a supposed neutral arbiter of the
Middle East peace process. Not only has the Obama administration
threatened to veto the UN bid, but the US Congress has already moved to
freeze hundreds of thousands of dollars in aid to the Palestinian
Authority because the PLO refused to drop the UN bid.
The PLO’s bid has also strengthened the confidence of a new
generation of Palestinian leaders, whose growing discontent with the
older generation in the PLO and the PA became more manifest and vocal.
This new generation believes that there is a need to go back to the
basics of building a popular mass movement and mass mobilisations both
in the occupied territories and internationally, and that the focus
should be on the struggle for statehood connected organically to the
struggle for Palestinian human rights.
The UN bid has contributed to a developing clarity among this new
generation that self-determination will be achieved only by building a
mass popular movement against Israeli colonialism, occupation and
apartheid. For many of these young leaders, this can and should be done
in conjunction with the Palestinian unarmed popular resistance in the
occupied territories and with the boycott, divestment and sanctions
campaign against the Israeli state initiated by Palestinian civil
society.
