The UN bid for Palestinian statehood should be seen as part of the ongoing struggle for reformulating a new strategy of resistance that represents the collective interests of all Palestinians.
On Friday, 23 September, Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas made a formal request to United Nations chief Ban Ki-moon: the UN should admit the state of Palestine as a full member.
PA officials announced they would give the UN Security Council two weeks to decide on their bid for full membership. The PA decided not to leave open the option of a lesser alternative – a non-member observer state, a status likely to be granted by the General Assembly, where the Palestinians maintain broad support.
The UN does not actually have the authority to recognise states: other nations reserve the right to bilaterally acknowledge statehood. But if the UN was to recognise a Palestinian state, it might open the door for it to claim membership in international organisations including the UN’s refugee agency (UNHCR), the World Health Organisation (WHO), and the International Criminal Court. Status recognition by these international groups would raise hopes that Palestinians could pursue charges of illegal occupation and human rights violations against Israel.
The massive popular demonstrations in different cities of the occupied West Bank on 23 September reflect widespread popular enthusiasm for the initiative. The unions, controlled mainly by ruling party Fatah, mobilised for the demonstrations, while government offices and schools closed early to allow employees and students to attend them.
Both state television and the state-run news agency WAFA called on the public to mass at the Muqataa, and Palestinians across the West Bank received text messages advertising “the official mass reception”. A few days before, the PA asked all mosques to join its campaign.
In the Gaza Strip, where the ruling Hamas doesn’t support the bid (claiming it will not bring independence), security officials cracked down on people watching the Abbas address in Gaza City cafes and confiscated Palestinian flags that crowds were waving in the streets.
The bid is fiercely opposed by Israel and the US. Barack Obama, in possibly the most pro-Israeli speech ever made by an American president, opposed the Palestinian initiative. Obama said a Palestinian state can only be established as a result of negotiations, and that there is no short-cut to Palestinian independence.
The Israeli prime minister Netanyahu rejected the PA initiative in his speech. Israeli authorities have previously threatened to withhold tax money they collect from Palestinians on behalf of the PA – if this bid is pursued – to further expand settlements in the occupied West Bank, and even to declare a state of emergency.
The statehood initiative has proved contentious among Palestinians activists. Many solidarity movements have been hesitant to support the statehood bill. Concern stems partly from the PA’s failure to publish any text describing what a Palestinian state would mean practically. Neither did Abbas’s speech explain it. Abbas has asked the UN for recognition and membership for a state within the territories occupied by Israel in 1967: the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip.
The application for UN membership for the “State of Palestine” gives prominence to resolution 181, the 1947 “partition” resolution which recommended the partition of Palestine without the consent of its indigenous people. This partition was a negation of the right of Palestinians, as a people anticipating decolonization, to self-determination.
The full application mentions resolution 194, which states the right of return of refugees, but the document mixes together various concepts including “self-determination,” “statehood,” and the “the vision of a two-State solution”. It accords great weight to statements of the “Quartet” currently led by Tony Blair, an ad hoc body that had consistently undermined Palestinian rights.
The PA declared that the strategy behind it is to move beyond the current “peace process” impasse. It aims at internationalizing the Palestinian-Israeli conflict after more than two decades of bilateral Israeli-Palestinian peace talks have failed to achieve a two-state solution.
In his speech, however, Abbas maintained that he is willing to go back to the negotiation table immediately with Israel based on the 1967 borders and complete cessation of the settlement activities, adding that he did not want to isolate Israel. Most of the Palestinian people believe that negotiations are useless, and have been since the Oslo agreement in the mid-1990s.
Many Palestinians have pointed out the limits of the UN bid in relation to the representation of Palestinians and the right of return. The right of return per se is not threatened by the current initiative. It is an inalienable universal right enshrined in international law and held to by the Palestinian people as a whole.
The concern is that changing the representative at the UN from the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) to the State of Palestine would adversely affect the ability of Palestinian representatives at the UN to claim and advocate that right. All Palestinians should have representation at the UN.
The PLO is the representative of the Palestinian people as a whole, representing those inside and outside the 1967 occupied Palestinian territories (West Bank and Gaza). Being confined to the 1967 boundaries, the State of Palestine would not be able to claim to represent the refugees (unlike the PLO).
The Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM), an independent alliance founded by a group of young Palestinians scattered throughout the world, has opposed the PA statehood initiative: “the statehood declaration only seeks the completion of the normalization process. The foundation of this process serves as nothing more than to ensure the continuity of negotiations, economic and social normalization, and security cooperation.”
The PYM states that this declaration jeopardizes the rights and aspirations of over two-thirds of the Palestinian people, who live as refugees in exile, to return to their original homes from which they, or their families, were displaced in the 1948 Nakba (Catastrophe) and subsequently. It also jeopardizes the position of the Palestinians residing in the 1948 occupied territories (the state of Israel) who continue to resist daily against the ethnic cleansing and racial practices from inside the colonial regime.
The fear is that Palestinian refugees would be politically disenfranchised and legally and institutionally disempowered from making their claims to their rights at the only place that matters: the United Nations.
The Abbas speech did not satisfy the opponents of the statehood initiative. The PYM actually characterised the Palestinian leadership as illegitimate, arguing that it has not been elected to represent the Palestinian people in its totality through any democratic means.
Since the Oslo agreement, the PLO has been undermined. Political fragmentation has been imposed upon the Palestinian people through the establishment of the PA.
In theory, the PA is a subsidiary body of the PLO. The West Bank’s PA and Gaza’s Legislative Council are incorporated into the Palestinian National Council (PNC) so there is one legislative body for all Palestinians. In practice however, the PA is emerging as a parallel structure which excludes the refugees who constitute the majority of the Palestinian people.
There has been a broad Palestinian mobilization in recent months, particularly the 15th March movement, to reclaim and democratise the PLO and the Palestinian National Council, demanding direct elections for the latter. The PNC is the highest Palestinian legislative body, representing all Palestinians (including refugees). The PNC is the body that creates the national strategies and policies of the Palestinian people, which the PLO executive committee should implement.
Only a rejuvenated, democratically elected PNC can lay the foundation for effective representation of Palestinian rights, including the right of return. A UN statehood initiative presented by a trusted, democratically elected, accountable leadership, and representing the will of the Palestinian people and their collective right to self determination, would be supported strongly by all Palestinians – and, consequently, by solidarity groups worldwide.
The UN bid should be considered as a part of the ongoing struggle in this framework. The debates and mobilisations around the statehood initiative are potentially more profound and significant than the bid itself. They point to the re-founding – on a democratic basis representing the collective interests of all the Palestinians, and reformulating a new strategy of resistance – of a national Palestinian movement.
