Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu keeps asserting impossible conditions during the ongoing troubled negotiations with the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and the Palestinian National Authority (PNA), which he knows very well both will never accept. He aims at stalling of talks to take advantage of time to annex more Palestinian lands with impunity.
To hide his Judaisation agenda of all historical Palestine, Netanyahu plays the generous role — though without success — by offering the Palestinians an entity of an empty shell, devoid of national and legal aspirations to form a real independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem (occupied in the 1967 war) as its capital. Israel’s main aim now is to completely turn the PNA into a security agency to protect and guard the colonial apartheid expansion in the West Bank. Netanyahu sounds like a broken record reiterating the protection of “Israeli security”, but how can security be maintained by annexing Palestinian lands while sitting to negotiate a two-state solution?
It appears now that a negotiated political settlement under the brokerage of the US is almost dead if not already buried, despite failed attempts to resurrect it. Recently, in an unprecedented move, the US Secretary of State, John Kerry, accused Netanyahu of wrecking the peace negotiations by “refusing to release the Palestinian prisoners as agreed and when a close deal was about to be finalised, Israel announced plans to build 700 units in its expansions of settlements [colonies]”. Indeed, the Zionist colonial agenda, which Israel wishes to impose upon the Palestinians, as well as on the American administration, is about to wreck the US position as “an honest broker” of peace.
With the PLO leaders currently talking about the possible demise of the PNA, a notion of a similar fate facing the Israeli government is being deliberated among Israeli political parties. Tsivi Beriel wrote in Haaretz that Kerry has pushed Israel into an impasse it has never faced, which is “new general elections where one of the following might win: Avigdor Lieberman, Danny Ayalon, Naftali Bennett or David Rotem, who will govern the Kingdom of Israel”. If such a development occurs, it will, in effect, guarantee the total boycott and isolation of Israel by the world. The PNA lacks the military means to stop the Israeli colonisation of West Bank. It cannot really protect the Palestinian people who are being killed, humiliated, robbed of their lands and imprisoned on a daily basis by the Israeli military occupation. One major possibility left for the Palestinian people is ‘a third intifada’ which would be directed not only against Israel, but perhaps also against the PNA as well as its “security coordination” with the Israeli military rule.
Another possibility/option came up in a recent study conducted by the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research — with assistance from US/ Middle East Project, the Norwegian Peace-building Resource Centre and a number of other international experts. The study reported that “the Palestinian [National] Authority is seen by the majority of Palestinians to be playing a dual role, which spares Israel the responsibility to care for the people under its occupation according to international law, while at the same time provide security for its Judaisation of the Occupied Palestinian Territories against the threat of the Palestinian demographic wrath”. The study also found that “the Israeli measures to punish the structure of the Palestinian [National] Authority would lead in time to its eventual demise”.
For this reason, some PLO and PNA members advocate the idea of “the Authority taking a decision to dissolve itself before Israel does”. With such a move, the PNA will shift to the Israeli national budget the responsibility of providing and caring for the occupied people of Palestine with a cost exceeding billions of dollars, usually supplied by various donors. In this case, the ‘one-state’ solution to the Palestinian issue will be the only option left.
Such a decision for dissolution by the Palestinian National Authority will create a humongous shock within Israel, in addition to driving its government into more political and economic difficulties.
Another option is for the Palestinian National Authority to seriously and resolutely go to the United Nations and join its various organs, thus bringing the whole world to face Israel; the only colonial/apartheid power left in our world still pretending to be a democracy. Many in the PLO/PNA leadership seem not to fear US threats to cut all its aid to the PNA. It is to be remembered that the American administration did not carry out its threat when the PNA went to the United Nations and gained a non-voting state status membership. If any of the second and third options (or both) are pursued, that will save the PNA blame by the Palestinian people, who will only direct their civil disobedience against the occupying Israeli military forces.
Professor As’ad Abdul Rahman is the chairman of the Palestinian Encyclopaedia.
