This week, President Bush will be hosting representatives from dozens of countries and international organizations. He is promising them, and us, an Israeli-Palestinian peace conference of remarkable proportions. Absent from this feast of good wills however, is the Palestinian people.
The over-stretched, under resourced Palestinian leadership, constantly preoccupied by a misty hope that one of these peace initiatives will hit, has lost its capacity to discern how removed it has become from its people. Indifferent to anything that transcends their day-to-day worries, Palestinian leaders have fooled themselves into believing that the so called ‘peace process’ is a sensible affair, in which they must play their part, making them lose sight of their people—in whose name this nebulous peace agenda was originally conceived.
In the years that followed the Oslo accords, some Palestinian dissidents warned that the Palestinian Authority, the primary product of these agreements, might well degenerate into an institution that merely serves Israeli interests. Back then, not many Palestinians took that sort of sentiment seriously.
Things look quite different today. Nowadays, the Palestinian Authority derives a great deal of its powers and prerogatives from the Israeli government. For instance, without Israeli transfer of tax revenues, fuel and electricity supplies, military equipment, and open routes for the movement of police and security forces, the Palestinian Authority, on the operational level, would be no different than any other dysfunctional NGO in the occupied territories. This reality begs the question: what is more likely, that Israel would sanction the promotion of Palestinian interests, some of which clearly contravene the territorial and economic interests of the Jewish state, or would simply confine itself to approving Palestinian Authority functions that serve its own interests? If, as many suspect, the answer is the latter, how then can we reasonably expect the Palestinian Authority, whose capacity to act is contingent upon Israel’s consent, to represent two conflicting interests at one and the same time?
To be sure, that would not make much sense. The role of the Palestinian Authority has been effectively reduced to maintaining and preserving the status quo, which entails Israeli control of land, water resources, borders, and key intersections and junctions in the West Bank, and Palestinian administrative control of their population.
This week’s Annapolis gathering is especially perilous because of the erosion of Palestinian national consensus, and the absence of any means of legitimate deliberations to restore it. By and large, the Palestinian Legislative Council has vanished from the political scene following the recent developments in Gaza. The Palestinian Liberation Organization is itself in disarray after key Fatah figures like Faruq al-Qaddumi and Hani al-Hasan made various public statements following the Hamas Gaza takeover that were interpreted as being unsympathetic to President Mahmoud Abbas. Moreover, civil society has been hesitant to test the limits of the freedom that the factional governments of the West Bank and Gaza strip may or may not allow for. This leaves the upper echelons of the Palestinian leadership in a position to haggle and bargain in Annapolis without any prospects of being held accountable by their own constituency.
After many years of negotiations and peace conferences, one would expect that the Palestinian leadership can rival any established nation state in political proficiency and diplomatic dexterity. Bitter experiences have demonstrated however that no sooner does this leadership disentangle itself from one political predicament than it lurches to the embrace of another. This unpromising condition is the direct result of the lack of serious and unhindered modes of democratic accountability both within the Palestinian Liberation Organization and the Palestinian Authority.
Any agreement between Palestinian and Israeli leaders must rely on understandings that are broadly accepted by their people. That the Palestinian people should have a democratic connection to those negotiating on their behalf, which is necessary to make any peace deal both legitimate and durable, is a principle that has yet to be respected by the international community.
Palestinian leaders should keep in mind that beneath the quiet vigilance of their so far patient polity lays an explosive mix of troubled sentiments that could be ignited by the least sign of perfidy. In light of the lack of substance proposed for Annapolis, they should reconsider their participation, and instead invest in finding ways to restore Palestinian consensus, in the hope that one day their leadership may actually be part of the solution, and not the principle problem.
Mohammed J. Herzallah is a Junior Research Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is a former President of the Palestine Solidarity Committee at Harvard University.
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