‘Quartet’
Corners PLO, Hamas
Into Critical Options
By Nicola Nasser
07 February, 2007
Countercurrents.org
In
Washington on February 2, the Middle East Quartet of peace mediators
promised the Palestinian people more of the same devastating status
quo, perpetuating their 40-year old Israeli occupation, prolonging the
international siege imposed on them, exacerbating their internal divide,
and thus cornering them into a situation that they can only shake off
either through civil war or unconditional surrender to the U.S.-backed
Israeli-dictated fait accompli, unless their national sense of accountability
could prevail to make mutual compromises into national consensus.
The Quartet statement read to reporters by the United Nations Secretary-General
Ban Ki-moon boils down to promising them only more of what the U.S.
former president Jimmy Carter recently summed up: “In the last
six years there has not been one day of good faith, substantive negotiation
between Israel and the Palestinians, not one day.”
“Recognizing the critical need to end the Palestinian/Israeli
conflict,” the Quartet pledged to support efforts to put in place
a process with the goal of ending the occupation that began in 1967
and creating an independent, democratic and viable Palestinian state,
living side by side in peace and security with Israel, and reaffirmed
its commitment to a just, lasting, and comprehensive peace based on
UN Security Council resolutions 242 and 338,” the statement said.
It was a positive introductory comprehension of the end goal, which
Ki-moon and his co-mediators – the High Representative for European
Foreign and Security Policy Javier Solana, European Commissioner for
External Relations Benita Ferrero-Waldner, Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice and her Russian and German counterparts, Sergei Lavrov and Frank-Walter
Steinmeier -- immediately shot in the feet by the “road map”
they adopted to reach that goal.
They failed to incorporate any reference in their statement to the UN
Security Council resolution 1515, which commits them and the international
community to the so-called two-state solution, although it was a non-binding
resolution because it wasn’t adopted according to Chapter VII
of the UN Charter.
Then they evaded any time-tabled commitment to reviving the peace process.
True they “welcomed” the 23 December summit of Palestinian
President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli premier Ehud Olmert and their trilateral
meeting with Rice, scheduled for February 21, but the upcoming meeting
according to the Quartet will be only a “dialogue” and to
Rice’s on record statements will be “informal.” The
Quartet’s pledge “to give active follow-up to these meetings
and to remain closely engaged” sounded hollow and meaningless.
The Quartet also “noted the continuing importance of the Arab
Peace Initiative,” which envisions an all-comprising and comprehensive
solution for the conflict with Israel, but failed to suggest an international
peace conferences, some dubs as Madrid II -- a key demand by the Arab
League, the PLO and Palestinian Authority (PA). Israel has rejected
both the Arab Initiative and the conference idea.
The international mediators “called for continued international
assistance to the Palestinian people,” and “encouraged …
the development of the Palestinian economy,” but, in obvious self-contradiction,
did not lift the Israeli and U.S.-led siege imposed as a collective
punishment on the PA and people.
Hypocritically, “the Quartet called for Palestinian unity,”
but fomented the Palestinian divide by urging donors to selectively
“focus on preserving and building the capacity of institutions
of Palestinian governance,” while at the same time maintaining
the diplomatic, economic and political isolation of the democratically
elected Palestinian government and ignoring Russian, Qatari and British
parliamentarian demands to engage the PA government shortly ahead of
their meeting.
Similarly, “the Quartet expressed its deep concern at the violence
among Palestinians,” but failed to commit its U.S. member to refrain
from fueling the violence with money, training and weapons to one side
of the infighting in a declared pledge to oust an elected government
or coerce it into accepting the Israeli preconditions to lift the siege.
Then the Quartet concluded with reiterating “its call for the
Palestinian Authority Government to commit … to non-violence,
recognition of Israel, and acceptance of previous agreements and obligations,”
ignoring the fact that the PA government, regardless of whether led
by Fatah or Hamas, is an institution mandated according to Oslo accords
to manage the Palestinian apolitical autonomy and is only an administrative
tool of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the political authority
who sets the PA’s terms of reference and still committed to the
aforesaid “principles,” a strict commitment pressuring it
into the brink of civil war.
Palestinian Options
The disappointing outcome of the Quartet meeting rules out any early
resumption of “formal” peace talks, leaves the Palestinian
people and leadership divided on the verge of civil war under the pressures
of both the occupation and siege, thus leaving the divide with only
one option: Individual and collective dialogue to review the deadlocked
and futile peace process as well as the yet un-delivering violent and
non-violent resistance, which both have almost reached a standstill.
Palestinian pollster Khalil al-Shikaki in a surveyed analysis dated
February 1 (www.pcpsr.org) concluded that President Abbas has four options
to break through the Palestinian impasse: 1) to form a national unity
government, 2) to organize early presidential and legislative election,
3) to fire the Hamas-led Palestinian government and form an emergency
one, and 4) to resign. Al-Shikaki ruled out the last three options as
counterproductive to the “Palestinian vital interests” and
could lead to more infighting. However his preferable first option could
not “completely end the siege and boycott in a short period.”
The only breakthrough left is mutual compromises. According to al-Shikaki,
Hamas’ flexibility in dealing “positively” with the
Quartet’s three conditions to “respect” the signed
accords, recognize Israel as a “fait accompli” and agree
to an open-ended truce makes the first option “viable.”
The Fatah-led PLO has yet to reciprocate by giving priority to national
consensus more than to the Israeli-drafted and Quartet-adopted three
conditions. Palestinian national unity will lead in the end to break
through the siege.
All sides of the Palestinian divide, the Israeli Occupying Power and
the world community should adapt to the fact that the 40-year old monopoly
of Palestinian decision-making by Fatah came to an end on January 25,
2006, when Hamas broke into the role of a principal decision-maker by
a landslide electoral victory that empowered it with dominant executive
and legislative powers, and sooner or later the Islamic Resistance Movement
will gain a parallel dominance in the PLO, a democratically-clinched
right that Hamas in its defense has tactically contributed to the ensuing
bloody power struggle.
However 12 months on, the unity government has failed the national bilateral
and multilateral dialogue as well as Islamic and Arab mediation efforts,
including Qatari, Egyptian, Jordanian, Syrian and Islamic mediators;
several ceasefire agreements have so far collapsed on the security approach.
The latest Saudi Arabian good offices are also expected to stumble on
the same approach, which foiled previous similar efforts.
Fatah’s Revolutionary Council, chaired by Abbas in the West Bank
town of Ramallah on Sunday, suspended a three-day session in waiting
for the outcome of the Mecca-hosted talks between Abbas and Hamas’
leader Khalid Misha’al on Feb. 5, but warned the PLO will go for
the Hamas-rejected presidential and legislative election in June if
the two leaders failed to agree on a unity government based on the Quartet’s
three conditions, which practically will sooner or later doom the outcome,
because Hamas views its subscription to the Quartet’s agenda as
a carte blanche for the Quartet, Israel and the PLO to resume their
15-year old counterproductive and futile so-called “peace process.”
The PLO and Fatah leadership insists on Hamas accommodating the Quartet
conditions as a Palestinian obligation to lift the siege, which Hamas
says was only tightened after its electoral victory and was in place
before that as a mechanism to pressure the PLO into accepting the comatose
former Israeli premier Ariel Sharon-initiated long-term interim arrangement
of a transitional Palestinian state on 42 percent of the West Bank and
Gaza Strip. Both Hamas and the PLO have recently unequivocally rejected
this Israeli unilateral plan. The Quartet’s silence or vague stance
on the arrangement and their promised “informal” revival
of high-level Israeli – Palestinian “dialogue” should
provide enough common ground for a PLO-Hamas consensus.
The deadlocked peace process, the paralysis of the PLO and PA institutions,
the inability of the Palestinian presidency and government alike to
rule the autonomous 42 percent of the Israeli-reoccupied West Bank or
the militarily-besieged Gaza Strip, the zero sum situation where the
Palestinians have neither an “armed struggle” nor popular
non-violent resistance save for seasonal symbolic expressions and where
the erosion of public trust in both leading movements, according to
latest Palestinian public surveys, threatens to render the Palestinians
leaderless, all have locked the Palestinian national liberation movement
in its current impasse.
The ensuing divide has led to bloody street battles that embroiled both
the Fatah and Hamas security executive forces in a militia-style power
struggle in mutual self-destruction, taking down with them what government
institutions the PA has built since 1993, including public services
infrastructure like power stations, universities and police and intelligence
stations, especially in Gaza Strip - - as this mission was left for
the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) in the West Bank - - amid mounting
and widening popular outrage, security chaos exacerbated by the crushing
economic siege, popular loss of hope deepened by the Quartet’s
latest unpromising meeting, helplessness of Arab and Islamic brothers
who are too preoccupied to rush for rescue with the several battle fronts
opened by turn once by the U.S. and then by Israel.
All these and other factors are creating the ideal environment to look
for survival in a new anti-occupation uprising that might sweep away
also the autonomy and both protagonists who are wasting their energies
in a struggle over who manages the Palestinian prison, according to
the Palestinian-Arab Israeli MP, Azmi Bishara, in a recent article.
However, joining of the Oslo political institutions by Hamas, accompanied
by the two-year old strict commitment to a unilateral truce, was an
indirect declaration of a change in course and tactics that confused
the movement’s declared strategy among supporters because of the
contradiction between rejecting the Oslo status quo and being incorporated
into its institutions, let alone being embroiled in bloody power struggle
over who leads them.
Similarly, the dead end the negotiations with Israel has reached, the
meager results the negotaitions have produced, the insistence of the
PLO on holding the Palestinian self-determination hostage to the whims
of the Israeli-U.S. good faith and its determination to commit Hamas
to the same futile course – which deprived the PLO even of the
limited autonomy it was offered on an interim basis until July 1997,
provided a “legitimate” PLO cover to slicing Jerusalem off
the occupied territories and isolating it as inaccessible for Palestinians,
and doubled the colonial Jewish settlers to more than 450.000 since
1967 -- have eroded the PLO’s credibility.
Salam Fayyad, the former PA Finance Minister and a founder of the new
Third Way political party alongside Hanan Ashrawi who are both incumbent
MPs, described the current status quo to the Seventh Annual Herzliya
Conference in Tel Aviv on Jan. 24: “The nature of relations today
between Israelis and Palestinians has reached levels of micromanagement,
where Israel is involved in the minute details of the lives of Palestinians.
It is important to remember that the entirety of the West Bank and Gaza
Strip is ruled by military orders – not by politics, logic, or
reason – but by military orders with (Israel’s) “security”
dictating the rules of the game.” To hell of course with Palestinian
security!
Both sides have all the compelling reasons to backtrack and bend on
individual as well as collective reviews of the status quo.
Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist based in Ramallah, West Bank
of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories.
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