The Warped Mirror: Palestinian strategic options

Judging from some of the talkbacks, the recent Jerusalem Post editorial that welcomed the Palestinian Authority's advertisement of the 2002 Saudi-inspired Arab League peace initiative under the title Yes to 'salam' didn't really qualify as a crowd pleaser. By contrast, there was quite a bit of talkback applause for an article by Louis Rene Beres, a professor of International Law, who argued that "the so-called 'Palestinian Territories' are not occupied by Israel" and that "a Palestinian state would severely threaten the very existence of Israel."

Given the experience after Israel's disengagement from Gaza, it is obviously not very difficult to make the case that further withdrawals could pose grave security risks to Israel. But anybody who is ready to argue that it is therefore in Israel's best interest to hold on to the territories beyond the 1967 borders would do well to have a look at a recent report issued by the Palestine Strategy Study Group (PDF version ).

The group, whose work was financed by a grant from the European Union, outlines what its members consider the most promising "strategic options" available to the Palestinians. These options include a call to abandon negotiations once and for all, and to then proceed to dissolve the Palestinian Authority in order to force Israel to bear the "full burden of the costs of occupation". In addition, there is the proposal to work "to maximise the cost of continuing occupation for Israel, and to make the whole prospect of unilateral separation unworkable;" ultimately, the goal would be to "shift from a two state outcome to a (bi-national or unitary democratic) single state outcome as Palestinians' preferred strategic goal. This reopens a challenge to the existence of the State of Israel in its present form, but in an entirely new and more effective way than was the case before 1988."

To be sure, those who hope to mount "a challenge to the existence of the State of Israel in its present form" have widely divergent hopes and motivations: some want to see an Islamic state to take the place of Israel, others hope that, by forcing Israel to absorb the Palestinians, it would be possible to simultaneously put an end to the detested Jewish state and to avoid the emergence of a Palestinian Islamic state.

But what is perhaps most striking is that these Palestinian "strategists" talk so openly about forcing Israel to bear the "full burden of the costs of occupation" - after all, Palestinian activists usually describe the occupation as benefitting Israel.

In this context, it's worthwhile to check out how the Electronic Intifada's Ali Abunimah comments on the strategy paper: He notes approvingly that the paper "calls on Palestinians to reject and expose the deceptive language of 'peacemaking' and 'state-building' that have been used to conceal and perpetuate a lived reality of expulsion, domination and occupation at Israel’s hands." Abunimah is of course an ardent advocate of the so-called "one-state solution", and clearly enough, "peacemaking" and "state-building" are nothing he wants to see happening. What is quite intriguing is that he points out that there are "major, substantive discrepancies between the English and Arabic versions" of the strategy paper; according to Abunimah, the Arabic version uses "firmer language in line with long-standing official Palestinian positions" - no surprise here...

Abunimah questions in the title of his commentary if the paper really advocates a "new Palestinian strategy or the same failed one." For him, the only worthwhile "new Palestinian strategy" would be an unequivocal call for a "one-state solution." But the fact of the matter is that the Palestinians rejected "peacemaking" and "state-building" long before there was any Israeli occupation - indeed, they rejected it long before there was Israel.

So while this is clearly an old strategy, once Israel was established, the main purpose of this rejection was to deny Israel its legitimacy - and again, this hasn't changed. Those who argue that Israel should accept the Palestinian reluctance to show a serious commitment to "peacemaking" and "state-building" risk to inadvertently support those who hope that the occupation will last long enough, and that settlements will spread far enough to make a "one-state solution" inevitable.