TFF brings excerpts of a longer analysis by professor Richard Falk who until recently also served as the UN Secretary-General’s envoy for the Occupied Territories.
His main argument is that the process of recognising Palestine and the Palestine Authority’s initiative at the UN Security Council will turn out to be futile unless accompanied by an entirely new approach consisting of a global civil society movement — citizens rather than government diplomacy.
The Palestinian Authority will seek a vote in the Security Council on a resolution mandating Israel’s military withdrawal from Occupied Palestine no later than November 2016.
Embedded in this initiative are various diversionary moves to put the dying Oslo Approach on track.
The Oslo Approach consists of direct negotiations between the parties and designated the United States, despite its undisguised partisan role, as the exclusive and permanent intermediary and go between.
Without the slightest deference to Palestinian sensitivities, U.S. presidents have appointed as special envoys to these negotiations only officials with AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Commitee) credentials such as Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk, and have proceeded as if their blatant partisanship was not a problem.
Evidently Israel would have it no other way, and the Palestinian Authority has meekly gone along either out of weakness or naiveté.
Not only was the Oslo framework itself flawed because it leaned so far to one side, but it was an unseemly tacit assumption of the process that the Palestinians would be willing to carry on negotiations without reserving a right to complain about the relevance of ongoing Israeli violations of international law, most conspicuously the continued unlawful settlement activity.
After more than 20 years of futility Washington’s continuing public stand that only by way of the Oslo Approach will a solution be found is beginning to fall on deaf ears, and new directions of approach are beginning to be articulated.
Israel itself is moving ineluctably toward a unilaterally imposed one-state solution that incorporates the West Bank in whole or in large part. It has recently seized 1000 acres of strategically placed land to facilitate the largest spatial enlargement of a settlement since the early 1990s and it has given approval for 2,600 additional housing units to be built in various West Bank and East Jerusalem settlements that already have more 650,000 settlers.
What to do instead
The expected controversy surrounding the Palestinian Authority initiative in the Security Council is a sideshow without any serious consequences however it is resolved.
There needs to be a clear recognition by the PA that direct negotiations are pointless under present conditions, and a general understanding that unless Israel changes behavior and outlook there is no hope to resolve the conflict by a reliance on diplomacy.
This will make recourse to nonviolent militancy via BDS, and such other tactics as blocking the unloading of Israeli cargo vessels, the best option for those seeking a just peace.
The best, and in my view, only realistic hope is to forget traditional interstate diplomacy for the present, and understand that the Palestinian future depends on a robust mobilization of global civil society in solidarity with the Palestinian national movement.
The current BDS campaign is gaining momentum by the day, and is coupled with a sense that its political program is more in keeping with the wishes of the Palestinian people than are the proposals put forth by the formal representations of either the Palestinian Authority or Hamas.
When neither governmental diplomacy nor the UN can produce a satisfactory solution to a conflict that has caused decades of suffering and dispossession, it is past time to endorse a people-oriented approach.
This is the kind of populist politics that helped end apartheid in South Africa and win many anti-colonial struggles.