Friday, October 03, 2014
Palestinian-U.S. relations head for stormy times
By Nicola Nasser*
Washington’s response to the speech that Palestinian
President Mahmoud Abbas delivered at the UN General Assembly last September 26
confirms that the bilateral Palestinian-U.S. relations are heading for stormy
times.
The U.S., which opposed Abbas’ plan to seek a UN Security
Council resolution to end the Israeli occupation within a defined timeframe,
not only cautioned him against proceeding with any such plan but also issued an
official statement condemning the language he used to express the Palestinian
people’s opposition to the continued occupation and the ongoing war crimes that
Israel is perpetrating in the territories it occupied in 1967.
“Abbas’ speech today
included offensive characterizations that were deeply disappointing and which
we reject,” U.S. State Department Spokeswoman Jen Psaki said in a statement on
last September 27, which criticised Abbas’ speech as “provocative,”
“counterproductive” and undermines “efforts to create a positive atmosphere and
restore trust between the parties.”
Clearly, Abbas bent before the onslaught of the winds of
American rejection. He “submitted” his plan to the General Assembly but he did
not ask to bring it to a vote in order to secure an international resolution
that would strengthen his hand when he submitted it to the Security Council. It
is also noteworthy that while he called for a deadline to end the occupation he
omitted the three-year timeframe that he had previously stipulated.
There is no serious Palestinian opposition to Abbas’ plan
to internationalise the search for a political solution to the Palestinian
struggle to end the occupation of Jerusalem , the
West Bank and Gaza US
But Abbas’ plan signifies that he has thrown in the towel
on his reliance on U.S.
sponsorship, which in turn means confrontation with Washington U.S. by
merely bowing before its opposition to his plan or by asking for U.S. Washington U.S.
All the indications are that the U.S. will campaign
against the Abbas plan and continue to insist on brokering a solution that it
has been unable to produce during the more than two decades in which it
monopolised the sponsoring the negotiating process with the Israeli occupying
power.
On September 23, 88 US senators signed a letter urging U.S.
Secretary of State John Kerry to take prevent “negative developments at the UN
General Assembly, UN Human Rights Council, and the International Criminal Court
that could derail any prospects for the resumption of peace talks between
Israel and the Palestinians.”
Senator Rand Paul refused to sign this letter. He wants
Washington to cut off “all aid to the Palestinian Authority until the
conditions in Senator Paul’s Stand with Israel Act are met,” according to his
e-mail statement to The Washington Post that day.
Warning Abbas “that America ’s
willingness to cooperate with him will continue to depend on his willingness to
return to the negotiating table with the Government of Israel and avoid
unilateral measures,” the senators were keen to sustain the usual U.S. “carrot-and-stick” policy, in this case by “enabling the Palestinian
Authority to move toward becoming the Palestinian governing authority in Gaza
But any policy of confrontation with the U.S. means that Abbas must reject all U.S.
In addition, in a confrontation of that sort, Abbas would
risk losing Arab support in view of the Arab consensus to ally with — or at
least not oppose — the U.S.
in the war it has declared against ISIS (the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria
In this context, the Arab League’s declared support for
the Abbas’ plan lacks credibility and cannot be relied on when it comes to
confronting the U.S. U.S.
This confrontation is foreshadowed by preliminary chapters
of the same, especially since 2011 when the U.S.
defeated the Palestinian drive to obtain UN recognition of Palestine U.S. was not able
to prevent the UN from recognising Palestine U.S. undermined
Palestinian accomplishments, such as the International Court of Justice
recommendation regarding the separating wall designed to annex another chunk of
the West Bank , and the Goldstein Report. The
Palestinians remember very well how the U.S. obstructed dozens of international
resolutions in support of Palestinian rights and how it continuously prevented
the international community from sponsoring any just negotiating process that
might end Washington’s own monopoly over what it fraudulently calls the “peace
process,” in which the U.S. has never been an honest broker.
The US-Palestinian confrontation was inevitable, even if
much delayed. Palestinian leaders from both the resistance and the negotiating
factions always tried to avert it. The Palestinians never chose confrontation;
successive US
If President Abbas, who for decades placed his faith in U.S.
good will, has finally reached the conclusion that it is futile to continue to
depend on the U.S. and that now is the time to stand up to Washington and turn
to the international community to sponsor his negotiating strategy. His
decision will receive the unanimous support of the Palestinian people. However,
if he backs down, he will undergo the most important test of his political
career, as he will come face-to-face with the people’s judgment of the
credibility of his strategic choices, which have never obtained a national or
popular consensus.
The choice of confrontation also entails the need to press
forward in creating and setting into motion the mechanisms for implementing the
reconciliation agreement between Fatah and Hamas, as well as the need to
respond quickly to the overwhelming Palestinian demand to apply for the membership
of international treaties and organisations.
But above all, it requires safeguarding the resistance in
all its forms and developing it in quantity and quality until its scope is
expanded to embrace all the Palestinian people, wherever they may be.
Confrontation means refusing to allow Ezz Al-Din Al-Qassam to be assassinated
twice!
Even if the inconceivable occurred and the U.S.
acknowledged the will of the international community in support of Palestinian
rights, refrained from using its influence to stop Abbas’ plan and even
refrained from wielding its veto in the UN Security Council, there remains the
perpetual risk that the UN resolution would amount to no more than a paper
victory to add to the pile of Palestinian paper victories, since any such
political victory requires a national force to translate it into a reality on
the ground in the occupied territories.
If the Palestinian presidency does not respond to these
needs and demands, which receive the full support of the Palestinian people, he
will find himself once again singing outside the his national flock.
Regardless of whether or not there is a confrontation with
the U.S.
The Palestinians have learned an important lesson from
their enemy. The Palestinian national movement has dozens of international
resolutions in its favour. This is something the Zionist movement never
possessed throughout its history, apart from that one non-binding partition
resolution, 181, adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1947. But this one
resolution the Zionists had translated into reality on the ground and then
expanded on it through the exercise of overwhelming military force. This is the
power that Palestinians are being prevented from possessing today, just as has
been the case in the past.
May God bless late Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel-Nasser who
always said that what has been taken away by force can only be regained by
force. History has proven him right and events have shown that the course the
Arabs and Palestinians took after he died — which headed in the opposite
direction to his — was gravely wrong, indeed sinful.
* Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist based in Bir
Zeit, West Bank of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories (nassernicola@ymail.com).
This article was first published and
translated from Arabic by Al-Ahram Weekly on October 3, 2014.
