Festivals, Museums, and Awards
In stirring opening remarks at the international 2021 mega-conference, Palestine Writes, Susan Abulhawa, asserts that “..this festival is meant to expand Palestine’s cultural imprint in the world.” Such an imprint is being achieved by Palestinian cultural creativity, inscribing the Palestinian struggle and the distinctive spirit of the Palestinian people at the center of the moral and political imagination of persons of conscience around the world. By so doing, Israel’s concerted attempt to remove the Palestinian struggle from the global agenda is being thwarted, discredited, and increasingly likely, reversed.
When the Pre-Trial Chamber of the International Criminal Court had the audacity to decide on February 5, 2021 that its Prosecutor had the authority to investigate allegations of international crimes of Israel in occupied Palestine it both struck a blow for international law but also exposed the raw nerve of Israeli defensive sensibilities. Netanyahu slammed this professionally crafted judicial opinion by respected jurists as ‘pure antisemitism’ and other Israeli leaders denounced the ICC decision as one more indication of Israel-bashing. Such an inflated response exposed the raw nerve of Israel vulnerability to being judged by international law criteria. After all at this stage the ICC proposed nothing more than an investigation of behavior in occupied Palestine that seemed beyond much doubt to violate the basis norms of international humanitarian law. Israel’s angry expresses its acute awareness of the importance of what goes on in the realm of ideas, whether legal, moral, or cultural.
Cultural vitality and pride is in such a setting integral to resistance.The outcome of this dialectical interplay between asserting the Palestinian presence and resisting Israel continuous practices of erasure has been the central theme of the struggle for land, sovereign authority, international legitimacy that has gone on for over a century, and seems likely to continue as far ahead as can be foreseen. To keep Palestinian hopes alive under such circumstances of oppression and uncertainty depends on remembering precious past times, envisaging a brighter future, and depicting the heroic exploits and incidents of the long ordeal. Such ‘work’ relies heavily on the energies of the mind, above all the moral, political, cultural, and spiritual imagination as expressed through words, images, and sounds, that is, poems and fiction, pictures and painting, and music of all sorts. This work is being done superbly well by Palestinian artists, whether in prisons, refugee camps, or exile. It inspires those of us who stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people as they break their chains to live as a free people sooner than our reasoning faculties suggest as possible. It is this mysterious anticipatory power of the imagination to make the impossible happen that makes experts and politicians repeatedly wrong, and so often vindicates the prophetic sensibilities of poets and visionaries.
I had the pleasure of taking part a decade ago in the Palestine Book Awards an annual event in London that combined celebrating the most notable books published during the year, either by Palestinian writers or about Palestine. The events are also high-spirited, likeminded gatherings at which several speakers trace the trajectory of the struggle, comment upon the ordeals afflicting the Palestinian people, while marveling at that special trait of sumud that underpina their uncanny hopes for the future. I was dazzled then, and since, by the Palestinian cultural performance exhibited by the quality of the books receiving these annual awards, Olympian standards sustained over all these years. These PBA gatherings have also been learning experiences for me, especially clarifying the relations between cultural vitality and emancipatory politics.
For many years, I viewed culture as a stimulating confirmation of Palestinian steadfastness, or sumud, which I innocently understood somewhat too passively as ‘resilience,’ essentially the capacity to endure abuse without giving in to malevolent pressures, while also bearing witness to the righteousness of a struggle for basic rights. Underpinning every sentiment was this sense of a collective sacred mission to recover a stolen national homeland, no matter what the costs and however long it takes. Without the fulfillment of such a mission every pause in the ongoing
struggle will never amount to more than a ceasefire, although the entrepreneurs of diplomacy may call it ‘peace.’ The right of self-determination is never realized without justice as ascetained by the satisfaction of legitimate grievances. Such a requirement does rule out a political compromise, especially as here where valid claims overlap and where the passage of
time has given rise to legitimating expectations once seen as unlawful encroachments. Yet a compromise between two aspiring peoples must be based on the abandonment of hierarchy and the acceptance of equality as guiding the negotiated relationship.
It is only through a longer immersion in this Palestinian engagement with the arts that I have come to realize that culture is resistance, and perhaps in the end more critical to the outcome of a struggle for land, dignity, sovereignty and homeland, than weaponry and coercive diplomacy. I realized that ‘culture’ broadly conceived was what I had delimited as ‘legitimacy’ by reference to Palestinian grievances as articulated through the rhetoric of law and morality.
Why Culture Matters
For a variety of reasons, I had become convinced that in the period since 1945 that the outcome of conflicts for the control of national space in colonized societies were more often won by the side that prevailed in the domains of symbolic politics rather than as was believed by most political elites, who claimed for themselves the mantle of ‘realism,’ by the side that controlled bloody battlefields and combat zones by force of arms. I named this new reality ‘Legitimacy Wars’ reshaping the balance of forces in many national settings as a ‘war’ waged with norms of law, morality, spiritual commitment, and truthfulness, rather than just with guns, missiles, and propaganda.
It was my further observation that the downfall of European colonialism all over Asia and Africa was a consequence of being defeated in a series of Legitimacy Wars, that is, by the weaker side militarily. What sustained these struggles was this vision of righteousness that could conquer hearts and minds, if mobilized, and if exerting sufficient pressure, could eventually transform even the calculations of militarists, politicians, and cynical commentators. Such a process over 25 years ago, it should be remembered, brought apartheid South Africa to its knees, unexpectedly produced the release of Nelson Mandela from a seemingly endless jail sentence. Systemic racism of the worst sort was replaced with constitutional democracy. All this was achieved without reliance on guns and bullets. The anti-apartheid movement waged a Legitimacy War on a global scale and prevailed, with Mandela hailed worldwide as leader and peacemaker.
This dynamic of mind over matter is not so easy to comprehend, but without this understanding, the importance of the cultural dimension of a Legitimacy War cannot be grasped. It is partly historically conditioned. For decades before the anti-colonial wars were won by colonized peoples, there was an acceptance of the idea that without better weapons the foreigners would never be defeated by the natives. It was the rise of nationalism as empowering people that created confidence in the validity of national grievances and several changes took place on the colonial side that eventually made it too costly in lives and treasures to uphold by force of arms its position of control and privilege. For one thing the morality of colonialism had come under ideological challenge even in the home countries of the colonialists, especially after the Russian Revolution, for another the European colonial powers were in decline and Western interests were being upheld by the United States with its own geopolitical ambivalence resulting from an anti-colonial heritage, which although weak and relegated to the past, was not entirely absent. It was also important that the economics that made colonialism and racism so profitable had been largely superseded by industrialism. On the nationalist side, these developments raised the expectations of national leaders who saw paths to victory, based on sustained struggle and perseverance. The belief gained societal credence that colonialism was a dying enterprise, and that it was better for the colonist to get out sooner than persist until pushed out.
The Zionist Project, Settler Colonialism, Palestinian Catastrophe
It is obvious that national characteristics play a vital role in the course of such struggles. The Palestinian situation is rendered more complex and uncertain due to the distinctiveness of Palestine. Although the land of Palestine was predominantly Arab in 1917 when the infamous Balfour Declaration was made by the British Foreign Office, with a Jewish minority of under 10%, the ambitions of the Zionist Project were for a long time not viewed through the optic of colonialism, but rather more in accord with a one-sided claim of a needed sanctuary for the Jewish people that would be freed from the afflictions of antisemitism. The underlying Zionist claim was that if a Jewish homeland could be established in Palestine, it would occasion a rebirth of Judaism in an atmosphere where the virtues of Jewishness would reveal themselves. Somehow the absolute necessity of disappearing as many Palestinians as possible remained a hidden part of the dominant Zionist narrative so effectively promoted and disseminated throughout the West.
The urgency surrounding the Zionist Project and its international political leverage increased as the extremities of Nazi antisemitism unfolded in an international atmosphere beset by increasing tensions between Hitler’s Germany and the liberal democracies. The most unspeakable of Jewish tragedies culminated in the Holocaust giving moral and political traction to Zionist claims, the full extent of which were only revealed by stages, a process that is continuing until today. While this was happening to the Jews under the midday sun of Western media ascendancy, the Palestinian reality was obscured by shadows taking the form of demeaning propaganda and one erasure after another, constant humiliations, and such a total marginalization that their grievances were both unknown and delegitimized. Even the infant UN conspired by decreeing partition over Arab objections and without consultation with Palestinians or their representatives, much less securing the consent, of the population. Palestine was partitioned by UN decree, with its territory to be divided into two sovereign states and the city of Jerusalem internationalized. What transpired was the cynical acceptance of partition by the Zionist side as a stepping stone to the fuller realization of its dream and its naïve rejection by the Palestinian side understandably outraged by an international proposal to establish by fiat a Jewish state, splintering in a cruel manner an ancient and essentially non-Jewish society.
From that defining moment in 1947, the future of racial dominance and victimization was prefigured. First came the Nabka, involving the forcible dispossession and displacement of as many as 750,000 Palestinians. Such gross ethnic cleansing was coupled with the total demolition of hundreds of Palestinian villages, further reinforced by an iron law of non-return to their homes and communities that had deep roots. It was this Western infusion of Jews, either escaping from persecution in Europe or spurred by the idealistic visions of a Jewish renaissance in this nascent state, that led inevitably to many cycles of resistance and repression, to the permanent indignities of refugee camps and the uncertainties of involuntary exile. The Western view was that Jewish victimization must be acknowledged through impunity for recourse to crimes against humanity while the existential fury of Palestinian victimization must be erased from the Western mind or discredited by images of backwardness, racism, and totally dismissed by superimposing allegations of terrorism so as to hide Palestinian recourse to its collective right of resistance. In this maelstrom of erasures and distortions, Israel benefitted from establishing its false credentials as ‘the only democracy in the Middle East,’ overlooking how such a temporarily legitimating identity rested on permanently driving Palestinian residents from their land.
The early Israeli leadership was Jewish to its secular core, and defiantly non-religious. And yet David Ben-Gurion, the charismatic first president of the state of Israel tactically proclaimed, ‘the bible shall be our weapon.’ What he meant became clear only by stages. Ben Gurion was referencing the degree to which the Zionist Project was a ongoing process rather than a single state-establishing terminal event associated with the origins of the state of Israel when it was established in 1948. As the process unfolded it became clear that the light at the end of the Zionist tunnel was the whole of ‘the promised land,’ a biblical injunction without any foundation in either international law or contemporary notions of self-determination. It required the passage of 70 years for Israelis to feel confident enough to allow the light of day to reveal the true nature of Zionist agenda in the Basic Law enacted in 2018. This law chiseled into the granite of irreversibility,d removed the last shred of ambiguity from the reality of Israel as resting on the legalization of Jewish supremacy. The concrete embodiments of the Basic Law were unmistakable: making Hebrew the only official language of the country and affirming that only Jews enjoyed the right of self-determination within Israel. These de facto circumstances had existed before being made explicit by legal enactment, but were effectively occluded for decades from critical scrutiny by Israeli diplomatic ploys and the charade of the Oslo ‘peace process’ that gave Israel the time it needed to establish a choke hold in the West Bank that the UN had set aside for a Palestinian state by way of a cascade of settlements that even the United States and European Union countries considered to be flagrant violations of Article 49(6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
As time passed, the godfathering role of the UN as providing legitimacy for the partition of Palestine gave way to the strategic partisanship with the United States that provided the geopolitical muscle needed to keep shrinking the territorial and political expectations of any viable Palestinian state while nurturing Israeli ambitions to achieve a Greater Israel. Not only does the United States annually subsidize Israel’s military superiority with respect to its neighbors, but it turns a blind eye to Israel’s nuclear weapons arsenal while prepping for an aggressive war should Iran even come close to the nuclear weapons threshold. Instead of seeking denuclearization of the region by agreeing to a nuclear free zone for the Middle East, favored by all relevant governments including Iran except Israel. The US allows Israel plus its Arab Gulf partners to keep the Middle East on the knife edge of a potentially disastrous regional war.
Without looking at the many bends in the road that led from the birth of the Zionist Project in the late 19th century to the present, we can grasp the tragic depth of what has befallen the Palestinian people through two apertures of historical illumination: settler colonialism and apartheid. By and large, due to the post-1945 surge of nationalist self-assertion, European colonialism has been tossed in the dustbin of history, with the exception of those former British colonies that in the colonial age were able to establish their own independent sovereign states by driving native populations into near total physical and pscho-political submission. Israel is a more flagrant exception, defying the decolonizing trend by establishing and even internationally legitimating its state during the last stage of transition to post-colonial realities. Because the fundamental rationale of the Israeli state is at once racist and superimposed on Palestine by European outsiders against their will in a hostile political environment, repression, resistance, and apartheid necessarily follow with an iron logic that will persists as long as both sides are unwavering in their claims of right.
There is no denying the existence of contradictory narratives, and the need for choice and commitment. The Israeli narrative, as suggested, rests on escaping persecution, Biblical authority and entitlement, effective control, the erasure of Palestinian legitimacy, and geopolitical alignments, as well as international, and a fragile and partial regional acceptance taking the form of Abraham Accords tying several Arab regimes to a process of normalization with Israel. These agreements were the last hour initiatives of the Trump presidency that bribed and browbeat Arab leaders to take steps that made the U.S. look like a peacemaker in the Middle East even if ‘the deal of the century’ found its way into the nearest garbage can.
In contrast, the Palestinian narrative is premised on sanctified national identity, struggle for basic rights, ordeals of suffering and victimization, being disenfranchised in their own homeland, supported by historical flows and precedents in analogous Legitimacy Wars, and a global solidarity movement that is responsive to aspirations for a just and sustainable peace that will allow both peoples to flourish as equals in a single democratic, secular state. Not surprisingly, the strongest most heartfelt demonstrations of solidarity come from South Africa and Namibia, that is, where the European forms of settler colonialism and apartheid were most starkly enacted. It is also no accident that Irish Catholics in Northern Ireland and Black Lives Matter in the United States bond so spontaneously with the Palestinian ordeal as all of these
movements have long endured abuse based on race and religion.
The politics of domination dims the light cast by cultural forces leading to detachment and dissent, while the culture of resistance illuminates suffering and struggle by casting blazing lights. It is in this spirit that we look over the list of those writers honored each year by PBA.
It was this same spirit of cultural vivacity, rather than spectacular shows of counterinsurgency weapons, that made Palestine Writes, a spiritual sibling of PBA, such an exemplary and memorable festival of love, solidarity, witnessing, and truth-telling. This contrast between pride in weaponry and hopes/nightmares is to express in the clearest possible cultural idiom the stark differences between a reliance for ‘peace’ on state-sponsored violence as the source of social order and on nurturing visions that celebrate peaceful futures that animate this desperate people-driven, bottom-up struggle for emancipation.
The Realities of Cultural Resistance
Susan Abulhawa’s heartfelt eloquence sets the tone for both Palestine Writes and PBA. Her opening greetings to those around the world attending the online festival, who were gathered virtually in the city of Jerusalem chosen both as a point of meeting for attendees but also the emotive geographical North Star of the Palestinian struggle. Her initial words drew attention to “the thirst for….dedicated celebration of our heritage, our imaginations, and cultural productions.” She went on to make it unmistakably clear that this festival was not to be experienced as a kind of literary salon of mutual self-congratulation: this festival “is for the stone throwers, the street marchers, the agitators and disrupters. It is for the kite flyers, the hunger strikers, the political prisoners.”
I was also struck by Palestinian/American poet Forgo Tbakhi’s quote of Sophia Azeb haunting observation, “[w]e are always in the process of becoming Palestinians.” Tbakhi adds, “[p]art of the cultural revolt is a deep investment in asking what it means to be Palestinian or what it could mean.” Putting the fierce invocation of Abulhawa together with the soul-searching of Tbakhi seems to suggest that the artist’s vocation does not end on the printed page, vivid painting, musical score, or cinematic imagery. Beyond the cultural productions, as crucial as they are, is the commitment to the risks, costs, and satisfactions of activism, whatever form it might take.
Palestine Writes ended with moving testimony by two iconic figures, Angela Davis and Hanan Ashrawi, revered for their persevering, lifelong, brave, and principled engagement in struggles for liberation from oppression. It is symbolic that Angela Davis came to the Palestinian movement of solidarity from her lifelong opposition to racism in all its ugly manifestations in the United States.
A letter from political prisoner, Khalida Jarrar, smuggled from her Israeli jail cell and read by her daughters at Palestine Writes offer us the authentic confirmation of how integral access to culture, which during imprisonment means books, is to the politics of struggle: “Books constitute the foundation of life in prison. They preserve the psychological and moral balance of the freedom fighters who view their detentions as part of the overall resistance against the colonial occupation of Palestine. Books also play a role in each prisoner’s individual struggle of will between them and the prisons’ authorities. In other words, the struggle becomes a challenge for Palestinian prisoners as the jailors seek to strip us from our humanity and keep us isolated from the outside world. The challenge for prisoners is to transform our detention into a state of a ‘cultural revolution’ through reading, education and literary discussions.”
As we ponder such words, we understand that books are not only a matter of keeping morale under conditions of isolation, mistreatment, and confinement, but an active medium of struggle in at least two ways. First, in an ongoing battle with prison authorities to be allowed books of choice. Jarrar points out, for instance, that Gramsci’s books are forbidden. And secondly, the reading of books with other political prisoners not only keeps spirits high but amounts to adult education in revolutionary praxis. I had an Egyptian friend who told me similar tales about his years in Nasser’s desert jail for political prisoners.
This fugitive participation of Khalida Jarrar in the final moments of Palestine Writes helps us appreciate that political prisoners are the living expression of Palestinian resistance, paying the double unjustifiable price of living under oppressive prison-like circumstances and then being punished for resisting by being further confined in prison cells. They also remind those of us living outside of Palestine, whether Palestinian or not, that there is a life and death struggle for freedom continuing, which resists not only daily oppression, but also various forms of Israeli expansion, territorial by way of de facto expansion and psychological by seeking to crush all forms of Palestinian resistance including its borderless expression through books, films, dance, music, works of art.
Endings and Beginnings
Against this background we can better appreciate why these cultural occasions on both sides of the Atlantic, although festive, are less about festivity than community, resistance, and struggle. In this regard, calling attention to the best books produced by Palestinians or about Palestine year by year is one active front in the ongoing Legitimacy War, a non-violent battlefield yet combative. These occurrences are also a time of stocktaking in a constantly changing political landscape, as well as opportunities for a renewal and repositioning of engagement by way of solidarity activities. We are not all guilty, but we are all responsible, and can muster only the feeblest of excuses if we decline to play a part. Reading and reflecting on relevant books is playing a part. It raises our consciousness and keeps awakening our conscience to the unmet urgencies of the Palestinian challenge. It can lead from the pages of a book or the rhythms of a song to joining the BDS Campaign or to the streets for protests.
These Palestinian cultural events should be seen as embarking on a series of new beginnings, on deepening as awareness of the present situation, and of enriching remembrances of past glories of heroics and martyrdom, not primarily as events bounded in time. These gatherings are renewals and discoveries of such deeply felt identifications, and beyond that, an opening of our ears to melodic bells, a subtle summoning to take action.
Global Justice in the 21st Century 
Northern Ireland and the Israel/Palestine ‘Peace Process’
22 DecI visited Belfast the last few days during some negotiations about unresolved problems between Unionist and Republican (or Nationalist) political parties, I was struck by the absolute dependence for any kind of credibility of this process upon the unblemished perceived neutrality of the mediating third party. It would have been so totally unacceptable to rely on Ireland or Britain to play such a role, and the mere suggestion of such a partisan intermediary would have occasioned ridicule by the opposing party, confirming suspicions that its intention must have been to scuttle the proposed negotiations. In the background of such a reflection is the constructive role played by the United States more than a decade ago when it actively encouraged a process of reconciliation through a historic abandonment of violence by the antagonists. That peace process was based on the justly celebrated Good Friday Agreement that brought the people of Northern Ireland a welcome measure of relief from the so-called ‘Time of Troubles’ even if the underlying antagonisms remain poignantly alive in the everyday realities of Belfast, as well as some lingering inclination toward violence among those extremist remnants of the struggle on both sides that reject all moves toward accommodation. The underlying tension remains as Republican sentiments favor a united Ireland while the Unionists Having continue to be British loyalists, deeply opposed to any moves toward a merger with the Republic of Ireland.
The current round of negotiations going on in Belfast involve seemingly trivial issues: whether the flag of the United Kingdom will be flown from the Parliament and other government buildings on 18 official holidays or everyday and whether the Irish tricolor will be flown when leaders from the Republic of Ireland are visiting Belfast; the degree to which annual Unionist parades passing through Republican neighborhoods of the city will be regulated to avoid provocations; and how might the past be addressed so as to bring belated solace to those who have grievances, especially associated with deaths of family members that were never properly addressed by those in authority at the time. Apparently, in recollection of the achievements attributed to George Mitchell, the distinguished American political figure who was principally associated with developing the proposals that produced the Good Friday Agreement, the present phase of an evolving accommodation process is being presided over by another notable American, Richard Haass. Haass is a former State Department official and current President of the Council on Foreign Relations, the influential establishment NGO in the foreign policy domain. In this setting the United States Government (as well as its leading citizens) is seen as an honest broker, and although the government is not now directly involved, an individual closely associated with the established order has been chosen and seems acceptable to the five Northern Ireland political parties participating in the negotiations. This effort to ensure the continuation of stability in Northern Ireland seems responsive to the natural order: that negotiations in circumstances of deep conflict do benefit from third-party mediation provided it is perceived to be non-partisan, neutral, and competent, and acts credibly and diligently as a check on the gridlock of partisanship.
The contrast of this experience in Northern Ireland with what has emerged during the past twenty years in the effort to resolve the Israel/Palestine conflict could not be more striking. The negotiating process between Israel and Palestine is generated by an avowedly partisan third party, the United States, which makes no effort to hide its commitment to safeguard Israeli state interests even if at the expense of Palestinian concerns. This critical assessment has been carefully documented in Rashid Khalidi’s authoritative Brokers of Deceit: How the U.S. Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East (2013). Beyond this taint, sand is repeatedly thrown in Palestinian eyes by White House gall in designating AIPAC related Special Envoys to oversee the negotiations as if it is primarily Israel that needs reassurances that its national interests will be protected in the process while Palestinian greater concerns do not require any such indication of protective sensitivity.
How can we explain these contrasting American approaches in these two major conflict-resolving undertakings? Of course, the first line of explanation would be domestic politics in the United States. Although Irish Americans by and large have republican sympathies, Washington’s multiple bonds with the United Kingdom ensure a posture of impartiality would be struck from the perspective of national interests. The United States had most to gain in Ireland by being seen to help the parties move from a violent encounter to a political process in pursuing their rival goals. Such would also seem to be the case in Israel/Palestine but for the intrusion of domestic politics, especially in the form of the AIPAC lobbying leverage. Can anyone doubt that if the Palestinians had countervailing lobbying capabilities either the United States would be excluded as the diplomatic arbiter or it would do its best to appear impartial?
There are other secondary explanatory factors. Especially since the 1967 War, it has been a matter of agreement with American policymaking circles, that Israel is a reliable strategic ally in the Middle East. Of course, interests my diverge from time to time, as seems recently to be the case in relation to interim agreement involving Iran’s nuclear weapons program, but overall the alliance patterns in the region put the United States and Israel on the same side: counter-terrorist operations and tactics, counter-proliferation, containment of Iran’s influence, opposition to the spread of political Islam, support for Saudi Arabia and conservative governments in the Gulf. Since 9/11, in particular, Israel has been a counter-terrorist mentor to the United States, and to others in the world, offering expert training and what it calls ‘combat-tested weaponry,’ which means tactics and weapons used by Israel in controlling over many years the hostile Palestinian population, especially Gaza.
A third, weaker explanation is purported ideological affinity. Israel promotes itself, and this is endorsed by the United States, as the ‘sole democracy’ or ‘only genuine democracy’ in the Middle East. Despite the many contradictions associated with such an assertion, ranging from eyes closed when it comes to Saudi Arabia or the Egyptian coup to a wide-eyed refusal to notice the Israeli legalized pattern of discrimination against its 20% Palestinian minority. It has been persuasively suggested that part of the reason that Arab governments are reluctant to support the Palestinian struggle is the fear that its success would destabilize authoritarian regimes in the region. In this regard, it was the first intifada, back in 1987, that seems in retrospect to have been the most important antecedent cause of the 2011 Arab Spring. It is also notable that despite the profession of democratic values in the Middle East, Israel showed no regrets when the elected government in Egypt was overthrown by a military coup whose leadership then proceeded to criminalize those who had been chosen only a year earlier by the national electorate to run the country.
These are weighty reasons when considered together, help us understand why the Oslo Framework and its Roadmap sequel, and the various negotiating sessions, have not produced an outcome that remotely resembles what might be fairly described as ‘a just and sustainable peace’ from a Palestinian perspective. Israel has evidently not perceived such a conflict-resolving outcome as being in its national interest, and has not been given any sufficient incentive by the United States or the UN to scale back its ambitions, which include continuous settlement expansion, control over the whole of Jerusalem, denial of Palestinian rights of return, appropriation of water and land resources, intrusive, one-sided, and excessive security demands, and an associated posture that opposes a viable Palestinian state ever coming into existence, and is even more opposed to give any credence to proposals for a single secular bi-national state. What is more, despite this unreasonable diplomatic posture, which attains plausibility only because of Israel’s disproportionate influence on the intermediary mechanisms and its own media savvy in projecting its priorities, Palestine and its leadership is mainly blamed for the failures of the ‘peace process’ to end the conflict by a mutually agreed solution. This is a particularly perverse perception given Israel’s extreme unreasonableness in relation to resolution of the conflict, the U.S. partisanship, and Palestine’s passivity in asserting its claims, grievances, and interests.
Finally, we must ask why Palestinian leaders have been willing to give credibility for so long to a diplomatic process that seems to offer their national movement so little. The most direct answer is the lack of the power to say ‘no.’ This can be further elaborated by pointing to the lack of a preferable alternative. A further indication of Palestinian diplomatic dependence, is the degree to which the United States exerts pressure on Ramallah because it finds the management of this bridge to nowhere of the peace process to be useful, despite its many frustrations and failures, allows Washington to exhibit both a commitment to peace and to Israel. The American Secretary of State, John Kerry, has in recent months pressured the parties to resume peace talks, talking often of ‘painful concessions’ that both sides would have to make if the negotiations are to succeed. This misleading appeal to symmetry overlooks the gross disparity in position and capabilities of the two sides. Whether such a disparity is so great as to make it dubious to use the language of conflict is itself an open question. Would it not be more forthright and revealing to ask due to the degree of inequality, whether Palestine has any capability to say anything about the terms of a resolution other than ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to what Israel is prepared at any time to offer? In this sense it more closely resembles the end of a war in which there is a winner and loser except that here the loser at least retains the sovereign right to say ‘no.’ Also it needs to be observed, that this perception is deeply misleading because it overlooks what might be called ‘the other war,’ that is, the Legitimacy War that the Palestinians are winning, and given the history of decolonization, seems to have a good chance of controlling the political outcome of the struggle.
Returning to the inter-governmental approach, it should also be noticed that the diplomacy does not take account of the historical background. Did not Palestine concede more than enough before the negotiations even began, accepting a frame for territorial proposals that seems content with 22% of historic Palestine, although this territory is less than half of what the UN partition plan proposed in 1947, and seemed then to be unfair given the ethnic demographics at the time? We should also take account of the relevance of the supposed basic UN policy against the acquisition of territory by the use of force, which would seem to mandate a rollback of Israeli territory at least to the 1947 UN proposals contained in General Assembly Resolution 181. The implication of Kerry’s painful concession rhetoric is that Israel would only be expected to remove some isolated settlements and outposts in the West Bank even though they were unlawful ever since established, and could retain the valuable land it has appropriated for the settlement blocs established since 1967 despite their existence being in flagrant violation of Article 49(6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention. In other words, Palestine is expected to give up fundamental rights while Israel is supposed to abandon some relatively minor unlawful aspects of its prolonged occupation of the West Bank and retain most of the ill-gotten gains.
What do we learn from such an analysis?
(1) Third-party intermediation only works if it is perceived to be non-partisan by both sides;
(2) Partisan intermediation can only succeed if the stronger side is able to impose its vision of the future on the weaker side;
(3) Analyzing the Palestine/Israel diplomacy underscores the relevance of (2), and should not be confused with its claimed character as an instance of (1);
(4) Perhaps in the aftermath of a Palestinian victory in the Legitimacy War the sort of framework for constructive diplomacy achieved in Northern Ireland could be devised, but its credibility would depend on non-partisan intermediation.