With each Israeli government, Palestine incurs additional losses which the PA then contends are worse than the previous, until the next. Perhaps Abbas would do well to articulate the international community’s “state-building” agenda for what it is – another tactic to annihilate Palestinian independence and facilitate colonial land grab.
Opinion: The Palestinian Authority’s Rhetoric and Actions Invalidate the Palestinian Narrative
With each Israeli government, Palestine incurs additional losses which the PA then contends are worse than the previous, until the next. Perhaps Abbas would do well to articulate the international community’s “state-building” agenda for what it is – another tactic to annihilate Palestinian independence and facilitate colonial land grab.
The Palestinian Authority has no political alternative to collaborating with Israel’s colonial project. Its complaints offer no constructive criticism.
Instead, the PA accentuates the predicament which the international community intended for Palestinians – that in time, reversing Israel’s colonial process would become impossible.
Of course, the international community eliminated the Palestinian historical narrative of the anti-colonial struggle, which could serve as the foundation upon which to build a legitimate political alternative. With the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, the late Yasser Arafat relinquished armed struggle – a move that the PA entrenched in its collaborative politics. In the PA’s rhetoric, subjugating the Palestinian anti-colonial struggle is called political pragmatism.
In the absence of a Palestinian alternative, the PA has no option but to turn to dissociated excuses; the most recent being that the current Israeli government is the worst Palestinians have so far experienced.
“Our people are facing a series of Israeli governments that are destroying any attempt to salvage the peace process. The current occupation government has gone further than its predecessors with daily killings and war crimes,” the PA’s spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeinah stated.
Why has Abu Rudeineh not acknowledged that Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett is extending what the Trump-Netanyahu allegiance implemented against the Palestinian people? If Bennett is worse than his predecessors, what does the PA’s statement say about the earlier governments post-Nakba, which laid the foundations for the permanent displacement of the Palestinian population? Why are earlier atrocities dismissed, just to point out the current state of Palestine’s deterioration?
The issue the PA should be raising is the ongoing Nakba. No Israeli leader will reverse the colonisation process, or embark on a path that does not ensure the cycle of Palestinian dispossession. Therefore, the issue is not Bennett’s government, but rather the foundations of the Zionist colonial enterprise that subsequent Israeli governments are bound to accomplish.
Additionally, the PA might have entertained hopes that once the Trump-Netanyahu alliance reached its demise, the Palestinian leadership might have regained some political standing within the international community, or be perceived as a negotiating partner by Israel. But Israel does not need to negotiate, not when the international community has not placed any restrictions on settlement expansion and de-facto annexation of Palestinian territory.
To put it succinctly, Israel has no incentive to negotiate, and the current Israeli government is benefiting from the groundwork laid by his predecessor, Benjamin Netanyahu.
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The PA’s relevance is tied to Israel’s needs, as well as the two-state compromise – the latter wholeheartedly supported by PA leader Mahmoud Abbas. To warn, repeatedly and ineffectively, that the PA will seek international recourse for Israel’s violations of international law, will not halt Israel’s colonisation process.
However, to pit Bennett as the ultimate orchestrator of international law violations against the Palestinian people is erroneous. In the same way that the former US President Donald Trump was perceived as the only US president who harmed Palestinian interests. Trump’s overt and belligerent way exposed the pro-Israel US agenda which his predecessors held sacred.
It would be better if the PA stopped invalidating the Palestinian people’s anti-colonial resistance, as opposed to wasting time comparing one Israeli government with another. History calls for an awareness of continuation, which the PA consistently fails to accomplish.
If Bennett is pushing ahead with de-facto annexation, it is because there has been a process that led to this appropriation. The PA ought to shift attention to its own role and discern how it abets one Israeli government after another.
With each Israeli government, Palestine incurs additional losses which the PA then contends are worse than the previous, until the next. Perhaps Abbas would do well to articulate the international community’s “state-building” agenda for what it is – another tactic to annihilate Palestinian independence and facilitate colonial land grab.
