Amira Howeidy examines why Mahmoud Abbas's bid for statehood is receiving ferocious criticism from Palestinians Eight months after a plethora of leaked documents exposing the Palestinian Authority's (PA) concessions to -- and collaboration with -- Israel during a decade of negotiations, the very same PA leadership is waging war in the United Nations against the US and Israel to gain Palestinian statehood come Friday. On the surface, PA President Mahmoud Abbas appears to be defying Washington and provoking dramatic reactions from Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel's prime minister, and his supporters. But independent Palestinian figures critical of Abbas's endeavour claim the man who is "escaping his failures during negotiations" is seeking his political survival in the UN, practically damaging the Palestinian cause in the process. The debate is reminiscent of the climate during the signing of the 1993 Oslo Accords, which ushered in the start of the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. Eighteen years of negotiations later, instead of the promised two-state solution, Palestinians are left with zero prospects for a sovereign state, concessions on the return of refugees, zero dismantling of illegal Israeli settlements and a new reality that literally obliterated the 1967 borders. And yet Abbas, the man who was at the helm of the PA as it ceded Palestinian rights that quashed all prospects of a viable "state", is now leading a diplomatic offensive to gain observer status membership of the United Nations. It is "a mini-state with a disfigured geography and no sovereignty," as Palestinian intellectual Joseph Massad describes it. The problem this poses, Massad wrote in an article published by Al-Jazeera on 15 September, is not just in the futility of the step, but its consequences, regardless of whether or not the UN grants the PA membership. Should the UN vote for the PA statehood status, argued Massad, associate professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia University, it will come at a tremendous cost to the Palestinians. For one, the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) will cease to represent the Palestinian people and the PA -- which was born out of the PLO's talks with Israel, and was negotiating with Israel on behalf of the PLO -- will replace it as their presumed state apparatus. This prospect is not an exaggeration. Documents leaked by Al-Jazeera news channel last January, titled the "Palestine Papers", offered minutes and documentation of how Palestinian negotiators went as far as offering to concede almost all of East Jerusalem to the Israelis, ceded the right of six million Palestinian refugees to return, and cooperated with the Israelis on security matters related to the Palestinian resistance. But because the "Palestine Papers" were released between the ousting of Tunisia's president on 14 January and the beginning of the Egyptian revolution on 25 January, the damning documents -- which could have easily led to the collapse of the PA -- were overshadowed by the uprisings. While Tunisia and Egypt's dictators were being toppled consecutively, very few were interested in the PA's weakness during negotiations between 2003 and 2010. Apart from what the PA is capable of doing should it be understood as a state under occupation, Massad points to the possibility of the UN adopting a "language of compromise," stipulating that such a state must exist peacefully side by side with the "Jewish State" of Israel. He explains: "This would in turn exact a precious UN recognition of Israel's 'right' to be a Jewish state, which the UN and the international community, the US excepted, have refused to recognise thus far. This will directly link the UN recognition of a phantasmatic non-existent Palestinian state to UN recognition of an actually existing state of Israel that discriminates legally and institutionally against non-Jews as a 'Jewish state'." Should the US veto a UN decision, which is a likely scenario too, Israel will also benefit because, in Massad's words, the unending "peace process" will continue "with more stringent conditions and an angry US, upset at the PA challenge, will go back to exactly where the PA is today, if not to a weaker position." Another critic of the PA's UN bid, Ali Abunimah, co-founder of the Electronic Intifada and author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse, challenged the legitimacy of Abbas's endeavour. He argued in Foreign Affairs on 19 September: "there is no democratic mandate for the Palestinian Authority to act on behalf of Palestinians or to gamble with their rights and future." More importantly, as Abunimah pointed out, nobody knows exactly what the PA is planning to propose before the UN tomorrow. "No draft text has been shared with the Palestinian people. Instead, the text is being negotiated with the Palestinian Authority's donors as if they, not the Palestinian people, are its true constituency." He cited opposition from the Palestinian Youth Movement (an international coalition of young Palestinians) which fear that unilaterally declaring a state along 1967 borders without any other guarantees of Palestinian rights would effectively cede the 78 per cent of historic Palestine occupied in 1948 by Israel and would keep refugees from returning to what would then be recognised de facto as an ethnically "Jewish state". Abbas's bid has also been rejected by Palestinian BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) National Committee, the largest coalition of Palestinian civil society groups. And recently, on 18 September, some 27 prominent independent Palestinian figures issued a statement describing Abbas as "desperate" to appear as a "brave warrior waging a heroic struggle against the Zionist-American enemy". The statement was signed by Anis Al-Qassem, who drafted the Palestinian interim constitution, Bassam Al-Shakaa, former mayor of Nablus in 1979 and a respected Palestinian figure, among others. It voiced fear of a UNGA resolution that would approve a Palestinian state membership "on the basis of the 1967 borders and not on the 1967 borders" which, it says, translates to Palestinian "recognition of the legitimacy of the Zionist entity�ê� paves the way for the PA's recognition of a Jewish state and gives new ground to tampering with refugee rights and Jerusalem." The communiqué ended with a call to "end" the "capturing" of the PLO by Abbas. Palestinian intellectual strategist Mounir Shafiq explains that a UNGA resolution on the basis of the 1967 borders is effectively a direct recognition of Israel within the pre-June 1967 borders. This would be a "free gift" from the UNGA to Israel, he said, because it will override the UN Partition Plan, or Resolution 181 (issued in 1947 and that divides Palestine between the Jews, giving them 56.47 per cent of the land, and the Palestinians, with only 43.53 per cent -- a deal they rejected). The UN Partition Plan was never implemented and in June 1967 Israel occupied the rest of Palestine. UN Security Council Resolution 242 called for Israel's withdrawal from territory occupied in 1967. It is an example of the many UN resolutions issued in the history of the Palestinian question, but never implemented.
