It is time for the Ramallah-based Palestinian leadership
to challenge the international community on
Palestinian independence
By John Whitbeck
As expected, Kosovo has issued its unilateral declaration
of independence, the United States and most European
Union countries, with whom this declaration was
coordinated, rushing to extend diplomatic recognition
to this "new country". This course of action should strike
anyone with an attachment to either international law
or common sense as breathtakingly reckless.
The potentially destabilising consequences of this
precedent (which the US and the EU insist, bizarrely,
should not be viewed as a precedent) have been much
discussed with reference to other internationally
recognised sovereign states with strong separatist
movements practising precarious but effective self-rule,
such as Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Transniestria,
Ngorno-Karabakh, Bosnia's Republika Srpska, the
Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus and Iraqi Kurdistan,
as well as to discontented minorities elsewhere.
One potentially constructive consequence has not
yet been discussed.
American and EU impatience to sever a portion of a UN
member state (universally recognised, even by them, to
constitute a portion of that state's sovereign territory),
ostensibly because 90 per cent of those living in that
portion support separation, contrasts starkly with the
unlimited patience of the US and the EU when it comes
to ending the 40-year-long belligerent Israeli occupation
of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (no portion of which
any country recognises as Israel's sovereign territory
and as to which Israel has only asserted sovereignty
over a tiny portion, occupied East Jerusalem). Virtually
every legal resident of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip
seeks freedom, and has for over 40 years. For doing so,
they are punished, sanctioned, besieged, humiliated and,
day after endless day, killed by those who claim to stand
on the moral high ground.
In American and EU eyes, a Kosovar declaration of
independence from Serbian sovereignty should be
recognised, even if Serbia does not agree. However,
their attitude was radically different when Palestine
declared independence from Israeli occupation on 15
November 1988. Then the US and EU countries
(which, in their own eyes, constitute the "international
community", to the exclusion of most of mankind)
were conspicuously absent as over 100 countries
recognised the new State of Palestine, and their
non-recognition made this declaration of independence
"symbolic", unfortunately for most Palestinians as well.
For the US and the EU, Palestinian independence, to
be recognised and effective, must be directly negotiated
on a wildly unequal bilateral basis between the
occupying power and the occupied people with emphasis
laid on attaining the final agreement of the occupying
power. For the US and the EU, the rights and desires
of a long-suffering and brutalised occupied people, as
well as international law, are irrelevant. For the same
US and the EU, Kosovar Albanians, having enjoyed
almost nine years of UN administration and NATO
protection, cannot be expected to wait any longer for
their freedom, while the Palestinians, having endured
over 40 years of Israeli occupation, can wait forever.
With the "Annapolis process" going nowhere, as was
clearly the Israeli and American intention from the
start, the Kosovo precedent offers the Ramallah-based
Palestinian leadership -- accepted as such by the
"international community" because it is perceived as
serving Israeli and American interests -- a golden
opportunity to seize the initiative, reset the agenda
and restore its tarnished reputation in the eyes of
its own people. If this leadership truly believes,
despite all evidence to the contrary, that a decent
"two-state solution" is still possible, now is an ideal
moment to reaffirm the legal existence (albeit under
continuing belligerent occupation) of the State of Palestine,
explicitly in the entire 22 per cent of Mandatory Palestine
that was not conquered and occupied by the state of Israel
until 1967, and to call on all those countries that did not
extend diplomatic recognition to the State of Palestine
in 1988 -- and particularly the US and the EU states --
to do so now.
The Kosovar Albanian leadership has promised protection
for Kosovo's Serb minority, which is now expected to flee
in fear. The Palestinian leadership could promise to accord
a generous period of time for Israeli colonists living illegally
in the State of Palestine, and Israeli occupation forces, to
withdraw, as well as to consider an economic union with
Israel, open borders and permanent resident status for
those illegal colonists willing to live in peace under
Palestinian rule.
Of course, to prevent the US and the EU from treating
such an initiative as a joke, there would have to be a
significant and explicit consequence if they were to do so.
The consequence would be the end of the "two-state
" illusion. The Palestinian leadership would make clear
that if the US and the EU, having just recognised a
second Albanian state on the sovereign territory of a UN
member state, will not now recognise a Palestinian state
on a tiny portion of the occupied Palestinian homeland, it
will dissolve the Palestinian Authority (which, legally,
should have ceased to exist in 1999, at the end of the
five-year "interim period" under the Oslo Accords) and
the Palestinian people will thereafter seek justice and
freedom through democracy, through the persistent,
non-violent pursuit of full rights of citizenship in a single
state in all of Israel/Palestine, free of any discrimination
based on race and religion and with equal rights for all
who reside there.
Palestinian leaderships have tolerated Western
hypocrisy and racism and played the role of gullible
fools for far too long. It is time to kick over the table,
constructively, and to shock the international
community into taking notice of the fact that the
Palestinian people simply will not tolerate unbearable
injustice and abuse any longer.
If not now, when?
The writer of this article is an international
lawyer and author of The World According to Whitbeck
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