What is Mahmoud Abbas Waiting For?

" It appears clear to all but the Palestinian president that resistance,
not supine collaboration, is the only strategic option"

By Ghada Karmi

With the appalling death toll in Gaza, relentless assaults
on the West Bank (in which negotiations chief Ahmed Qurei's
own bodyguard was killed), and Israel's blatant settlement
expansion, one must wonder what Israeli atrocity, if any, would
make the Palestinian president change course. True, last week
he raised with his colleagues the possibility of suspending peace
talks with Israel if it persisted in its assaults, but he has not acted.
Why not?

Surely Gaza's plight should have been enough to outrage him, as
it has done legions of people across the globe. The crowning act in
a catalogue of murders took place on 15 January when Israeli
tanks and helicopters invaded the Zaytoun district of Gaza,
killing 19 people and wounding 50 in just 24 hours.
The following day, Israel's army killed another three Gazans,
and the day after it bombed the Gaza Interior Ministry,
killing one woman and wounding 46 others. Many more
will die after this week's power shutdown across
80 per cent of the Strip.

The number of dead in Gaza has been rising steadily
for months. Last November 36 Gazans were killed. In
December this figure jumped to 60, and in the first two
weeks of January 55 have so far died. Last week, Ehud
Barak, Israel's defence minister, announced the closure of
all crossings into Gaza, cutting off the pathetically small
amount of food, medicine and other essentials that had
been entering the Strip. What was already a humanitarian
crisis in Gaza following Hamas's election to office in 2006
is now likely to become a full-blown disaster. A whole generation
of Gaza's resistance leaders has already been wiped out
by Israeli targeted assassinations. Undeterred by legality
or consequences, Israel's prime minister, Ehud Olmert,
pledged to increase the attacks until "the firing of rockets
stops", but this is not the main objective. Israel's actions
clearly show it aims to destroy Gaza, economically and
structurally, and annihilate its every means of resistance.

Nor has the West Bank, supposedly Abbas's domain, been
spared. The Israeli army has repeatedly invaded towns and
villages there, carrying off scores of Palestinians in the
process and destroying acres of cultivated land. In one
such operation in Nablus on 5 January, 23 people were
seized, including several Fatah members. This elicited a
rebuke from Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, which changed
nothing. Meanwhile, Israel announced it would build
1,000 new homes to expand the Har Homa settlement
currently choking Bethlehem, and swell the already
bloated Maale Adumim settlement in East Jerusalem.
Another settlement sprang up in the Ras district of
Hebron, linking Kryat Arba and Tel Rumeida, the most
intolerable settlements for Palestinians to bear. In addition,
and despite Israeli undertakings to the contrary, outposts,
illegal even under Israeli law, still proliferate across
the West Bank.

Given such ample proof of Israeli ill intent, it is legitimate
to ask why the Palestinian Authority (PA) does not halt this
charade, call an end to a peace process conducted on such terms,
refuse to lead an authority that has neither power nor resources,
and whose main function, no matter what its members imagine,
is to safeguard the Zionist project. A conviction is growing in
some Palestinian circles that the PA should terminate
negotiations with Israel and transform itself from the
present failed organisation, supine before Israeli and
Western diktat, into a leadership body of a people
under occupation.

There is much merit in such a course. It calls Israel's
bluff in spinning out the peace process interminably while it
consolidates its grip on Palestinian land; it frustrates Western
attempts to protect Israel, by way of bribing the Palestinians --
to the tune of over $7 billion -- into settling for a fraction of their
legitimate rights; and it incidentally helps to improve the PA
leadership's image, now widely regarded as quislings and
Western puppets. But most importantly, it re- establishes
reality for the Palestinians that there is no state-in-being;
that they are an occupied people who must fight by every
means for their freedom. And to this end, they must set
aside internecine enmity and factionalism.

None of it will happen, however. Despite the manifest
failure of the "peace process" to date and Israel's increasing
gains at Palestinian expense, Abbas and his colleagues
want to continue with the process. Though Arafat was a case
apart, it is the same error he made over Oslo and set the
pattern for subsequent Palestinian strategy. Simply put,
this regards Palestinians as too weak to impose any terms
against the might of Israel, America and Europe. So they can only
hope to salvage something from this line-up by acquiescing
to the demands of these powers, even at the expense of
Palestinian rights -- so the theory goes. Abbas has
added his own ingredient to this mixture by rejecting all
forms of armed resistance, believing that Palestinian passivity
will succeed better than force. Security collaboration with
Israel (a euphemism for thwarting Palestinian resistance),
the inability to defend even PA officials and Fatah members
against Israeli assaults, helplessness in the face of
Israel's violations of all agreements, and current paralysis
over the horrors unfolding in Gaza are all consequences
of this strategy.

Clearly the strategy has failed. No amount of collaboration,
passivity and obedience to the other side has worked.
The Palestinian situation is far worse today than in 1993,
and a different approach is needed. The Palestinians may
be weak, but they have one major strength: the power to say
"No". Imagine if they now refused to negotiate with Israel on
current terms, dismantled the PA as the scapegoat and
whipping boy for Israeli occupation it has become, and
established a leadership of resistance that refused to
cooperate while under occupation. Such a move would
wreck the whole construct so carefully designed by
Israel and its allies and whose pivot is Palestinian
acquiescence. President Bush would have no trophy to
save him from total ignominy; Israel would face a rebellious
Palestinian population without leaders to do its dirty work;
and Europe would have to confront its own ignoble
complicity with the occupation by its funding of it.
Above all, Palestinians would regain their self-respect
and their right to resist, and their cause would once again unite
the Arab world against its enemies. Fear of such an outcome,
disastrous to Israel and its allies, is the Palestinian trump card,
if they care to use it.

The writer is author of Married to Another Man:
Israel's dilemma in Palestine .