If Kosovo Can Be Free, Why Not Palestine?
John V. Whitbeck, Arab News

Arab News, Saudi Arabia
Feb 19 2008

As expected, Kosovo has now issued its unilateral declaration of
independence, and the United States and most European Union countries,
with which this declaration was coordinated, are rushing to extend
diplomatic recognition to this "new country", a course of action which
should strike anyone with an attachment to either international law
or common sense as breathtakingly reckless.

The potentially destabilizing 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 unhappy portions
of other internationally recognized sovereign states with strong
separatist movements practicing 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.

The American and EU impatience to sever a portion of a UN member state
(universally recognized, even by them, to constitute a portion of
that state’s sovereign territory), ostensibly because 90 percent
of those living in that portion of the state’s territory support
separation, contrasts starkly with the unlimited patience of the
US and the EU when it comes to ending the 40-year-long belligerent
occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (no portion of which
any country recognizes as Israel’s sovereign territory and as to
which Israel has only even 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 recognized even if Serbia does not
agree. However, their attitude was radically different when Palestine
declared independence from Israeli occupation on Nov. 15, 1988. Then
the US and the EU countries (which, in their own eyes, constitute
the "international community", to the exclusion of most of mankind)
were conspicuously absent when over 100 countries recognized the new
State of Palestine, and their nonrecognition made this declaration of
independence purely "symbolic" in their own eyes and, unfortunately,
in most Palestinian and other eyes as well.

For the US and the EU, any Palestinian independence, to be recognized
and effective, must still be directly negotiated, on a wildly unequal
bilateral basis, between the occupying power and the occupied people –
and must be agreed to by the occupying power. For the US and the EU,
the rights and desires of a long-suffering and brutalized occupied
people, as well as international law, are irrelevant.

For the 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,
to reset the agenda and to 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 percent of Mandatory Palestine
which was not conquered and occupied by the State of Israel until 1967,
and to call on all those countries which 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 the
Israeli colonists living illegally in the State of Palestine and
the 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 recognized a second
Albanian state on the sovereign territory of a UN member state,
will not now recognize one 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, nonviolent 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 live there, as in any true democracy. 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 that the Palestinian people simply will not tolerate
unbearable injustice and abuse any longer.

If not now, when?

– John V. Whitbeck, an international lawyer has advised the Palestinian
negotiating team in negotiations with Israel.