IF KOSOVO, WHY NOT PALESTINE?
Al-Ahram Weekly
21 -27 February 2008
It is time for the Ramallah-based Palestinian leadership to challenge
the international community on Palestinian independence, writes
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?