On waking up, Palestine was still there

One might easily be tempted to think that after the shock and awe and the sound and fury of Trump's departure and Biden's arrival, the Palestinian issue had been relegated to the history books. Nothing could be further from the truth. Recently, a leaked document, produced by US administration insiders, has been circulating in the Emirates, listing in some detail the elements of an initiative aimed at refocusing the official US position on the Palestinian peace process.

Among some short-term initiatives, such as an emergency 12 million euros in aid to alleviate the humanitarian catastrophe that the pandemic has wrought in Palestine, the document highlights US support for a two-state solution, including reversing the closure of Palestinian diplomatic offices in the US, resuming financial contributions to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, and putting the thorny issue of illegal Israeli settlements on Palestinian land back on the table.

The document, which is ultimately more a declaration of intent than a programme of action, has been leaked on the eve of elections in Israel, and a few months before the first Palestinian elections in 15 years, so it seems certain that the leak is intended to manage the expectations of all parties involved as to what the rules of the game will be for the next four years.

The background to the document is, on the one hand, the reasonably positive outcome of the Abraham Accords, which significantly reduces the number of actors in conflict, and, on the other hand, the failure of the Kushner initiative, which for the Palestinians was tantamount to accepting that to cure the disease you had to kill the patient. The normalisation of relations between countries and Israel has something of déjà vu for the Palestinian national movement, which was born at the dawn of the demoralisation that took hold in Palestine when defeat in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war led to a retreat by Arab countries.

This lesson from history should not go unnoticed in Israel, which has no reason for complacency given that the Palestinians are unlikely to resign themselves to their fate, no matter how many embassies and trade delegations Israel opens in Arab capitals. On the contrary, impotence, abandonment and despair could well be an incentive for the PLO and its more intransigent supporters in the Islamic world to raise the stakes, and not necessarily against Israel.

Especially when the undeniable failure of almost 30 years of interminable negotiations may well give reason to the most radical critics of the decision to replace the armed struggle enshrined in the PLO's founding document with a diplomatic effort that has not borne fruit in the face of the fait accompli policy of Israel and its allies, the inoperability of international law, and the strategic incoherence of Israel's strategy, and the strategic incoherence of the Palestinian negotiators, whose habit of moving from maximalism to compromise, accepting a posteriori agreements with worse conditions than those offered a priori, as happened both in Algiers in 1988 and Oslo in 1993, reveals a weakness that the Israeli negotiators have been able to exploit. A return to high-profile violence, either directly or through subcontracting, would however be the PLO's greatest strategic mistake, and could lead not only to international indifference to the Palestinian cause, but possibly to open hostility, especially in an Arab world whose societies are undergoing a process of transition to a new understanding of political Islam that will necessarily force them to let go of any impediments to progress.

Thus, there are few options open to Palestinians, inside and outside the borders of Palestine. With a return to the pre-1967 state of affairs out of the question, Palestinian leaders are obliged to remember the fate of Lot's wife, focusing their strategy on possibilism and looking ahead. First, by putting their house in order, working to overcome the political fragmentation of Gaza and the West Bank. This lack of unity undermines the vindication of the Palestinian cause, in that, unfairly or not, it calls into question their ability to govern themselves, and relativises the order of priorities of both factions.

Only if inter-Palestinian understanding is possible will social progress be possible, which must unfailingly involve the development of institutions that represent and involve all Palestinians, balancing individual and collective rights, as a first step towards overcoming the sectarian miserabilism that has given rise to power structures that have proven incapable of providing security and prosperity to the Palestinian people.  If Palestinian leaders are able to understand that politics can be done without sovereignty, and if they have the courage to exchange sophistry for pedagogy, it will be possible to move towards a stable solution, which will surely revolve more around formulas of shared sovereignty than on achieving state sovereignty in the style of the Westphalian order, something that, by its very nature, seems unthinkable in a disintegrated nation whose regional configuration makes it imperative to share responsibility for territorial control with Jordan, Israel and Egypt.

The purpose of the US document seems to be none other than to offer the Palestinians a new relational framework in which to reframe their proposals, to prove wrong those who accuse them of never missing an opportunity. Otherwise, they will be sowing the seeds of their own irrelevance.