Washington’s response to the speech that
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas delivered at the UN General Assembly last
September 26 confirms that the bilateral Palestinian-U.S. relations are heading
for stormy times.
The U.S., which opposed Abbas’ plan to seek
a UN Security Council resolution to end the Israeli occupation within a defined
timeframe, not only cautioned him against proceeding with any such plan but
also issued an official statement condemning the language he used to express
the Palestinian people’s opposition to the continued occupation and the ongoing
war crimes that Israel is perpetrating in the territories it occupied in 1967.
“Abbas’
speech today included offensive characterizations that were deeply
disappointing and which we reject,” U.S. State Department Spokeswoman Jen Psaki
said in a statement on last September 27, which criticised Abbas’ speech as
“provocative,” “counterproductive” and undermines “efforts to create a positive
atmosphere and restore trust between the parties.”
Clearly, Abbas bent before the onslaught of
the winds of American rejection. He “submitted” his plan to the General
Assembly but he did not ask to bring it to a vote in order to secure an international
resolution that would strengthen his hand when he submitted it to the Security
Council. It is also noteworthy that while he called for a deadline to end the
occupation he omitted the three-year timeframe that he had previously
stipulated.
There is no serious Palestinian opposition
to Abbas’ plan to internationalise the search for a political solution to the
Palestinian struggle to end the occupation of Jerusalem ,
the West Bank and Gaza US
But Abbas’ plan signifies that he has
thrown in the towel on his reliance on U.S.
sponsorship, which in turn means confrontation with Washington U.S. by
merely bowing before its opposition to his plan or by asking for U.S. Washington U.S.
All the indications are that the U.S. will
campaign against the Abbas plan and continue to insist on brokering a solution
that it has been unable to produce during the more than two decades in which it
monopolised the sponsoring the negotiating process with the Israeli occupying
power.
On September 23, 88 US senators signed a
letter urging U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry to take prevent “negative
developments at the UN General Assembly, UN Human Rights Council, and the
International Criminal Court that could derail any prospects for the resumption
of peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians.”
Senator Rand Paul refused to sign this
letter. He wants Washington to cut off “all aid to the Palestinian Authority
until the conditions in Senator Paul’s Stand with Israel Act are met,”
according to his e-mail statement to The Washington Post that day.
Warning Abbas “that America ’s willingness to cooperate with him will
continue to depend on his willingness to return to the negotiating table with
the Government of Israel and avoid unilateral measures,” the
senators were keen to sustain the usual U.S.
“carrot-and-stick” policy, in this case by “enabling the Palestinian Authority to
move toward becoming the Palestinian governing authority in Gaza
But any policy of confrontation with the U.S. means that Abbas must reject all U.S.
In addition, in a confrontation of that
sort, Abbas would risk losing Arab support in view of the Arab consensus to
ally with — or at least not oppose — the U.S.
in the war it has declared against ISIS (the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria
In this context, the Arab League’s declared
support for the Abbas’ plan lacks credibility and cannot be relied on when it
comes to confronting the U.S. U.S.
This confrontation is foreshadowed by
preliminary chapters of the same, especially since 2011 when the U.S. defeated the Palestinian drive to obtain UN
recognition of Palestine U.S.
was not able to prevent the UN from recognising Palestine U.S.
undermined Palestinian accomplishments, such as the International Court of
Justice recommendation regarding the separating wall designed to annex another
chunk of the West Bank , and the Goldstein
Report. The Palestinians remember very well how the U.S. obstructed dozens of
international resolutions in support of Palestinian rights and how it
continuously prevented the international community from sponsoring any just
negotiating process that might end Washington’s own monopoly over what it
fraudulently calls the “peace process,” in which the U.S. has never been an
honest broker.
The US-Palestinian confrontation was
inevitable, even if much delayed. Palestinian leaders from both the resistance
and the negotiating factions always tried to avert it. The Palestinians never
chose confrontation; successive US
If President Abbas, who for decades placed
his faith in U.S. good will, has finally reached the conclusion that it is
futile to continue to depend on the U.S. and that now is the time to stand up
to Washington and turn to the international community to sponsor his
negotiating strategy. His decision will receive the unanimous support of the
Palestinian people. However, if he backs down, he will undergo the most
important test of his political career, as he will come face-to-face with the
people’s judgment of the credibility of his strategic choices, which have never
obtained a national or popular consensus.
The choice of confrontation also entails
the need to press forward in creating and setting into motion the mechanisms
for implementing the reconciliation agreement between Fatah and Hamas, as well
as the need to respond quickly to the overwhelming Palestinian demand to apply
for the membership of international treaties and organisations.
But above all, it requires safeguarding the
resistance in all its forms and developing it in quantity and quality until its
scope is expanded to embrace all the Palestinian people, wherever they may be.
Confrontation means refusing to allow Ezz Al-Din Al-Qassam to be assassinated
twice!
Even if the inconceivable occurred and the
U.S. acknowledged the will of the international community in support of
Palestinian rights, refrained from using its influence to stop Abbas’ plan and
even refrained from wielding its veto in the UN Security Council, there remains
the perpetual risk that the UN resolution would amount to no more than a paper
victory to add to the pile of Palestinian paper victories, since any such
political victory requires a national force to translate it into a reality on
the ground in the occupied territories.
If the Palestinian presidency does not
respond to these needs and demands, which receive the full support of the
Palestinian people, he will find himself once again singing outside the his
national flock.
Regardless of whether or not there is a
confrontation with the U.S.
The Palestinians have learned an important
lesson from their enemy. The Palestinian national movement has dozens of
international resolutions in its favour. This is something the Zionist movement
never possessed throughout its history, apart from that one non-binding
partition resolution, 181, adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1947. But this
one resolution the Zionists had translated into reality on the ground and then
expanded on it through the exercise of overwhelming military force. This is the
power that Palestinians are being prevented from possessing today, just as has
been the case in the past.
May God bless late Egyptian leader Gamal
Abdel-Nasser who always said that what has been taken away by force can only be
regained by force. History has proven him right and events have shown that the
course the Arabs and Palestinians took after he died — which headed in the
opposite direction to his — was gravely wrong, indeed sinful.
* Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab
journalist based in Bir Zeit, West Bank of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian
territories (nassernicola@ymail.com).
This article was first
published and translated from Arabic by Al-Ahram Weekly on October 3, 2014.
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