Dirty Deals: Israel & Bahrain & UAE

 

The signing of the deal normalizing relations between Israel, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates caused a stir in the Middle East. It seems Israel is increasingly gaining political ground in the region, expanding trade and financial relations, and solidifying an Arab-Israeli axis against Iran and to accomplish Shimon Peres and the Zionist Project aim to conquer the Arab market in order to dominate the Arab world. All of this is happening against the will of the Palestinian people and without any concession from the Israelis.

These developments have raised a number of important questions on the political scene in the Middle East. Does this diplomatic success for Israel mean that the Palestinian question has been completely sidelined in Arab politics?

Have Palestinians lost their “veto power” on the normalisation of relations between Arab states and Israel?

Will the UAE be able to bypass the Palestinians, the original owners of the cause, and come up with a “solution” to the Palestinian issue?

For decades, there has been a consensus among Arab states that any dealings with Israel have to be conditioned on a “land for peace” arrangement that includes its withdrawal from the territories it occupied during the 1967 war. That is, the Israelis would have to give up occupied territory for the creation of an independent Palestinian state in exchange for normalising relations with Arab countries.

This consensus gave an unspoken “veto power” on normalisation to the Palestinians, making the resolution of the Palestinian issue the only way in which Israel would be accepted in the Arab world.

What the Emirati-Bahraini-Israeli agreement has done is basically sideline this past Arab consensus on how to deal with the Palestinian issue and make public what has been going on informally for years – the normalisation of relations between Tel Aviv and Abu Dhabi.

It demonstrates Emirati and Bahraini disregard for the long-term Arab position of “land for peace”. Abu Dhabi and Manama have effectively given the Israelis what they want – open political relations, trade, and backing for their anti-Iran confrontation efforts – without any real concessions on the Palestinian issue.

For the Palestinians, , this is a clear attempt to preserve the status quo and allow the Israelis to continue stealing Palestinian land, demolishing Palestinian homes, imprisoning and killing Palestinians and altogether solidifying their apartheid rule. Contrary to what the Emiratis have claimed, this deal has not stopped the annexation of Palestinian lands on the ground.

The Israelis do not hide their optimism that establishing full diplomatic relations with the UAE and Bahrain will open the door to establishing full relations with other countries, such as Oman, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and perhaps Sudan. If these normalisation deals continue, then it would mean that the Palestinians have lost their “veto power” on normalisation with Israel and their cause has lost its political value to the Arab regimes.

While the deal is indeed bad news for the Palestinians, it is important not to exaggerate its significance. Abu Dhabi, Tel Aviv and Washington have touted it as a “peace for peace” (as opposed to “land for peace”) initiative, trying to equate it to the peace agreements Egypt and Jordan concluded with Israel in the past. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the architect of the deal, like most Israelis, knows very well that any such comparison is unrealistic.

After all, neither Bahrain nor the UAE has actually been at war with Israel and they also have no common borders, unlike Jordan and Egypt, which waged deadly wars against the Israelis. The peace deals that the two countries signed with Israel not only put an end to hostilities but also forced Israel to withdraw from territories it had occupied.

Nothing of such political importance was contained in the “peace” deal that Bahrain, the UAE and Israel signed last month.

As bad as this deal is for the Palestinians, it does not make the Palestinian issue go away. Despite all the noise and PR, Israelis very well realise that normalisation of relations with Gulf nations will not “get rid of” millions of Palestinians. It cannot erase them from history or from reality.

There seems to be some hope among some moderate Israelis that the UAE, the new self-declared “peacemaker” of the region, could use the deal as a stepping stone and wield its influence to help resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In a recent article, former Israeli diplomat, Nadav Tamir, wrote about the possibility of Abu Dhabi initiating new negotiations between the Palestinian Authority and Tel Aviv to produce a settlement that includes a separate Palestinian state.

The success of such an initiative, however, is highly unlikely, given that the relations between Ramallah and Abu Dhabi are at an all-time low. The PA has made it clear it considers the Emirati deal with Israel a “betrayal” and has issued strongly-worded condemnations.

If the UAE fails to play a useful role in reaching a settlement with the Palestinians, Tamir fears that the agreement with the UAE could turn from a tactical achievement to strategic harm.

In the short-term, normalisation with Israel only adds to the isolation of the PA and could benefit Hamas – something that is not in the interest of Israel, which has long used the authorities in Ramallah to indirectly depoliticise and control the Palestinian population. In the long run, Arab normalisation with Israel without concessions on the Palestinian issue takes away the main Arab leverage to enforce a two-state solution, which could backfire.

A deeply weakened PA is likely to collapse and leave the administration of Palestinian towns and villages in the West Bank to their occupier – Israel. Such a development would only further put to the fore the apartheid practices of the Israeli state, giving full rights to Israeli Jews, while oppressing and discriminating against the native Palestinian population.

This would likely provide even more fuel into the transnational grassroots opposition to Israeli occupation and apartheid, which is already putting significant pressure on Israel to give the Palestinians their rights.

In this sense, the continuing denial of statehood to the Palestinians by the Israeli right-wing ruling elite and the collapsing support for Israel among younger generations of Americans and Western Europeans puts the country even more firmly on a path towards a one-state solution, where Israelis and Palestinians would enjoy equal rights. This would effectively mean the end of the Zionist dream of a Jewish state on all of historic Palestine.

The current Israeli political leadership is too short-sighted to see these potential developments. Netanyahu is enjoying the image boost the normalisation deal gave him and is probably hoping this would secure his re-election once the ruling coalition collapses and allow him to continue dodging jail over the corruption crimes he is being tried for. His premiership may well go down in history as the one that laid the groundwork for the end of the exclusive Jewish state in Palestine.

Thus, what may seem like a major loss for the Palestinian cause may turn out to be more harmful for the Zionist project. Sooner or later, the Israelis will have to face to consequences of denying Palestinian statehood. 

PALESTINA

 A Zionist-led war on a Palestinian cultural festival in Rome has exposed the fragility of the Italian political system when it comes to the conversation on Palestine and Israel. The sad truth is that, although Italy is not often associated with a ‘powerful’ pro-Israel lobby as is the case in Washington, the pro-Israel influence in Italy is just as dangerous.

The latest episode began on September 24, when the Palestinian community in Rome announced plans to hold ‘Falastin – Festival della Palestina’, a cultural event that aims at illustrating the richness of Palestinian culture in all of its grandeur. The idea behind it is not to simply humanize Palestinians in the eyes of ordinary Italians, but to explore commonalities, to cement bonds and to build bridges. However, for Israel’s allies in Italy, even such unthreatening objectives were too much to bear.

The festival, sponsored by II Municipio of Rome – one of the administrative subdivisions of Rome central municipality – found itself at the center of a major – and ludicrous – controversy.

On September 25, an odd pro-Israel post appeared on the Partito Democratico II Municipio – the center-left Italian political party that controls that particular subdivision. Without any context or marking any specific occasion, the post, which displayed the Israeli flag, celebrated the friendship between the Democratic Party and Israel while condemning the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement (BDS).

The haphazardness of the post and the strange timing suggested that the Democratic Party is under attack for its sponsorship of the Palestinian festival. Overwhelmed by angry comments on social media, the Party’s Facebook page abruptly removed the anti-Palestinian post without much explanation.

But clarity followed soon when, on September 30, the Jewish Community of Rome issued a statement expressing outrage at the II Municipio for allegedly sponsoring ‘an anti-Semitic festival’. Taking advantage of the deliberate distortion between anti-Semitism and the legitimate criticism of apartheid Israel, the Community’s representatives raged on about BDS and the alleged boycott of Jewish businesses.

The statement, part of which we translate here, claimed that “… the BDS Movement will attend the initiative (The Festival), and this is unacceptable and dangerous (because) the boycott movement denies the very existence of the state of Israel and it is linked to the terrorist groups of Hamas and Fatah.”

Aside from the unsubstantiated – more accurately, completely fallacious – claims, the statement referenced the ‘IHRA definition of anti-Semitism’, further explained below, which was accepted by the Italian government as well as the French and Austrian parliaments. Based on that logic, the statement concluded that, one, “the BDS movement is anti-Semitic” and, two, “the II Municipio is legitimizing anti-Jewish hatred”.

In a clearly coordinated move, the Wiesenthal Center, which often poses as a progressive organization, also went on the attack. On the same day that the Jewish Community of Rome released its statement, the Center dispatched a letter to Italian Prime Minister, Giuseppe Conte, also recounting the same false claims of BDS’ alleged anti-Semitism, the IHRA definition and so on.

The Center stooped so low as to compare the BDS movement to Germany’s Nazi program. It claimed that the Palestinian boycott movement was, in fact, inspired by the Nazis’ boycott of Jews, referencing the slogan “Kaufen nicht bei Juden” (Do not buy from Jews).

The fallout was quick and, judging by the typical gutlessness of European politicians, predictable as well. II Municipio councilor, one Lucrezia Colmayer, abruptly declared her resignation, “distancing” herself from the decision of II Municipio President, Francesca Del Bello, for sponsoring the Festival.

“With this gesture, I want to renew my closeness to the Jewish Community of Rome, with which I shared this important cultural and administrative path,” Colmayer wrote.

Del Bello soon followed with her own statement. “I apologize if the sponsorship of the II Municipio to ‘Falastin – Festival della Palestina’ … offended the Jewish community and led a councilor to resign,” she wrote, rejecting Colmayer’s resignation and inviting her to return to the Council.

Fortunately, despite all obstacles, “the Festival was a great success,” Maya Issa, a member of the Palestinian Community of Rome and Lazio, told us.

The Festival “was a way for people to learn about Palestine and to see Palestine under a different light. The atmosphere was magic – Palestinian colors, scents, food, Dabkah, art and literature”.

The good news is that, despite the well-coordinated Italian Zionist campaign, the Palestinian Festival still went ahead and, according to Issa, “many Italian politicians understood our message and they decided to participate”.

Now that the Festival is over, the pro-Palestinian groups in Italy are ready to counter the false accusations and the defamatory language lobbed at them by the pro-Israel camp.

“We will respond with the truth and we will refute all the false claims, especially the lies about the BDS Movement,” Issa said, adding “we, the Palestinian community, must resist, along with all those who support true democracy and freedom”.

There is no doubt that the Palestinian community of Italy is more than capable of achieving this crucial task. However, two important points must be kept in mind: First, the “IHRA definition of anti-Semitism”, also known as EUMC, has been deliberately misused by Zionists to the point that a genuine attempt at curbing anti-Jewish racism has been transformed as a tool to defend Israeli war crimes in Palestine, and to silence critics who dare, not only to censure Israel’s illegal actions, but to even celebrate Palestinian culture.

Of particular significance is that the very person who drafted that ‘definition’, US attorney Kenneth S. Stern, has condemned the misuse of the initiative.

In a written statement submitted to the US Congress in 2017, Stern argued that the original definition has been greatly misused, and that it was never intended to be manipulated as a political tool.

“The EUMC ‘working definition’ was recently adopted in the United Kingdom, and applied to campus. An ‘Israel Apartheid Week’ event was cancelled as violating the definition. A Holocaust survivor was required to change the title of a campus talk, and the University (of Manchester) mandated it be recorded, after an Israeli diplomat complained that the title violated the definition,” he wrote.

“Perhaps most egregious,” Stern continued, “an off-campus group citing the definition called on a university to conduct an inquiry of a professor (who received her PhD from Columbia) for anti-Semitism, based on an article she had written years before. The University (of Bristol) then conducted the inquiry. While it ultimately found no basis to discipline the professor, the exercise itself was chilling and McCarthy-like.”

A second point to also consider is that Italian politics has reached the point that, on many issues, it has become difficult to easily distinguish between supposedly progressive parties and the populist ones. Palestine, in the new Italian political discourse, especially that of the Democratic Party is, perhaps, the most obvious case in point.

This is particularly disturbing, considering that Partito Democratico was, itself, the ideological culmination of parties that existed during the era of Italy’s First Republic (1948-1992), which were known for their strong stances in favor of Palestinian rights and self-determination and strong opposition to Israel’s violations of international law.

This is no longer the case, as the party’s stance on Palestine now hardly deviates from the stifling mantra, “Due popoli due stati” – “Two people two states”.

The new era of Italian politics makes it possible for the likes of Lia Quartapelle – a Democratic Party MP – to pose as a human rights defender on the global stage while referring to Israel as “an extraordinary exception, a plural democracy in a region that fed sectarian and fundamentalist policies”. Her statement is not only wrong and deluding, it also embodies a deep-seated form of anti-Arab sentiment, if not, arguably, outright racism.

The attempt at shutting down the Palestinian Festival is a microcosm of Italy’s foreign policy agenda in Palestine and Israel, where Rome offers Palestinians nothing but empty rhetoric, while practically remaining subservient to the chauvinistic and racist right-wing agenda of Tel Aviv.

Italians must understand that this is no longer just a conversation on Palestine and Israel, but one that directly affects them and their democracy, as well. Italy is a country that brought, then fought and defeated fascism; allied with, then fought and defeated Nazism. Once more, they are presented with the same stark options: siding with Israeli racism and apartheid or upholding the Palestinian people’s struggle for freedom. 

INTERACTIVE: Palestinian Remix

Addameer

OCHA

Palestinian Center for Human Rights

B'Tselem 

International Solidarity Movement – Nonviolence. Justice. Freedom

Defense for Children 
Breaking the Silence

BRASIL

Carlos Latuff Twitter

The Intercept Brasil

AOS FATOS: As declarações de Bolsonaro, checadas 

Reality check : Azerbaijan vs Armenia

Azerbaijan and Armenia have accused each other of swiftly violating the terms of a ceasefire in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region, raising questions about how meaningful the truce, brokered by Russia, would turn out to be.

The ceasefire, clinched after marathon talks in Moscow advocated by President Vladimir Putin, was meant to halt fighting to allow ethnic Armenian forces

in Nagorno-Karabakh and Azeri forces to swap prisoners and war dead.

Under the international law, Nagorno-Karabakh is recognised as part of Azerbaijan. But ethnic Armenians, who make up the vast majority of the population, reject the Azerbaijani rule and have been running their own affairs with Armenia’s support since a devastating war in the 1990s following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Earlier on Saturday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who helped mediate the ceasefire talks in Moscow, said in a statement the truce had been agreed on humanitarian grounds.

The International Committee of the Red Cross would help make the truce work, he said.

“The specific terms of the ceasefire still need to be agreed,” said Lavrov, who said the two rivals had also agreed to enter into what he called substantive peace talks to be held under the auspices of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s (OSCE) Minsk Group.

However, the ceasefire has been breached. To what level or extent is not immediately clear.

Azeri President Ilham Aliyev, meanwhile, told Russia’s RBC news outlet that the warring parties were now engaged in trying to find a political settlement, but suggested there would be further fighting ahead.

Azerbaijan’s Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov also said the “humanitarian ceasefire” would only last for as long as it took for the Red Cross to arrange the exchange of the dead.

Speaking at a briefing in Baku, he complained that the status quo on the ground in the mountainous region did not suit his country and that Azerbaijan hoped and expected to take control of more territory in time.

As a matter of fact, the ceasefire has not been welcomed by the Azeri people either. They believe that after 30 years … this is the first time they have the upper hand. The have military power with more sophisticated weapons. They believe a long truce or long-term ceasefire will only help Armenians build their positions.

Meanwhile, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and his Russian counterpart discussed the latest developments in Nagorno-Karabakh in a phone call on Saturday.

Rouhani welcomed the ceasefire and said Iran continues to be ready to facilitate a peaceful resolution, but repeated concerns about the reported deployment of foreign fighters. “The presence of terrorists in the conflict can be dangerous for Iran and Russia, and the entire region,” Rouhani said.

Vladimir Putin, on the other hand, briefed Rouhani on Russian efforts to resolve the conflict and said he understood Iranian concerns: “All neighbouring countries must try to end war and bloodshed and strive for conflict resolution through negotiations.”

As the all-out war between Armenia and Azerbaijan is still under way, what is becoming clear is that the repercussions of this war will be larger than the casualty count as a new regional framework is developing to deal with the conflict.

The thawing of the frozen conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh between Armenia and Azerbaijan has been months in the making. After border skirmishes between Armenia and Azerbaijan in July, Ankara increased its rhetoric against Armenia in August, on the centennial of the Treaty of Sevres, and in the wake of Turkish-Azerbaijani joint military exercises in late July and early August. Subsequently, reports of increased Turkish military support and the transfer of military equipment to Azerbaijan began to circulate.

Speeches at the 75th UN General Assembly by the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan, only days before the start of large-scale military operations on September 27, also foreshadowed the escalation. In their speeches, both Armenia’s Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev used cautioning language: the former aimed at the growing involvement of Turkey, the latter at the lack of diplomatic progress and continued Armenian intransigence.

Since the early 1990s, negotiations for resolving the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict have been deeply entrenched in the OSCE Minsk Process, a Euro-Atlantic framework that also includes Russia and Turkey. However, by many accounts, the Minsk Group has run its course without achieving any tangible results; moreover, there is an increased perception, especially on the part of Azerbaijan, that the Minsk Group is unable or unwilling to provide an effective resolution to the conflict.

The analysis of Russia and Turkey’s official reactions to the escalation provides observers with a sense of how the latest violent thaw might be a prelude to a shift in the framework of the conflict – from a Euro-Atlantic endeavour to a regional one. In that shift, Turkey’s unequivocal support for, and military presence in, Azerbaijan has been met with a relatively passive reaction from Russia, manifested in the form of a call on both sides to restrain from escalating the war – a position that puts the perception that Russia is Armenia’s strategic ally in doubt.

Furthermore, Turkey’s active (albeit seemingly tacit) participation in the conflict in a region that Russia considers to be its back yard can be viewed within the prism of Moscow and Ankara’s gravitation towards a synergy on several foreign policy fronts. Thus, even as Turkey and Russia stand on opposite sides in the Syrian and Libyan civil wars, they have both found some common ground in their mutual distancing from Western political and even military (NATO in the case of Turkey) paradigms. This shift might be explained by Moscow’s attempt to revive the Primakov Doctrine (named after Russian former foreign and Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov), which speculates that Russia should form regional alliances to resist the global hegemony of the US.

Many outsiders are taking the view that the thawing of the frozen conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh is a new chapter in the age-old proxy war between Moscow and Ankara in the Caucasus. Yet, upon closer examination, it appears that both sides are using this renewed conflict to work together to exert influence in the region while excluding Western powers.

The paradox of the Turkish-Russian love-hate relationship was most obvious when in November 2015 Turkish jet fighters sgot down a Russian warplane over Turkey’s border with Syria. Instead of being used by Moscow to escalate tensions with Ankara, the incident was translated into increased Russian bombardment of Turkey’s Syrian allies; and by mid-2016, it had ostensibly been forgotten, as the two countries announced the reset of their relations. By 2019, Turkish-Russian relations were amicable enough for the two countries to sign a military cooperation agreement paving the way for Ankara to buy Russian-made surface-to-air missiles.

Other than their combined suspicion of and adversarial posture towards the West, both Russia and Turkey have taken advantage of several developments in the past couple of years to increase their cooperation, especially in the South Caucasus. Thus, the increased isolationism of US foreign policy and a lack of interest by European countries in the region, coupled with the global COVID-19 pandemic’s shifting of most countries’ attention on domestic public health concerns, have all provided an opportunity for Russia and Turkey to “hijack” the Nagorno-Karabakh dossier from the Minsk Process and convert it into a regional endeavour.

The implications of shifting the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict from the multilateral OSCE Minsk Group’s framework to a Russian-Turkish regional one (with an Iranian role possible but as yet unclear) could have major and lasting consequences. In this context, Russia’s continued “wait and see” approach might pay off when both Armenia and Azerbaijan find themselves in a military impasse, even if both sides claim some variation of “victory”.

In such a scenario, Russia would utilise its various levers against both Armenia and Azerbaijan to ensure they accept a Russian-imposed ceasefire with a high probability of Russian peacekeepers being deployed on the line of contact. Perhaps the first step towards this goal is Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s announcement (four days after the fighting started) that Moscow is ready to host both Armenia and Azerbaijan to discuss the possible settlement of the conflict “independently as well as within OSCE Minsk group”.

From Turkey’s perspective, Ankara’s “spoils” from the recent conflict and the possible Russian unilateral/regional diplomacy to resolve the conflict can be two-fold: a claim of military and diplomatic victory by Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and more importantly, the strengthening of Turkey’s “mentorship” over Azerbaijan.

Despite the UN Security Council calls on September 29 for containing the conflict and continuing its mediation within the OSCE framework, it has become obvious that the Minsk Process is no longer a viable option for the actors involved in the conflict – especially Azerbaijan.

With no end in sight to the military operations between Armenia and Azerbaijan, the possible shift of this conflict from a multilateral framework (OSCE Minsk Group) to a regional one (Russian-Turkish-Iranian) is indicative that both Russia and Turkey do not consider the West a relevant player in their back yard. Whether by choice or by accidental convergence, the two regional powers are ready to define and implement their own security strategies in the South Caucasus bilaterally, with only token, half-hearted objections from the West. 

PALESTINA

It is abundantly clear that Palestinian Authority President, Mahmoud Abbas, has underestimated the seriousness of the challenges facing Palestine and the Palestinians.

The rushed agreement between his party, Fatah and Hamas in Istanbul on September 24, and the Palestinian leader’s speech at the 75th session of the UN General Assembly the following day, indicate that the Palestinian leadership insists on operating within the stifling confines of the Oslo accords and the dead-end road of the ‘peace process’.

Abbas has spent most of his political career mastering an intricate balancing act, one that would allow him to remain the favored leader of Palestinians – to the West – while legitimizing his rule among ordinary Palestinians through a system of political patronage – itself subsidized by US-led international funders.

The outcome worked well for Abbas and a clique of Palestinians who became rich because of their ties to Abbas’ Authority, but bode terribly for the Palestinian people.

For a quarter of a century, particularly since the establishment of the PA in 1994, the Palestinian cause has subsisted in its darkest and most demoralizing periods, one that is defined by extreme Israeli violence, rapid expansion of the illegal Jewish settlements, unhindered corruption among Palestine’s political elite and unprecedented disunity among Palestinians everywhere.

The PA’s scheme would have continued longer, were it not for US President Donald Trump’s decision to disengage from his predecessors’ previous strategies in the Middle East – foremost among them, the fruitless ‘peace process’.

However, it was not the Trump administration that opted for an American retreat from the Middle East, in general, and Palestine, in particular. Trump merely accelerated what was becoming the new American foreign policy doctrine. During the two terms of former President Barack Obama, Palestine featured fleetingly in US calculations: in the early months, and again, when the ‘lame duck’ administration refrained, in December 2016, from vetoing UN Security Council Resolution 2334, which condemned Israel’s illegal Jewish settlements.

For many years, the ‘peace process’ existed nominally. On the ground, the Oslo accords were transformed to that of technical security and financial arrangements between the PA’s upper echelon and the Israeli government.

When, in February 2019, Washington decided to cease its financial assistance to the Palestinian leadership, Abbas and the PA understood this decision as a political declaration that Washington and Tel Aviv no longer saw their ‘moderate’ Palestinian allies as assets.

Bewildered by the abrupt American policy shift, Abbas sought alternatives. Instead of offering an unconditional apology to the Palestinian people for his leadership’s corruption, his personal failures, the factionalism and the squandered opportunities to unify Palestinians around a new national liberation strategy – one fueled by popular resistance and global solidarity – Abbas continued with the same old discourse, unhindered.

At his UN speech on Friday, Abbas insisted on referencing the peace process calling, again, for an international peace conference, among other fantasies. Abbas’ references are both outdated and unfeasible, for Washington is now turning to a new phase, one that is predicated on the complete disregard of international law and the de facto acceptance of Israel’s colonialism and occupation.

Aside from appealing to Western sensibilities, another crucial element in the PA’s new balancing act is to reinvent itself among ordinary Palestinians who, for decades, have felt abandoned and leaderless.

In his UN speech, Abbas labored to rebrand himself to these two different target audiences. “We will continue creating life and hope under the flag of national unity and democracy,” he said, adding “We will remain faithful to peace, justice, human and national dignity under all circumstances.”

In fact, Abbas has neither committed to democracy nor to Palestinian unity. He is currently unelected as his presidential mandate expired in 2009, and never in his 15-year rule did he earnestly opt for inclusion or unity among his people.

The latest episode of the ‘unity’ saga took place in Istanbul on September 24. Despite the triumphant speeches afterwards, this too, seemed like a mere self-serving exercise.

The expeditious declaration that rivals Fatah and Hamas are finally ready for democratic elections, is a cunning but, ultimately, futile initiative. The agreement will buy Abbas time to promote himself as a political moderate, although free and democratic elections can never be held under occupation.

It is doubtful that any kind of elections, free or otherwise, is possible. Following the agreement, Fatah representative at the talks, Azzam al-Ahmad, declared that “without Jerusalem, there will be no elections.” In other words, “there will be no elections.”

During Palestine’s first elections in 1996, Israel barred Jerusalemites from participating, merely agreeing to very limited votes in areas located on the outskirts of the city, and only through the post office. It is unthinkable that Israel will allow for a mass Palestinian vote in Jerusalem now that Washington has fully recognized the city as Israel’s capital.

What about Palestinians living in Areas B and C, which are, more or less, under total Israeli military control? Will they be included in the vote? What about Palestinians trapped behind the Israeli apartheid wall in the West Bank? In the ‘firing zones’? Or those isolated in small pockets in the Jordan Valley, etc.?

Democratic elections are ideal under circumstances where a nation has true sovereignty, legal and political jurisdiction, and territorial control. The PA has none of this.

Moreover, insisting on elections, which, even if possible, will merely lead to the overhaul of the Palestinian Authority, is equivalent to sustaining the many illusions of Oslo and its adjoining ‘peace process’.

While Oslo failed Palestinians entirely, it was useful for Israel as it brought to an unceremonious end the entire Palestinian national liberation project, in favor of a ‘state-building’ program that had no tangible basis in reality. If serious in its intentions, the Palestinian leadership must demolish, not sustain the status quo.

Even successful elections within the Oslo framework would further divert Palestinian energies from their liberation project in favor of another political dead end, that will only protect the ‘gains’ of Palestine’s ruling elites, while selling more false hope that the coveted peace is still at hand to ordinary Palestinians. 

INTERACTIVE: Palestinian Remix

Addameer

OCHA

Palestinian Center for Human Rights

B'Tselem 

International Solidarity Movement – Nonviolence. Justice. Freedom

Defense for Children 
Breaking the Silence

BRASIL

Carlos Latuff Twitter

The Intercept Brasil

AOS FATOS:As declarações de Bolsonaro, checadas