Statehood requires more than status update

This is supposedly what Palestinians have been literally dying for since their systematic ethnic cleansing and the start of the brutal Israeli occupation spanning over decades. But talking to ordinary Palestinians, I have yet to meet one who believes the way the Palestine Liberation Organisation is pushing forward the statehood bid at the United Nations will improve life on the ground.

“Look at us – our souk is dead, our streets and houses taken over by settlers, to move out I need a permit to show at the Israeli checkpoints, which I never get,” a baker in Hebron’s old city said. “What kind of state will this be if our lives will remain ruled by the Israeli occupation?”

His sentiment is echoed in varying tones across the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza – from cynical shrugs to downright anger at feeling totally excluded, especially in the blockaded enclave ruled by Hamas.

Despite this momentous event, the PLO has done a terrible job at informing, let alone consulting, the people it is meant to represent. For months, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas was lost in testing the grounds in diplomatic circles, checking how far he could go in calling America’s bluff while forgetting that this was about the millions of people living under occupation or as refugees abroad.

Some of the Palestinians’ most crucial questions, on the eve of the UN Security Council vote, remain without clear answers, with even conflicting legal opinions and no leadership that, at such a crucial moment, is so terribly needed. Reports from international agencies have multiplied in the past days, but nobody is talking to the Palestinians. What happens to the refugees’ right of return? How will the Palestinian state function under occupation? What will the state of Palestine look like? What about Gaza?

The idea of declaring statehood while effectively having two governments ruling the territory in question is a recipe for a failed state. Despite the signed reconciliation agreement between Fatah and Hamas last April, the two parties have kept behaving like two separate governments, ignoring the overwhelming calls from the street and civil society to form a unity government. That Abbas forged ahead with the statehood bid without involving Hamas leaves him with even less legitimacy than he already had. Hamas cannot oppose statehood, but it did criticise the unilateral move that seems to have taken nobody’s concerns into account. It is now waiting for the day after the vote to be proven right.

On the other hand, watching Israel’s frantic diplomatic race against the PLO’s initiative and its clear threats against this “unilateral” move has a tinge of historical justice. Israel can never be taken seriously when it tells Palestinians that they are breaching past agreements and commitments to bilateral negotiations for peace, when the world now knows – thanks to the leaked Palestine Papers earlier this year – the details of Israel’s intransigence even when Palestinian negotiators were willing to sell their souls for some peace agreement.

Israel is terrified of the legal prospects that would come out of all this, but it shouldn’t. Legally, every settler and soldier present in the new state of Palestine would be an act of war, subject to the International Criminal Court, but Israel has gotten away with so many human rights and international law violations for the last six decades that very few Palestinians see this as relevant to their cause. Only two days ago, the UK bended its laws of universal jurisdiction to make prosecution of war criminals even harder than it already was, giving Tzipi Livni and Ehud Olmert’s regime all the reassurances that they can travel freely to London despite showering indiscriminately the 1.6 million population of Gaza with white phosphorus.

One good thing that comes out of this is America’s embarrassing situation, just when it preaches democracy and liberty in the wake of the Arab Spring and after years of channelling funds to the PA for supposed state building. Never mind the politicisation of that aid that has entrenched the divisions between the West Bank and Gaza, the stubborn refusal to engage with Hamas when they were democratically elected, never mind the millions of dollars of “humanitarian aid” that went to train and equip Abbas’s forces to do the policing for Israel: By vetoing the vote for statehood at the UN, the US administration will be putting its priorities “on the record” and Abbas, for once, would be calling America’s bluff. What happens next is the big question.