Legal Limbo

The legal status of the Palestinians depends today on the graces of one man alone, Bill Clinton. For years the US managed to hide its views concerning an ideal solution to the Palestinian problem, but the dilemma of May fourth has forced the American president to show a few cards. To the great discomfiture of the Palestinians, their new friend and protector balks at recognizing their right to self-determination. He is not even willing to guarantee a new deadline for concluding negotiations. Instead, the US recommends giving Israel an extension until May 2000, but without any commitment to that date. The Palestinians will have to make do with the vague moral encouragement Clinton gave them during his visit to Gaza on December 14, 1998: "Israel must recognize the Palestinians' right to aspire to live in freedom today, tomorrow, and for ever." On May fourth the intermediate phase of the Oslo agreement will cease to be in effect, and the Palestinian Legislative Council, as well as its president, Yasser Arafat, will no longer have a legal mandate. Until the permanent arrangement is signed, the official legal status of the Territories will return to that of "Occupied". Israel's government is not likely to renegotiate the matter until after its own upcoming elections (on May 17, or if a runoff is required, June 1). Thus the Territories are about to enter legal limbo, a status which Arafat – for the sake of his own credibility in the eyes of his people – can ill afford.

Arafat has been hopping about the world (23 countries in a month!), not so much to gain recognition for a state (his self-declared aim), but rather to show his people that he is doing his best to wrest from Oslo all he can. Wary of what his rivals in Hamas will say on May fifth, he has just released from prison four of their number who planned the bombings of Israeli buses three years ago. The bitter truth is this: there is no proclamation of statehood because there is no state. If Arafat were to proclaim as such the little he holds today, he would merely cause embarrassment, while opening the door for Israel to abjure the Oslo agreement. The Palestinian Authority (PA), in its present confusion, could hardly govern so much as a village. Its structures are near collapse. This is especially true of the courts, as evinced in a one-day warning strike by West Bank lawyers at the end of April. They protested against "the crumbling of the legal system in the Palestinian areas." (Danny Rubinstein, Ha'aretz, April 25.) The local officials and security forces, they claimed, take the place of the law courts in "settling" disputes; when cases do reach the courts, they added, there is no power of enforcement to put decisions into effect. Attorney Fayez Abu Rahma, who became General Prosecutor in 1997 (after his predecessor was suspected of taking bribes), resigned several months ago, calling the PA "a regime that acts without law." (Ibid.) Since then the post has remained vacant.

The curtain had not yet come down on the May-fourth show when Arafat and his cronies pulled a new-old rabbit out of the hat. It is time, they said, to dust off the UN Partition Resolution of 1947 (No. 181). The latter laid the basis for the establishment of a Palestinian state in areas even larger than those Israel conquered twenty years later. There are several tragic ironies here, but one of them, surely, is this: when Arafat signed onto Oslo, he himself abandoned those UN decisions which served as the sole legal basis for realizing Palestinian rights. His new friends (Shimon Peres and Bill Clinton), he reckoned, would provide what the UN couldn't. In the early nineties, given the collapse of the Soviet Union, the leader of the Palestinian national movement announced, in effect, to his people: We can't swim forever against the tide. We've been defeated, it's time to face up to the laws of realpolitik.
But reality had not yet finished with Arafat. His "theory of defeat" was itself defeated. The past decade has shown that the US is not as omnipotent as it seemed to be in 1991. Nor has America changed its spots. With the disappearance of the Soviet Union, global imperialism has not become more generous or humanitarian. The imposition of sanctions and violence on Iraq, and lately the bombardment of Belgrade, show just how unable America is to tolerate opposition. On the other hand, when it comes to rewarding its minions, Washington has proved unable to deliver the goods. More and more peoples are being elbowed off to the margins, among them the already-long-marginalized Palestinians.
Despite the dismal failure that is Oslo, the right to self-determination, i.e. sovereignty over a viable state, still belongs to the Palestinian people, in its capacity as a national group that was conquered and deprived of this right. Yasser Arafat has disqualified himself as its guardian. There are democratic forces in the world, we believe, that recognize the need to present, over against US policy, a sane global alternative which does not exclude two-thirds of humanity. The Palestinian people can realize its right to self-determination only by uniting with these forces. It needs allies precisely from the developed, industrialized nations: people who reject the approach of warfare, subordination, and chronic unemployment that NATO is attempting to impose.