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Preening Like a State
by Darryl Li | published April 3, 2014 - 3:21pm
On Tuesday, Mahmoud ‘Abbas surprised peace processers by making use of Palestine’s recently upgraded status as a UN-recognized “state” to sign 15 international agreements,
mostly concerning human rights, humanitarian law and diplomatic
protocol. The move was announced at a hastily convened meeting of the
PLO executive committee, but appears to have been carefully crafted to
support extending the US-sponsored negotiations that have dragged on
haplessly over the past nine months. Its connection to any strategy of
national liberation is far less clear, lending support to the critique of the international law approach to the question of Palestine advanced by Mezna Qato and Kareem Rabie in Jacobin.
The immediate calculations are relatively straightforward: Israel reneged yet again on the promised release of prisoners (Yousef Munayyer artfully retraces this
chapter in the farcical history of the “peace process”). This
backsliding presented a major crisis to a Palestinian leadership
desperately invested in maintaining the appearance of diplomatic
progress. Tuesday’s accessions allow the Palestinian leadership to show a little backbone by
defying US-Israeli diktats against “internationalizing” the question of
Palestine. At the same time, the Palestinian leadership demonstrates to
the world its eminent reasonableness: Israel demands that Washington
release the convicted spy Jonathan Pollard while the Palestinians are
blamed for voluntarily shouldering obligations to respect human rights
and the laws of war.
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