Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas met with US Secretary Anthony
Blinken in Ramallah on Sunday 27 March [photo credit: @SecBlinken]
The picture of Blinken shaking hands with Abbas provoked the fury
of Sheren Falah Saab, the Haaretz journalist and writer on Arab
cultural affairs. “Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is nothing more
than a decoration with which the left likes to be photographed
periodically for public relations and fundraising purposes,” she wrote
in a piece that underlined the extent to which the ageing Abbas is
disconnected from the lives of ordinary Palestinians struggling to
survive Israel’s onerous occupation and its efforts to remove
Palestinians from East Jerusalem. (For more on East Jerusalem evictions
listen to our 17 March podcast with Aviv Tatarsky.)
Her anger too was directed at the Arab leaders who have walked away
from the Palestinian cause. The Negev summit she wrote “doesn’t
interest the younger generation of Palestinians, young men and women who
have lost hope in their leaders and in both Western and Arab politics,
which time after time paper over the real problems.”
Of far more concern than Palestine for the ministers meeting in the
Negev will be regional security and most specifically the deal which may
or may not
come to fruition that sees a return of the US to the JCPOA from which
Donald Trump departed in 2018. One worry is the idea that the US would delist the IRGC
as a terror organisation. That is an issue not only for Israel but for
the Emiratis and the Bahrainis who view Iran as an existential threat
and the IRGC as the tip of the spear for that threat.
Ever since the Abraham Accords
dramatically shifted a needle that had long been frozen, at least in
the public domain (much had gone on for a long time behind the scenes,)
the tide has been running stronger and stronger against Palestinian
aspirations for a viable, independent state. With Arab states no longer
giving even nominal support to the two-state model and young
Palestinians in particular utterly fed up with the impotent and corrupt
leadership of the PA now may be as good a time as any to officially take
Abdullah’s peace initiative off life support, declare it dead and bury
it.
But those same states and their leaders, as well as the Israelis
would be advised not to dance on the grave. And Sheren Falah Saab says
better than anyone why that is so:
Even though Israelis and the Arab Gulf state leaders have an
inexhaustible desire to continue downplaying the Palestinian issue as if
it didn’t exist, there’s a reality here that can’t be forgotten, one
that has been crying out for more than 70 years. The Israeli occupation
is eating away at the lives and souls of the younger generation of
Palestinians, and they refuse to be silent.
(For more on a way forward for Palestine and Israel Jonathan Kuttab
provides an intriguing insight in this extract from our 22 October podcast:
If all the experts and the pundits realise that a Palestinian
state is not going to happen, then we need some new thinking out of the
box, we need to go back to the drawing boards; this grand compromise of
two states can no longer be effective…. It's beyond confederation. It's
an attempt to basically radically alter the concept of Palestinian
nationalism and the concept of Zionism, to somehow incorporate and
include the other rather than to exclude it, delegitimise it, demonise
it, disenfranchise it, or even physically eliminate it. That can no
longer happen. So can the two live together? Is it possible to think of a
hybrid solution that is fully Jewish and Arab at the same time? (One)
that addresses the needs, the fears, and the history of both sides, and
gives them basically everything they want except for exclusivity, except
for the denial of the other.)