Two of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ top advisers on negotiations with Israel insisted in an editorial that Palestinians abandon their campaign for an independent state and instead strive for a “soft” sovereignty that would bring Jordan and Egypt assumes responsibility for border security matters.
In the latest issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, Hussein Agha and Ahmad Samih Khalidi write that the normalization agreements between Arab states and Israel require Palestinians to reconsider their approach to peace and state capture.
“The prospect of securing ‘hard’ sovereignty, based on the nineteenth-century conceptions of the nation-state, with full and complete control over land, borders and resources, is extraordinary,” they wrote.
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Palestinians may have to choose between the ‘self-defeating chimera of hard sovereignty’ or ‘the use of softer versions’, they said.
They argue that the pan-Arab confrontation with Israel is coming to an end with the agreements recently signed between some countries and the Jewish state. Meanwhile, the Palestinians, they warned, are being left behind.
“It is clear that the Palestinians need a new approach – one based on a reconsidered strategic vision and recalibrated pursuit,” Agha and Khalidi wrote. “It must redefine the Palestinian notion of sovereignty, review the Palestinian view of security and not remove responsibility or make threats that are not credible.”
“Under soft sovereignty, border security arrangements will have to be trilateral in the West Bank (Jordan, Israel and Palestine) and Gaza (Egypt, Israel and Palestine),” they suggested.
Due to its history and geographical location, Jordan is inextricably linked to the West Bank, and Egypt is similarly linked to the Gaza Strip, they wrote.
“New Egyptian and Jordanian roles could be effective additions at a time when the Palestinians on their own have been unable to secure their country from further Israeli invasion,” they said, adding that both countries would be directly involved in any future peace talks. between Israel and the Palestinians.
View on the border between Israel and Jordan, in the Jordan Valley, on the West Bank on 17 June 2020. (Yaniv Nadav / Flash90)
Both, who live in London, Agha and Khalidi, have long been involved in negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.
In their opinion on foreign affairs, they cite Israel’s recent normalization agreements with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco and write that Saudi Arabia has also taken ‘unprecedented steps in this direction’.
Oman may also be normal, while other Arab governments ‘maintain important, though discreet ties with Israel’.
“Further moves towards normalization appear to be only a matter of time,” they predicted, accusing the Arab governments of taking the step out of self-interest.
Normalization undermined what had previously been a common Arab position, as set out in the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, based on peace, that ties with Israel would only be established after they had completely retreated to the pre-1967 corpses. said that Israel now has little incentive for peace with the Palestinians.
‘If there is an effective Arab strategic depth – that is, the willingness of Arab states to lend their support to the Palestinian cause – the Palestinians must now think about how to reorient their struggle, how to address what they brought to this point, and how to change it, ”they said.
They noted that initial Palestinian anger over normalization had faded and that the Palestinians had weakened their ability to object by insisting on a national right to ‘independence of will’. Such a policy enables other nations to ‘claim the right to respond to their own sovereign will and forge their own way’.
“In short, Palestinian diplomacy has failed miserably,” they wrote. “It takes extraordinary talent to turn an almost complete consensus between Arabs and Muslims on the future of Palestine and Jerusalem into just another matter on a packed Arab agenda.”
But despite their skepticism about the normalization between Israel and Arab countries, the two speculated that future deals might offer the Palestinians, among other things, to condition Saudi relations with Israel ‘to end Israel with the de facto annexation of the West Bank by its settlement expansions. ‘
This view differs from the view presented in a daily newspaper in the Palestinian Al-Quds on Monday by a former Saudi adviser who stressed that the kingdom would only normalize ties with Israel after the establishment of a fully independent Palestinian state. .
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas speaks at a meeting of the Palestinian leadership in the West Bank city of Ramallah on September 3, 2020. (Flash90)
Agha and Khalidi also attacked the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the official representative of the Palestinian people, for “losing all credibility as a decision-making or representative body”, as outdated, because it no longer reflects the politics of Palestinian society, and as “retaining a zombie form” compared to the Palestinian Authority, which is the real political center.
Yet they also reserved criticism for the PA, which ‘hardly offered a seductive model of good governance, a better life or greater freedom’.
However, they praised Abbas because it greatly diminished the idea of ’armed struggle’ among wider Palestinian society.
Peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians have been frozen since 2014.
