Palestinian Bid for Statehood | Camelia Sulieman
03/10/2011 14:34:00
The UN Security Council have begun closed-door negotiations on the Palestinian bid for UN membership with major powers increasing pressure for direct Palestinian-Israeli talks – US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Najib Mikati, prime minister of Lebanon, which currently holds the rotating chair of the Security Council, have already backed the Palestinian bid. Camelia Sulieman, author of Language and Identity in the Israeli-Palestine Conflict (published this month), assesses the issues surrounding the revivification of a partition plan.
The revivification of a partition plan through the UN will set the course for a solution which may lead to further dispossession and further injustice. Any state which bases itself on ethnicity or religion compromises its democracy and its civil rights. There will be always groups of people who fall outside the ethnic or religious boundaries designated by the state. What do you do about them? We have many examples in modern history of what partition means and what its consequences are.
The first spark of a fully formalized idea of a partition plan of historic Palestine emerged with the UN General Assembly Resolution 181 on 29 November 1947. The UN Resolution came as a result of Britain turning the question of Palestine to the UN after several outbursts of violence between the Arab and Jewish communities in Palestine. At that point in history, Britain, exhausted after two world wars, was in the process of withdrawing from most of its colonies. Partition seemed to be an easy and fashionable solution to national and religious struggles, for example, during this time, India gained independence, and was divided into two counties. One needs to be reminded of the human cost associated with the partition of India. In that context, the UN Resolution 181 recommended the partition of Palestine to two countries: Jewish comprising 55 per cent of the land, and Arab comprising the rest. The resolution was rejected by the dissipated Arab leadership and a process of ethnic cleansing of the Arab population started. On 15 May 1948, the state of Israel was established on 78 per cent of what comprised historic Palestine. Most of the Palestinian Arab population became refugees in the neighboring countries, and the Palestinian community ceased to exist as a community living in one contiguous land. The idea of partition was muted in the aftermath of the establishment of the state of Israel. After the 1967 war, with Israel seizing 100 per cent of the land, the idea of partition was revived again, first at the UN in 1974, when Yasser Arafat, the head of the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization) called for the establishment of two states in historic Palestine. As a result, the UN granted Palestine an observer's position at the UN, and recognized the PLO as the sole representative of the Palestinian people. In 1988, Arafat, in exile in Tunis, announced the establishment of the state of Palestine in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. This announcement facilitated the initiation of direct talks between Israeli and Palestinian officials during the 1990s with the help of foreign officials. The talks stalled due to several factors, most important of which, is the Israeli governments' positions on building settlements in the West Bank. On 23 September 2011, Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, submitted a bid to the UN calling for the recognition of independent Palestine in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Abbas's move must be understood in the context of a Palestinian exhaustion from the American sponsored direct talks with the Israelis, known as the peace process.
Historically speaking, three venues characterize the Palestinian desire for statehood and a just solution. The first two are at the government and high official levels, and the last venue is at the level of unofficial politics: international recognition (exemplified by the UN bid), and direct talks sponsored by the US (characterizing the process toward statehood in the past two decades). The third venue of informal politics toward a just solution is characterized by organized peace activism. This latter level of activism rarely captures the news, but it is a level which seeks a humanistic solution through connecting as human beings to the grievances of the other group. It is this level which my book highlights.
Finally, the UN bid must be understood in the context of what else is going on in the Middle East. Iraq has just witnessed a bitter 'sectarian' cleansing. The nature of statehood and whom it should and should not include as full citizens is hotly debated everywhere in the Middle East from Egypt, to Tunis, to Bahrain to Jordan. Taking into consideration the centrality of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Middle East politics, it is time the Palestinians and Israelis set an example of a just and humanistic solution which can inspire and mobilize other people in the Middle East toward better democracies and better civil rights. ■
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