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If Kosovo, why not Palestine?
It is time for the Ramallah-based Palestinian leadership to
challenge the international community on Palestinian
independence
By John Whitbeck
22/02/08 "Al-Ahram
Weekly" -- - -As
expected, Kosovo has issued its unilateral declaration of
independence, the United States and most European Union
countries, with whom this declaration was coordinated, rushing
to extend diplomatic recognition to this "new country". This
course of action should strike anyone with an attachment to
either international law or common sense as breathtakingly
reckless.
The potentially destabilising consequences of this precedent
(which the US and the EU insist, bizarrely, should not be viewed
as a precedent) have been much discussed with reference to other
internationally recognised sovereign states with strong
separatist movements practising precarious but effective
self-rule, such as Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Transniestria,
Ngorno-Karabakh, Bosnia's Republika Srpska, the Turkish Republic
of Northern Cyprus and Iraqi Kurdistan, as well as to
discontented minorities elsewhere. One potentially constructive
consequence has not yet been discussed.
American and EU impatience to sever a portion of a UN member
state (universally recognised, even by them, to constitute a
portion of that state's sovereign territory), ostensibly because
90 per cent of those living in that portion support separation,
contrasts starkly with the unlimited patience of the US and the
EU when it comes to ending the 40-year-long belligerent Israeli
occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (no portion of
which any country recognises as Israel's sovereign territory and
as to which Israel has only asserted sovereignty over a tiny
portion, occupied East Jerusalem). Virtually every legal
resident of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip seeks freedom, and
has for over 40 years. For doing so, they are punished,
sanctioned, besieged, humiliated and, day after endless day,
killed by those who claim to stand on the moral high ground.
In American and EU eyes, a Kosovar declaration of independence
from Serbian sovereignty should be recognised, even if Serbia
does not agree. However, their attitude was radically different
when Palestine declared independence from Israeli occupation on
15 November 1988. Then the US and EU countries (which, in their
own eyes, constitute the "international community", to the
exclusion of most of mankind) were conspicuously absent as over
100 countries recognised the new State of Palestine, and their
non-recognition made this declaration of independence
"symbolic", unfortunately for most Palestinians as well.
For the US and the EU, Palestinian independence, to be
recognised and effective, must be directly negotiated on a
wildly unequal bilateral basis between the occupying power and
the occupied people with emphasis laid on attaining the final
agreement of the occupying power. For the US and the EU, the
rights and desires of a long-suffering and brutalised occupied
people, as well as international law, are irrelevant. For the
same US and the EU, Kosovar Albanians, having enjoyed almost
nine years of UN administration and NATO protection, cannot be
expected to wait any longer for their freedom, while the
Palestinians, having endured over 40 years of Israeli
occupation, can wait forever.
With the "Annapolis process" going nowhere, as was clearly the
Israeli and American intention from the start, the Kosovo
precedent offers the Ramallah-based Palestinian leadership --
accepted as such by the "international community" because it is
perceived as serving Israeli and American interests -- a golden
opportunity to seize the initiative, reset the agenda and
restore its tarnished reputation in the eyes of its own people.
If this leadership truly believes, despite all evidence to the
contrary, that a decent "two-state solution" is still possible,
now is an ideal moment to reaffirm the legal existence (albeit
under continuing belligerent occupation) of the State of
Palestine, explicitly in the entire 22 per cent of Mandatory
Palestine that was not conquered and occupied by the state of
Israel until 1967, and to call on all those countries that did
not extend diplomatic recognition to the State of Palestine in
1988 -- and particularly the US and the EU states -- to do so
now.
The Kosovar Albanian leadership has promised protection for
Kosovo's Serb minority, which is now expected to flee in fear.
The Palestinian leadership could promise to accord a generous
period of time for Israeli colonists living illegally in the
State of Palestine, and Israeli occupation forces, to withdraw,
as well as to consider an economic union with Israel, open
borders and permanent resident status for those illegal
colonists willing to live in peace under Palestinian rule.
Of course, to prevent the US and the EU from treating such an
initiative as a joke, there would have to be a significant and
explicit consequence if they were to do so. The consequence
would be the end of the "two-state" illusion. The Palestinian
leadership would make clear that if the US and the EU, having
just recognised a second Albanian state on the sovereign
territory of a UN member state, will not now recognise a
Palestinian state on a tiny portion of the occupied Palestinian
homeland, it will dissolve the Palestinian Authority (which,
legally, should have ceased to exist in 1999, at the end of the
five-year "interim period" under the Oslo Accords) and the
Palestinian people will thereafter seek justice and freedom
through democracy, through the persistent, non-violent pursuit
of full rights of citizenship in a single state in all of
Israel/Palestine, free of any discrimination based on race and
religion and with equal rights for all who reside there.
Palestinian leaderships have tolerated Western hypocrisy and
racism and played the role of gullible fools for far too long.
It is time to kick over the table, constructively, and to shock
the international community into taking notice of the fact that
the Palestinian people simply will not tolerate unbearable
injustice and abuse any longer.
If not now, when?
The writer is an international lawyer and author of The World
According to Whitbeck
© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly
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