Exactly 65 years after the United Nations passed the Partition Plan, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas will ask the General Assembly to grant Palestine the status of a non-member state. Nineteen years after the signing of the Oslo Accords, 10 years after U.S. President George W. Bush announced the road map, seven years after the final peace agreement was to have been signed with the Palestinians, the PA is taking one more, small step toward the theoretical realization of its virtual status.
It will not be a full member of the United Nations. It is unlikely that it will be able to avail itself of The Hague's International Court of Justice or International Criminal Court. While it can join the UN Human Rights Convention, its boundaries are not recognized, its capital is disputed and, at most, it can wear on its lapel the little flag that attests to its membership in the club of nations. It will still be a country under occupation which does not have enough money to survive; which needs permits from Israel to breathe; which will not be permitted to have an army; which will not have a national airport or seaport; which exists among a patchwork of Jewish settlements. It will be a country that is run by two governments, one in the West Bank and the other in Gaza, with a capital city on paper only.
It is a Palestinian national spare parts storeroom that Israel sees as an existential threat. It will crush the stamina and deterrence of the country that just last week declared a resounding victory in Gaza. What kind of threat is it when the Palestinian state cannot even dislodge one settler, place guards on its borders, or restore one dunam of "state lands"? For the moment it seems that the Palestinian state is even more terrifying than Iran - so much so that even the United States, which contributed less to the entire peace process than it invested in attaining a cease-fire in Gaza, urgently warned Israel not to dare topple the PA.
Non-member status does not threaten Israel; it angers it. Israel prefers to work opposite an organization, an authority, an entity or a cell. It likes to have an "address" on which to hang responsibility, as long as that address is not a state. Because that would mean working opposite a state that would have equal status, one that would have to be declared an enemy state if one wanted to attack it militarily, kill its citizens - in a targeted manner, of course - or even just use its territory for military training. An organization or an authority, in contrast, may be wiped out, rooted out or its "infrastructure destroyed."
Upon "territories" it is possible, although prohibited, to settle the citizens of the occupying power. A Palestinian state, however, could theoretically determine who has a right to live in it. Theoretically, because Palestine cannot evict its foreign residents. Such a Palestine angers Israel, which believes that the Olso Accords have granted it an eternal exemption from actually applying them, and now understands that the threat of annulling these accords is like shooting itself in both feet. It would mean that Israel would have to go back to running the Palestinians' welfare, medical, educational and sewerage systems. And in any case, what is left of the Oslo Accords to annul, after they have been ground to bits and now exist in name only? Israel, which managed to turn those agreements into a unilateral diktat, is furious that the PA has dared to take a unilateral step. The chutzpah, not the threat, is intolerable.
But even on the assumption that Israel does not intend to conduct real negotiations to end the conflict with the Palestinians, especially after the extremist nature of the next government has become clear, the establishment of a Palestinian state is an advantage. After Israel gets over its anger, it will realize that an official Palestinian state, even one that Hamas is helping to run, can be a more responsible partner for conducting daily life than two authorities fighting each other. Peace may not emerge from it, but the quality of life for 5.5 million Palestinians is also worth something. They deserve a state.
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