The Palestinian street has spoken

Perhaps the most serious evidence that the reconciliation agreement signed last week in Cairo by Fatah and Hamas, the two main Palestinian organisations, upsets the global status quo is the chorus of denunciation by Israeli leaders.

The Arab spring – from Tunisia to Egypt – has inspired and driven on young Palestinians themselves and the speed of events has surprised everyone. And since Fatah and Hamas signed the deal, which was endorsed by 11 smaller Palestinian groups and brokered by Egypt’s new government, Israeli leaders from Prime Minister Netanyahu, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman and opposition leader Tzipi Livni have all expressed their hostility.

The outbursts from Israel politicians and intelligence agencies, who have worked might and main to divide and rule, are backed up by the withholding of $89 million worth of tax revenues which the Palestine Authority needs to pay 170,000 civil servants and their dependents. This is an illegal act to undermine unity and economically starve the Palestinians, which even the ever-so-tame United Nations general secretary Ban ki-Moon has criticised.

Israeli leaders are terrified that the reconciliation deal that follows years of bitter conflict between Fatah and Hamas – one controlling the West Bank and Hamas the Gaza Strip – will gather momentum for a sense of real Palestinian unity and strength.

Their anger is in sharp contrast to the jubilant feeling in Palestinian refugee camps in the occupied territories and in places like the Ain al-Hilweh camp, the largest in Lebanon, where Fatah and Hamas flags fluttered together and people celebrated over the weekend.

The cessation of hostilities between Fatah and Hamas goes some way towards realising – at least on paper - the demands raised by thousands of Palestinian youth in the March 15 Movement. Two months ago, Palestinian youth under occupation in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank - who make up over 65% of the population there –as well as those living as second class citizens in Israel, took to the streets with 20 of them going on hunger strike. Via Facebook and other means, they issued a call to the governments of the West Bank and Gaza, demanding:

• the release of all political prisoners in the prisons of the Palestine Authority and Hamas
• an end to attacks by one organisation on the other
• the resignation of the governments of Haniyeh and Fayyad to re-build a government of national unity agreed by all Palestinian factions representing the Palestinian people
• the restructuring of the Palestine Liberation Organisation to contain all Palestinian factions and get back to its initial aim: Palestine’s freedom from illegal occupation
• the end of all forms of security co-ordination with Israeli occupation forces.

This new generation seeks national unity independently of political factions. Students and school children on the protest, said they were inspired by movements in other parts of the Arab world to initiate a political movement that would go on until unity was reached.

But as night fell, armed groups in civilian clothes were backed up by the Hamas authorities who then sent in the police. The peaceful youth and many women, journalists and photographers were beaten with sticks and clubs, facts backed up by the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights.

Nevertheless, their discredited leaders have been forced to respond to their “street”. And the Palestinian street, is, as rights campaigner Noura Erakat Erakat has noted, a global one. Perhaps the most significant factor, however, is the ongoing Egyptian revolution. The overthrown Mubarak dictatorship worked with the Israeli regime to turn Gaza into the world’s biggest prison camp. Now Egypt is preparing to open the Rafah border crossing into Gaza, which the Israelis have said they won’t allow.

Many Palestinians interviewed on the streets of Gaza after the deal was signed, are keenly aware that the reconciliation has been made out of a position of weakness by both Hamas and Fatah. Neither the pursuance of a two-state “solution” by Fatah, nor the militant Islam demonization of all Jews by Hamas, has paid dividends. A secular, one-state approach is required. For that to succeed, new leaders will have to come forward.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

One solution, one state

The leaked “Palestine Papers” establish beyond any doubt that the Zionist rulers of Israel are not interested in any sort of an agreement, however dramatic the concessions Palestinian negotiators are prepared to make.

Tragically in some ways, the papers also reveal the degeneration of the Palestine Authority (PA) under Mahmoud Abbas. The more intransigent the Israelis, the more PA officials grovelled while hiding the truth about what they were doing from the Palestinian people.

All to no avail. The lingering death of the "peace process" is self-evident.

Al Jazeera TV published the leaked files, which contain more than 1,600 internal documents related to the last decade of peace negotiations. They include memos, e-mails, maps, minutes from private meetings, accounts of high level exchanges, strategy papers and even power point presentations.

Among Al Jazeera's significant revelations are major offers by the PA to Israel in the context of settlements in East Jerusalem, including major portions of the Old City that adjoin the Dome of the Rock, the second holiest site in Islam.

PA leaders also proposed "unprecedented" land swaps with the Israeli government, Al Jazeera revealed. In 2008, then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert met with PA President Mahmoud Abbas after the PA offered to allow the Israeli state to annex most of the East Jerusalem settlements without demanding concessions in return.

Olmert reportedly showed Abbas a map of the newly-proposed swaps, which outlined Israel's plan to annex more than 10 percent of the West Bank. "Abbas was not allowed to keep a copy of the map, and so the 73-year-old Palestinian president had to sketch a copy by hand on a napkin," the network added.

Desperate for a deal, Palestinian negotiators led by Saeb Erekat privately agreed that only 10, 000 refugees and their families, out of a total refugee population exceeding 5 million, could return to Israel as part of a settlement.

Condoleezza Rice, secretary of state under George Bush, suggested in 2008 Palestinian refugees could be resettled in South America. "Maybe we will be able to find countries that can contribute in kind," she said. "Chile, Argentina, etc."

PLO leaders also accepted Israel's demand to define itself as an explicitly Jewish state, in sharp contrast to their public position. Erekat privately told Israeli negotiators: "If you want to call your state the Jewish state of Israel you can call it what you want." Israel's 1.3 million Palestinian citizens are particularly opposed to the notion of a “Jewish state” because it undermines their own rights which are constantly being eroded in any case.

The Electronic Intifada’s co-founder and executive director, Ali Abunimah, was given special access to the documents and helped analyse them for Al Jazeera. He said:

What we can discern immediately from these documents is that the US-brokered negotiations, especially under the Obama administration, can never lead to the restoration of Palestinian rights and that the two-state solution is basically dead. In the long term, we will have to ask how the peace process charade, revealed in these papers, was allowed to continue for so long as Israel continued its relentless colonisation of Palestinian land and the Palestinian Authority that was supposed to be a step on the road to freedom become a sophisticated tool of continued Israeli occupation.

He is right. But the responsibility for the almost desperate nature of the concessions lies not just with the PA leaders but with also with other Arab regimes, especially Egypt’s who help Israel to enforce a blockade of Gaza, for example. From Damascus to Amman, discredited leaders have watched the Palestinian people’s suffering from a safe distance. Washington, of course, has consistently backed the Israelis and the Zionist view that they have a God-given right to occupy Palestinan land.

A way forward may now be opening up as the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia finds its echo in Cairo today and other Arab cities tomorrow. The sweeping out of the old dictatorships can open the way to a new leadership and the building of a secular, single state which Jews and Palestinians can co-habit as they did in earlier times.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor