Indirect Peace Talks should be renounced

10 May 2010
Even when the PLO was in dire straits in 1991 due to the financial and political embargo the Gulf states imposed on it for its stance on the first Iraq war, it did not rush into peace talks. The PLO only attended the Madrid conference after agreement to do so had been sought at meetings of the Palestine National Council, the Central Committee, and the Executive Committee. The agreement to go to the Madrid conference was contingent on five pre-conditions, the most significant of which was recognizing the PLO and abiding by the Palestinian constants.

Now the Palestinian negotiators are attending talks without a meeting of the Palestine National Council or the Central Committee. There was a meeting of the Executive Committee, but its term has expired, it represents at most just half of the Palestinian people, and the meeting in question did not even have a legal quorum.

Indirect negotiations, which began yesterday, according to an announcement by Dr Saeb Erekat [Sa'ib Urayqat], head of the PNA negotiations department, will take place according to Israeli conditions and for goals that have nothing to do with the Palestinian people and their aspirations to return home and regain all their usurped rights.

The "written" approval to participate in the negotiations is unlawful and all those participating in them, on all levels, do not enjoy any legitimate authorization by the people at home and in the diaspora. Therefore, any agreements reached in these negotiations would not be binding on the Palestinian people. The claim that the PNA would submit the agreements to the people in a public referendum is rejected, because it is a falsification of the people's will.

The most prominent factions in the PLO, which have always provided the cover for the PNA to incorrectly claim Palestinian representation, boycotted the Executive Committee's recent meeting and formally object to the negotiations. We are referring here in particular to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine [PFLP] that has the most significant weight in the committee. It has apparently realized that the situation had become intolerable and has taken the side of the national constants. The PFLP has retreated from its previous position, which have caused it to lose much of its credibility among the ordinary Palestinian people. This move is to its credit and deserves praise.

Most of the secretaries of the factions that "approved" the decision to participate in the negotiations for well-known reasons have no real representation among the Palestinian people at home or in the diaspora. They have become mere furniture pieces in a dilapidated entity called the PLO Executive Committee. They are small factions that have not won a single seat in the last Palestinian Legislative Council elections. Their membership mostly consists of their secretaries general, their wives, children, and office guards.

Regrettably, the Palestinian decision is made by few individuals with no national authority to debate them or hold them to account. We must not keep silent about this serious matter to prevent involving the Palestinian people in agreements that would disavow the legitimate Palestinian rights, would be difficult to disengage from, and would bind future generations.

We are facing a big deception enveloped by the saying that participation in the indirect negotiations was based on an Arab decision made by the so-called Arab peace initiative follow-up committee at its recent meeting at the Arab League headquarters in Cairo.

The committee's decision was not Arab. It was a decision dictated by the United States to a group of "moderate states" that held an immediate meeting and decided to provide an umbrella for those who wanted to participate in the negotiations. Many Arab states were not consulted, and most of them do not support this move.

The justification preachers in the PNA said that by agreeing to return to indirect negotiations, they wanted to expose Israel before the international community and reveal its faults and settlement policies that are hampering the peace process.

Praise the Lord! We have heard these words more than one million times over the past years, as if the Israeli hostile and settlement policies have not been exposed and in a provocative way and as if Israel and its officials have not been boasting about and priding themselves with this nakedness.

This is bankruptcy in its ugliest forms. What is more serious is that these bankrupt officials are overbearing, lying, and flattering. They are dealing with the Palestinian people as a herd. They are feeding them with sweet promises and exploiting their poverty, siege, and suffering in order to involve them in plans they know very well that the people hate and oppose.

Israel has not stopped building and expanding settlements, and it would not abandon the process to Judaize Jerusalem and the other occupied Arab territories. Only yesterday, on the first day of the indirect negotiations, there was a report about the construction of new housing units in the Ra's al-Amud neighbourhood in occupied Jerusalem. This was a clear challenge and deliberate humiliation to the Palestinian negotiators taking part in them. Those who made this announcement were not the PNA representatives but the Israeli Peace Now Movement. We will not be surprised if they denied this report.

The US Administration, like all previous administrations, knows which party is obstructing the peace process. It does not need to broker direct or indirect negotiations to convince itself about it. The United States was the sole sponsor of all the rounds of direct negotiations, which began 17 years ago since the signing of the Oslo Agreement. But there are officials who have persisted in making justifications, and justifications have become a basic part of their policies. The issue is one of gaining time, no more and no less, until the necessary preparations, military or diplomatic (economic sanctions), are completed to deal with the Iranian nuclear programme, the exaggerated arming of the Islamic resistance in southern Lebanon led by Hezbollah, and Syria's support of the resistance with missiles and military equipment.

We are pained seeing a Palestinian side used in an ugly way to serve this dangerous plan, while aware of most of its details, if not all, and consciously trying to defend it.

We have opposed Palestinian independent decision-making based on our belief in the Arab and Islamic nature of the Palestinian issue. We opposed it when the Arab governments were developing their security and military policies for the liberation of Palestine from the Sea to the River, embraced the three Khartoum no's, and were using all their capabilities for waging the battles of honour and dignity. Now, however, after most Arab governments had become tools in the service of American and Israeli plans, we support the need to uphold Palestinian independent decision-making. We reject the hijacking of this decision-making by an impure Arab committee, called the follow-up committee of a peace process that has decayed and rotted - a committee whose current real chair is US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who took over the controls from her unsuitable predecessor, the other lady, Condoleezza Rice.

Indirect negotiations are another attempt to foil a crystallizing Palestinian tendency towards resistance in all its forms, particularly after the people have become convinced that the two-state solution is no longer possible and the peace process has failed. Therefore, the Palestinian people and those participating in the peace process must renounce it before it is too late. We are the first to renounce it.

The Palestinian people are not a testing ground and must never be so because they are proud and generous people. Their honourable and noble history testifies to their sacrifices, heroisms, and steadfastness in the face of the ugliest forms of siege and aggression. Their problem is that some of their sons are ignoring these facts and tirelessly going after a mirage of solutions and settlements.