Will Abbas go to the ICC as a plaintiff or a defendant?

There is no doubt that President Mahmoud Abbas will go to the International Criminal Court in The Hague on behalf of the State of Palestine sooner or later, preferably sooner. He will represent Palestine as it is outlined in the Rome Statute of 1998 and ratified by the relevant Palestinian representative body. However, if he does not seize the opportunity to defend Palestinian rights at The Hague he may well find himself accused of war crimes in the same court. The facts of the matter have long been simple, clear-cut and documented.

Every member of every Palestinian faction is extremely frustrated by Abbas’s reluctance to sign the Rome Statute on behalf of the Palestinian people. This sense of frustration has become even more aggravated as thousands of women, children and elderly people fall victim to the Israeli occupation’s crimes. The latest massacre in Gaza has only worsened the situation and confirmed that Zionist forces have no plans to ease the suffering in the near future; more than ten thousand men, women and children have been injured by Israel’s war machine over the past four weeks, along with more than 2,100 killed.

These war crimes have reached a disgusting level, causing public uproar among not only Arab and Palestinian populations, but also around the world, from Britain to South Africa to Latin America; all are outraged by and have criticised Israel. The global reaction to Israel’s actions demonstrate a comprehensive international dissatisfaction; they also show that the world has pro-Palestinian sentiments which believe in the right to Palestinian freedom from the siege. It has been estimated that the international demonstrations mobilised in defence of the Palestinian people and their rights are the largest in history and represent a new balance in international public opinion on the Arab-Israeli issue.

If the international reaction to Israel’s latest aggression on Gaza is not enough to convince Mahmoud Abbas to go to the ICC and issue a formal complaint against the war criminals, he needs to look at the statements and appeals issued by more than 20 international legal institutions, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. In its statement issued on 8 May, Amnesty International urged Abbas to sign the Rome Statue. The ICC’s current attorney general, Ms Fatou Bensouda, has been quoted as saying: “The ball is now in Palestine’s court. They have only sent me one page in regards to their acceptance of the Rome treaty.”

If Abbas is satisfied with all of this, we must remind him that his legitimacy depends on his defence of the Palestinian people and that he must fight for their rights wholeheartedly and efficiently. When it comes to Abbas’s legitimacy one must also note that he was elected in 2006 by just 30 per cent of the Palestinian people. His official term of office ended four years later but he has yet to leave office. Moreover, 70 per cent of Palestinians live in the diaspora and most did not vote for Abbas in any way. If Abbas still has a shred of political legitimacy he must remember that he is required to defend the Palestinian people and that the blood of the two thousand martyrs who have died will forever be on his hands if he refuses to go to the ICC.

The Palestinian Authority president now has a long track record for which the Palestinian people, as well as various groups and organisations, must hold him accountable. He tried to delay the UN’s Goldstone Report, an action that ultimately means that he was helping Israeli war criminals to evade justice. This regression on Abbas’s part is not an assumption for there is evidence of the validity of this statement. For example, Yuval Diksin, the former leader of Israel’s Shin Bet internal security agency, warned Abbas in January 2010 that the PA would suffer financial losses if it did not back away from the Goldstone Report. After the Israeli government threatened to take way the privileges of the Ramallah elite, Abbas was met with an uproar of protests forcing him to abandon the damning document.

The themes of the discourse on the conflict are dictated by the US and Israel. In fact, in a recent congressional report issued on 3 July, the US Congress clearly outlined that America’s support for the PA was conditional and that the authority was required to dismantle the reconciliation agreement, stop all efforts being carried out by the resistance and halt all intentions to take Israel to The Hague. Upon closer inspection of the budget to which the Congress referred, it appears that the PA receives close to $440 million a year from the US alone. Only 15 million dollars are allocated to development projects. Meanwhile, the PA’s annual governance budget amounts to approximately $3.5 billion, 55 per cent of which is allocated to the salaries of 160,000 PA employees. Around 70,000 of those employees are members of the so-called PA security forces which coordinate their work with Israel. What we can conclude from this is that Western governments threaten Palestinian officials with the loss of their salaries and by doing so they are paying them to remain slaves to the Israeli occupation. Thus, Palestinian rights take a back seat to protecting Ramallah’s elite.

What this all means is that a very small and meagre elite controls the destinies of 12 million Palestinians and it is all down to European and American aid. The Palestinian people wholly reject this reality and its outcomes and it is this sentiment that will mobilise the Palestinians to find a way out of this divide in which we now find ourselves. Hundreds of notable Palestinian personalities have protested against the elite’s control because they do not fear that they may be affected by a governmental decision as a consequence. Mahmoud Abbas’s willingness to continue to delay the signing of the Rome Statute is an unforgivable crime because it ignores the fact that Palestine was given the right to defend itself in the United Nations in 1974. More importantly, the Palestinian right to independence was recognised by the League of Nations in 1920.

Holding Abbas and the PA accountable for their actions also means looking into their security coordination with Israel, which in light of the occupation is considered to be a crime regardless of what governmental officials choose to call it. The question of accountability will stretch to encompass corruption, theft of public funds and nepotism. One can even go so far as to say that the Oslo Accords were even more detrimental to Palestinian livelihood than the Balfour Declaration. After all, Balfour was a secret agreement between two colonial parties without the knowledge of the Palestinian people, whereas, the Oslo Accords was meant to be an agreement between the occupying power and the people under occupation. Oslo was an agreement that allowed the occupiers to act as if they were partners and had the right to Palestinian land. The Oslo agreement is what led the occupation forces to gain total control of nearly 60 per cent of Palestinian land and near total control of the remainder of the area in question. The biggest crime about this agreement is that it did not mention Palestinian rights even once. The UN began to refer to international law as a reference and for 20 years the likes of Mahmoud Abbas have complained while Israel seized the West Bank in its entirety.

The Paris Protocol, or the Protocol on Economic Relations, signed in 1994, facilitated Israel’s complete take over of the Palestinian economy by giving the former the right to control 98 per cent of the West Bank’s imports. Ironically, this protocol is a near exact replica of the Paris Protocol of 1941 between Nazi Germany and occupied France. The French Vichy government was essentially the Nazi occupation’s puppet.

The list of who must be held accountable is rather long; however, the Palestinian people will not settle for anything less than a newly-elected government with an entirely new cabinet. The need to elect a new cabinet has been delayed since March 2005 yet it is one of the things that determine Abbas’s sense of legitimacy. He must defend Palestinian rights and sign the Rome Statute and agree to hold Israel accountable for its war crimes in The Hague. If he fails to do so, it is highly likely that he may end up going to the ICC as a defendant alongside other guilty parties.

The author is founder and president of the Palestine Land Society (PLS) and a former member of Palestine National Council.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.