PA plans further incarceration for Palestinians

As predicted, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s diplomatic framework, intended to serve as the initiation to further negotiations with Israel, is a regurgitation of previous compromises. The renewed insistence upon the two-state solution is particularly repulsive, reinstated adamantly and with absolute contempt, as if Palestinian resistance were an imaginary entity and so-called Operation Protective Edge an ephemeral occurrence.

Simplifying Palestine remains Abbas’s speciality. Demarcating borders would take “half an hour or an hour”, a ludicrous estimate that is justified, according to Abbas, upon alleged US validation of the treacherous two-state fabrication. Should an agreement fail to materialise within nine months with regards to borders, prisoner releases, a settlement freeze, refugee issues, Jerusalem and the theft of water, “unilateral statehood moves” will be the president’s next step. It is a euphemism for further compliance with US-Israeli diktats.

Having failed to achieve anything but the further deterioration of Palestine, rhetoric is becoming increasingly marginalised from reality, with timeframes and expectations precluding the necessity of resistance. Senior PLO member Hanan Ashrawi was quoted in YNet News as stating, “I don’t want to give you very specific [timeframe], but let’s say within three years we should know that the occupation will end.”

The aftermath of Protective Edge has cemented certainties that many diplomats prefer to ignore. Wallowing in assumptions and definitions which are subsequently imposed upon the Palestinian population takes precedence over resistance. Such concessionary attitudes elicit questions with regards to how Palestinians and their demands are defined within the political context. The decades-long history of Palestinian resistance has been validated during the course of Israel’s latest genocidal chapter of violence against the people of Gaza, yet negotiators are intent on diminishing and altering the Palestinian narrative through discourse attempting to reintroduce, erroneously, the two-state solution as the demand of the masses.

Contrary to the insidious implications, there is no correlation between Palestinians and the two-state solution. For leaders to insist upon the fragmentation of people and nationhood is a process of betrayal; a form of acquiescence to imperialism and its infliction of constant lacerations upon Palestinian memory. However, the PA still insists upon defining freedom for Palestinians from within the incarceration established by Israel’s allies which, within the current context of shifting political strengths, constitutes a colossal betrayal of resistance. Hence the constant impositions in order to create a fictitious narrative coinciding with the incessant demands to concede further territory. This is also within the mainstream narrative of “ending the occupation” without a single reference to the inherent violence and usurpation within Israel’s settler-colonialism.

In attempting to denigrate the recently-triumphant resistance, the PA has aligned itself with the forces clamouring for Palestinian oblivion. The process of extending negotiations is a tactic employed by imperialism in order to allow Israel impunity and time to further its colonial expansion; it has become a PA scheme that not only betrays acquired weaknesses in leadership, but also the absolute denial of Palestinian rights in relation to the recent resurgence of armed resistance. The ramifications of decades of settler-colonial expansion have been reduced to insignificant timeframes that ridicule the oppressed. For the PA, Protective Edge has merely provided an interlude translating into an embraced, callous disassociation; it’s an exercise in practical and rhetorical displacement of land and people willingly embraced by the compromised entity in Ramallah.

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