What kind of Palestinian state?

The vote last week in the House of Commons to recognise the Palestinian Authority as the “state” of Palestine rallied a large degree of popular support. The Palestine Solidarity Campaign was mobilised around the issue for months in advance, sending out regular updates and constantly lobbying for a Yes vote.

PSC says that 57,808 of their supporters ultimately emailed their MPs to encourage them to vote for Parliament’s recognition. The Palestinian Authority’s official representatives in London were of course strongly engaged in the same effort.

Despite so many of Palestine’s supporters in the UK engaged in raising awareness around the issue, the question must be asked: what kind of Palestinian state would result should this motion ever be implemented in practice?

The vote was of course symbolic, and will have no effect on actually existing UK government policy. But that aside, even were it able to change the government’s policy, what changes would result in practice on the ground in Palestine?

The answer to this, unfortunately, is: very little.

It should be a truism by now, but for far too many people it is not, so it bears repeating: the Palestinian Authority is an extension of Israeli occupation. Especially in its “security coordination” role with Israel, the PA acts as the everyday enforcer of Israeli occupation.

PA police violently prevent Palestinian protesters from demonstrating against Israeli settlements, checkpoints, military bases and prisons (all of which are illegal under international law). PA undercover units arrest, harass, jail and torture Palestinian journalisms that raise even very timid criticisms of their rule. PA forces arrest and jail dissident Palestinian activists and fighters from opposition parties such as Hamas.

The PA is probably the only entity in the world that has managed to erect much of the necessary apparatus and infrastructure to create a police state, without actually having a state.

The so-called Palestinian Authority has no real authority. The small, restricted and isolated areas of the West Bank that are supposedly PA-controlled are in fact dominated by Israel. PA police forces have standing orders to withdraw to base as soon as Israeli troops roll into town to kidnap Palestinians opposed to their rule.

Under the training regime of American General Keith Dayton, PA troops were told during graduation: “You were not sent here to learn how to fight Israel … we can live in peace and security with Israel.”

While the PA does provide some useful and worthy municipal services to the Palestinians living in the West Bank, these are peripheral to their main role as enforcers of Israel’s occupation.

Although opinion of the PA within Israel’s political class often appears to be divided, with the right wing often ostensibly critical, the reality is that the PA plays a critical role in reducing the cost of Israel’s occupation. And that goes for political and reputational costs on the domestic and international levels, as well as financial costs to the Israeli government and wider economy.

The vast majority of the PA’s budget comes from international donors and sponsors. When it comes to Gaza, Israel’s vicious and vindictive wars systematically destroy infrastructure, projects often financed by European governments. In the West Bank too, Israel often bulldozes and otherwise destroys projects aiming to improve Palestinian life, which have been sponsored from Europe.

When all is said and done, the PA is ultimately answerable to Israel. A “state” run by the PA will never be anything other than a powerless and fragmented entity in small portions of historical Palestine, closely representing the Bantustans of the South African apartheid era. As with the Bantustans, reintegrated into South Africa after the dismantlement of apartheid, the removal of the Palestinian Authority is a precondition for the liberation of Palestine.

The PA stands between Israeli occupation and Palestinian popular anger. A state in mere fragments of the now-remaining 22 per cent of historical Palestine will be incapable of achieving the fulfilment of rights for the majority of the Palestinian people: i.e. the refugees, and their descendants, who were driven out of Palestine by Zionist militias in 1948. And it will do nothing for the 1.5 million Palestinians who live as second-class citizens in “Israel proper”.

In fact, for these far-too-often forgotten, yet vital, components of the Palestinian people, a PA non-state could even damage and engender the advancement of their rights.

While many took heart from the outpouring of support for the Palestinian people in Parliament on Monday, the actual text of the motion should give serious pause for thought.

And the motion was explicitly put forward as a way to save the two-state solution. During the debate on Monday, Grahame Morris MP, proposing, went so far as to claim that the one-state solution is “morally repugnant and politically untenable”.

Let us not forget that the one-state solution, so controversial in some circles, is the daring notion that there should be a democratic state for Palestinians and Jews in historical Palestine.

It is easy to propose there should be a Palestinian state, but what kind of state?

As Omar Barghouti, co-founder of the BDS movement put it in the New York Times last week: “If [a state] is the first step toward recognizing the irrefutable right of the Palestinian people to self determination, then it would be a positive contribution … But, if it is, as implied, solely meant to resuscitate the comatose version of the ‘two state solution’ which, as dictated by Israel, omits basic Palestinian rights, then it would be yet another act of British complicity in bestowing legitimacy on Israel’s unjust order.”

An associate editor with The Electronic Intifada, Asa Winstanley is an investigative journalist who lives in London.

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