The opportunistic PA spells danger for Palestinians with Israel’s Jewish Nation State Law

The Palestinian Authority continues to give examples of discrepancy on two levels within its rhetoric. In response to Israel’s Jewish Nation State Law — which only elicited “concern” within the international community despite it being a blatant attempt to legitimise the crime of apartheid by Israel’s colonial structure — PA leader Mahmoud Abbas has attempted to reclaim the Palestinian narrative from his own people.

In a statement published in part by Wafa news agency, Abbas declared, “This law is one of the forms of conspiracy on our narrative and our national cause, especially Jerusalem with its sanctities.” Palestinians, he said, will not be discouraged “from their legitimate struggle to defeat the occupation and establish their independent state.”

In Abbas’s statements, there is an intricate web of dissociation and complicity which must be kept in mind each time the PA seeks a degree of equivalence between the leadership and the people in order to invoke the national cause. Palestinian Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah pointed out that the law “speaks of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, the Occupying Power, which clearly encourages colonial activities in the occupied lands.”

PA rhetoric is stale and compromised. A leadership that discusses the recent colonial process as providing clarity about Israel’s aims, without any reference to the origins and aims of Zionism, Israel’s founding ideology, is tantamount to an admission of being unaware of the ultimate aims of colonial expansion. Yet the PA is not unaware, for the simple reason that ever since its inception it has functioned as an extension of Israel’s colonial violence against the people of Palestine.

READ: Israel’s ‘nation state law’ targets Palestinian existence

This time, however, Abbas has attempted to go a step further by adding “our narrative” to the usual jargon. Undoubtedly, the PA President seeks to imply the narrative of anti-colonial struggle as a response to Israel’s ongoing ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. However, the PA narrative, which is the platform Abbas uses for his complicit speeches, is far removed from the aspirations of the Palestinian people. Indeed, the PA narrative is compatible with that of Israel in terms of oppression of the people. Moreover, there needs to be a unified objection to the PA strategy of assimilating its actions to the Palestinian anti-colonial struggle for the sake of providing foundations for its rhetoric.

Hence, using phrases such as “defeating the occupation and establishing their independent state” should not be read as contiguous. Palestinian anti-colonial struggle goes beyond defeating the manifestation of Israel’s military occupation; to refuse to differentiate between the two is a classic PA tactic. In addition, it was never the aspiration of the Palestinian people to establish a state on the remaining fragments — less than 22 per cent — of historic Palestinian territory. The two-state compromise is an international imposition that has nothing to do with Palestinian liberation. Hamdallah, however, is equating the Jewish Nation State Law with the demise of the two-state paradigm, rather than attributing to the latter the opening up of possibilities for Israel to entrench its colonisation through, for example, the former.

The Jewish Nation State Law is a blatant violation of Palestinian rights. The PA, on the other hand, is the epitome of conspiracy with Israel. Hence, if Abbas wishes to speak of “our narrative”, he should clarify the PA’s role as being separate from that of the Palestinian people, who will be paying the price for violations enshrined in legislation.

#ApartheidIsrael

The new Israeli law stipulates that self-determination is an exclusive right of the Jews, which eliminates the whole context of historic Palestine. Unlike Israel, which has encroached upon Palestinian territory continuously since its creation in 1948, the PA has isolated each violation, so that its discourse centred on illegal settlements, Palestinian prisoners or the two-state hypothesis while colonialism was all but forgotten, despite it being the root cause of all Israeli violations. Among the factors that have contributed to this elimination, there is no doubt that one must take into account the fact that the PA and the international community are willing accomplices in adamantly refusing to recognise Israel’s colonial trajectory for what it has always been; an ethnocentric enterprise hell-bent on taking all of Palestine from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea.

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