Abbas’s UNGA speech omits important historical realities

When Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas warned of a greater danger than threats to the two-state politics during his UNGA prerecorded speech, he rendered the warning invalid by making the threats sound recent and new. Not only was Abbas warning the wrong audience, he also used the same audience’s language – that of international complacency – to undermine the reality of Israel’s ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.  

The threat, Abbas said, “has now come to threaten the very life and existence of the Palestinian people on their homeland.” However, the threat of ethnic cleansing was what sustained the colonial Zionist ideology even before the establishment of Israel’s colonial enterprise on stolen Palestinian land.

The UN General Assembly knows its history, even though it prefers to eliminate it as reference. UN Resolution 181(1947) passed through the UNGA with 33 votes in favour and has sustained the politics of colonialism to the present day. 

Diminishing his flawed argument even further, Abbas reverted back to the two-state politics, saying, “This solution guarantees peace for all, instead of the threat emanating from Israeli extremism, which seeks to expand its colonial project towards establishing the so-called Greater Israel and completely erasing Palestinian presence.” 

The two-state paradigm has so far only guaranteed colonial expansion. One look at the 1947 Partition Plan – the precursor to all the colonial expansion that followed – establishes this fact. Does Abbas view ethnic cleansing as a threat and if so, why does not the two-state raise the same fear of ethnic cleansing? The hypothesis is flawed. Colonialism requires land and ethnic cleansing to thrive. The two-state paradigm preserves both. It does not eliminate colonialism. On the contrary, colonialism is protected and given time to embark on an alternative approach to Greater Israel which the entire world has seen with Gaza. 

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Abbas did state that “the two-state solution proposals are nothing more than a distraction in today’s reality” given the conditions on the ground. However, this important statement is marred not only warnings that that the UNGA knew about while voting in favour for Partition, but also with closing rhetoric about saving the two-state paradigm when there is nothing salvageable about it. 

The 1988 decision which Abbas referred to in his UNGA speech was not historic for the right reasons. Accepting the two-state paradigm “on the basis of international legitimacy” only means that the Palestine Liberation Organisation at the time accepted the basis for Zionist colonialism. If international legitimacy provides protection for colonialism, and the world has proved it does, then the PLO and now the PA are furthering a colonial legacy that continues forcibly displacing Palestinians from their land. 

“Our vision for peace is clear,” Abbas said, further obfuscating clarity. “The Palestinian people remaining on its own land, determining its future for itself and the Palestinian state alongside the State of Israel.”

A Palestinian state that has no security of its own will always run the risk of being colonises, as the two-state does not automatically decolonise Palestinian land. Is this really what the Palestinian people envisage?

An extension of colonialism under a different political process that would still lead to forced displacement paving the way for Greater Israel? Judging from what we have seen so far, only the UN would not object to this absurdity.

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