January 04, 2015
The move
by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to sign the documents to join
the International Criminal Court (ICC), and give it jurisdiction to investigate
allegations of Israeli and other war crimes in Palestine, should be seen as a
positive development that brings international law into play in the
Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Yet I find it difficult to be enthusiastic or
optimistic about this move, due to the whimsical, personalized,
uninstitutionalized and erratic manner in which Abbas and the current
Palestinian leadership go about the business of managing statehood.
We have
just witnessed the sad spectacle of Abbas deciding to take the issue of
Palestinian statehood to the UN Security Council (UNSC), and in the end
discovering that he was unable to secure the 9 votes needed to pass the
resolution (which would have been vetoed by the United States in any case). The
failure at the UNSC is symptomatic of the wider problem that has bedeviled the
rump Palestinian leadership that remains in place under Abbas, while many
Palestinians have abandoned his drifting ship and joined Hamas and other
political groups.
That
problem is simply that Abbas and his few advisers have consistently failed to
undertake the hard work needed to succeed in political and diplomatic action,
and to mobilize those assets that the Palestinians do enjoy in the region and
the world. The hard work I am talking about is nothing magical or exotic. It is
simply the hard work of spending days and weeks undertaking the basic mobilizing,
consulting, negotiating, threatening, enticing, and other such activities that
are necessary for the success of any political campaign — whether running for
local judge in a small town in Arkansas, or president of France, or seeking
passage of a resolution at the United Nations or any such international forum.
What
Abbas has not done is to go to the UNSC armed with political firepower that
could assure his success, because he did not bother to spend time consulting
with Palestinians everywhere in order to mobilize a strong national consensus
for his move. The lack of consultations with Palestinians is one of Abbas’
fatal flaws, because he ends up looking like a frail old man who naively calls
for the application of law and justice to the cause of his people — a noble and
just cause, to be sure — but nobody takes him very seriously because he is
perceived to be speaking for himself and his few advisers only.
At the
Security Council specifically, he seems not to have done the necessary hard
work of consulting widely with all members of the council and other interested
parties, nor to have engaged in reasonable bargaining to achieve a draft
resolution that could secure a majority. There is no moral victory or any
advantage whatsoever in doing what Abbas just did — go to the UNSC and fail to
get a 9-vote passage. All he has done is to diminish himself and look like a
bumbling beginner in the eyes of the diplomatic world, and thereby set back the
Palestine cause at least in the short term.
I fear
now that the Palestinian decision to join the ICC will repeat this pattern of
political failure anchored in a personalized, non-democratic and authoritarian
style of governance that has been the ruin of the modern Arab world. The
Palestinian cause has massive support around the world, among ordinary
citizens, political groups, governments, religious and professional
organizations, and the overwhelming majority of Arabs, and most of their
governments. Abbas has consistently failed to mobilize these forces and direct them
into the political arena where he engages in global action, such as the UNSC
and the ICC.
There is
no price to be paid if a country does not support the Palestinians in the UNSC,
because Abbas and his colleagues do not constitute a formidable force that can
cause anyone any pain. The Israelis and the pre-state Zionists in Europe
especially understood this very well, and have consistently achieved their main
political objectives globally because they understand how to transform a
limited number of assets into maximum political leverage.
Abbas
lacks the charisma and political legacy that Yasser Arafat enjoyed, but the
main reason for his repeated failures to move the Palestine cause forward has
been his insistence on acting like a lone old man. The Security Council failure
should be a huge wake-up call. Abbas and the people around him should
acknowledge that their political approach or strategy have failed repeatedly,
and they must reach out first and foremost to the human, political, and
intellectual wealth of their millions of fellow Palestinians who have been
alienated from the Palestinian leadership since the Oslo accords in 1993.
If the
Palestinian leadership under Abbas’ wobbly, personalized guidance pursues the
ICC route as it has pursued other diplomacy, the Palestinian people have
nothing to look forward to. Serious issues of national fate require serious
leadership, and Abbas does not fit that bill any longer.
Rami G. Khouri is published twice
weekly in the Daily Star. He was founding director and now senior policy fellow
of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the
American University of Beirut. On Twitter: @ramikhouri.