INTAFF-Are They Ready? Nuts-and-Bolts Questions About Palestinian Statehood

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Tuesday, Sep. 06, 2011
Are They Ready? Nuts-and-Bolts Questions About Palestinian Statehood
By Benjamin Barthe / La Stampa / Worldcrunch

RAMALLAH — The offices of the Palestinian Ministry of Planning, in Ramallah's upscale al-Masyoun neighborhood, were all abuzz last week. The civil servants on staff were just finishing a much anticipated report due to be submitted at the end of September, just in time for the meeting of the U.N. General Assembly in New York City.

The report is an assessment of what is known as the Fayyad plan, named after the Palestinian Prime Minister, Salam Fayyad. This middle-aged man is well liked by Western government leaders, who never miss the opportunity to praise his talents and integrity. In August 2009, Fayyad had announced that he would give himself two years to build the foundations of a legitimate nation, which could then be promptly proclaimed to the international community.

"The main message of this report is that we are ready to run our own country," explains Bashar Juma'a, a senior executive at the Ministry of Planning. "We follow the lines of the reports made by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which have acknowledged that the Palestinian Authority made progress and which have concluded that we deserve to have a real state."

The text's submission is supposed to match the diplomatic push being made by the Palestinian leadership, which wants the U.N. to review and upgrade Palestine's status from simple observer to a full member-state status. There is no doubt that President Mahmoud Abbas will brandish the report so as to win support from most countries. "We've been ready for decades now," explains Juma'a. "Our misfortune, as Palestinians, is that we have to prove it. We are not as lucky as the Southern Sudanese whose state has been recognized by the international community [last July], just after they proclaimed it."

The Palestinian Authority is particularly proud of its progress in the area of governance. The public deficit has dropped from 29% of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2007 to 16% last year, thanks to tough incentive measures in the payment of water and electricity bills as well as improved tax collection, which has increased revenue by 50% between 2009 and '10.

Last spring, a French diplomat claimed that "to have such results in such a short time [was] unprecedented, particularly for a nonstate. The Israelis' arguments according to which Palestinian people are either terrorists or corrupt or incompetent are not valid anymore. Fayyad has laid the foundations for a real state."


However, those measures were not enough to stabilize the budget of the Palestinian regime, which faces a significant deficit. In July, employees only received half of their salary because of a delay in the payment of promised financial assistance.

Economic performance is also disappointing. It was supposed to be the strong suit of Fayyad, who used to work at the IMF. According to a recent report made by the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, the standard of living in the West Bank had dropped at the end of 2010 while unemployment was rising from 23.5 to 25%.

According to the World Bank, the building and investment frenzy in Ramallah as well as the GDP's growth rate of 8% to 9% — confirmed these past two years by the World Bank itself — don't really reflect the actual state of development, which is still choked by the continued strain of Israeli checkpoints. Instead, it is more a reflection of the growth of aid from the international community.

Such assistance exceeded $7 billion between 2008 and '10, which corresponds to the world's highest allocation per inhabitant after the one granted to the tiny republics of the Pacific Ocean such as Palau and the Marshall Islands. "In a country that nearly has no control over its economic resources, whether it's earth, air, water or borders, it is complete nonsense to talk about development," admits Sam Bahour, a management consultant.

When it comes to the country's institutions, despite visible progress in terms of transparency, Fayyad's efforts were never truly made a reality. Even if the European Union invested tens of millions of dollars in the creation of Palestinian custom officers, Israel still refuses them to be deployed to the Allenby Bridge border between the West Bank and Jordan, like they did in the 1990s.

"On paper, we've achieved many things, and we've trained ourselves to be as perfectly operational as any other state, but the problem is that Israel won't give us the space to put our skills into practice," says Hatem Yousef, the Palestinian Prime Minister's economic adviser.

"Building a state in Palestine is a virtual experiment," adds a foreign expert. "No matter how hard you try, reality always threatens to crush your efforts."

The continuing cleavage between Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, and Fatah, which runs the West Bank, has undermined the implementation of the Fayyad plan. In the absence of a working parliament, dozens of laws were not passed, hindering the modernizing task undertaken by the Prime Minister, especially in the Justice Department.

In parallel, by associating security reform, one of his big projects, with anti-Islamism and by turning a blind eye on the abuses made by his pro-Fatah police officers, Fayyad has greatly contributed to the maintaining of the intra-Palestinian divide. "We often feel like the efforts we make end up protecting Israel rather than helping our own people," criticizes Azem Kawasmeh, a popular citizen leader.

In an article published last June, the American academic Nathan Brown, who knows the Palestinian political system very well, concluded on a half-satisfying note: "Western countries have always had high expectations of Salam Fayyad. Unfortunately, he's never been really able to meet them." As talented as he is, Fayyad can only aspire to be the Prime Minister of an "artificial" state.



This post is in partnership with Worldcrunch, a new global-news site that translates stories of note in foreign languages into English. The article above was originally published in Le Monde.

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Thursday, Sep. 01, 2011
The Palestinians' Statehood Dilemma: Full U.N. Membership or Observer Status?
By Karl Vick / Jerusalem

It looks like a sure loser: the Palestinian bid for admission to the United Nations as a sovereign state. Never mind that a large majority of the U.N. General Assembly would vote "Yes." U.N. rules clearly state that all applications must first pass the Security Council, where the United States stands poised to exercise its veto, at the behest of Israel.

If not that, then what? Then come the fallback options, including one alternative that experts on international law describe as so attractive to Palestinians there's a strong case for making it the first option. Instead of asking for full U.N. membership, Palestine can ask to be admitted as an "observer state." That's one rung up from the "observer entity" status it has held since 1974. Such a promotion comes with two advantages: It requires no Security Council action, and so amounts to a sure thing. The other privilege: it very likely opens the way for Palestinians to level charges against Israel in the International Criminal Court, and otherwise confront the occupying power in new, more sympathetic venues.

"The ICC is a big issue," says Yuval Shany, a professor of international law at Hebrew University, "but I'm not so sure it's the only issue. There could be other issues, like peacekeeping. "A Palestinian observer state might invite U.N. peacekeepers into the West Bank and Gaza, inviting at least a legal confrontation with Israeli troops that have been occupying the territories since 1967. "It opens up a lot of options, no matter what happens," Shany says.

Palestinian leaders are still debating what course to take come Sept. 21, when the U.N. General Assembly convenes in New York. While both Israeli and Arab diplomats court wavering European governments, the Obama administration is working frantically to produce a formula that will coax the Palestinians back to negotiations with Israel, which have proceeded for 20 years without resolution. Meanwhile, the global Palestinian community is riven by an earnest debate about the implications of statehood for the four to five million Palestinians living outside Gaza and the West Bank.

But the die appears to be cast, the hotels booked. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, is set to address the assembly on Sept. 23. The question is what he will bring home.

"I actually make the argument against going to the Security Council, because you're just going to embarrass the Americans by forcing them to veto," says Victor Kattan, a policy advisor for al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network. "You can go the General Assembly and get what you want."

What Palestinians want, most immediately, is leverage over Israel, because statehood only becomes meaningful with the withdrawal of Israeli troops, which Abbas concedes will happen only through negotiations. The threat of being dragged before the bar at The Hague looks like leverage. As evidenced by its outcry over the U.N. investigation of war crimes in the 2008-2009 Gaza offensive, Israelis are extremely sensitive to allegations of wrongdoing leveled by international organizations. Indeed, the country likes to describe the Israel Defense Forces as "the most moral army in the world." If things got as far as arrest warrants, accused Israeli officials would be cast in the same lot as Sudan's Omar al-Bashir and others who must plan their overseas travel with great care.

"It's more than bad publicity," says Kattan. "I think they would be terrified of traveling to any country, not just Europe, any country that has ratified the Rome treaty [establishing the ICC]. The U.S. hasn't so they'd be safe there."

But Palestinians would face the same hazard, notes Robbie Sabel, another Hebrew University professor of international law. Signing on to the ICC treaty — as experts say entities with U.N. observer status are very likely entitled to do — also makes the signatory accountable for crimes against humanity, including terror attacks. "If they join the ICC every Palestinian citizen in the future who commits a war crime or crime against humanity will be subject to the jurisdiction of a court," says Sabel. "This is why none of Israel's neighbors, except Jordan, have joined the ICC. So the Palestinians would have the same dilemma."

Palestinian moderates, who are led by Abbas, might be tempted to exploit that dilemma in order to coerce militant factions, such as Hamas, to forswear violence. If that seems a bad bet, however, U.N. rules present yet another option, one that would put similar pressure on Israel without any immediate prospect of blowback. The General Assembly might ask another court affiliated with the U.N., the International Court of Justice, for an advisory opinion on whether Palestine qualifies for statehood.

"I recommend it," says Abdallah Abu Eid, a retired international law specialist from Birzeit University on the West Bank. "Ask the General Assembly to ask the ICJ for an advisory opinion. Although advisory opinions by the ICJ are not binding legally but they have very big impact morally." Sabel agrees: "It's considered weighty, shall we say."

The bottom line, experts say, is that in legal terms Palestinians ought to gain from almost any course they ultimately choose in New York. In the end, states become states by being recognized as states by other states. Admission to the General Assembly, which South Sudan won in July, amounts to collective recognition, which is wonderfully efficient. But a steady accumulation of endorsements by individual governments and international institutions — the IMF and World Bank both say Palestine looks ready — has the same effect, and being gradual, may be more likely to coax Israel toward concessions.

"I think the most significant tangible outcome they can hope to attain is a call by the General Assembly on member states to recognize a new Palestinian state and facilitate its introduction to other international instruments and institutions," says Shany. "That would mean you have significant political endorsement with perhaps some legal implications."