94 Days to Go
Why the Palestinians Should Negotiate

By Sherwin Pomerantz

94 days from now the United Nations General Assembly’s 2011 session in New York will open and, unless they can be persuaded otherwise, the Palestinian Arabs will have their resolution in favor of statehood presented to the UN. In spite of what will probably be a negative vote at the Security Council, the General Assembly will approve it. And what then?

Akiva Eldar, the Chief Political Columnist for Israel’s Ha’aretz newspaper, had an informative piece in today’s paper where he presented some statistics about the Palestinian economy. Astute readers will recall the praise which continues to be heaped on Salam Fayyad, the Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority and the architect of its economic growth engine. While as an experienced former senior staff person at the International Monetary Fund, he is certainly a well respected economist with good intentions, Eldar cites the following facts taken from an UNRWA (the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East) economic report just published:

• Construction jobs in the area controlled by the Palestinian Authority declined 35% in the second half of 2010 compared to the first half of the year.
• Industrial jobs declined 30% during that same period.
• During 2010 unemployment increased by 3.3% and reached 25% at the end of the year.

Now before anyone goes and gloats about these figures, or says “we told you so”, or “we knew all along that they can’t do it” it is critical to internalize the fact that with so many people out of work Israel itself is threatened. People who cannot provide for themselves financially look for ways to release the tension that this causes. In a repressive society that is the rule in the West Bank, the odds are that pent up anger will encourage the populace to turn to the checkpoints that control entry into the areas controlled by Israel or even to march on the settlement communities themselves. And how will they be stopped?

So the Palestinian Arab initiative at the UN may be successful in gaining the recognition of a majority of the General Assembly but, in practice, it could very well create a nightmare for both Israel and the Palestinian Authority. In truth the Palestinian Authority will be faced with some intractable dilemmas. The Authority itself will become irrelevant as it exists under the Oslo agreements which prohibit entry into 60% (i.e. Area C) of the West Bank which would then be considered part of the new Palestine. But if the Authority is disbanded what happens to the 150,000 people it employs as well as their families and vendors from whom they purchase goods? After all, the donor monies that support the Authority will not, prima facie, be rerouted automatically to the new Palestinian state. And will that result in the West Bank turning into Gaza East?

Faced with this doomsday scenario has caused Abu Ala (Ahmed Queria) to present a new diplomatic solution to the problem in order to get President Abbas down from the tree he has climbed and move Israel to a peace conference. At least he understands that winning the recognition objective is no substitute for direct negotiations between the parties. The only question is why it took so long for the Palestinian Arab leadership to understand this.

The challenge now remains for the Palestinian Arab leadership to internalize what some of its members do seem to understand and for the Netanyahu government to internalize, as well, the difficult situation in which we will all find ourselves in mid-September. We can, of course, act as if nothing will change but burying one’s head in the sand does not make the problem go away. That is our combined challenge in the next 94 days.