NEW YORK // The Palestinian leadership is seeking even wider international recognition in what appears to be an alternative strategy to US-led negotiations for a peace deal with Israel, the deadline for which expires on Tuesday.
The Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) now plans to apply for membership of dozens of the international treaties and conventions in addition to those it requested on April 1, a senior official said.
Bassam Al Salhi, a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, said on Sunday that the PLO’s central council decided to pursue Palestine’s rights as a permanent observer state at the United Nations to “continue membership of UN agencies and international conventions”.
“What you saw [on April 1] was just the opening act,” said Yousef Zeidan, legal adviser for the state of Palestine’s permanent observer mission to the UN. “We have new tools and we are going to use them at the right time to benefit the Palestinian people.”
The move marks what analysts say is likely a strategic shift away from the failed on-again-off-again negotiating process that Washington has brokered since the 1993 Oslo Accord to a new unilateral strategy of internationalising the Palestinian quest for statehood at a time when Israel is coming under increasing international pressure over its occupation of the West Bank.
In November 2012, the UN General Assembly voted to make Palestine a non-member observer state. But the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, agreed to the US and Israeli demands to hold off from exercising his government’s new right to join international conventions and organisations for the past nine months — the time frame allotted for the latest round of negotiations to arrive at a deal.
Tel Aviv and Washington were particularly opposed to Palestine joining the International Criminal Court, which would allow it to pursue to war crimes charges against senior Israeli officials for their policies in the occupied territories.
However, the negotiations floundered in recent weeks after Israel’s refusal to release a final batch of Palestinian prisoners as agreed before the talks began last July, and a significant increase in settlement activity, including 700 new West Bank settlement tenders. In response, the PLO announced on April 1 that it submitted membership applications to join 15 international treaties and conventions, all of which will be granted by early July.
Some of the treaties, such as the UN Convention against Corruption, are concerned primarily with building the domestic governance capacity of a future Palestinian state, while others open new avenues to challenge Israel on the international stage.
“The idea here is to amplify the Palestinian voice in as many different international arenas as possible and prepare a broad front through which Palestine can challenge Israel [in arenas] in which it is represented or even where IT IS not,” said Yousef Munayyer, executive director of the Palestine Center in Washington DC.
Having a legal foothold in international agencies and treaties would allow Palestine to use the mechanisms available to it to raise cases against Israel, including at the UN’s International Court of Justice, on a variety of issues in accordance with the provisions of each treaty, such as racial discrimination, torture and the rights of children.
“Then there is the political aspect,” said Rami Khouri, a visiting scholar at Princeton University and the director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut. “If you raise many cases and Israel is bombarded with 15 different cases at 15 different international agencies with a lot of the world supporting pursuit of the cases, then the Israelis are going to freak out.”
Until now, the Palestinian Authority leadership has used the threat of joining the international bodies and conventions as leverage within the context of the US-mediated talks, but every attempt has failed and the latest failure has led to those within the PA who support the talks to have “less and less traction among Palestinian decision makers”, Mr Munayyer said. “There is now more of a reason to believe that this is strategic and a new alternative to the Washington-led peace process.”
Another part of the PLO’s change in strategy came last week when the PLO and Hamas announced that they will form a consensus government made of technocrats before fresh elections later this year. In response to the show of unity between the PLO and Hamas, which Israel and the West consider a terrorist organisation, Mr Netanyahu announced the suspension of the peace talks.
With US President Barack Obama and his secretary of state, John Kerry, who led the latest push for peace, both signalling that they will now retreat from their efforts, Palestinian officials may be thinking about what happens after Mr Abbas, now 79, steps down.
The next time Washington picks up the process again may not be until the second term of the next administration. The prospect of six or seven more years of unfettered Israeli settlement building may have forced a strategic rethink in Ramallah.
“They’re starting to realise there is an alternative,” said Mr Khouri. “There’s no guarantee, but it’s better than just sitting around and wasting another 20 years.”
The Palestinian leadership senses that as well as having a new toolbox of options, the global political consensus is for the time being tipping in their favour, with a small but growing Boycott, Divest, Sanction movement as well AS the European Union’s sanctioning of Israeli goods and institutions operating in the occupied territories.
“They are encouraged in part by some of the things they’re seeing in Europe and internationally in terms of support both at the state level, the international organisation level, and civil society level where people are increasingly talking about isolating Israel,” Mr Khouri said.
The Palestinian Authority does risk losing crucial aid funds from the US as a result of its membership in the international bodies, the first 15 of which the PLO joined without reservation, taking on all rights and obligations.
US law stipulates that Washington must withdraw funding from any organisation that recognises Palestine as a state, as it did with the UN cultural body, Unesco, in 2011. But the risk of a collapse of the PA — which Israel and the West prefers to deal with over the Islamist Hamas — as well as a potential for losing a vote at a growing number of international organisations may force the US administration to ask for waivers to bypass the law.
“If [the US] starts having to forfeit its vote in a variety of different international organisations, that may also cause them to lose standing and yield their ability to challenge things in the international arena … that could come with a hefty price tag,” Mr Munayyer said.
tkhan@thenational.ae