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Palestinian Statehood Has Lost Its Glitter

(Guardian-UK) Ahmad Samih Khalidi - Barring unforeseen developments, it appears as if the PLO and its Ramallah-based arm, the Palestinian Authority, will head to the UN General Assembly in September seeking international recognition of a Palestinian state along the 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital. But as the PLO inches towards this goal, it seems out of tune with prevailing Palestinian sentiment. For one thing, the PLO is as much a part of the crumbling Arab order as any of the collapsing regimes around it; and it is now losing the last vestiges of its founding legitimacy as a product of the era of armed struggle and the contemporary national movement forged by Yasser Arafat. Today the PLO can claim no genuine representative status. What is emerging instead is a slow but sure manifestation of a new transnational movement, centered less on statehood and more on forging a national project that will traverse the existing Palestinian divides - diaspora, occupied territories and Israeli Arab citizens - and bypass the notion of an independent Palestinian state on part of Palestinian soil. This shift is premised on forging a new common identity and common national goal - embracing all sectors of Palestinian society and aimed at the entirety of Palestine before 1948. From this perspective West Bank statehood seems an irrelevance, almost an anachronism. It matches neither the popular revolutionary zeitgeist of the Arab world nor wider Palestinian aspirations. The writer is a senior associate member of St. Antony's College, Oxford, and a former Palestinian negotiator. Today's issue of Daily Alert was prepared in Israel on Chol Hamoed Pesach.
2011-04-20 00:00:00
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