Minor league politics

Editorial

Last week, Brazil “recognized” a Palestinian state in the form of the pre-Six Day War West Bank borders. Argentina and Uruguay, excitedly jumping on the recognition bandwagon, said they too will take the utterly inconsequential step of recognizing Palestine à la 1967 boundaries.

“The Argentine government recognizes Palestine as a free and independent state within the borders defined in 1967,” declared a letter from Argentine President Cristina Kirchner to the Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas.

Not to be outdone in these diplomatic dramatics, Uruguay’s deputy foreign minister, Roberto Conde, announced, “Uruguay will surely follow the same path as Argentina in 2011. We are working towards opening a diplomatic representation in Palestine, most likely in Ramallah.”

Conde gets top marks for naming a city in the West Bank. Ramallah is the de facto capital and the centre of Palestinian government activity, so the probability of opening a diplomatic office there demonstrates outstanding foreign affairs acumen.

Brazil’s region-leading recognition is apparently a direct response to an appeal from Abbas last month to Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. However, if the Latin trio are so determined to turn the clock back to 1967, it should be said, they should recognize the West Bank as a part of Jordan because, to be historically accurate, that was the status quo ante.

Luckily, historical accuracy need not be part of diplomatic equations. There are plenty of ideological and other factors behind any country’s international actions. But, having asked his South American friends to go out on a limb for him, Abbas himself seems determined to saw it off at the trunk.

The same day that Brazil made its announcement, Abbas was on Palestinian TV warning that he may fold up his country and go home. Well, not go home, perhaps, but return at least to the petulant, minor league politics of Palestinian history. Abbas is threatening to dissolve Palestinian self-rule and dump the problems of his people back on the lap of Israel.

Dissolving the Palestinian Authority would only be a last resort, Abbas said, but if Israel doesn’t stop settlement construction, he might have no other option, he warned. Such a development would have to go down as the one case in human history when a people’s independence was stymied by an adjacent country building granny flats. While there is little to be gained from Israel’s reticence to halt settlement expansion in the West Bank, it remains one of the more farcical aspects of the Mideast conflict that constructing a few homes is deemed a more serious barrier to peace than targeting civilians for murder, or a public education curriculum intended to breed generations of hate-filled martyrs.

If Abbas were to fulfil his huffy threat, Israel would again be saddled with full responsibility for the 2.2 million Palestinians living in the West Bank. This is hardly innovative statecraft on the part of Abbas. Wiping their hands of the Palestinians and dumping them on Israel’s doorstep has been the primary geopolitical strategy of the Arab world for the past half-century. In the aftermath of the 1967 war, in which Israel unexpectedly found itself “winning” the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, Israeli officials immediately offered to hand the territories back to Jordan and Egypt, from which they had been taken. The answer, at the Khartoum Conference of the Arab League on Sept. 1, 1967, was not no – but hell no. (We paraphrase.)

Contrary to the wisdom of Abba Eban, who said the Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity, the Arab League in fact knew an opportunity when they saw one. There was nothing to be gained on their part from taking responsibility for a restive population of stateless Palestinians. But the Palestinians have made a first-rate battering ram against the Jews, who could not be bested in conventional warfare.

Still, abandoning the hope of eventual independence is hardly a predictable strategy for the leader of the Palestinians himself. Yet there was Abbas last week, threatening to give up the fight. If all else fails, he warned, “I will tell the Americans and the Israelis, come and put an end to all this. I can’t continue like this. We have an occupation and we don’t. No, keep it all and release me.”

Such a statesman. The only thing that has stood between Palestinians and complete self-determination since 1994 has been their leaders’ refusal to take the one step demanded of them in the negotiations for a two-state solution: dismantle the apparatus of terror and incitement that prevents Israelis and Palestinians from living peacefully together. It turns out that Abbas would rather dismantle his own country than its infrastructure of hatred. All of this should leave the impetuous South American countries wondering what it is, exactly, that they are recognizing.

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