Long-awaited unity should embolden Palestinians
The reconciliation between the Gaza and West Bank leaderships should embolden Palestinians to assert their legitimate rights and demand negotiations as a state under occupation.
It seems that US Secretary of State John Kerry has gained some insight into Israel’s “negotiating” methods and its demanding approach to the “peace process.” He has now apparently glimpsed that the consequences of Israel's attitude toward the Palestinians carries the seeds of an apartheid-like outcome.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s attempts to elicit acknowledgment from the Palestinians that Israel is a Jewish state stifles any feasibility of an acceptable outcome, not only for the Palestinians and the Arabs, but for the international community as well. Netanyahu’s attitude toward the Palestinians concerning the agreement between the Gaza and West Bank leaderships to form a joint government is also intended to undermine any expectation of an outcome stemming from the reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas, which obviously strengthens the unity of the Palestinian people in the occupied territories.
It is well established that Israel denies that it is an occupying power. It has behaved and acted consistently, since the Oslo Accords and even before, as a claimant to the lands it captured and thus never applied the articles of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibit an occupier from altering the demographic or geographic character of the occupied territory. This has been Israel’s pattern since June 1967, and more emphatically so since the Oslo agreements were signed in 1993. It alternatively treats the Gaza Strip as an “enemy entity” (belligerent sui generis), thus undermining any prospect of discussion, let alone consequential negotiations. It is now imposing its own conditions by trying to pre-empt any genuine reconciliation between the West Bank and Gaza authorities.
The question arises as to whether the United States has discovered many realities obscured by the peace processes since Oslo. Jimmy Carter discovered the haughtiness of Israel’s dictates after leaving the presidency, and now it appears that Kerry might have discerned the same technique, which is pursued not as an occupier, but a conqueror.
