A West Bank anachronism

The PLO goal of statehood has lost its glitter as a new national mood transforms the Palestinian struggle

Ahmad Samih Khalidi
The Guardian, Tuesday 19 April 2011

".....In what may be the beginnings of an unprecedented and fertile exchange of ideas, recent meetings have brought together intellectuals, opinion-formers and policymakers from the different Palestinian constituencies to review the challenges arising from the blocked prospects for negotiations and the surging revolutions changing the map of the Arab world. This has been matched by a renewed spirit of popular activism that is starting to take hold in the occupied territories, spurred and inspired by events elsewhere in the region.

What this approach, still in nascent and tentative form, reflects may be profoundly important for the future of the struggle; a move away from seeking the ever-shifting goalposts of an inevitably constrained and incomplete form of statehood that would come at the expense of equally fundamental rights to a much broader interpretation of self-determination that includes all the divergent Palestinian constituencies, and a much wider and continuing confrontation with the Zionist enterprise in Palestine.

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. Its means will include the struggle for civil rights in Israel, ending the West Bank occupation, healing the split with Gaza, and safeguarding refugee rights including the right to live free in Palestine. It will be primarily expressed by popular and mass protest and the appeal to universal values, and articulated and developed through interaction within and between the various Palestinian communities.

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. At best it addresses part of the Palestinian condition on part of the land. The alternative may have no short cuts, but will reclaim the legacy of the past and revive the legitimacy of a struggle that may now be on the verge of yet another historical transformation."