Donald Macintyre, The Independent, 26 July 2012
The cause of the Palestinians has never been more “marginalised” than it is today, according to a warning by their internationally respected Prime Minister Salam Fayyad.
Citing the international focus on the Arab spring, the eurozone crisis and the US electoral cycle, Mr Fayyad yesterday said that Palestinian leaders were facing a “path of growing untenability” while the world largely focused its attention elsewhere.
In an interview with The Independent, the Palestinian Prime Minister was strongly critical of the West’s failure to tackle Israel more “seriously” over its violations of international law and its obligations under the nine year old Road Map.
He declared that this “marginalisation” was now the “biggest obstacle” to progress towards a Palestinian state. “Our cause has never been this marginalized,” he said. “Ever. This is our greatest challenge.”
And he warned that the Palestinian Authority itself was being undermined because of factors ranging from its acute financial crisis to a potential loss of faith by Palestinians that it would able to end to an occupation that is “entrenching itself by the day.”
He said the international Middle East Quartet of the US, EU, Russia and the UN, had focused on what at present was the “seemingly impossible task of re-launching the peace process in an effective manner… at the expense of paying attention” to a series of violations which included, but were not limited to, expansion of settlements in the occupied West Bank and which had taken place with “no consequences whatever.”
These included nightly incursions by the military into Palestinian cities designated under the Oslo accords as Area A of the West Bank and now supposed to be under control of in large part Western trained Palestinian security forces. “There is not a night when there are not multiple raids or incursions in Area A,” he said. He pointed out that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been in the cabinet under Ariel Sharon that had accepted the internationally agreed Road Map that had among other things called for a halt to settlement building. “It really is outrageous. There is not a single requirement of the road map that the government of Israel can assert they are complying with. Not one.”
The international community had in 2009 issued a series of declarations that all settlement should indeed stop—which led to a ten month settlement freeze while attempts were made to restart substantive negotiations—he said that first the US and then the EU had now in effect told the Palestinians that “the rules of the game have changed”.
Calling for a pronounced shift by the international community to a “compartmentalized” approach in which it “raised the bar of accountability” by confronting Israel over the occupation without in any way “delegitimising” Israel itself, he declared: “What the EU, indeed the whole world should do…. is to ask the government of Israel—any government of Israel a straightforward question: ‘Do you support as a solution to this conflict the emergence of a fully sovereign state of Palestine on the territory occupied in 1967, including East Jerusalem? Yes or no?’”
“If they answer yes it is going to be very hard for them to explain how they continue to accept settlement expansion, settler extremism, violence that in certain instances cannot be described other than as outright terrorism.” Mr Fayyad said that attacks on Palestinians and their property, farmland and mosques had increased by 150 percent over the last year.
The same applied to the “violent manner in which the Israeli army deals with non-violent Palestinian protests. This is both wrong and can be extremely dangerous from a security point of view because you simply don’t know whether there is going to be an incident too many.” And indeed both create the feeling that there is a “feeble PA” that “cannot do anything to effectively represent the people by mobilizing international opinion to stop this.”
0 Comments:
Post a Comment