November 8, 2013 | Quote
Palestine’s Self-Inflicted Wounds
About six months ago, I sat in a coffee shop in al-Tireh, a suburb of Ramallah, and interviewed a senior official within Fatah. The official, wanting to talk about the internal dynamics within the Palestinian leadership, wished to remain anonymous. In between flowery anecdotes about his meetings with Dick Cheney (“He always asked about my family”) the official began to shed some light on the Palestinian UN bid of 2011 and 2012. True to perception, various fault lines and rifts began to emerge between his description of how the UN campaign was formed and how other senior officials had described the process. Was Abbas pressured into the UN? Did close advisors convince him? Did he always have it in the back of his mind? If there was one thing the collective Palestinian narrative could agree on, it was that everyone was convinced their explanation was the only explanation for what would become the largest unilateral policy decision in the post-Oslo years.
In his new book, State of Failure: Yasser Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas, and the Unmaking of the Palestinian State [3], Jonathan Schanzer attempts to unravel these narratives and provide insight into how the Palestinian leadership navigates the rough seas of pseudostatehood. It’s a daunting task—as Schanzer acknowledges early on, the field is crowded with literature on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yet, much of that literature is written in a comparative light; it’s usually the Palestinians in relation to Israel, or in relation to the peace process, or the Arab League, and etc. In putting the internal dynamics of the Palestinian leadership as the focal point, “State of Failure” reveals some truly unsettling facets of how the Palestinians craft and implement their policies. In covering the recent tremors in the political structure, the book focuses on former prime minister Salam Fayyad and his rather inglorious fall from grace in the leadership. The internal disputes, the well-documented rifts and disagreements between Fayyad and the Fatah leadership, all are laid out cogently in the book.
The book isn’t likely to be on the PLO’s reading list anytime soon. And most certainly, if there’s one specific area of the book where Schanzer is likely to reach an impasse with the Palestinian leadership, it’s the description of the UN campaign. In the book, Schanzer takes a contemporary approach, detailing the roots of the campaign in 2005, when Palestinian diplomats began working in earnest with Latin American nations, developing a diplomatic strategy that would eventually lead to 2011. This diplomatic strategy was at times viewed as almost antagonistic to negotiations by some within the leadership, but by 2008 and 2009, when Tzipi Livni had failed to form a negotiation-centric government and Benjamin Netanyahu had ascended instead, the idea of this comprehensive and unilateral diplomatic campaign began to take hold. By 2010, with talks breaking down over settlement moratoriums and varying preconditions, the campaign became the predominant driving force of Palestinian policy. This is where things get murky.