Today, Middle Eastern leaders meet in Manama for a U.S.-backed conference on the economic reconstruction of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. On the table is a detailed $50-billion proposal for the amelioration of the Palestinian economy. Yet the response of the Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas has been to boycott the conference altogether. Evelyn Gordon examines the perverse reasoning behind this decision, and the even more perverse reasoning of its defenders:
The Palestinians’ refusal to attend a U.S.-sponsored “economic workshop” . . . has been widely treated as a reasonable response to the unlikelihood that Donald Trump’s peace plan . . . will satisfy their demands. But in fact, it’s merely further proof that the Palestinian leadership doesn’t actually want a state—or at least, not a viable one. Because even if Palestinian statehood isn’t imminent, economic development now would increase the viability of any future state.
This understanding is precisely what guided Israel’s leadership in both the pre-state years and the early years of statehood. The pre-state Jewish community was bitterly at odds with the ruling British over multiple violations of the promises contained in the 1917 Balfour Declaration, the 1920 San Remo Resolution, and the 1922 British Mandate for Palestine. These included Britain’s serial diminishment of the territory allotted for a “Jewish national home” and its curtailment of Jewish immigration, notoriously culminating in a total denial of entry to Jews fleeing the Nazis.
Nevertheless, the pre-state leadership still welcomed and cooperated with British efforts to develop the country, knowing that this would benefit the Jewish state once it finally arose (despite Britain’s best efforts to thwart it). . . . Thus, if the Palestinian Authority actually wanted to lay the groundwork for a viable state, what it ought to be doing is attending the conference and discussing these proposals. To claim that this would somehow undermine its negotiating positions is fatuous since attendance wouldn’t preclude it from rejecting any proposals that had political strings attached.
Read more on Evelyn Gordon: http://evelyncgordon.com/once-again-the-pa-shows-it-doesnt-care-about-having-a-viable-state/