In the final days of 2021, Palestine Authority President Mahmoud Abbas visited the Israeli Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Defence Benny Gantz at his home in Rosh Ha’ayin, central Israel. It was not their first meeting. The latter was in August in Ramallah, and the upshot was the announcement of a set of confidence building measures to which I will return below.
The meeting on 28 December was unique, not just because it occurred years after the last Palestinian-Israeli negotiating round or even the last visit by President Abbas to Israel in 2014, nor because it did took place outside an official negotiating venue whether in Israel, the West Bank or at a regional or international capital but in the home of the Israeli participants (the reports make no mention as to whether the meeting was over dinner or whether refreshments were served). This meeting and its prelude in August stand out, rather, because, according to reports, the participants did not broach the conventional sphere of such headings as the “peace process” and the “Abraham accords.” As a whole, the purpose of the meetings was to identify the parameters for talks on the security threat to Israel posed by Palestinians who believe it is necessary to use violence to end the Israeli occupation and on the violence used by Israeli settlers who are set not only on perpetuating the occupation but on expelling Palestinians. In such exploratory negotiations, it is necessary to create a climate conducive to positive progress. But this is precisely what Abbas and Gantz could not accomplish, not because of any personality idiosyncrasies on either side but because both are trapped in inextricable predicaments.
As a member of the largest governmental coalition in Israeli history, Gantz’s hands are tied. The only thing holding the coalition together is the shared determination to keep Benjamin Netanyahu from returning to power, because if he did it would probably be for another dozen years. The current prime minister, Naftali Bennet, is an extreme hardliner who totally opposes the Palestinians’ right to establish a state in principle, let alone an independent one with the pre-June 1967 borders and a capital in East Jerusalem. Mahmoud Abbas, for his part, is the head of the Palestinian Authority, which is recognised as the sole legitimate governing authority of the Palestinian people in the West Bank and Gaza, and he is the chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, universally recognised as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. But the reality is that Hamas staged a coup against the PA over 15 years ago and seized control of Gaza. It also claimed for itself the right to veto the Palestinian government, just as Hizbullah has done with the government in Lebanon. In both cases, the government lacks one of the defining features of a state, the monopoly on legitimate recourse to armed force.
Due to the foregoing, Abbas and Gantz had very little wiggle room in their talks. Perhaps the ceiling was best captured by Palestinian Spokesman and Civil Affairs Minister Hussein Al-Sheikh who said the purpose of the meeting was to “create a political horizon” leading to a “political solution” that conforms with “international legitimacy and resolutions.” The Israelis issued no such commentary. Instead they spoke of a number of confidence building measures such as security cooperation, granting residency rights in Jerusalem to 6,000 Palestinians currently in the West Bank and another 3,600 the right to work in Israel.
All this might not seem much. Hardly worth the exchange of visits, some might argue. The two sides could probably have come up with such measures through the normal channels. But clearly there is more to it than the sum of its parts. This is evident from the reactions of political adversaries. On one side Hamas and its supporters, true to form, decried the meeting as a sellout of the Palestinian cause, a betrayal of its martyrs and a stab in the back to the resistance which was on the verge of victory. On the other side, Netanyahu and his camp called the meeting a direct threat to the security of Israel. The vehemence of such reactions may stem from the fact that the meeting and its outputs are part of a process that is more extensive than it appears.
On 14 December, the US State Department announced that the US-Palestinian Economic Dialogue (USPED) had met again for the first time in over five years. It last met in May 2016. “Participants recognised the importance of restored political and economic relations between the U.S. government and the Palestinian Authority and pledged to expand and deepen cooperation and coordination across a range of sectors,” said the statement that appeared on the State Department’s website.
The American delegation included many senior diplomats and leading economic figures. It was headed by Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs Yael Lempert, who told her Palestinian interlocutors in the virtual meeting that the Biden-Harris administration felt that the Palestinian people deserved to live in “freedom, security and prosperity.” In this spirit she said, “Growing the Palestinian economy will also play a critical role in advancing our overarching political goal: a negotiated two-state solution, with a viable Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security with Israel.”
This is not a contrived coincidence. A new approach to dealing with the Palestinian question is in the making. It draws on the lessons gleaned from the Trump approach, one of the consequences of which was a rupture in US-Palestinian relations. Soon afterwards came the fourth Gaza war and a freeze in the Palestinian reconciliation process, all of which were effectively part of a Hamas bid to hijack the Palestinian will.
The Palestinian process that the PA is trying to steer is based, firstly, on staunching the haemorrhage of the Palestinian population remaining on the land. The sole de facto reality that the Palestinians have achieved from the Oslo Accords is their sustained presence as a people and a governing authority in Palestine. But this type of thing can only be achieved by avoiding Hamas-style extremism which makes life in Palestine hard for Palestinians to bear, in general, and even harder for Palestinian Christians, and which compels Palestinians in Israel to face unprecedented forms of Israelisation. It is also important to recall that previous forms of Palestinian action have fed the rise of Hamas which, in turn, poisoned the wells of support from Arab powers and many international quarters that sympathise with the Palestinian cause.
The current state of Palestinian-Israeli relations renders the demographics a critical factor in those equations. It forces Israeli political forces to contemplate what the one-state solution would look like and it can rally Palestinian and Arab forces behind a single peace process that creates an alternative to the racist forces inside Israel.
*A version of this article appears in print in the 6 January, 2022 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly.
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