Misrepresenting Saeb Erekat

I think this post goes a long way to demonstrate my not-very-positive opinions of Fatah and the Palestinian Authority. Revelations in the "Palestine Papers" that Washington "wouldn't stand for" (not a direct quote - the quotation marks are to indicate the outrageousness of it dictating this kind of thing) any change in the PA leadership, democratic or not, further point to its rising status as yet another US-backed police state in the region. I'll also say that I'm more or less a fan of Al-Jazeera, and the Guardian is my daily paper. AJ and the Guardian published the papers, and have played a major role in spinning them. A lot of their spin is justified - in particular regarding the jaw-dropping pro-Israeli bias of US figures, even including Obama and George Mitchell.

However I do think that Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat has been rather unfairly portrayed in some of this coverage. In particular, it's been widely reported that Erekat privately promised to recognise Israel as  a Jewish state while publicly vociferously rejecting such demands. I may not be on totally solid ground here, but from my understanding is that this is far from accurate.

Firstly this shouldn't be confused with the fact that Netanyahu and the Israelis have recently been pushing the Palestinians to recognise Israel as a Jewish state now, as a precondition for talks or Israeli "concessions" (ie international legal and Roadmap obligations, such as freezing settlements). Neither Erekat nor anyone else in the PA have ever made that concession (which would be meaningless unless it was a public one).

As for claims that he privately agreed to recognise Israel as a Jewish state as part of a peace deal, these seem to rest on two sources. The first is a transcript of a November 2007 discussion in which Erekat said  "If you want to call your state the Jewish state of Israel you can call it what you want." As far as I can tell, the document containing this quote hasn't been posted yet, so there is no evidence that Erekat is doing anything beyond saying it was none of the PA's business what Israel defined itself as.This isn't at all inconsistent with what Erekat and co have been saying publicly. Here is Abbas saying in July last year, six months before the release of the Palestine Papers, that "Israel can call itself whatever it wants. We don't have to recognize those definitions." The other document cited is this one, notes of an internal PA negotiating unit meeting, in which Erekat says in response to a warning that the US will back Israel on the matter: "This is a non-issue. I dare the Israelis to write to the UN and change their name to the 'Great Eternal Historic State of Israel'. This is their issue, not mine." Again, there is nothing here to indicate that Erekat is promising the Israelis anything, as opposed to simply refusing to engage Israel on the issue or be drawn on it, on the basis that it's not a matter for Palestinians to decide; and this meeting was an internal one, and involved no promises to the Israelis or the US. Loathe as I am to agree with the vile Tony Blair, I think he was right today to say that at least in this case semi-flippant remarks for private consumption have been taken entirely out of context. And again it's not inconsistent with what PA figures have said in public, as far as I can see. Any comments or information that would shed further light on this is welcome.

Israel and Palestine: The "Arab majority" fallacy

A lot of commentators on the Israel-Palestine issue, including some I respect, in recent months and years have liked to make something along the lines of the following argument:

Given current demographic trends, and taking into account both Israeli Arabs and Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, in the not too distant future, the combined Arab population in Israel and the Palestinian Territories will be larger than the Israeli Jewish population. If a two state solution does not happen before then, Israel will find itself ruling over more Arabs  than Jews. At that point it will no longer be able to be both a Jewish state and a democracy. Instead it will become an apartheid state and according to some proponents of the argument, such as John Mearsheimer, it will be ostracised by the international community and the American Jewish community as Apartheid South Africa 2.0. As a result it will eventually cease to exist as we currently know it and will be replaced by some sort of bi-national state or lead to a catastrophic war.

This argument, despite its popularity amongst intelligent and otherwise sound analysts, is seriously misguided. Why? Because democracy is about a lot more than ethnic majoritarianism. Ruling over occupied territory is not somehow democratic because when your country and the occupied territory are taken together, the population of the ruling ethnicity is slightly larger than the population of the dominant ethnicity in the occupied territory. That would be a ridiculous view of democracy.

Israel's rule over the Palestinian Territories is just as undemocratic now as it will be in the future when Palestinian and Israeli Arabs start outnumbering Israeli Jews. The idea that it is somehow less illegitimate and more democratic as long as there is at least one more Jew than Arab in the combined territory of mandate Palestine is absurd and offensive. Certainly it will be an important symbolic change, with the numbers further emphasizing the undemocratic nature of the situation, but the situation itself will not have fundamentally changed; Israel will continue to be undemocratically ruling over millions of Palestinians, and Israeli Jews will continue to have vastly more privileges in both Israel and the Occupied Territories than Arabs, especially Palestinian Arabs. If that situation will be able to be described as undemocratic and apartheid in the future when Arabs in Palestine outnumber Jews, it is just as much undemocratic and apartheid now.

As for the idea that the right-thinking states of the world and Israel's current supporters will suddenly turn against it once the demographic balance changes in favour of Palestinians, I don't think so. The international consensus view does not regard or treat the territory of Palestine as a single entity or country, even though for many intents and purposes it essentially is. They treat it as two entities: Israel on one side, and the Occupied Palestinian Territories on the other (or three, given the West Bank-Gaza split, but that's largely irrelevant to this discussion). When the population balance across pre-mandate Palestine shifts, they will not start treating Israeli Jews as a minority in a single entity called Palestine, undemocratically ruling over the majority Arab Palestinians. They will continue to see a more-or-less democratic (with the pre-1967 borders) Israeli state, undemocratically occupying the Palestinian Territories as it has done it has done for more than 40 years. Nothing will have essentially changed for them, and if they have been able to tolerate the situations as it currently stands for more than four decades they will probably continue to do so regardless of symbolic demographic changes.