Why the Palestinian diaspora must become politically engaged
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Once upon a time the highest decision-making body on the Palestinian side was the PNC, the Palestine National Council. It was effectively a Palestinian parliament-in-exile. Its members were elected or nominated by Palestinian communities in many countries of the diaspora. Highest decision-making meant that even Chairman Arafat was answerable to it. Policy had to be approved by it. In other words the PNC was a manifestation of Palestinian democracy in action.
And that, I’ll add in passing, is why the Arab regimes loathed it. The message they got from the composition of the PNC and the way it worked was that a Palestinian state would be democratic; and that, they feared, would subvert their own authoritarian order. They knew that what the Palestinians would have in a state of their own, something approaching real democracy, was what their own citizens would want and demand when they saw it working in Palestine. And that, in turn, was why most if not all Arab regimes would have celebrated behind closed doors if Sharon had succeeded in closing the Palestine file for ever.
Under the in-Palestine leadership of “President” Abbas, a man I regard as more of a collaborator with Zionism than not, the PNC has been sidelined almost out of existence.
It follows, or so it seems to me, that the way for the Palestinian diaspora to start to become seriously engaged politically is by organizing and mobilizing to demand that the PNC be brought back to life, re-structured and re-invigorated by fresh elections to it in every country where Palestinians are.
That would enable the Palestinians to speak to power with one credible voice.
Next question… Given that the prime role of a re-structured and re-invigorated PNC would be to determine Palestinian policy as well as representing it, what should that one voice say? In other words, what should Palestinian policy be?
In my view that’s a question which does not require much discussion and debate. Though not yet formally buried so far as Western governments and the mainstream media are concerned, the two-state solution has long been dead… killed by Israel’s on-going colonization – the continuing theft of more and more Palestinian land and water and what amounts, all up, to on-going ethnic cleansing by stealth and slowly.
That being so, there are in my view only two possible end-game scenarios. There will either be a final Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestine or One State – one state with complete justice for the Palestinians and equal rights and security for all. (In verbal parenthesis I’ll add that “complete justice for the Palestinians” means that all who wanted to return, would return, preferably in a phased and managed or controlled way).
So One State for all would be the policy determined and represented by a re-structured and re-invigorated PNC.
Next question… Could it, One State for all, ever become a reality?
As things are there’s a case for saying “NO”. But in my view much could depend on how successful the Palestinian advocates of it were in convincing the Western world, Americans in particular and Jewish Americans especially, that the wellbeing and security of all Jews currently in Israel-Palestine and who wanted to stay in the de-Zionized One State would be guaranteed.
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