Palestinians reflect on the past 30 years since the first Oslo Accords were signed and all the ways in which the agreement impacted their lives, pushing them even further away from achieving liberation and statehood.
Palestinian leadership bears responsibility for accumulated diplomatic failures. The public’s confidence cannot be restored without serious intervention, including dissolving the Palestinian Authority and reforming the PLO.
In an excerpt from her new book “Justice For Some: Law and the Question of Palestine,” Noura Erakat tackles the Palestinian Authority and its “illusory quest” for statehood where economic perks under the promise of self-autonomy “has shaped the Palestinian leadership’s commitment to U.S. tutelage and its reticence to embark on a bolder course based on a politics of resistance.”
Last summer, Trump’s moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem opened the floodgates for a new era of Israeli provocations on the city’s Palestinians. Helena Cobban outlines the decades-long Zionist assault on the Palestinian presence and institutions in the holy city, and says that this new period will likely see greater government support for projects to extend the extremist settlers’ matrix of control over all parts of the Old City.
After 24 years the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s diplomatic mission in Washington DC closed yesterday, following orders from the Trump administration to shutter their operations in the U.S.
The fate of the Palestinian national consensus government, a unity coalition between leaders in the West Bank and Gaza, will be decided in the next few days after reports yesterday that the West Bank heads will resign and establish a new authority late this evening following disputes with Hamas over their rule in Gaza. Little is known about who will fill the replacement government, but President Mahmoud Abbas is poised to continue his role as the chief official of the union under the promise of future elections for his seat and cabinet members, according to an official with the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO).
Early this morning Jordan submitted to the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) a draft resolution on behalf of the Palestinians to end Israel’s occupation of territory occupied in June 1967 through a negotiations process. The resolution would be the first to call for a third-party security presence to “guarantee and respect the sovereignty of a State of Palestine,” but it puts no deadline on Israel’s withdrawal.
Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak has called the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) bid for United Nations…