Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad issued a puzzling declaration last week when he was interviewed in Washington by Danna Weiss on Channel 2. He stated that what he wanted was a Palestinian state, but at the same time he specified that he was not interested in a unilateral declaration of statehood. Since he was appearing on an Israeli station, it had to be taken into account that he was seeking to appeal to Israeli public opinion, which has been concerned that in the next few months he was planning to stand with Abu Mazen on a veranda in Ramallah and declare a Palestinian state on the 1967 lines.
Was Fayyad now ruling out the Palestinians going down the unilateral course? Was he saying that the only way the Palestinians would obtain a state was through negotiations? To answer these questions, it is essential to hear very carefully his choice of words, for what he actually said was that the Palestinian people are not interested in "another" unilateral declaration of statehood. In an interview in the Saudi-owned newspaper, Asharq Awsat, on November 18, Fayyad disclosed a great deal more than he was willing to tell Israel's Channel 2. He explained in that earlier interview:"...I always say that what we should pin our eyes on is not the proclamation of the state but the establishment of the state since the state was proclaimed in Algeria in 1988."
In other words, according to Fayyad, the Palestinian state already exists. There is no need for him to make a new declaration in 2011, because Yasser Arafat declared the Palestinian state on November 15, 1988 in Algiers, at a meeting of the Palestinian National Council, the supreme body of the PLO. All the Palestinian Authority has to do is to get more states to recognize the Palestinian state. If Washington complains to Fayyad that he is acting unilaterally, he can say that the Palestinians themselves did not declare a state.
Fayyad will say that the Palestinian Authority is not at fault. What happened was that other countries decided to give them recognition--they did it not him. As has been noted in earlier articles, if either Israel or the Palestinians change the legal status of the West Bank by themselves, such action would constitute a material breach of a core commitment in the Oslo Agreements. By saying that the Palestinian state was declared back in 1988, then Fayyad can say that he did not do anything wrong.
There are serious problems with the argument that Fayyad is trying to make. In 1988, the PLO was sitting in Tunis and did not exercise the kind of control of a defined territory that is one of the pre-conditions for recognizing a new state, under in international law. Even today, there are serious questions over whether the PLO fulfills that minimal condition, there are overlapping authorities between Israel and the PA who both rule the West Bank. Moreover, Hamas rules the Strip Gaza. But back in 1988 the PLO's lack on control of the territories was even more blatant. True, within a year of Arafat's declaration approximately 95 states declared they recognized the new state that he had declared. But many had reservations. Even the PLO's ally, the USSR, said at the time that it "recognized the declaration of the Palestinian state, but not the state itself."
The hardest question for Fayyad is how can he say that the Palestinians declared their state already in 1988, when they continued to threaten that they would declare a state in the years that followed. To recall, many in the Palestinian leadership argued that on May 4, 1999, the five-year interim agreement that the PLO signed with Israel was over. For example, Abu Ala, as the speaker of the Palestinian Parliament, wrote at the time because a legal vacuum would result, the Palestinian Authority had to declare a state in 1999. In the end they dropped the idea. But then again in 2008, after Kosovo declared it was an independent state, the Palestinians spoke again about declaring a state.
Prof. James Crawford of Cambridge University, who is the leading international expert on the issue of recognizing new states, has written: "if a new unilateral declaration is thought to be necessary by some within the PLO, on what basis was that of 1988 insufficient?" It was noteworthy that when Abu Mazen appeared at the UN General Assembly on November 24, 2000, he spoke about Jerusalem as "the capital of our future state." In February 2009, Abu Mazen complained that Israel was "preventing the Palestinians from attaining their goal--the establishment of an independent Palestinian state." In short, according to Abu Mazen, the Palestinian state does not yet exist.
There is an even wilder argument put forward today by academics who are sympathetic to the Palestinian cause: that the Palestinian state was already established when the British Mandate was set up and all the Palestinians have to do is claim that they are the successors to the British, ignoring the the fact that the Mandate document specifically recognized the historical rights of the Jewish people. The main spokesman for this thesis is Prof. John Quigley from Ohio State University, who speaks on this subject around the world and in front of groups sponsored by the UN. All these initiatives involve efforts to give the Palestinians a state, without having to make them actually declare one.
