Could Black Lives Matter Inspire Palestinians?
By Tony Karon
Could the Black Lives Matter movement provide a template for resetting Palestinian strategy?
Writing in the New York Review of Books, International Crisis Group analyst Tareq Baconi argues that the proposed unilateral Israeli annexation of more of the West Bank – whether or not it goes ahead – has affirmed the irrelevance of the PLO’s negotiations-for-statehood model. The Oslo Peace Process that had envisaged a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem via U.S.-brokered talks collapsed in 2000, and Israel has continued to cement and expand its settlements that defy international law, and which make geographic nonsense of the viability of a Palestinian state in that territory.
Many Palestinians have long viewed the Palestinian Authority – created ostensibly as a proto-state administration under the failed Oslo process – as Israel’s de facto security contractor, “pacifying its own population in Israel’s ultimate interest.”
That, says Baconi, has prompted many Palestinians to shift their thinking from pursuing statehood to pursuing Palestinian rights and equality within the single state that has been the reality west of the Jordan River for more than a half-century. These activists focus on the Israeli state, which “provides civil and political rights to Jews that are withheld from Palestinians, in varying degrees depending on their location.”
This intractable reality – which has often been compared with South Africa’s apartheid system – has become the basis for an alternative model of Palestinian mobilization. This model focuses on “the language of human and civil rights to challenge the political repression of Palestinians and the systematic denial of their individual and collective rights.”
“We need to redefine the Palestinian struggle,” one young man in Hebron told Baconi during his reporting. “We need a new Palestinian political identity, not one defined by Hamas or Fatah. We’re now living in a one-state reality. We don’t want a Palestinian state on the basis of 1967, but our rights as humans.”
Advocates of this profound shift in the framing of Palestinian struggle see it as addressing the flaws and failures of the two-state model in a realistic way; critics say it’s a dangerous ceding of what little power Palestinians have to an Israeli state quite happy to maintain an apartheid system.
Politics, ultimately, is a question of power, and Baconi sees more than a feedback loop of solidarity in mutual shows of support between U.S. Black Lives Matter activists and their Palestinian peers. Just as BLM is shaking up U.S. politics, Palestinian leaders may soon have to reckon with a growing movement of younger people who are no longer struggling for separate statehood, but for democratic equality in a single state of Israelis and Palestinians.
“While the Palestinian leadership appears powerless to prevent further annexation, or even mobilize international public opinion against it, BLM is providing a showcase for an alternative, grassroots form of action and power against systemic oppression,” he writes, “and many Palestinians are listening.”
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