A sterling line-up of Palestinian policy analysts has now launched Al-Shabaka (‘The Palestinian policy network’), which looks like an on-line think-tank that will be timely policy papers by these people and others.
The first three papers on the site are:
* How sovereign a state?, by Camille Mansour, who looks at the gaps that, if negotiations start under currently foreseeable circumstances, would still exist between “a ‘moderate’ Israeli position [and] a Palestinian stance guided by the objective of achieving a sovereign Palestinian state, and briefly explores whether these gaps might be bridgeable.
Mansour, a longtime professor of international relations at the Sorbonne and Birzeit University, writes, “The analysis reveals how unlikely it is that a truly sovereign Palestinian state can come about as a result of negotiations in the present circumstances.”
* The Dangers of Disaggregating Sovereignty by Diana Buttu, who was legal advisor to the Palestinian negotiating team from 2000 to 2005, including during the 2001 round of negotiations at Taba and Israel’s unilateral evacuation from the Gaza Strip in 2005.
Buttu is openly critical of the way her former bosses in the PLO leadership conducted the negotiations in that period.
She writes:
- Israel’s approach to Palestinian sovereignty is best demonstrated in the period following its unilateral evacuation from the Gaza Strip. As was its approach during bilateral negotiations, Israel retained essential elements of sovereignty after its pullout, while also arguing that a new international standard be developed to cover an entity that is no longer considered to be occupied yet lacks the elements of full sovereignty (somewhat akin to the Bantustans of South Africa that only the apartheid government of South Africa recognized as being states).
… The experience following Israel’s unilateral evacuation from the Gaza Strip sheds light on its future plans for the West Bank. It is hoped that Palestinian negotiators will learn from their experience of negotiations with Israel and realize that the sum of the disaggregated parts can never be greater than the whole.
* Finally, development economist Samer Abdelnour has a paper titled A New Model for Palestinian Development. The model he advocates has the name ‘Sustainable Local Enterprise Networks.’ A more old-fashioned name for it might be ‘Swaraj’, the name Gandhi gave to the economic model he established when the British were still in India, as a way to build continuing resilience among India’s people, their skill-levels, and the basis of the future independent Indian state.
Abdelnour also asks some good questions about whether the western-aid-dominated and quintessentially top-down model being pursued by Salam Fayyad can actually do what the Palestinians need.
So: a great start from Al-Shabaka. Keep it up, friends!
thank you! great resource.