By Akiva Eldar
On midday Wednesday, minutes after it was reported that Palestinian negotiator Yasser Abed Rabbo had threatened to follow Kosovo's example and unilaterally declare an independent Palestinian state if the talks with Israel stalled, chief negotiator Ahmed Qureia (Abu Ala) was on the phone to Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni. Abed Rabbo, he told her, was fantasizing, adding that an official denial was on the way. Livni did not seem concerned. What was worrying her was the possibility that her talks with Abu Ala might not lead to a Palestinian state.
In effect, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) long since declared an independent state conforming to the 1967 boundaries. This November will mark the 20th anniversary of the unborn state. The declaration was issued in 1988 at a meeting of the Palestine National Council in Algiers, which also recognized a Jewish state existing alongside the Palestinian state. Now it appears that if, as Abed Rabbo warned, the negotiations will reach an impasse at the end of the year, that declaration will end up on the trash heap of history.
The talks with the Palestinians are being conducted in the shadow of growing fear in Jerusalem for the fate of the two-state solution. When Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told Haaretz at the Annapolis conference in November that if a two-state solution was not reached soon Israel would be "finished," he was not fantasizing. He and Livni know that if the "Annapolis process" goes the way of the "Camp David process," son of the "Oslo process," the Palestinian Authority will fall in their wake.
The 100,000 salaries of officials and policemen are the only fuel of the respirator that is keeping the PA alive. Jerusalem is well aware of the initiative of Adnan Abu Odeh, a Jordanian statesman of Palestinian origin who was King Hussein's court minister: for some months he has been calling openly for the PA to be dismantled and the keys to be returned to the Israeli military regime.
I heard similar comments this week from one of the most moderate of Fatah officials, a signatory to the Geneva Initiative. If the negotiations bog down at the end of the year, he said, he will demand that the territories be returned to the control of the IDF. "Instead of talking about occupation, we will recognize that we are living in an apartheid state," he said. "Instead of fighting for independence, we will fight for equal rights. We will not allow the PA to become a new version of the Village Leagues, the failed attempt by Israel in the 1980s to cultivate a local leadership in the hope of placing responsibility for day-to-day life in its hands."
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/957168.html