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How To Make Israel Look Bad For Abiding By Its Agreements With Us

ErekatBy Saeb Erekat, Palestinian negotiator

The struggle against Israel is essentially a struggle for public opinion. There’s no question the best way to capture public opinion is to sabotage agreements we made with Israel and then blame Israel for the inevitable negative consequences. Works every time.

The procedure is pretty simple: we make an agreement with Israel to pursue a certain environmental, humanitarian, or otherwise worthy goal. We neglect to fulfill our end of the bargain, and then when Israel tries to uphold or enforce the provisions of that agreement on the Palestinians under its jurisdiction, we cry Occupation! Oppression! Coercion!

Take water. It’s pretty clear that it’s in everyone’s interest to keep unauthorized well-drilling in check, so the main aquifer serving both Israelis and Palestinians doesn’t get depleted or compromised. The Palestinian and Israeli water companies signed an agreement to enforce a ban on unauthorized drilling back in 2007, and the Palestinian company repeatedly affirmed its commitment to doing something about all that drilling. But it never actually did anything. Finally, Israel got fed up with the potential damage to the aquifer and stopped Palestinians from drilling – and we immediately protested – oppression! Colonialism! Apartheid! It’s like taking candy from a baby. It’s our own baby, mind you, but who cares about having enough water tomorrow when we can score propaganda points today?

Another good example involves medical visits. Israel has superior medical care, no question; so Palestinians often seek Israeli medical care. Of course that entails paperwork and approvals, so the patients have to have the proper forms. Israel signed an agreement with the Palestinian Authority outlining the procedures for such visits, and naturally the forms have to bear the letterhead of the entity that actually signed the agreement, i.e. the Palestinian Authority. A few months ago President Abbas ordered that all of our letterheads be changed to “Country of Palestine,” and each time someone used a form with that on it, the Israelis insisted it be changed before they process the patient. It was a situation begging to be exploited.

So of course we did. We sent a much larger group than usual, all at once, and alerted the media when Israel cruelly refused to honor forms from an entity with which they had never signed an agreement. But nobody cares about upholding an agreement – Apartheid! Discrimination! Think of the children!

Really, it’s just an extension of the human shield tactic: using civilians as pawns in the struggle for public opinion. If Hamas and Hezbollah can place noncombatants in harm’s way so mothers can cry for the cameras when the inevitable civilian casualties come, the least we can do is apply that approach to everything else.

The key lies in not actually caring about our citizens. If we cared, we wouldn’t be encouraging people to make noise about Israeli farms and businesses that employ Palestinians in the West Bank. We couldn’t be bothered to provide actual employment – we’re too busy using Western funding to pay pensions to released Palestinians who murdered Israeli civilians.

The kicker of all this is that all the pressure we can get other countries to put on Israel over settlements is in specific disregard of the Oslo Accords of 1993 – Israel and the PLO agreed that the fate of the settlements would be determined by bilateral negotiations. But that won’t stop us from calling for settlement freezes and all sorts of other concessions as preconditions for those negotiations. And the world sides with us! Despite the specific terms of our agreements!

We can’t lose. So of course we never have to concede anything.

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