Ali Abunimah
The Abbas-backed "Palestine Network" has responded to my recent comments about it, via an open letter addressed to me and posted on a blog by a Ms. Fatima AbdelKarim who identifies herself as a volunteer in the "Secretariat of the Palestine Network" based in Ramallah.
The response attempts to portray the Palestine Network as a benign grassroots, democratic initiative to tie together Palestinians inside and outside the homeland in support of something called the "Palestinian National Project." Thus the response hopes to challenge the perception widely held among Palestinian activists that the Palestine Network is a centrally-planned project intended to co-opt, divide and control Palestinian activists. One of the main criticisms activists have made is that the Palestine Network is an effort to build legitimacy for a peace settlement that ignores and violates the right of return of Palestinian refugees. (In fact, I can reveal here that the "final concept paper" of the Palestine Network makes no mention whatsoever of Palestinian refugees or their right of return. I am publishing this concept paper in full below this blog post).
The fact remains that the Palestine Network is entirely conceived and directed out of the offices of Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas and the Ramallah Palestinian Authority (PA). You can read Fatima AbdulKarim's response in full for yourself. I will comment on a few sections quoted below:
This project came along as a demand of many Palestinians abroad and was open to the contributions of many of those who got engaged in the development of the concept of the Palestine Network, which was subject to 13 rounds of edits, until it reached its final draft, those people contributed in order to engage in the Palestine Network project with practical and constructive manner. Upon their request, an unofficial taskforce was established, and it took it upon itself to facilitate the launch of this process.There has been no transparency at all in this process. The only persons definitely known to be on this task force are Abbas chief of staff Rafiq al-Husseini and close Abbas advisers Issa Kassissieh and Ramzi Khoury (who according to the concept paper is the "Executive Director"). The Palestine Network itself has not published any lists of its leaders or participants. Although the Palestine Network's documents provide a website address (www.PalestineNetwork.com) it does not work. There is no way for any Palestinian interested in this "grassroots" and "democratic" organization to get in touch with it and say they wish to participate. It is inconceivable that any genuine grassroots drafting process would have resulted in a document that completely omits the right of return and other fundamental Palestinian rights.
Rather than Palestinians around the world reaching out to Abbas and asking him and his surrogates to take this initiative, it has been the other way around. I have heard directly from activists in several European countries and the United States that surrogates of the Ramallah PA contacted them to ask them to help establish the Palestine Network.
The taskforce will dismantle itself as of the start point of the Palestine Network Founding Conference (23rd -27th of February 2010) that is meant to launch the independent, democratic, and representative grassroots network run by its own members.Based on their track record, it is impossible to imagine any project initiated and run by Abbas' unaccountable cronies being in any way democratic or grassroots. Indeed it would appear that the reason that the Ramallah PA decided to initiate the Palestine Network is precisely because there has been an upsurge of independent grassroots activism, and several initiatives specifically, that are not under the control of the PA. The Palestine Network is an attempt by the PA to reassert some influence and control over the Palestinian diaspora.
As for the finances, so far no monies were brought in from the PNA [Palestinian National Authority]; German and Belgian donors pledged unconditional funds for the launch of this project, in their belief that this project is constructive and is badly needed in this time.The statement above is in response to my assertion that the Palestine Network is funded out of Abbas' office. Since the finances of the Palestinian Authority are completely opaque and unaccountable (although Abbas established innumerable commissions of inquiry into endemic corruption none of them ever produced any results) it is of course impossible for me to know exactly from which bank account the funds flow. But that is not the important point.
The Ramallah PA itself is a shell that would collapse without massive financing from the European Union and the United States. The funding for the Palestine Network comes from exactly the foreign governments that have used money as a means to try to coopt Palestinians politically and encourage them to surrender their basic rights, to keep them divided, to reward those who side with Abbas and his appointed "prime minister" Salam Fayyad, and to punish those who don't. If these German and Belgian donors are truly interested in supporting "grassroots" and "democratic" organizing, it is impossible to understand why they would fund the opaque, undemocratic, unelected and corrupt Palestinian Authority in Israeli-occupied Ramallah.
It was a demand of the majority of the participants of the Founding Conference that they visit the different Palestinian cities occupied in 1948 and 1967, since this will be the first visit to many of them to Palestine; they demanded that they see the realities on the ground themselves. And right before their guided tour in Tel Aviv, Haifa, Nazareth, and Jaffa, they will have guided tours in Jerusalem, in areas close to the Apartheid Wall, and will see the settlements near Bethlehem, where the conference is taking place. The visit to Haifa, Jaffa, Nazareth and Tel Aviv is meant to allow participants to meet with their brothers and sisters’ living in what is now Israel, face to face to hear from them directly on the challenges they face and see their own realities on the ground.This is very interesting; the anonymous participants in the Palestine Network "demanded" to see Tel Aviv, Jaffa, Nazareth, Haifa and Jerusalem. At at time when ordinary Palestinians are not free to move even around the West Bank let alone enter occupied Jerusalem (indeed they continue to be expelled); when Gazans are under suffocating siege; when Palestinian Americans and other diaspora Palestinians are being routinely denied entry at the Allenby Bridge and al-Lydd airport ("Ben-Gurion Airport"); when Israeli occupation forces are kidnapping international activists from the heart of occupied Ramallah, how is it that the participants of the "grassroots" Palestine Network will be able to travel freely in all parts of Palestine, even the 1948 areas?
The answer is obvious: because the "Palestine Network" is organized by the Ramallah PA, and because the Ramallah PA coordinates all its activities with the Israeli occupation, the Palestine Network participants will be given the same special privileges that "VIPs" from the Ramallah PA receive -- as long as they cooperate with the occupation.
Finally, here is the Palestine Network concept paper in full - the one that went through 13 drafts:
(download)
Uprooted Palestinian
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