An Indirect Route to a Palestinian State?

The state of Palestine would lack legitimacy among Palestinians themselves.

What would it mean to go straight to Palestinian statehood?

A Palestinian state will need to be built from the bottom up.

The PLO has succeeded in obtaining European support for a unilateral Palestinian declaration of statehood.

The PLO embodies Palestinian national aspirations for independence and statehood.

In short, it must accept a Palestinian state, through deeds as well as words.

In addition to nonviolent activities, Palestinian state building efforts have been put in high gear.

As the Palestinian Authority had made clear, the option of a State with temporary borders was unacceptable.

While state building is handled by the civilian Palestinian Authority, political efforts are handled by the PLO, whose chairman, Abbas, is the head of Fatah as well as the Palestinian Authority s president.

The PA needs to continue along the steps of State formation around the priorities associated with Palestinian development objectives, including improved governance.

Netanyahu s demand that the future Palestinian state be demilitarized is just, reasonable, and necessary.

Israel accepted this, but the Palestinians did not, so the Palestinian state was never established.

There cannot be a Palestinian state without dealing with West Bank settlements.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas might be attracted by the money if it is accompanied by the trappings and symbols of statehood.

At the time, the opening of the airport was described as evidence of progress toward Palestinian statehood.

We hope that Israel, in cooperation with the Palestinian Authority and neighbouring countries, will take similar steps towards withdrawal from all occupied Arab territories and the establishment of a fully sovereign Palestinian State.

Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu s conditional promise to support Palestinian statehood has been rendered meaningless by his government s provocative settlement policies in the areas that were supposed to comprise the Palestinian state.

The third challenge in establishing a Palestinian state is to create the institutions of statehood hospitals, ports, airports, roads, courts, police stations, tax offices, and government archives.

Under Fayaad, the Palestinian Authority seems to be superseding the Palestinian national movement s diaspora based emphasis in favor of state building within the territorial confines of the occupied territories.

It is possible that in the Palestinian state there would be a small Jewish minority, consisting of West Bank settlers whose attachment to the Biblical homeland is so intense that they would be willing to live under Palestinian control provided that the Palestinians would grant them Palestinian citizenship.

In the Palestinian case, with the lack of the kind of leadership that Arafat provided, the radical wing, Hamas, cannot be discarded from the process leading to Palestinian statehood.

But isolating the Palestinian government significantly heightened the chaos in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and has effectively contributed to a deconstruction of statehood.

In the Proclamation of the Independent State of Palestine, of 15 November 1988, the PLO made no reference to the address by the King of Jordan concerning the West Bank, mentioning only the end to the occupation of the Palestinian territories.

In addition to nonviolent activities, Palestinian state building efforts have been put in high gear. Salam Fayyad, the energetic Western trained Palestinian prime minister, has implemented a detailed blueprint for declaring a de facto Palestinian state by August 2011.

We should also intensify our efforts for the establishment of a Palestinian State living side by side with Israel in peace and security.

We would also like to reiterate that we will make every possible effort whenever such effort is required, until an independent Palestinian State is established.

At the same time, Israel has continued to resort to all kinds of deception and misleading ploys in order to distance itself from those terms of reference and to ignore the international will in order to both gain land and win peace. That has prevented the establishment of the desired comprehensive and just peace.

It would seriously compromise the prospects for a negotiated solution to the conflict by prejudging the border of a future Palestinian State and indeed by making the building of such a State physically impossible.

Syria ISIS Control Most Of The Palestine Refugee Shelter Yarmouk camp in Damascus Syria PLO Conformed pic.twitter.com zbIq3M3xTC Terrormonitor.org ( Terror_Monitor) April 1, 2015

But a Palestinian state will not appear now or in ten years if Israel continues build settlements in areas slated to be part of it.

A Palestinian state will need to be built from the bottom up. And what is built should not be destroyed.

This requires improved security, inflows of aid and investment, and the curtailment of land expropriations that deny the promise of statehood.

People gradually became accustomed to the expression Palestinian state, and those who embraced it received support and gained prestige on the international scene.

How can Palestinian statehood be preserved? Which guarantees are needed to safeguard Lebanon s sovereignty?

In fact, a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders is exactly what US President Barack Obama has called for.

There will be another roadmap to final two state status, with some timetable for Palestinian statehood, conditional on Hamas s renunciation of violence.

The wall threatens the territorial integrity of a future State of Palestine, as envisaged in Security Council resolution 1397 (2002) and upheld in the road map.

Israel would have a guarantee that its security would not be endangered by a final status agreement and the establishment of a Palestinian state, and that its withdrawal from the Palestinian territories would be gradual, over several years, and monitored on the ground by a third party.

The Palestinians are pushing for international recognition of their statehood, while the Israelis are using their settlement policy to preempt a Palestinian state.

Regardless of which of the two states they lived in, all Palestinians would be citizens of the Palestinian state, all Jews citizens of Israel.

Netanyahu s intention was essentially to force the Palestinians into admitting that the right of return of refugees applies only to the Palestinian state, not Israel.

In such an uncertain situation, the challenge to PA economic policymakers of preparing for statehood could not be greater.

For example, French President Nicolas Sarkozy preempted a common European position on the Palestinian statehood bid at the UN in September.

And observer state status contradicts the reality on the ground, in which the Palestinian Authority does not actually control the territories claimed.