L’ultimo intervento dell’International Crisis Group sulla Palestina si concentra sui nuovi segnali che arrivano da Ramallah. Sia dai diversi nuclei della dirigenza palestinese (OLP, presidenza, governo) sia dalla società civile. La novità è che i palestinesi, per la prima volta da due decenni, sono estremamente riluttanti a riprendere i negoziati con gli israeliani. Perché?
Neither the PLO nor its leadership has given up on negotiations. They have invested in them too much for too long, and their power depends too heavily on the process to accommodate a swift and radical shift. Nor have they deeply reflected about, let alone developed, realistic substitute strategies. Still, they have begun to give them some thought. They are focusing on three forms of action to increase their leverage and reduce their dual dependency: on Israel to end the occupation of its own volition and on the U.S. to pressure Israel to do so.
A first idea making headway is to turn to the international arena, where the balance of power tilts more in the Palestinians’ favour. The suggestion of a UN Security Council resolution either endorsing the contours of a final settlement or recognising a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders is a prime example. Israelis resent or fear others as well, including Palestinian recourse to international legal bodies or boycott of settlement products. Prime Minister Salam Fayyad wishes to go about the goal of statehood in a different way: painstakingly building institutions from the ground up to prompt both international recognition and pressure on Israel to end the occupation. A newly re-politicised civil society in the West Bank, backed to a degree by the Palestinian Authority (PA), is pushing a range of hostile but largely non-violent initiatives directed at Israel as a path between the two dominant (and so far failed) paradigms of the past – peaceful negotiations and armed resistance.
La campagna sul boicottaggio e il disinvestimento, peraltro, è una di quelle che sta inanellando successi, tanto da preoccupare le autorità israeliane. Una campagna che parte dalla società civile, la BDS campaign, ma anche una campagna che sta spingendo l’ANP a prendere misure di carattere simile, tipo la decisione – da parte di Abu Mazen – di vietare l’acquisto e la vendita di prodotti che arrivano dalle colonie israeliane in Cisgiordania.