Palestine: The Legitimacy of Hope

Summary

Richard Falk, Special Rapporteur on Occupied Palestine for the UN Human Rights Council from March 2008 through March 2014, collects blog posts written between 2010 and 2013, unsubstantively altered, around the thesis that the Palestinian national movement has shifted from armed resistance and conventional diplomacy — both exhausted in his account — to a “legitimacy struggle”: a nonviolent, soft-power grand strategy that seeks to win the commanding heights of international law and morality, mobilise global civil society (above all the BDS campaign), and so change the political climate in Israel and the United States enough to make a just peace possible (Palestine: The Legitimacy of Hope, PDF p.18-23). Part 1, read here, comprises the front matter, the Introduction, the whole of Part 1, “Resolving the Conflict” — nine posts arguing that the United States cannot be an “honest broker”, that international law is excluded from the peace process to Palestine’s detriment, that time is not neutral, and that the two-state solutions on offer in Washington and in the Barghouti–Avnery conception are radically different things — and the headnote to Part 2, “Gaza”, which presents Gaza as occupied territory under unlawful blockade and collective punishment, its Hamas leadership willing in Falk’s account to negotiate and observe ceasefires, and the international community’s Responsibility to Protect norm as geopolitically withheld from Gazans (PDF p.70-74).

What the file is

• The book: Richard A. Falk, Palestine: The Legitimacy of Hope (Just World Books, 2014). All text copyright 2014 Richard Falk; LCCN 2014944991; ISBN (pb.) 978-1-935982-42-5, (hc.) 978-1-935982-48-7, (e.) 978-1-935982-47-0 (PDF p.10).
• It is a collection of posts from Falk’s blog “Global Justice in the 21st Century”, organised into seven thematic clusters: 1. Resolving the Conflict; 2. Gaza; 3. Prison Resistance; 4. Global Solidarity: Initiatives and Obstacles; 5. The United States, the United Nations, and International Law; 6. The Larger Picture; 7. Fragments of the Whole (PDF p.12-15, p.20). The selected entries were written between 2010 and 2013 and “have not been substantively altered” (PDF p.20). Each cluster opens with a headnote written for the book; Part 1’s chapter headnote and the Introduction are dated by the Introduction’s signature, Santa Barbara, May 28, 2014 (PDF p.23).
• Two maps precede the Introduction: Map 1, West Bank Fragmented by Israeli Settlements and Barrier, 2014, and Map 2, Distribution of Registered Palestinian Refugees (PDF p.12, p.16-17). In the text copy both maps appear as images with only the cartography credit (“Cartography by Jane Sickon and ©2014 Just World Publishing, LLC.”), so their content is not accounted for in the reading notes for this part.
• PDF p.1, p.2 and p.9 are blank leaves in the text copy, with no extractable text in the original either. No printed page numbers are visible in PDF p.1-74, so locators are PDF pages only.
• The posts carry numbered endnotes (Part 1’s posts run to endnotes 1-33; Part 2’s numbering restarts). The endnote texts are printed at the back of the book, outside this part’s range, and are accounted for in the final part; in this part the notes record each endnote marker and what the running text attributes to it.
• The text copy intermittently breaks words and sentences into spaced fragments (notably in the Introduction and several posts) and has one mojibake artefact, “Barghouti��s” (PDF p.58). Passages are reassembled in reading order in the reading notes and the artefact is noted where it occurs.

Section by section

• Advance praise (PDF p.3-6): unsigned-in-place blurbs attributed at their ends to Phyllis Bennis, Marwan Bishara, Victoria Brittain, Christine Chinkin, Noam Chomsky, Lisa Hajjar, Mary Kaldor, Karma Nabulsi, Raja Shehadeh and, split across PDF p.5-6, one further praise paragraph ending with Shehadeh’s attribution. The blurbs converge on Falk as a “truthful observer” and “truthful witness” whose term “legitimacy struggle” names today’s Palestinian grand strategy of resistance and liberation — non-violent, based on morality, international law and human rights standards (Brittain, PDF p.3).
• About the publisher and “Other works by Richard Falk” (PDF p.7-8): Just World Books’ self-description and a list of Falk’s fourteen earlier books, 1963-2014.
• Copyright page (PDF p.10) and dedication, “For Zeynep & Andre / who got me this far—with love” (PDF p.11). Contents (PDF p.12-15) and the two maps (PDF p.16-17) follow.
• Introduction (PDF p.18-23): Falk’s tenure and stance. “From March 2008 through March 2014, I acted as Special Rapporteur on Occupied Palestine for the UN Human Rights Council.” (PDF p.18) Blocked by mainstream media’s “rigid ideological filter”, he took refuge in the blogosphere. His premise is to be “a truthful observer and a progressive interpreter” (PDF p.19): exposing the occupation’s cruelty, the settlements’ lawlessness, the separation wall’s illegality, detention brutality, child abuse and discriminatory law, and in Gaza acute poverty, unsafe water and food insecurity; also scrutinising the Palestinian Authority’s compliant postures and Hamas’s evolution toward long-term coexistence and nonviolent resistance. “I believe that the time has long passed for Hamas to be treated as a political actor” Indiscriminate rocket fire is condemned as a serious violation, to be viewed in the context of a people’s right to resist occupation and of Gaza’s blockade, collective punishment and “regime of state terror” (PDF p.19-20). Palestinians have learned their UN-confirmed rights “are not self-implementing”, that Arab neighbours will not liberate them, and — after the collapse of direct negotiations on April 29, 2014 — that the “two-state consensus” is a dead end. Falk renames his earlier “legitimacy war” a “legitimacy struggle”, prefigured by the 1987 intifada: “The essence of this legitimacy struggle is its reliance on soft-power initiatives that draw on the capacity of people to serve as the principal agents of historical change.” (PDF p.21) Against a French ambassador’s “Israel has won. The Palestinians have been defeated”, he generalises that most political struggles of the last seventy-five years were won by the side with inferior military capabilities, while conceding Tibet, Kashmir and Chechnya go against the trend. The struggle’s main arena is boycott and divestment edging toward sanctions (BDS); its target “is not the sovereign state of Israel, but Israeli policies and practices” (PDF p.22-23). The volume contrasts “old thinking” (diplomacy or armed struggle) with “new thinking” resting on “nonterritorial militant nonviolence as a liberation strategy” (PDF p.23).
• Part 1, “Resolving the Conflict”, headnote (PDF p.24-26): the mainstream road-to-peace view — intergovernmental negotiations with the United States as hegemonic intermediary — has held since Camp David 1978; the Security Council initially set a peace conception on 1967 borders and a fair refugee resolution in Resolution 242. The 1993 Oslo handshake “sanctified” a process that accentuates the hard-power disparity and is “heavily slanted in favor of Israel”; the PA indulged “the fantasy that the United States can be trusted to act as an “honest broker.””, revived by John Kerry in 2013-14 (PDF p.24). The chapter’s posts are chronologically arranged; “The Palestinian Statehood Bid” is read against Israeli and United States efforts to keep Palestinians “a mute and humiliated, occupied, and dispersed people” until negotiations certify them “legitimate” (PDF p.25). The UNESCO post sets out the legitimacy-struggle thesis; the Mashaal post cautiously reads Hamas as sharing that outlook tactically; “The Palestine National Movement Advances” advocates the strategy, holding that fairness requires a changed climate in Israel and the United States that only much greater solidarity and resistance pressure can produce, with BDS epitomising the militant nonviolence most likely to do it (PDF p.25-26).
• “On the Peace Process”, November 21, 2010 (PDF p.26-28): mainstream discourse cares whether a deal can be struck, not about its fairness, the partisan mediator, or Palestinian representation, “which is neither inclusive nor legitimate”. Abbas’s East Jerusalem freeze condition and Netanyahu’s United States “bribe” are noted. Three severe shortcomings: (1) excessive United States influence from its dual role as unconditional ally and self-appointed “honest broker”; (2) exclusion of international law on borders, Jerusalem, settlements, water and refugees, on each of which “the Palestinian claims accord with international law while the Israeli position does not”; (3) exclusion of the historical context that would imprint a colonial character on the Zionist project from the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and show the Israeli governing process combining “ethnic cleansing, the crime of apartheid, and settler colonialism” (PDF p.27-28). A land swap for settlement blocs is a trap: Israel offering Negev desert or Galilee Palestinian communities would legitimate the blocs and contribute to ethnic cleansing of Palestinians behind the green line “in exchange for essentially nothing” (PDF p.28).
• The Palestinian Legitimacy Struggle versus “Lawfare”, December 15, 2010 (PDF p.28-31): universal jurisdiction, from the piracy precedent through the post-1945 trials and the Nuremberg Principles to the International Criminal Court’s establishment in 2002, grounds accountability for aggression, crimes against humanity and war crimes; but the hegemonic hierarchy’s leaders enjoy impunity — “Double standards sever any link between law, as administered by the state system on a world level, and pretensions of global justice.” Into the vacuum moved global civil society, with BDS movements, citizens’ tribunals from the Russell Tribunal to the 2005 Iraq War Tribunal, and civil disobedience (PDF p.28-30). The Goldstone Report illustrates the legitimacy struggle / “lawfare” interface: it reinforced Palestinian contentions from Operation Cast Lead (December 27, 2008–January 18, 2009) and enraged Israel’s leaders; the lawfare counterattack is “cynically and polemically” undertaken to discredit reliance on international law by the victimised. Palestinians “have been victimized in these respects for more than sixty-two years”; the legitimacy struggle is “the best contemporary instance of a “just war.”” (PDF p.30-31).
• “The Palestinian Statehood Bid”, September 20, 2011 (PDF p.31-37): the initiative has at least given visibility to the ordeal “which has lasted now for an incredible period of sixty-three years”, under occupation, in refugee camps and in exile; the conflict, with nuclear weaponry and world poverty, exhibits the failure of international law and morality, “as well as of common sense and enlightened realism”, to guide the behavior of leading sovereign states (PDF p.31); no issue has generated this solidarity since the anti-apartheid campaign. Palestinian critics call the bid diversionary and divisive, risking a territorial shrinkage of the dispute and limbo for “approximately seven million Palestinian refugees and exile communities”; at the core is representation — the PLO’s councils include the diaspora, the post-Oslo PA addresses occupation alone — and Hamas’s refusal to support the bid despite the Egypt-brokered June 2011 unity agreement. Hamas leaders have periodically indicated willingness to sign a coexistence agreement “of up to fifty years if Israel withdraws completely to the green line” (PDF p.32-33). Falk analyses the furious Israeli and United States opposition (Joseph Massad, Balakrishnan Rajagopal and John Quigley cited), the Charter’s “we the peoples” giving way to “we the hegemon”, and Israel’s gold-plated pretext: only “direct negotiations” can produce statehood, a delay Netanyahu suggested could last sixty years. “In this conflict, time has never been static or neutral.” During Oslo Israel more than doubled the settlement population; the wall was found unlawful “by a vote of 14 to 1 in the World Court”; the Palestine Papers showed even the Olmert government disinterested in resolution despite PA concessions. The United States as broker is likened to asking “the elder brother of the wealthy husband to arbitrate a fight over assets with the penniless wife” (PDF p.34-37). The post closes on Israel’s insistence on confirmation as a “Jewish state” against a Palestinian minority “numbering more than 1.5 million” (PDF p.37).
• “UNESCO Membership and Palestinian Self-Determination”, November 3, 2010 (date as printed; see Open questions) (PDF p.37-44): Palestine’s admission to UNESCO is “a step forward in the long march of the Palestinian people toward the dignity of sunlight”. “The simple arithmetic of the UNESCO vote—107 in favor, 14 opposed, 52 abstentions, and 21 absent—fails to tell the story of the vote’s one-sidedness”, the against votes including Samoa, the Solomon Islands, Palau and Vanuatu under American arm-twisting. The United States threat to withhold some $60millionforthecurrentyear,22percentofUNESC{O}^{\prime }s$643 million 2010–11 budget, is embedded in early-1990s legislation; other states should offset the deficit, with China, India, Russia, Brazil and South Africa — all of whom voted to admit Palestine — glimpsing a “new world order”. The vote proves the time has come to remove the United States from its presiding role; Michel Rocard’s prescription that Europe step in is rejected as “incredibly Orientalist”, and a quartet of Turkey, Brazil, Egypt and India is floated against the discredited Quartet (PDF p.38-42). Victoria Nuland’s “regrettable, premature” is answered: after “more than forty-four years” of occupation the charge of prematurity “qualifies as comedic”. Both the United States and Israel “have lost the capacity to serve their own security interests” and are “well on their way to becoming rogue states”; American support is subservience to “the Netanyahu–Lieberman governing coalition” (PDF p.42-43). The post ends urging membership in the WHO, ICC, UNICEF and ICJ and continued BDS and blockade-breaking initiatives: “there are many symbolic battlefields in the ongoing legitimacy war for Palestinian self-determination” (PDF p.44).
• “Khaled Mashaal and Prospects for a Sustainable Israel–Palestine Peace”, December 12, 2012 (PDF p.44-51): Western commentary read Mashaal’s Gaza rally speech for Hamas’s twenty-fifth anniversary — recovering all historic Palestine “inch by inch”, challenging Zionism’s legitimacy, justifying resistance while disavowing attacks on civilians as such and denying complicity in the November 21, 2012 Jerusalem bus bombing — as “the true face” of Hamas. Falk supplies biography and context as he gives them (exile from age eleven; the 1997 Mossad poisoning in Jordan and the antidote exchanged for the captured perpetrators; the return as a “third birth”; the eight-day attack, Operation Pillar of Defense; the assassinations of Ahmed al-Jabari and, as printed, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin on May 22, 2003) and weighs the contrary record: Mashaal’s interviews indicating readiness for a long-term hudna if occupation ends and Palestinian rights, including return for “the four to five million Palestinians living in refugee camps or exile”, are upheld; his CNN words, “We are ready to resort to a peaceful way, purely peaceful way without blood and weapons, as long as we obtain our Palestinian demands.”; and Mousa Abu Marzook’s statement to Falk in Cairo that the Hamas Charter’s destruction pledge had become “a false issue” (PDF p.44-47). Falk accords the moderate formulations greater weight: since entering electoral politics in 2006 Hamas’s dominant emphasis has been a political track envisioning long-term coexistence once occupation ends. Rocket fire is placed in context — the American plot to reverse the 2006 election by arming Fatah, the blockade since mid-2007, targeted assassinations — with Levy’s figures: 271 Palestinians and not a single Israeli killed between the 2009 ceasefire and November 2012, and since 2001 “fifty-nine Israelis have died as compared to 4,717 Palestinians” (PDF p.48). Hamas rockets violate international humanitarian law and should be condemned, but the Goldstone Report condemned them “in a typically decontextualized manner” and was silent on a Palestinian right of resistance — “a serious deficiency in international humanitarian law” in prolonged occupation (PDF p.49). Israel missed its opportunity when Palestinians limited their ambition to “22 percent of historic Palestine”; the post ends holding that treating the rally speech as definitive is premature, and that if the two-state space is gone the alternative is “a unified Palestine that is governed in accordance with human rights standards and international law” (PDF p.50-51).
• “On Political Preconditions for Real Peace Talks”, May 15, 2013 (PDF p.52-54): diplomacy between sovereign states needs political preconditions; a winner dictating terms needs none, and Israel has performed as winner for the twenty years of the Oslo framework, the Roadmap and the Quartet, expecting Palestine to act as loser, aiming at a “peace” retaining settlements by swaps, annexing all Jerusalem, keeping West Bank aquifers, ignoring refugees and de-linking Gaza. Kerry’s resumption effort lacks preconditions on either side: the Netanyahu government is committed to Greater Israel, and Ramallah lacks representational coherence — Gaza’s elected authorities and refugee communities are unrepresented. Resumption is “worth less than nothing”: the weaker side will be blamed for breakdown, and both sides will escalate Plan B, Palestine’s emphasising BDS, highlighted by Stephen Hawking’s boycott of Shimon Peres’s conference. “Time is not neutral in situations of gross disparity”; a two-state outcome that seemed viable in 1967 and less so in 1993 “by 2013 it is a delusionary goal” (PDF p.52-54).
• Whose “Two-State” Solution? Endgame or Intermission?, June 6, 2013 (PDF p.55-60): Kerry’s fifth trip of 2013 and his American Jewish Committee plea are set against Marwan Barghouti’s answers from prison to Al-Monitor: a 180-degree United States turn, a fully sovereign Palestine in the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as capital, full implementation of Resolution 194, and removal of all settlements. Two radically different two-state solutions cohabit one tent: “the American conception” from Obama’s May 19, 2011 speech — 1967 borders with minor adjustments, acceptance of Israel’s refusal of return and incorporation of the main settlements — against the Barghouti–Avnery conception of genuine sovereignty and equality, Barghouti and Uri Avnery differing importantly on return, Avnery opting for a more territorial view consistent with his “more moderate and humane Zionist views” about limiting rights of Palestinian refugees and about the second-class status of the Palestinian minority living in Israel, but still rather far from Barghouti’s position on these crucial matters so often ignored by the Western media. Netanyahu offers no freeze or prisoner releases; Kerry was probably hoping that his remarks at the American Jewish Committee event would generate some pressure on Netanyahu to be somewhat more forthcoming, and if Netanyahu was more adroit, he could yield on these confidence-building prerequisites and put Abbas in a bind; negotiations would break down with Palestinians blamed and hasbara presenting “a statelet instead of a state” (PDF p.55-58). Barghouti’s quoted denunciation of the Arab League’s amended 2002 Arab Peace Initiative — “No one is entitled to amend borders or swap land” — and his affirmation that “Security cannot be achieved without peace” and that “Total resistance is the most effective” within UN Charter and international law limits are reproduced (PDF p.58-59). Netanyahu’s and Kerry’s real Plan B is “economic peace” plus a four-billion-dollar West Bank investment scheme; the Roadmap and Quartet were “a thin and deceitful veil thrown over a one-sided American control over Israel–Palestine diplomacy”; the flicker of light is the legitimacy war “being waged on a global battlefield” (PDF p.59-60).
• “Reviving the Israel–Palestine Negotiations: The Indyk Appointment”, July 30, 2013 (PDF p.60-63): Kerry’s appointment of Martin Indyk — former ambassador to Israel (1995-1997 and 2000-2001), onetime AIPAC employee, chosen over Daniel Kurtzer and Dennis Ross, both “equally known as Israeli partisans” — is “revealing and distressing”. Kerry’s criterion of “reasonable compromises” excludes international law and the parties’ rights: “international law could be the great equalizer, soft power neutralizing hard power. This is precisely why Israel has worked so hard to keep international law out of the process” (PDF p.61-62). A Palestinian or Middle Eastern co-envoy (Rashid Khalidi, John Esposito, Chas Freeman, Ray Close are named) is unthinkable in the Beltway’s imagination. The post expects “yet another charade falsely advertised as “the peace process.””, against a regional scene of Syria’s civil war, Egypt’s military coup, threats against Iran and Iraq’s sectarian struggle (PDF p.62-63).
• “The Palestinian National Movement Advances”, December 19, 2013 (PDF p.64-69): the legitimacy war approach is Hegelian rather than Marxist: decisive battles are won in “the realm of ideas and symbols of just cause”, not by superior weaponry; its battlefields are “mainly symbolic and nonterritorial” and its mechanism “the conversion of ideas into people power”. Exhibits: BDS growth, the Swarthmore Hillel chapter’s defiance, Dutch companies cutting settlement ties, and the Association for Asian American Studies and American Studies Association academic boycotts. Netanyahu’s and Peres’s boycott of Nelson Mandela’s funeral, Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor’s delegitimisation charge, and Ambassador Ron Dermer’s “Why Israel?” riposte are answered — the boycotts target policies, not Israel’s legitimacy; Israel’s democracy claim is set against Henry Siegman’s “ethnocracy” label and a Palestinian minority of “more than 1.6 million persons” under discriminatory laws. The “no practical impact” dismissal is answered with the South Africa and Pinochet’s Chile campaigns and Falk’s late-1970s meeting with World Bank president Robert McNamara: the ASA resolution helps construct “a new subjectivity surrounding the Israel–Palestine conflict”, and momentum “is capable of breaking down a structure of oppression at any moment”. South Africa’s concealed reassessment until Mandela’s release and Gandhi’s cycle of struggle close the post: “It is a time when genuine hope becomes plausible thanks to Palestinian successes in waging a multifront legitimacy war.” (PDF p.64-69)
• Part 2, “Gaza”, headnote (PDF p.70-74): Gaza in the Palestine mandate after the Ottoman collapse, Britain mandatory until 1947; occupied and administered by Egypt after 1948; Israel the occupying power since 1967. “more than 60 percent of its population registered as refugees”, its 2013 population “estimated at 1.76 million” (PDF p.70). The 2005 Sharon “disengagement” dismantled twenty-one settlements and withdrew forces, but Israel retained control of entry and exit and treated rockets as “terrorism”; the West ignored targeted assassinations, sonic-boom overflights and periodic large-scale operations. Hamas’s early-2006 election victory and mid-2007 victory over Fatah put Hamas in administration of Gaza from 2007; Israel, the United States and the EU classified Hamas a terrorist organization and Israel imposed a comprehensive blockade that “virtually destroyed the Gazan economy”, partly relieved by tunnels to Egypt — “nearly all of the estimated one thousand tunnels” destroyed after Egypt’s 2013 coup, with the Rafah crossing more tightly regulated (PDF p.70-71). Operation Cast Lead, the twenty-two-day assault commencing December 27, 2008, led to the UN Human Rights Council investigation and the Goldstone Report, whose war-crimes charges against both sides caused uproar in Israel, rejection by the United States, non-implementation, and Goldstone’s backing away from the deliberate-targeting finding his three co-commissioners refused to withdraw (PDF p.72). The Gaza Hamas leadership “has been willing to negotiate and observe ceasefire arrangements and has offered long-term assurances of peaceful coexistence if Israel lifts the unlawful blockade and withdraws to 1967 borders in accord with Security Council Resolution 242”, while Israel ignores the initiatives and insists only the PA represents the Palestinians; the April 2014 Fatah–Hamas unity move already led Israel to withdraw from negotiations (PDF p.72-73). Gaza “remains part of occupied Palestine” and “a site of massive collective punishment of the civilian population, which is unconditionally prohibited by Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention” (PDF p.73). The headnote closes on the Responsibility to Protect: formulated after the 1999 Kosovo War, prominent in the Libya 2011 debate, controversial after NATO’s regime-changing operations there, and confirmed as geopolitical by “its nonapplication in relation to the long ordeal of collective punishment inflicted upon the people of Gaza” (PDF p.73-74). The first Gaza post, “Stop Operation Cast Lead 2”, dated December 31, 2010, begins at the foot of PDF p.74 and is read in part 2.

Key passages

• “From March 2008 through March 2014, I acted as Special Rapporteur on Occupied Palestine for the UN Human Rights Council.” (PDF p.18)
• “I believe that the time has long passed for Hamas to be treated as a political actor” (PDF p.19)
• “The essence of this legitimacy struggle is its reliance on soft-power initiatives that draw on the capacity of people to serve as the principal agents of historical change.” (PDF p.21)
• “Double standards sever any link between law, as administered by the state system on a world level, and pretensions of global justice.” (PDF p.29)
• “In this conflict, time has never been static or neutral.” (PDF p.36)
• “The simple arithmetic of the UNESCO vote—107 in favor, 14 opposed, 52 abstentions, and 21 absent—fails to tell the story of the vote’s one-sidedness.” (PDF p.38)
• “We are ready to resort to a peaceful way, purely peaceful way without blood and weapons, as long as we obtain our Palestinian demands.” — Khaled Mashaal to CNN, as quoted by Falk (PDF p.46)
• “Security cannot be achieved without peace.” — Marwan Barghouti, as quoted by Falk (PDF p.59)
• “It is a time when genuine hope becomes plausible thanks to Palestinian successes in waging a multifront legitimacy war.” (PDF p.69)

Evidence the work relies on

• Falk’s own tenure and reports as UN Special Rapporteur on Occupied Palestine, 2008-2014, and his blog “Global Justice in the 21st Century”, from which the posts are taken (PDF p.18, p.20).
• UN instruments as cited in the posts: Security Council Resolution 242 (PDF p.24, p.45, p.72), General Assembly / Resolution 194 on the right of return (PDF p.56, p.59), Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention (PDF p.73), and the World Court’s 14-to-1 finding on the separation wall (PDF p.36).
• The Goldstone Report and Operation Cast Lead (PDF p.30, p.49, p.72), the Palestine Papers published by Al Jazeera English (PDF p.36), and the UNESCO membership vote and its arithmetic (PDF p.38).
• Interviews and statements as presented in the posts: Khaled Mashaal’s interviews with Western journalists, including CNN on November 21 (PDF p.46); Mousa Abu Marzook’s conversation with Falk in Cairo (PDF p.47); Marwan Barghouti’s written answers to Adnan Abu Amer of Al-Monitor (PDF p.55, p.58-59); Victoria Nuland’s statement on the UNESCO vote (PDF p.42); Michel Rocard’s prescription (PDF p.41); Yigal Palmor’s and Ron Dermer’s responses to the ASA boycott (PDF p.66-67).
• Figures credited in the text: Gideon Levy in Haaretz for the 59 Israeli and 4,717 Palestinian deaths since 2001 and the 271-to-none ratio for 2009-2012 (PDF p.48); World Bank and IMF progress reports on the Palestinian Authority (PDF p.32); analyses by Joseph Massad, Balakrishnan Rajagopal and John Quigley on the statehood bid (PDF p.34).

Analysis

Falk’s method in this part is first-person blog commentary framed by two book-written texts (the Introduction and the Part 1 headnote) that impose a single interpretive thread — legitimacy struggle — on posts written across 2010-2013 for other occasions. The argument is normative before it is empirical: contested issues are assessed against international law and universal morality, and actors are judged by whether they accept that frame (the peace process is condemned first for excluding it). Evidence is illustrative rather than systematic: ratios of deaths, vote arithmetic, appointment biographies and quoted statements carry the claims, and contrary evidence is engaged mainly in the Mashaal post, where the Gaza rally speech is weighed against interview statements and the moderate record is preferred expressly “at least for exploratory purposes” (PDF p.47). The limits follow from the form: posts are dated interventions in debates whose other sides appear in summary or quotation, figures are credited to the intermediaries named in the Evidence section rather than to underlying datasets, and the endnote texts supporting individual claims are printed at the back of the book, outside this part. Falk states his standpoint rather than concealing it — “a truthful observer and a progressive interpreter” (PDF p.19) — and the headnotes, written in 2014, read the 2013-14 Kerry effort’s collapse back into posts from 2010 onward.

People, organizations, places and events

Richard Falk, Khaled Mashaal, Marwan Barghouti, Martin Indyk, UNESCO, Hamas, Palestinian Authority, Palestine Liberation Organization, Mahmoud Abbas, Benjamin Netanyahu, Richard Goldstone, Goldstone report, Gaza, Oslo Accords, First Intifada

Concepts

Legitimacy struggle, Lawfare, Universal jurisdiction, Two-state solution, Responsibility to Protect, BDS movement, Self-determination, Right of Return

How it relates to other sources

• With Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation: both end in advocacy of nonviolent pressure from below — Makdisi’s Coda and Epilogue present BDS as an emergent alternative leadership answering Palestinian civil society’s call, and his Hebron and Gaza chapters document the everyday regime Falk’s posts invoke in general terms. Falk’s treatment of Hamas differs from Makdisi’s Epilogue assessment: where Makdisi finds Hamas has little to offer beyond not being Fateh, Falk reads Hamas since 2006 as pursuing a political track toward long-term coexistence and argues it should be treated as a political actor. Both assessments stand, attributed, on the Hamas page.
• With The Question of Palestine: Falk takes up Said’s representation problem directly — the statehood-bid post’s core question, whether the PA or the PLO speaks for the Palestinian “self” entitled to self-determination, is Said’s question in the conditions of 2011 — and repeats Said’s finding that the United States blueprint offers autonomy well short of self-determination.
• With The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine and Zionist Colonialism in Palestine: Falk’s three shortcomings of the peace process adopt their frame in one sentence — a process excluding the historical context would not see a project that “combines ethnic cleansing, the crime of apartheid, and settler colonialism” (PDF p.28) — without the archival apparatus those works supply.
• Falk is the first ingested source written from inside the UN human-rights machinery it discusses: the Goldstone Report, the Human Rights Council investigations and the UNESCO vote appear in Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation as outside events; here they are narrated by the serving Special Rapporteur for the territory concerned.

Open questions

• The UNESCO post is dated November 3, 2010 as printed (PDF p.38), yet it is placed after the December 15, 2010 “Lawfare” post and the September 20, 2011 statehood-bid post, in a chapter whose headnote says the posts are chronologically arranged (PDF p.25), and it answers the statehood sequence of posts around it. The date stands as printed; whether the printed year is the book’s error is not resolved within this part.
• The Mashaal post dates the killing of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin to May 22, 2003 (PDF p.46) and gives Mashaal’s birthplace as “the Selwad neighborhood of Ramallah” (PDF p.45). Both stand as printed; no second statement of either appears in PDF p.1-74 against which to check them.
• Falk’s two counts of the Palestinian minority in Israel differ across posts: “more than 1.5 million” in the statehood-bid post (PDF p.37) and “more than 1.6 million persons” in the December 2013 post (PDF p.66). Both stand as printed, in their places.
• The endnote texts for Part 1’s posts (endnotes 1-33) and Part 2’s opening are printed at the back of the book, outside PDF p.1-74; attributions carried only by an endnote are therefore unresolved in this part.
• The content of the two maps (PDF p.16-17) is carried in the original as images; the text copy preserves only their titles (in the Contents, PDF p.12) and the cartography credit, so what each map shows is unaccounted for in this part.

Coverage

PDF p.1-74 of 297, read in full in part 1 of 5. Remaining: part 2, PDF p.75-135; part 3, PDF p.136-197; part 4, PDF p.198-259; part 5, PDF p.260-297.