Last week, the State Department said that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson could not renew a certification, expiring in December, necessary for the PLO office in Washington to continue operations.
A State Department spokesman cited a U.S. law that states the PLO cannot operate a Washington office if it tries to get the International Criminal Court to prosecute Israel for purported crimes against Palestinians.
In a recent speech to the UN General Assembly, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas called on the International Criminal Court “to open an investigation and to prosecute Israeli officials for their involvement in settlement activities and aggressions against our people.”
The matter seemed open and shut given the unambiguous language of the law. Further, it has long been U.S. policy that Palestinian efforts to challenge Israel in international forums, thereby end-running direct negotiations, are inimical to the realization of a peace agreement. As such, the U.S. has regularly condemned such Palestinian efforts.
Yet it now appears that despite the Abbas speech, the U.S. will allow the PLO office to continue to function, but with “restrictions” requiring “the PLO Office to limit its activities to those related to achieving a lasting and comprehensive peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians.”
Given the longstanding U.S. policy regarding the Palestinian resort to international agencies in pursuing statehood and the Palestinian position that extra-negotiation efforts would serve to pressure Israel to make necessary concessions at the negotiating table and thus were compatible with the notion of a negotiated settlement, this latest development seems to be right in line with typical diplomatic word game solutions.
From the start of this latest confrontation we had thought the overarching issues lay in avoiding the appearance of the U.S. kowtowing to Palestinian threats by ignoring one of its duly enacted laws and keeping Israel from the clutches of an international array of hostile agencies. So the question is whether the “diplomatic solution” covered those points.
The crunch will surely come if and when Mr. Abbas and his cohorts resume their efforts at the ICC and/or other UN agencies – and how the U.S. responds. But we still can’t avoid the sense that the Palestinians definitely made their point – “we will not be pushed round” – and the Trump administration sort of made its point – we are implementing the spirit if not the letter of the law in order to preserve the possibility of negotiations.
Put another way, it has likely not been lost on the Palestinians that they have come through this episode maintaining their little office without having withdrawn Mr. Abbas’s ICC speech.