PLO Executive Committee member Wasel Abu Yousef on Saturday told Agence France-Presse that although the Trump Administration has not offered any clarifications to the Palestinian Authority on its vision of how to resolve the conflict with Israel, any solution or return to negotiations would require three basic points:
1. A reference to the resolutions of international legitimacy and international law, especially resolutions issued passed by the UN General Assembly which guarantee the right of the “Palestinian people” to statehood and sanction additional rights.
2 Set a time limit to end the “occupation.”
3. Stop all forms of Israeli “aggression,” from “liquidation and ethnic cleansing” to “collective punishment and settlement.”
Abu Yousef stressed that the PA’s goal is not only to manage the conflict, but to resolve it and end the “occupation of the Palestinian land,” something the pro-Israel biased America has never offered. Now, apparently, things have changed, and, as the PLO senior official suggested, “There was talk of forming a Palestinian-American committee to crystallize Palestinian ideas for any future peace process.” Not specifying who had been doing the talking on that one, Abu Yousef conceded that “this committee has not been formed until now.”
Interestingly, Abu Yousef stressed the necessity of stopping the Palestinian-Israeli coordination regarding the Paris Convention, which he claims is “unfair to the Palestinian people under occupation.”
It should be noted that the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 2015 ratified the “State of Palestine” as full participant, even though there was no such thing as a “State of Palestine.” The PA has not invested in its sewer and water purification systems for decades, and was described its own 2012 study: “In the West Bank, construction and maintenance of water and sewage infrastructure are problematic.” Nevertheless, as if you couldn’t figure this out on your own, the first thing the new member “state” noted was how all its troubles began with the “occupation.”
The Israeli Water Authority for its part blames the poor environmental conditions on the PA’s failure to maintain and develop its inadequate infrastructure which cannot meet increasing demand. Infrastructure upgrades could not be done for six years, because it has been impossible to convene the Israeli-Palestinian Joint Water Committee, established under the 1993 Oslo Accords. Only last January did the two sides finally meet to sign an agreement to renew cooperation in water development.
Now, according to Abu Yousef, this cooperation, intended to improve the lives of Arabs living under PA rule, must be stopped, just in time for the water shortages of July and August.