By Ramona Wadi

The Palestinian Authority has not ceased to display where its compromised loyalties lie. With each public statement or declaration, it is evident that the PA is working for diplomatic conjectures and, as a result, against Palestinian freedom.

In a meeting in Ramallah with the Dutch representative to the occupied Palestinian territories, Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh urged for recognition of a Palestinian state “in order to save the two-state solution from collapse”.

In 2016, the Middle East Quartet had declared the two-state paradigm obsolete. Three years later, international consensus on an obsolete paradigm as the “only solution” shows no signs of abating. The PA has relentlessly promoted this contradiction, even though the only result it has generated so far is the facilitation of Israel’s colonial expansion.

Palestinians have not benefited from the international community’s misrepresentation of their colonized land. The two-state compromise does not decolonize. On the contrary, it allows cohesion for Israel and the international community; the latter hiding behind the veneer of “consensus” to extend its duplicitous role of aiding Israel and pretending to support Palestinian rights. As long as this presence is not challenged politically, the PA rests assured it can extend its monopoly over Palestinian politics; that is, in the absence of political unity that derives its foundations from Palestinian resistance.

Meanwhile, the two-state hypothesis propaganda has ensured its survival away from the needs of the Palestinian people. It has trampled over Palestinian rights and silenced Palestinian demands, to the point that any diversion, however slight, is considered a threat to the international community’s diplomatic agenda. The tragedy in this spectacle is that the PA has completely aligned itself with protecting international interests. Hence recognition of a Palestinian state is no longer tied to prospects of Palestinian rights, but rather to the international community surviving its own debacle intact.

PA involvement in supporting the two-state compromise means that it is also promoting the illusion of conflict. This misrepresentation and mismanagement of all Zionist violations even prior to the establishment of Israel is what lies at the foundations of international and PA diplomacy.

All the Israeli violations which the PA speaks about, notably settlement expansion and Jerusalem have not propelled the international community into action to “save the two-state solution”. From the international community’s perspective, the priority now is to ensure the erasure of Palestinian political rights by continuing to rhetorically resuscitate the two-state hyperbole.

Recognition of a Palestinian state to save the diplomatic agenda is a blatant betrayal of Palestinian rights by the PA. Decades have pointed towards an intensifying dissonance between the international community’s plans and the Palestinian people. To preserve its existence, the PA has abandoned Palestinians; indeed, displaced them from the political process while abusing their existence to continue the farcical differentiation between US and international agendas.

As the absence of any form of a state becomes clearer, it is imperative to return to the earliest indications of Zionist colonization and the forced displacement of the Palestinian people. The solution for Palestinians lies in the Palestinian right of return – precisely the issue which the US is fighting so hard to eliminate and which the international community diluted from the start through a weak resolution that preserved the Zionist project while shifting blame onto the colonized and dispossessed Palestinian population.

– Ramona Wadi is a staff writer for Middle East Monitor, where this article was originally published. She contributed this article to the Palestine Chronicle.