Resignation of Palestinian government 'unlikely to bring much change'
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Transcript
00:00 Some analysis on this. I'm very pleased to be joined now on the program by Hisham
00:04 Helieh. He's a Middle East specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for
00:09 International Peace. Good afternoon to you sir, thanks very much for making the
00:12 time. Hello, good afternoon. I'd like to get your reaction first of all just to
00:18 the news that this Palestinian government is to resign. What kind of
00:22 change might this bring? I'm not sure we should expect terribly much change. The
00:28 Palestinian Authority doesn't have authority to put it bluntly over much of
00:34 what would be required in order for it to govern effectively in again the parts
00:39 of the West Bank that it apparently has authority over. This is an occupation by
00:47 the Israelis, it has been since 1967. It's split into several different areas just
00:53 in the West Bank with limited authority and of course no sovereignty in those
01:00 areas. So I think it's very clear that all of the pressure that has been
01:06 brought to bear on the PA, particularly from the United States but also elsewhere,
01:11 has resulted in large sections of the PA wondering what the heck they're doing
01:15 there. Well the Palestinian Prime Minister, the outgoing Prime Minister
01:20 Mohamed Sheteyyeh, talking about the need now for Palestinian national unity talks.
01:24 Does that mean the PA is talking to Hamas? I would not be surprised that all
01:31 of the PA were talking to Hamas because Hamas isn't disappearing from the
01:37 equation. I think even Israeli military experts have been very clear over the
01:43 past four months that even if they manage to severely diminish Hamas's
01:49 military capacity, which I think they are more than capable of doing and have done
01:54 tremendously, that doesn't mean that Hamas disappears from the political
02:00 field of the Palestinian reality. And I think the overwhelming majority of the
02:07 international community realizes that. Whether we like it or not is another
02:11 question but I don't think that anybody should be silly enough to think that it
02:15 will simply disappear or be extinguished. But surely major actors like the United
02:21 States would not accept the idea of a Palestinian national unity government in
02:26 some way involved in the governing of Gaza after the end of this war that
02:30 would include Hamas? Well they may want to accept or may not want to accept but
02:37 let's be clear, the United States hasn't seen fit to use its leverage to get
02:43 their own partners, i.e. the Israelis, to end this war and to accept a two-state
02:50 solution and and and. I mean there are numerous things that the United States
02:54 has said that it wants Israel to do but refuses to use any leverage in order for
03:01 them to do so. The Biden administration has made it clear for months that they
03:04 want this conflict to stop. Actually over the past couple of months it's been made
03:10 very clear that they want this conflict to stop but unfortunately it's also been
03:14 very clear that they refuse to actually use any leverage in order for the
03:19 conflict to stop. So I think any suggestion that the United States has
03:25 some sort of veto power here really needs to be put to the test when it
03:30 comes to the Israelis first and foremost. And as to the Palestinians themselves
03:35 I'm interested in what kind of reaction this news today may be getting among
03:39 Palestinians particularly in the occupied West Bank because Mahmoud
03:44 Abbas is really the figure that is deeply unpopular here and it seems that
03:48 he probably will stay in place now. I think he will stay in place but I think
03:55 Palestinians more generally and of course you'd have to go to to the West
04:00 Bank and to Gaza if you were able to have reporters going to Gaza without
04:05 being escorted by the Israelis. I think you ought to go and ask them because
04:09 quite frankly I think Palestinians more generally are feeling incredibly
04:14 frustrated. The last four months has seen a huge bombardment and destruction of
04:22 Gaza, the continuation and occupation that seems unending, the spreading of
04:27 settlements in the West Bank, several thousand more were announced over the
04:31 last few days alone. These are all illegal under international law, even the
04:36 United States has said that and reconfirmed that over the last couple of
04:40 days. So I think this is just adding to yet one more trauma that they have.
04:46 Let's talk perhaps a little bit then about the latest coming out of Gaza. I'm
04:51 interested in where you think things stand this Monday as to the idea of a
04:56 full-scale Israeli incursion into Rafa. Israel of course has been saying for
05:00 weeks that it will do that despite international condemnation. It hasn't
05:04 begun yet. Do you think it will? I think it will and I think it'll be
05:09 catastrophic and I think that we are being telegraphed very slowly with a war
05:16 crime and I mean that very seriously. The concerns among the security
05:23 establishment in the UK and in the West more generally, of which I am a part, is
05:30 extremely concerned that if you send in a force like the IDF into such a
05:35 severely condensed and you know huge numbers of civilians in a very very
05:41 small place such as a Rafah city, then it is unavoidable that you will see a mass
05:46 casualty event which is a massacre by any other name and the Israelis are
05:52 telling us we are going in and I don't think that we should really be taking a
05:58 face value the suggestion that there will be quote-unquote an evacuation plan
06:02 that will defend and protect civilians and I want your viewers to recognize
06:07 Israel is in occupation of the Gaza Strip. It has been in occupation of the
06:13 Gaza Strip since 1967. That occupation has never ended and as a result under
06:19 international law as the occupying power they have responsibility to protect the
06:25 civilian population in that area. They abrogated that responsibility numerous
06:31 times over the last four months with you know around 30,000 people dead over the last
06:36 few months and I am very concerned that if they go into Rafah, as they say they
06:41 will and I have complete confidence that they mean what they say in this regard,
06:45 that we will see many more people die and they will not be Hamas fighters. They
06:50 will be civilians, they will be women and children. You asked about the situation
06:55 in Gaza, we're seeing children starve to death. We literally have children
07:00 starving to death in Gaza and this is on the international community to put an
07:06 end to. It is entirely possible for it to end today if the White House wants it to end.
07:14 Let me ask you that very directly then. What more can the White House do to stop
07:20 this incursion into Rafah taking place? Let's be clear here, they've done nothing
07:26 at all thus far. What we've seen are statements from the White House. We
07:31 haven't seen any leverage being used from the White House and on the contrary
07:35 we've also seen political interventions at the UN in order to protect Israel
07:40 from UNSC council resolutions. So it's not that the White House is sort of
07:45 throwing their hands up in the air after having actually done anything. What the
07:49 White House has done, what the Biden administration has done for the last
07:52 four months has been about talking. It hasn't been about using leverage. The
07:56 leverage that it has in terms of the arms deals that it has, in terms of the
07:59 aid that it provides Israel, in terms of all of the political support that it
08:03 gives Israel internationally, especially at the United Nations. None of that has
08:07 been touched, none of that has been even suggested to have been touched. Okay, so
08:11 there hasn't been anything that the Biden administration has done in terms
08:15 of actual use of leverage and if it's serious about ending this conflict then
08:19 that's where we need to start. Is there political pressure on Biden, do you
08:25 think, to do that, to impose sanctions on Israel, to cut some of that funding
08:30 towards the Israeli army? Is any of that seriously part of those conversations in
08:34 Washington? In Washington, no. I think what you have in Washington is a
08:41 begrudging awareness that the majority of the Democratic base has been for
08:47 a ceasefire for quite some time. There's a consideration within the Democratic
08:53 Party that Biden may lose this coming election at the end of the year to
08:59 Donald Trump precisely because of how he's conducted the United States role in
09:05 this war because there will be constituencies where this will affect the
09:10 support tremendously. But I don't think that the party, sorry not the party, the
09:15 administration is seriously considering, I wasn't even talking
09:20 about sanctions, but simply talking about the removal of certain arms
09:25 deals and aid I think would be tremendously welcome in de-escalating
09:32 the situation and ending the war.