*This piece is published in collaboration with Chatham House. It is part of a series which addresses the future of governance and security in the Middle East and North Africa, and their impact on the role of the state in the region. The Palestinian political leadership’s obsession with the idea of statehood as a means to realise self-determination and freedom, has proved to be detrimental to the struggle of decolonising Palestine. This leadership – under the pressure of regional and international actors – committed a strategic mistake by prioritizing a “statehood under colonialism” paradigm instead of leading processes to decolonise Palestine first and then engage in processes of state formation. Statehood under colonialism is a fundamentally flawed paradigm and a distraction from the core impediment to peace and justice. The adoption of this “miscalculated priority” could be illustrated through four “critical junctures” in history and until the present day. These include the 1988 Palestinian Declaration of Independence, the signature of the 1993 Oslo Accords – which was, in essence, a security arrangement – to eventually establish a state, the state-building project under the premiership of Salam Fayyad, who declared that Palestinians are getting “closer to the Rendezvous with freedom” as the state exists in all but name,1Salam Fayyad, “Talk to Al-Jazeera: Salam Fayyad”, Al-Jazeera, 6 August 2011. Available at https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/talktojazeera/2011/08/201186783974816.html and finally the Palestinian Authority’s UN statehood bid led by President Mahmoud Abbas, which continues to unfold until the present day. “Statehood” becomes the narrow and only lens through which the political leadership examines the national liberation project, and against which their strategies are assessed. It also becomes the analytical and operational lens that the international actors use to justify their policy interventions, aid packages, and political benchmarking. Yet, this alignment on the objective and approach reinforced the impasse. Crucially, … Continue reading “What is a State without the People?”: Statehood Obsession and Denial of Rights in Palestine