Abbas and a Palestinian Passport

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

Mr. Mahmoud Abbas has announced that the Palestinian Authority will issue a Palestinian passport bearing the title “State of Palestine.” I assume he will also change the title on the Palestinian personal identity card to read “State of Palestine” in place of “Palestinian Authority,” and that the letterheads on the various forms and pages of official transactions will likewise be changed to bear the title “State of Palestine.”

This is a fine thing, should it happen — but the Palestinian passport and identity card must not continue to carry the Israeli number. Every personal identity card held by people in the West Bank and Gaza today, as well as the passport bearing the title “Palestinian Authority,” carries the Israeli number, the very number Israel assigned from the moment it occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip. After the establishment of the Palestinian Authority, an administrative arrangement was put in place ensuring that Israel is kept informed of every newly born Palestinian, one by one, and that every newborn is assigned a number according to a pre-agreed administrative arrangement between the Authority and Israel. In other words, the form — whether of the identity card or the passport — has changed somewhat under the Palestinian Authority, but the underlying substance of subordination to the Zionist civil administration has not changed at all, and any soldier at any checkpoint can open his device and access the full details of the Palestinian’s life.

Does Mr. Abbas mean, then, that he will now achieve independence in the matter of identity cards and passports? Of course, Palestinians ought to have been freed from carrying the Zionist identity decades ago. Civil disobedience — the weakest form of resistance — ought to have been carried out; identity cards ought to have been burned, throwing the Zionists into confusion over identifying people and tracking their activities. Two important steps ought to have been taken from the early 1970s onward, given how firmly they would have expressed a determination to defeat and be rid of the occupation: economic boycott and civil disobedience. It was precisely the failure to take these steps that invited the occupation to treat us with contempt, and to toy with our civil and economic conditions and our political future. So will Abbas’s statement now remedy what we have neglected across all these years?

[…] also, this includes a travel ban on anyone carrying the new passport, imprisonment or fines for anyone carrying the new identity card, and a ban on entry into the United States and European countries, or some of them, for anyone carrying this passport. He should also expect further financial and economic strangulation from Israel and its supporters. Is he prepared for that? If not, he had better remain as things stand, and refrain from taking steps he will later have to walk back.

Abbas’s statement is inconsistent with the negotiating track currently under way, and inconsistent with the administrative arrangements charted by the Oslo Accord and, later, the Taba Agreement. If Abbas wishes to continue along the negotiating track, then any steps taken outside of it will achieve nothing, and will remain subject to the vision of the stronger party as to what the outcome of that track ought to be. He knows perfectly well that the Authority previously tried to head its correspondence with the title “Palestinian National Authority,” and ran into Israeli refusal, and backed down.

If, on the other hand, Abbas decides to go through with it and affirm the Palestinian identity, he must be honest with the people about the Israeli measures they are likely to face, so that they can be psychologically and nationally prepared to stand firm. Israel will take a range of measures, and we will find ourselves in daily confrontation with it, and in confrontation as well with the external powers that support it. If Abbas decides to go through with it, this will mark the beginning of civil disobedience, and will constitute a new stage of struggle in the history of our conflict with the Zionists, taking us out of the Oslo phase and into a new kind of confrontation with the occupation.

I believe that the negotiating track has inflicted enormous damage on us, at the national, psychological, social, and moral levels, and that the years of negotiation since 1988 are more than enough to confirm that Israel, and those who stand with it, are not prepared to recognize the fixed national rights of the Palestinian people. The time has come for us to reorganize our national affairs anew, and to rebuild ourselves according to Palestinian premises aimed at liberation and the recovery of our fixed national rights.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “عباس وجواز سفر فلسطيني” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.