State of recall

As Palestinians are admitted to the Unesco,and the US threatens to cut funding to the UN organisation,there’s another development which could critically nuance the Palestinian bid for statehood. Mahmoud Abbas,president of the Palestinian Authority,has done an unthinkable for a Palestinian leader. On Friday,he told an Israeli TV channel that the Palestinians and the Arab world had made a mistake in rejecting the 1947 UN General Assembly Resolution 181,which paved the way for the partition of British-ruled Mandate Palestine.

That rejection meant a Jewish state was created while the Palestinians were left without a state. Palestinian and Arab leaders had then called for resisting Resolution 181,with Arab neighbours invading Israel at the declaration of the latter’s independence in May 1948,threatening to occupy the entire former Mandate territory. At the end of that war,the Arab armies stood defeated and Israel had increased its land area by half as much as its original allotment. Ever since,the Middle East has been defined by the threat to Israel’s existence and the suffering of the Palestinians.

Which is why,Abbas’s admission is historic. Not because it seems to reaffirm Israel’s insistence that the Palestinians’ 1947 “blunder” was responsible for their fate,but because he has articulated what the Palestinian internal debate has shied away from — introspection. After all,the inheritors of the old rejectionist line are militant Hamas,while most Palestinians and Israelis agree with the two-state solution. Abbas,as he also regretted,had narrowly missed finding a permanent peace with former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert before the latter quit over corruption allegations. With Hamas and Abbas riding a see-saw — Abbas’s UN bid for statehood,Hamas’s gains from the prisoner exchange — it remains to be seen how this admission plays out with ordinary Palestinians.