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Building a Palestinian State from the Bottom Up

[Ha'aretz] Shlomo Avineri - The U.S. special envoy to the Middle East, George Mitchell, is an experienced statesman whose greatest achievement is the agreement between the Protestant majority and Catholic minority in Northern Ireland. Some lessons can be learned from Northern Ireland. There, the decommissioning of militias' weapons was a precondition to elections. The PA elections failed in part because the movements running in them were essentially armed militias. The Oslo process was an attempt to build the institutions of a Palestinian nation state from the top down; this fell through because Palestinian society did not produce the instruments for building a structure for the state. In the last two years, the Quartet's Middle East envoy Tony Blair and U.S. Security Coordinator Keith Dayton have made some successful attempts to build Palestinian institutions from the bottom up. They are the only successful attempts so far to create infrastructure for a state. True, this process is gradual and bound to take time, but the other process - the top-down one - failed, and it was time to admit it. The writer, professor of political science at Hebrew University, served as director-general of Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
2009-04-16 06:00:00
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