The Palestinian Authority in the World Court

The Palestinian Authority in the World Court

The announcement by Mahmoud Abbas that the Palestinian Authority, which he leads, is now taking steps to join fifteen international agencies has a striking parallel to events that took place in the United States fifty years ago this month. That’s when Malcolm X called for black Americans to make their case to the world at large.

Malcolm made his case at the Cory Methodist Church in Cleveland, Ohio, in an April 3, 1964, speech he titled “The Ballot or the Bullet.” It was a provocative title, but there was nothing provocative or radical about Malcolm’s belief that the changes he wanted in American life would be expedited if they were heard in a worldwide forum at a time when the United States and the Soviet Union were Cold War rivals.

“Whenever you are in a civil rights struggle, whether you know it or not, you are confining yourself to the jurisdiction of Uncle Sam. No one from the outside world can speak out in your behalf as long as your struggle is a civil rights struggle,” Malcolm told his Cleveland audience. “We need to expand the civil rights struggle to a higher level—to the level of human rights.”

For Malcolm, elevating the civil rights movement to an international level gave it a power that it did not have when it remained a purely domestic movement. “When you expand the civil rights struggle to the level of human rights, you can take the case of the black man in this country before the nations in the U.N. You can take it before the General Assembly. You can take Uncle Sam before a World Court,” he declared.

Malcolm believed that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans were about to make the interests of black voters a priority. He thought it essential to reach over the heads of both parties if he were ever to achieve maximum effectiveness.

Abbas is guided by a similar view of Israel as an intransigent force in its current negotiations with the Palestinian Authority. He has said the delay in the release of Palestinian prisoners by Israel triggered his decision to seek greater international recognition, but what clearly drives Abbas and the Palestinian Authority is an on-the-ground situation that only gets worse as negotiations with Israel drag on.

Abbas needs to achieve the end—and before that, the moderation—of the West Bank occupation and Gaza blockade that make the day-to-day life of Palestinians such an ordeal. “Because we did not find ways for a solution, this becomes our right,” he has said of his effort to take the Palestinian case to organizations outside Israel.

In this context it is understandable why Israel opposes the Palestinian Authority’s desire to internationalize its struggle. The status quo benefits Israel in the short term and strengthens the political hand of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. But the United States is in a different position.

In continuing to support Israel’s stance on this matter—for example, by canceling John Kerry’s trip to the region in response to Abbas’s appeal—we are hurting our claim that we are a nation both Israel and the Palestinians can trust. It is hard to imagine that we would accept for Israel, let alone for ourselves, the limits we think the Palestinians should accept for themselves in international affairs.

We need to take a page from our own country’s struggle for national self-determination. Our Declaration of Independence begins with an appeal to natural rights doctrine and the world at large, not the laws of England. The founding fathers thought they had much to gain from a document that, in their words, showed “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.”

Two centuries later that international appeal still had powerful sway in America’s political culture. In 1964, the year of Malcolm’s “The Ballot or the Bullet” speech, the civil rights movement did in fact acquire international status of the highest order when Martin Luther King Jr. was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. At the time, nobody in the American government said King should turn down the Nobel Prize.

Why then do we feel so threatened today by the desire of the Palestinian Authority to join international agencies that include the Geneva Convention and focus on women’s, children’s, and other human rights?

Nicolaus Mills is professor of American Studies at Sarah Lawrence College and author of Winning the Peace: The Marshall Plan and America’s Coming of Age as a Superpower.