Sinai today: Kerry in Wonderland

Warren Goldstein:

In March 1992, I joined other white South Africans in participating in a referendum. Excited to participate in an historic event, it was to be the first and, fortunately, last time I would vote in an all-white election. Two years later, in 1994, universal suffrage was introduced in South Africa, and with it, true freedom and democracy, which redeemed us all.

The ruling National Party government at the time was headed by president F.W. de Klerk who had begun a reform process and initiated negotiations with the African National Congress following his historic 1990 speech in the then all-white South African Parliament. In one sweeping moment he unbanned the ANC, announced the imminent release of Nelson Mandela, and set in motion a legislative agenda for the swift repeal of the worst Apartheid legislation.

He led his National Party – the same party that had laid the architecture of the Apartheid state in 1948 – to begin a process of constitutional negotiations with the ANC and other parties, with the open intention of creating the framework for full one-person- one-vote democracy and freedom for all South Africans, black and white.

The decision wasn’t unanimously popular. Two years later, de Klerk’s party lost a crucial parliamentary by-election in a constituency of Potchefstroom to the Conservative Party, which had campaigned on the platform of reversing the dramatic reforms de Klerk had initiated. Dr. Andries Treurnicht, the CP’s hardline right-wing leader, vowed to restore full Apartheid if his party was elected in a general election. The scale and prominence of the CP’s by-election victory seemed to be a repudiation of the reform process begun by de Klerk; it called into question the legitimacy and the mandate of the National Party to negotiate.

And so, in what at the time was perceived to be a shock move, president F.W. de Klerk declared a national referendum, putting before white voters a simple yes or no option to the following question: “Do you support the continuation of the reform process which the State President began on 2 February 1990 which is aimed at a new Constitution through negotiation?” A bitter campaign was fought, and in the end de Klerk carried the referendum with 69 percent of the white voters voting “yes.”

De Klerk’s mandate having been established, negotiations with the ANC proceeded apace.

I was obviously one of the “yes” voters in the referendum, and at the time, this concept of mandate made a deep impression on me. I understood then a central tenet of conflict resolution – you cannot negotiate without a mandate to do so. It is this issue of mandate – or lack thereof – that is casting a shadow over the current John Kerry-facilitated negotiations between the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority.

Even if Mahmoud Abbas and the PA leadership agree to a deal with the Israelis, the question will remain as to whether they have a legitimate mandate from the Palestinian people to arrive at such an agreement.

There is clearly a mandate to do so on the Israeli side – Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu heads a democratically elected, wide-ranging coalition government in one of the world’s most robust democracies.

Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority, on the other hand, are not the elected leaders of the Palestinian people. They have not been to an election with their people for many years, and Fatah lost the last election it faced in the Gaza Strip. It is instructive, also, to examine those parties not represented at the negotiating table. Hamas, which represents the remaining Palestinians, has declared openly and often that it rejects any peace arrangement with Israel, and that a Jewish state on any part of the Land of Israel, including within the 1947 UN borders, is completely illegitimate. As it states explicitly in its charter, “There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors.”

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