The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has stalled negotiations on the land borders of a future state of Palestine, but it has not stopped the Palestinians from taking the first steps in establishing what their state would claim at sea.
Palestinian Permanent Observer to the UN Riyad Mansour on Friday said his government had begun preliminary negotiations with Egypt to define the extent of Palestinian-claimed territory in the Mediterranean off the roughly 40km-long coast of Gaza, the strip bordering Israel and Egypt where about 1.8 million Palestinians live.
Mansour said the negotiations, which he described as having begun recently, were possible because of the Palestinian territories’ UN status as a nonmember observer state, which the UN General Assembly recognized in November 2012.
That status empowered the Palestinians to achieve membership in UN bodies and treaties, like the convention that created the International Criminal Court, much to the irritation of Israel and the US, its most important ally.
In this case, the Palestinians have taken action as signers of the Law of the Sea Convention, a 1982 treaty that codifies international law concerning territorial waters, sea lanes and ocean resources, Mansour said.
The ambassador said the Palestinians were entitled to declare an undersea “exclusive economic zone” in the Mediterranean under provisions of the treaty.
While neither Israel nor the US have signed the treaty, it still has the force of international law.
“We are heavily involved in the Law of the Sea because, among other things, it deals with issues related to our borders and our exclusive economic zone off the coast of the Gaza Strip, and we are negotiating, particularly with Egypt, the demarcation of our border of the sea,” Mansour told a group of reporters at the UN.
The goal is “to declare our exclusive economic zone and to survey our wealth in that economic zone” and to give the declaration to the UN agency that administers the Law of the Sea Convention, he said.
It remains unclear how, or whether, the actions could affect the borders of a future Palestinian state, in territories now occupied or controlled by Israel.
Negotiations for a two-state solution to the conflict collapsed more than two years ago. Each side has blamed the other for the impasse.
The Palestinians’ use of their UN seat to advance the cause of statehood has long angered Israel, which has insisted that only direct negotiations between the two sides will produce a solution.
The Israelis have described the Palestinian effort as a public relations campaign that has created a false impression that Palestinian statehood is becoming a reality, whether Israel accepts it or not.
Mansour’s declarations on the Law of the Sea were sharply criticized by Israeli Permanent Representative to the UN Danny Danon.
“This is yet another attempt at hollow victories by the Palestinian representatives,” Danon said. “They are once again avoiding direct negotiations and instead turning to the international community. This meaningless statement does not bring any stability to our region and, more importantly, will not better the life of a single Palestinian.”
Mansour described the Law of the Sea negotiations as the latest signal that the Palestinians intended to use the levers of the UN to help achieve their aspirations.
“The Israeli occupying authority would like us to show that we are not a state, and what we did in November 2012 is a gimmick,” he said. “They want to keep us in the realm of ‘nothing happened.’ We are showing something historic and significant happened.”
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