EDITOR: Obama’s dilemma
The failure of the US to move Israel into any negotiated peace in the last few decades is coming to haunt Obama. That the US has so totally accepted Israel’s narrative and positioning, is also the reason why there is no possible just solution. Netanyahu, like his Israeli public, is unable to move towards vacating the territories – having spent every minute of his political life supporting the settlers and the continued stealing of Palestinian land. There is no Two-State solution, and there never was – Israel has started to build the settlements within few months of its victory in 1967, exactly in order to make a Palestinian state impossible. All Israeli government of whatever party have continued with this policy of dispossession of the Palestinians of their land, whether they called themselves right, left of centre. That is why there will not be a Palestinian state as result of the vote: Israel’s acts and Washington’s support and veto, will make even this symbolic state impossible, on 22% of Palestine.
So, we have to think beyond this coming week. Israel is threatening to annul the Oslo Accords as a result of the Palestinian UN resolution. To this we should say, good! Let them do so. Let the occupation stand bare, unmitigated by Palestinian agents. Israel controls all that moves in Palestine, so let this situation be clear and visible. This will make Israel again responsible for all the Palestinians and their rights. So let us start accepting realities and demand a single democratic state in the whole of Palestine, with an immediate end to Zionism.
Now this may sound strange for those who were fooled by the decades of the ‘Peace Process’, a process which made it possible for Israel to settle more people on Palestinian land, but brought neither peace nor justice. There is no longer any reason to be fooled, and most people realise that now. Let us start now fighting fora single democratic state of all its citizens, devoid of Zionist racism. There is no other solution, is there?
In the face of the blind intransigence of Israel and the US, there is no longer any choice. What is wrong with a single, democratic, secular state of all its citizens, living in equality? Who, apart from extreme undemocratic Zionists, is against it?
An American veto of Palestine statehood would be a tragedy: Observer
The unconditional, unquestioning support of the United States towards Israel helps neither country
Henry Porter
Beneath the slogan: “Be on our side – we are on the side of peace and justice”, a couple of nice-looking young men, a Palestinian designer and an Israeli social worker, plus their children, gaze out of the poster that appeared on the New York subway last week. I passed it a few times before registering the message at the bottom of the ad, an appeal to end US military aid to Israel, which is timed for the Palestinian application for statehood at the UN Security Council this week.
To the European eye, the message isn’t particularly alarming, in fact barely worth noting, but in one of the great Jewish cities of the world it is regarded as inflammatory. In no time, local Jewish leaders were on TV claiming that the poster was anti-Israel, possibly even anti-Jewish, regardless of the fact that the campaign was paid for by a group that included many Jews and it raises a legitimate issue.
One of the depressing parts of the intractable Middle East problem is the chill that descends on any discussion in the United States about the future of Palestine or, indeed, US support for Israel. Apart from occasional press comment, notably in the New York Times, the media stay clear of criticising Israel, while politicians live in fear of offending the Jewish vote in a country where elections are never more that two years away.
When John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s book The Israel Lobby came out four years ago, they were firstly pilloried and then the book was buried, so that their proposition that Israel’s supporters distorted American foreign policy to the detriment of both Israel and America was never properly tested. That episode dishonoured America’s tradition of unfettered political debate.
But the chill is amazingly effective. Even in these straitened times, when the US is running an overdraft of $14 trillion, the American taxpayer unquestioningly continues to stump up about $3bn every year to support Israel’s military and ensure the country’s continued regional dominance.
Watching a TV reporter tiptoeing round the story of the subway campaign, which was naturally all about who was going to be offended by the ads, rather than the $3bn, I realised that the problem is not so much American public opinion as the lack of it. Most Americans have decided that it is simply safer to leave Israel out of the discourse. So, unconditional support continues without much review or debate or, for that matter, anyone being able to list the benefits to the American national interest that derive from this alliance.
Supporters of Israel in Europe, among which I count myself, find the terms of this uncritical, one-way relationship bizarre and it is unsustainable after three regimes in North Africa have fallen to a genuinely democratic popular movement and a heroic struggle continues in Syria, Bahrain and Yemen. A year ago, the application by the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, to the Security Council for full statehood might have seen premature, but today it is the natural and proper outcome of the liberation that is sweeping through the Arab world.
American diplomats and the representative of the Quartet Powers, Tony Blair, fought hard to dissuade Abbas, arguing that the application for statehood, which will be almost certainly vetoed by the US, would dangerously raise expectations in the West Bank and Gaza, when nothing will have changed on the ground. This is true, but there are times when you can’t stand in the way of history. We are at a moment where diplomatic finesse and arguments about timing and convenience count for little, especially after the democratic aspirations of the people in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Syria have been warmly welcomed by the US.
The inconsistency between the US attitude towards Tunisia, for example, and Palestine seems rank hypocrisy to hundreds of millions of Arabs, whose revolutions, incidentally, were never defined by hatred for Israel or America. The young activists I met on the streets of Tunis and Cairo earlier this year may be wary of both countries but in scores of conversations I had, they talked only about democracy, rights, accountability, jobs and the corruption of their leaders. No one raised Israel or America. That signified an enormous change from the previous generation and provided us with a once-in-a-century opportunity that may be about to be lost.
While many in the State Department and the White House recognised what was vital and new about the Arab Spring, they have allowed the American debate, such as it is, to be dominated by myths that the revolutions inevitably contained an Islamist core and that the Arab peoples were preternaturally disposed to tyranny and sweeping Jews into the sea. True, there has already been an eruption of anti-Israeli sentiment in Egypt with the storming of the embassy 10 days ago, but this is nothing compared with what may ensue if Palestinian aspirations are rejected by America and Israel, both of whom have already accepted the principle of two-state solution. A new Palestinian intifada would be a disaster for the Middle East and Israel and in the current turbulence there is no way of knowing where it would end.
If Susan Rice, American ambassador to the UN, goes against the wishes of more than 120 countries that support the recognition of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders and vetoes the move, we can be certain of at least two outcomes: the reduction of American influence in the Middle East and the further isolation of Israel, which this year has already lost two important allies in Egypt and Turkey. A vote against Palestine statehood will also increase Iran’s opportunities to cause mischief and drive a wedge between Saudi Arabia and the US, which some may welcome, though it is probably not in the long-term interests of peace.
The Obama administration has failed to bring Israel and Palestine together in meaningful talks and has absolutely nothing but further Israeli prevarication to offer the Palestinians. Though we may fear the consequences, Abbas is right to press the interests of his people this week.
We should remember that when Israel applied for membership of the UN in 1949, it argued that issues about refugees and the status of Jerusalem stood a better chance of being resolved if Israel was awarded statehood. That is exactly the Palestinian position. Abbas asks only that Palestine should meet Israel in negotiations as an equal.
There is no good reason for a veto and no conceivable upside. It is a tragedy to watch America, compelled by a failure of its national debate and the fear of what Israel’s supporters may do at the next election, to move unerringly towards such a disastrous action.
A Palestinian state is a moral right: Observer Editorial
The case for a Palestinian state is unanswerable and must be supported in the west
For the Zionist movement seeking an independent state of Israel, desire became reality in November 1947, when the General Assembly of the United Nations passed Resolution 181 supporting the establishment of a Jewish state in a partitioned Palestine.
That state was declared on 14 May 1948 by David Ben-Gurion and the Jewish people’s council in a Tel Aviv museum. The state of Israel was recognised that evening by President Truman of United States and by the Soviet Union a few days later.
More than six decades later, Palestinians, who at first refused to accept the partition plan of the newly minted UN, are seeking similar recognition, firstly in front of the Security Council, asking for their own state based on the 1967 borders free from occupation and settlement by half-a-million Israelis, able to determine their own affairs.
The idea of a Palestinian state should be uncontroversial. The United States supports the notion, as does the UK. Indeed, in his 2009 Cairo speech, President Barack Obama insisted: “Israelis must acknowledge that just as Israel’s right to exist cannot be denied, neither can Palestine’s.”
Yet Obama appears determined to veto the move towards Palestinian statehood, while Britain has hinted it is likely to abstain in a Security Council vote.
Should the Palestinian request fail at the Security Council, it will then go to the General Assembly, where it seems likely that close to 130 states will vote to support a Palestinian resolution which will be able only to grant an enhanced status to become the equivalent of the Vatican – an “observer state”. It will, however, be a deeply symbolic moment providing a political, moral and diplomatic victory for the Palestinian cause that the world will find difficult to ignore.
It will, significantly, also allow Palestine to become a signatory to the International Criminal Court, permitting it to pursue claims against Israel.
While it seems certain that European countries such as France and Spain will support recognition, what is less clear is how the UK will vote in the General Assembly, amid increasing speculation that it might support an enhanced Palestinian status of “observer state” with the right to complain to the International Criminal Court, but only if cases cannot be raised retrospectively.
The objections to a Palestinian state – driven by Israel with the support of the US – are dangerous and transparently self-serving ones, not least in the midst of an Arab Spring where the US and Europe have tried to present themselves as being supporters of democracy, freedom and justice.
The only valid mechanism for the creation of a Palestinian state, this argument goes, is the ongoing peace process, but in fact it is a moribund peace process, which Israel has done its best to smother under the obstructionist leadership of Binyamin Netanyahu.
Equally contentious is the claim by some supporters of Israel that in seeking their own state through the declaration of the international community rather than direct talks, Palestinians are seeking to “delegitimise” Israel.
The reality is that what those opposing the moves at the UN are demanding is that Palestinians adhere to a non-existent peace process in the good faith that at some time it might be revived in the future under American guidance.
They also require Palestinians to refrain from moves that would expose the double standards of the White House and Congress which, while supporting a two-state solution in words, has not only failed to deliver one but now threatens actively to block that outcome.
Palestinians, this newspaper believes, are right to be wary of the vague promise that things might be better in a revived peace process at some unspecified time in the future. Despite Oslo and 20 years of peace negotiations, as comparison of maps makes only too clear, the space available for a Palestinian state has only shrunk with each passing decade as Israel has continued to appropriate more land in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
The actions of the Israeli army in the occupied territories, as the recent book of a decade’s worth of soldiers’ testimonies by the servicemen’s group Breaking the Silence has recently demonstrated, have not changed in the desire to control and disrupt ordinary Palestinian life on a daily basis.
The truth is that the occupation has become self-sustaining, both for the Israeli army which is implementing the policy, and for a partly militarised society and its politicians, who cannot persuade themselves to bring the occupation to an end.
There are risks, inevitably, in taking the issue of statehood to the UN, even in the end if it is only for the upgrading of its observer status. Moves on statehood threaten the long-fractious relationship between Fatah and Hamas, the latter of which opposes the statehood moves, particularly in its stronghold, Gaza, raising the risk of more political violence between the rival factions.
There is the danger, too, that the tactic will feel like a damp squib on the day after when Palestinians wake up to see nothing in their lives has changed.
But already the strategy has shed important light on a Middle East peace process in which a United States that has long cast itself as an impartial broker (while vetoing every crticism of Israel raised at the UN) is a far from neutral referee, even as its influence in the region has appeared diminished.
That new reality was dramatised last week with the explicit threat by Saudi Arabia that its important relationship with the US will be downgraded should America choose to use its veto. As in November 1947, we stand at a crossroads of history.
As British ministers deliberate how they will vote in the Security Council, they are confronted with the choice between what is morally right – supporting a Palestinian state – and hypocrisy justified in the name of pragmatism.
The state of Israel was founded amid risk and uncertainty, which those who supported it fully recognised. They did not argue that a Jewish homeland was possible only in the most ideal and secure conditions. That argument should not be used to further delay Palestinian statehood.
