EDITOR: It all goes back to normal, or does it?
So after the fracas at the UN, the thousands of words, photo-opportunities and ‘brave stands’, it seems that Israel under Netanyahu goes back to the coal face – to enlarging the settlements as fast as they can. This they can do due to their bigger partner, the US under Obama, the most obscenely pro-Zionist president, or as the Israeli and Jewish pundits have it – ‘the first Jewish President of the US’. There is simply nothing which the US President will refuse to Israel, especially a year before re=election is due. If there is a red line for US policies in the Middle East, some frontier they may not cross in assisting Israel against the Palestinians, then we definitely do not know about, or cannot even surmise what it may be. Israel knows it will get away with (mass) murder, and that is why it does it.
The EU are not any better, either because they are servile before the US, or because of their own twisted sense of debt to the Jewish people after the Holocaust. The bottom line is the same – Israel can do anything it wishes and get away with it, and the Palestinians cannot do anything, and they will also get it in the neck. The EU is financing the occupation, so as to remove this cost from Israel’s responsibility.
What is Abbas going to do now, after the ‘victory’ at the UN? Wait. Like he waited before. This policy is writing off the Palestinian people – there is nothing which they should or could do – Abbas will do it all, or as the case has been until now, will do nothing on their behalf, on top of also being the unelected president of the PNA, the police force protecting Israel from the Palestinians. The Security Council holds no hope for Abbas or his ineffectual and corrupt friends. What then? An appeal to the Galactic Council?
The question is – will the Palestinians be the only Arab people not to try and unseat their non-elected ‘leaders’?
Israel must annex West Bank settlements, right-wing MKs tell Netanyahu: Haaretz
In letter to premier, leaders of several Knesset factions say Israel must retaliate against the Palestinians’ ‘unilateral’ statehood bid at the UN, or risk losing its deterrence.
Israel should legally annex West Bank settlements in response to the Palestinians’ recent bid for recognition in the United Nations, the leaders of several right-wing Knesset factions said in a letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday.
The letter was signed by Likud chairman Ze’ev Elkin, Shas chairman Avraham Michaeli, Habayit Hayehudi chairman Uri Orbach, and the leader of the National Union faction Yaakov Katz.
In the missive, the right-wing MKs urged the prime minister to sanction the Palestinian Authority for what they called a “unilateral” move in the UN, saying that Israel had to make it clear that it would not agree serve as the Palestinians’ “punching bag.”
Among the steps mentioned in the letter to Netanyahu, the right-wing leaders mentioned the gradual annexation of all West Bank settlements; cutting Palestinian aid money; accelerated settlement building; cancellation of PA officials’ VIP ID cards; and prohibiting any Palestinian construction in areas controlled by Israeli security forces.
Citing the reasons behind such steps, the missive indicated that a Palestinian avoidance of unilateral moves was the only return Israel received for all of its concessions as part of the Oslo Peace Accords.
“The PA’s UN bid on unilateral recognition is a blunt breach of those agreements, which have, in the last 18 years, taken their severe toll on us,” the letter said, condemning states involved in those accords that are now deliberating whether or n or to support their undoing.
“We call upon you to make it clear to those nations that their conduct during this crisis rules them out was mediator in future negotiations,” the letter said, warning of the “serious damage that could befall Israel if it chooses to avoid reponse.”
In such an event, the letter indicated, Israel would “completely lose its deterrence, thus stimulating the Palestinians to continue their actions against it in the international arena.”
“In fact, the international damage that Israel could suffer in the wake of the UN vote is significantly smaller than that it would suffer if it doesn’t follow up on the principle you set a decade ago – ‘If they give, they’ll get; if they don’t give, they get nothing.'”
Jonathan Cook: UN bid heralds death of Palestine’s old guard: IOA
26 SEPTEMBER 2011
New leaders will spurn two states
Jonathan Cook
Amid the enthusiastic applause in New York and the celebrations in Ramallah, it was easy to believe — if only a for minute — that, after decades of obstruction by Israel and the United States, a Palestinian state might finally be pulled out of the United Nations hat. Will the world’s conscience be midwife to a new era ending Israel’s occupation of the Palestinians?
It seems not.
The Palestinian application, handed to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon last week, has now disappeared from view — for weeks, it seems — while the United States and Israel devise a face-saving formula to kill it in the Security Council. Behind the scenes, the pair are strong-arming the Council’s members to block Palestinian statehood without the need for the US to cast its threatened veto.
Whether or not President Barack Obama wields the knife with his own hand, no one is under any illusion that Washington and Israel are responsible for the formal demise of the peace process. In revealing to the world its hypocrisy on the Middle East, the US has ensured both that the Arab publics are infuriated and that the Palestinians will jump ship on the two-state solution.
But there was one significant victory at the UN for Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the Palestinian Authority, even if it was not the one he sought. He will not achieve statehood for his people at the world body, but he has fatally discredited the US as the arbiter of a Middle East peace.
In telling the Palestinians there was “no shortcut” to statehood — after they have already waited more than six decades for justice — the US President revealed his country as incapable of offering moral leadership on the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If Obama is this craven to Israel, what better reception can the Palestinians hope to receive from a future US leader?
One guest at the UN had the nerve to politely point this out in his speech. Nicholas Sarkozy, the French president who himself appears to be wavering from his original support for a Palestinian state, warned that US control of the peace process needed to end.
“We must stop believing that a single country, even the largest, or a small group of countries can resolve so complex a problem,” he told the General Assembly. His suggestion was for a more active role for Europe and the Arab states at peace with Israel.
Sarkozy appeared to have overlooked the fact that responsibility for solving the conflict was widened in much this way in 2002 with the creation of the Quartet, comprising the US, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations.
The Quartet’s formation was necessary because the US and Israel realised that the Palestinian leadership would not continue playing the peace process game if oversight remained exclusively with Washington, following the Palestinians’ betrayal by President Bill Clinton at Camp David in 2000. The Quartet’s job was to restore Palestinian faith in — and buy a few more years for — the Oslo process.
However, the Quartet quickly discredited itself too, not least because its officials never strayed far from the Israeli-Washington consensus. Last week senior Palestinian negotiator Nabil Shaath spoke for most Palestinians when he accused the Quartet’s envoy, Tony Blair, of sounding like an “Israeli diplomat” as he sought to dissuade Abbas from applying for statehood.
And true to form, the Quartet responded to the Palestinians’ UN application by limply offering Abbas instead more of the same tired talks that have gone nowhere for two decades.
The Palestinian leadership’s move to the UN, effectively bypassing the Quartet, widens the circle of responsibility for Middle East peace yet further. It also neatly brings the Palestinians’ 63-year plight back to the world body.
But Abbas’ application also exposes the UN’s powerlessness to intervene in an effective way. Statehood depends on a successful referral to the Security Council, which is dominated by the US. The General Assembly may be more sympathetic but it can confer no more than a symbolic upgrading of Palestine’s status, putting it on a par with the Vatican
So the Palestinian leadership is stuck. Abbas has run out of institutional addresses for helping him to establish a state alongside Israel. And that means there is a third casualty of the statehood bid – the Palestinian Authority. The PA was the fruit of the Oslo process, and will wither without its sustenance.
Instead we are entering a new phase of the conflict in which the US, Europe, and the UN will have only a marginal part to play. The Palestinian old guard are about to be challenged by a new generation that is tired of the formal structures of diplomacy that pander to Israel’s interests only.
The young new Palestinian leaders are familiar with social media, are better equipped to organise a popular mass movement, and refuse to be bound by the borders that encaged their parents and grandparents. Their assessment is that the PA – and even the Palestinians’ unrepresentative supra-body, the PLO – are part of the problem, not the solution.
Till now they have remained largely deferential to their elders, but that trust is fast waning. Educated and alienated, they are looking for new answers to an old problem.
They will not be seeking them from the countries and institutions that have repeatedly confirmed their complicity in sustaining the Palestinian people’s misery. The new leaders will appeal over the heads of the gatekeepers, turning to the court of global public opinion. Polls show that in Europe and the US, ordinary people are far more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause than their governments.
The first shoots of this revolution in Palestinian politics were evident in the youth movement that earlier this year frightened Abbas’ Fatah party and Hamas into creating a semblance of unity. These youngsters, now shorn of the distracting illusion of Palestinian statehood, will redirect their energies into an anti-apartheid struggle, using the tools of non-violent resistance and civil disobedience. Their rallying cry will be one person-one vote in the single state Israel rules over.
Global support will be translated into a rapid intensification of the boycott and sanctions movement. Israel’s legitimacy and the credibility of its dubious claim to being a democracy are likely to take yet more of a hammering.
Events at the UN are creating a new clarity for Palestinians, reminding them that there can be no self-determination until they liberate themselves from the legacy of colonialism and the self-serving illusions of the ageing notables who now lead them. The old men in suits have had their day.
Jonathan Cook won this year’s Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.
Netanyahu’s speech of lies: Haaretz
Benjamin Netanyahu promised he would feed us the truth, not another campaign speech, but a test of this promise seems apposite.
By Akiva Eldar
Bertolt Brecht wrote, in his poem “The Necessity of Propaganda,” “Even the hungry must admit that the Minister of Nutrition gives a good speech.” (Translation from the German, Jon Swan. ) It must be admitted that Benjamin Netanyahu gave a good speech at the UN General Assembly. His English was polished, his hand gestures precise and his body language perfect. His propaganda was sweet as honey dripping from his lips. It improves from speech to speech. But the prime minister promised that this time he would feed us the truth, not another campaign speech. A test of this promise seems apposite.
The real main message that Netanyahu brought to New York was that peace is achieved through direct negotiations between the parties, not unilateral measures like appealing to the United Nations. (By his truth, expanding the settlements in territory whose future is supposed to be determined through negotiation is presumably a bilateral measure. ) As a goodwill gesture to the Arab neighbors, Netanyahu quoted “an old Arab saying that you cannot applaud with one hand.” The truth is that the “saying” is actually a distortion of a well-known Zen koan. An innocent mistake, happens to everyone. The lie is in the “moral” of the saying, according to which the problem is the Palestinians’ refusal to clap their hands for peace and talk about security.
As a sage providing support for his own truth, Netanyahu claimed that in 2000 Israel “made a sweeping peace offer that met virtually all of the Palestinian demands.” It would be interesting to hear the opinion of then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak on this “truth,” for example on the Palestinian demands regarding the Temple Mount and the Palestinian refugee issue. Netanyahu also invoked his immediate predecessor, Ehud Olmert, to help substantiate his claims that there is no one to talk to. According to Netanyahu,”Olmert afterwards made an even more sweeping offer, in 2008. President Abbas didn’t even respond to it.” This is one of those cases where a half truth is even worse than a lie.
Netanyahu certainly read Olmert’s op-ed in The New York Times last week, asserting that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas never rejected his offer: “The parameters of a peace deal are well known and they have already been put on the table. I put them there in September 2008 when I presented a far-reaching offer to Mr. Abbas,” Olmert wrote.
Netanyahu, who is so concerned about our security that he is even demanding the creation of military bases in the West Bank, claimed the Palestinians are refusing to talk about security arrangements. Really? Let him try to deny that the Palestinians submitted a detailed security proposal, via U.S. envoy George Mitchell. How many times must Abbas repeat, in speeches and interviews, that he is willing to demilitarize the territories and even to permit an international force like the Multinational Force and Observers in Sinai, or even U.S. troops, to deploy in the Palestinian state.
We must also reveal the truth about “the refusal of the Palestinians to recognize a Jewish state in any border,” as Netanyahu said to the General Assembly on Friday. His statement was made soon after Abbas submitted to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon an official request to recognize the Palestinian state within the 1967 borders, a state that will live in peace with the State of Israel.
Apparently Netanyahu did not manage to see the application and did not know that it was based on UN Resolution 181, providing for the creation of an Arab state alongside Israel, as well as on the 1988 Palestinian declaration of independence, which recognized UN Security Council Resolution 242 and referred to Israel as a Jewish state.
In his speech, Netanyahu exaggerated the danger of the threat posed by Muslim extremists, which he illustrated with the precedent of Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip – giving “the keys of Gaza to President Abbas” and receiving Qassam rockets in return. How does one correlate a unilateral withdrawal with handing the keys over to the enemy? Netanyahu easily skipped over the Arab League Peace Initiative, yellowing on the shelf for nearly a decade. In it, all Arab League members, including the Palestine Liberation Organization, offered Israel not only peace and security within the 1967 borders and an agreed solution to the refugee problem, but also normalization of relations.
The Quartet proposal, issued after Netanyahu’s speech, refers directly to the Arab League offer and the Middle East road map – which demands an end to building in the settlements and the dismantling of the illegal outposts – as sources of authority for the negotiations. The Quartet expects the two parties to set aside the propaganda and begin showing their hands. If the Palestinians don’t pull his chestnuts out of the fire, maybe Netanyahu’s truth will finally be revealed.