By Richard Falk

The latest occupation crime in Afghanistan was a shooting spree on March 11, reportedly committed by a lone American soldier in Afghanistan’s Kandahar Province.

Sixteen Afghan civilians, including women and children, were shot in the middle of the night without any pretence of combat activity in the area. Such an atrocity is one more expression of a pathological reaction, allegedly by one soldier, to an incomprehensible military reality – a reality that seems to be driving US military personnel on the ground crazy. The main criminal here is not the shooter, but the political leader who insists on continuing the mission in face of the evidence.

US soldiers urinating on dead Taliban fighters, the burning of Qurans, and troops convicted of killing Afghan civilians for sport or routinely invading the privacy of Afghan homes in the middle of the night: whatever the military commanders in Kabul might say in regret, and Washington might repeat by way of formal apology, has become essentially irrelevant.

These so-called “incidents” or “aberrations” are nothing of the sort. These happenings are pathological reactions of men and women caught up in a death trap not of their making, an alien environment that collides lethally with their sense of normality and decency. Besides the desecration of foreign lands and their cultural identities, US political leaders have, for more than a decade, unforgivably placed young Americans in intolerable situations of risk and enmity. Equally revealing are recent studies documenting historically high suicide rates in the lower ranks of the US military.

Senseless and morbid wars produce senseless and morbid behaviour. Afghanistan, like Vietnam 40 years earlier, has become an atrocity-generating killing field. In Vietnam, the White House finally accelerated the US exit when it became evident that soldiers were murdering their own officers, a pattern that became so widespread that it gave birth to the word “fragging”.

Whatever the pretext after the 9/11 attacks, the Afghanistan War was misconceived from its inception. Air warfare was relied upon to decimate the leadership ranks of al-Qaeda, but instead its top political and military commanders slipped across the border. Regime change in Kabul, with a leader anointed by Washington to help coordinate the foreign occupation of his country, was a counterinsurgency formula that had failed over and over again.

But with the militarist mindset prevailing in the US government, failure was once again reinterpreted as an opportunity to do it right this time. Despite the efficiency of the radical new tactic of killing targets using drones – the latest form of state terror – the outcome is no different.

What more needs to be said? It is long past time for the United States and its NATO allies to withdraw with all deliberate speed from Afghanistan, rather than to proceed on its present course: negotiating a long-term “memorandum of understanding” that transfers the formalities of the occupation to the Afghans while leaving private US military contractors – 21st century mercenaries – as an outlaw governance structure after most combat forces withdraw by the end of 2014.

As in Iraq, what has been “achieved” in Afghanistan is the very opposite of the goals set by Pentagon planners and State Department diplomacy: the country is decimated rather than reconstructed, the regional balance shifts in the direction of Islamic extremism, and the United States is ever more widely feared and resented, solidifying its geopolitical role as the great malefactor of our era.

The United States seems incapable of grasping the pathologies it has inflicted on its own citizenry. The disgusting 2004 pictures of US soldiers getting their kicks from torturing and humiliating naked Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib should have made clear once and for all to the leaders and the public that it was time to bring troops home, and keep them there if we cared for their welfare. What the pattern exhibits is not only a criminal indifference to the wellbeing of “others”, but a similar disregard of the welfare of our collective selves. The current bellicose Republican presidential candidates calling for attacks on Iran favours taking a giant step along the road – a road that is heading towards an American implosion. And the Obama presidency is only a half step behind: counselling patience, but itself indulging in war-mongering – whether for its own sake, or on behalf of Israel, is unclear.

President Obama was recently quoted as saying of Afghanistan: “Now is the time for us to transition.”

No, it isn’t. “Now is the time to leave.” And not only for the sake of the Afghan people, but for the sake of the American people Obama was elected to serve.

Richard Falk is the Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University and Visiting Distinguished Professor in Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has authored and edited numerous publications spanning a period of five decades, most recently editing the volume International Law and the Third World: Reshaping Justice (Routledge, 2008).

He is currently serving his third year of a six year term as a United Nations Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights.

Follow him on Twitter: @rfalk13

Article Courtesy Al Jazeera.com

By Richard Falk

There is a natural disposition for supporters of the Palestinian struggle for self-determination to suppose that the Palestinian statehood bid must be a positive initiative, because it has generated such a frantic Israeli effort to have it rejected. Despite the high costs to United States diplomacy in the Middle East at this time of regional tumult and uncertainty, the US has committed itself to exercise its veto on Israel’s behalf if that turns out to be necessary. To avoid the humiliation of disregarding the overwhelming majority opinion of most governments in the world, the US has rallied the former European colonial powers to stand by its side, while leaning on Bosnia and Colombia to abstain, thereby hoping to deny Palestine the nine votes it needs for a Security Council decision, without technically casting a veto.

On the side of Palestinian statehood, one finds China, Russia, India, South Africa, Brazil, Lebanon, Nigeria, and Gabon, the leading countries of the South, the main peoples previously victimised by colonial rule. Is not a comparison of these geopolitical alignments sufficient by itself to resolve the issue of taking sides on such a litmus test of political identity? The old West versus the new South.

Add to this the drama, eloquence, and forthrightness of Mahmoud Abbas’s historic speech of September 23 to the General Assembly, which received standing ovations from many of the assembled delegates. Such a favourable reception was reinforced by its contrast with the ranting polemic delivered by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who insulted the UN by calling it “the theatre of the absurd” while offering nothing of substance that might make even mildly credible his strident rhetoric claim to support “peace,” “direct negotiations” and “a Palestinian state”. The deviousness of Netanyahu was made manifest when, a few days later, the Israeli government announced that it had approved 1,100 additional housing units in the major settlement of Gilo, east of Jerusalem. This was a bridge too far even for Hillary Clinton, who called the move “counter-productive” and which Europeans regarded as deeply disappointing and confidence-destroying – so much so that Netanyahu was openly asked to reverse the decision.

Security Council recommendation

There are a variety of other indications that additional settlement expansion and ethnic cleansing initiatives will be forthcoming in the weeks ahead. Are not such expressions of Israeli defiance that embarrasses even their most ardent governmental supporter enough reason by itself to justify a Security Council recommendation of Palestine statehood at this time? Would it not be worthwhile at this crucial moment to demonstrate the wide chasm separating increasing global support for the pursuit of justice on behalf of the Palestinian people from this domestically driven US reliance on its ultimate right of veto to block Palestinian aspirations? Would it not be well to remind Americans across the country, including even its captive Congress, that its own Declaration of Independence wisely counselled “a decent respect for the opinions of mankind”?

If ever the use of the veto seems ill-advised and deeply illegitimate, it is in this instance, which the Obama administration seems to acknowledge. Otherwise why would it use its leverage to induce allies and dependent states to go along with its opposition to Palestinian membership in the UN?

Turning to the speech itself, the language of recognition may be more notable than the substance. Never before in an international forum had the voice of the Palestinian Authority spoke of Israel’s occupation policies so unabashedly – as “colonial”, as involving “ethnic cleansing”, as imposing an unlawful “annexation wall”, as creating a new form of “apartheid”. With admirable directness, Israel was accused of carrying out the occupation in a manner that violated fundamental rules of international humanitarian law, and cumulatively amounted to the commission of crimes against humanity.

In the course of his speech Abbas tried hard to reassure the Palestinian diaspora on two matters of deep concern: that the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) will continue to represent the Palestinian people, who are the ultimate beneficiaries of the most fundamental of Palestinian rights at stake, the right of self-determination. The issue here is lost on almost all observers of the conflict, that the Palestinian Authority (PA), of which Abbas is president, is a subsidiary body that was created by the PLO with a temporary mandate to administer Palestinian territory under occupation, and thus it was important to allay suspicions that the PLO was an intended casualty of the statehood bid – so as to territorialise the conflict and give the Abbas and PA leadership complete representational control over the Palestinian role at the UN.

Straightforward language

The deep concern here relates to the adequacy of representation relating to the Palestinians living in refugee camps in neighbouring Arab countries or in exile around the world. In the Palestinian National Council, 483 of its 669 members are drawn from Palestinians not living under occupation. President Abbas used the clearest possible language to reaffirm the position of the PLO just prior to enumerating the five conditions guiding his leadership role: “I confirm, on behalf of the PLO, the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, which will remain so until the end of the conflict in all its aspects and until the resolution of the final status issues…”

In the background of this representation issue is an anxiety that Palestinian refugee rights will be forgotten or marginalised in the course of striking a deal that is build around a “land for peace” formula. Again, Abbas inserted some reassuring language in his speech to the effect that peace will depend on “a just and agreed upon solution to the Palestine refugee issue in accordance with resolution 194,” which unconditionally affirmed a Palestinian right of return. Relevantly, Netanyahu in his speech alluded to the “fantasy of flooding Israel with millions of Palestinians”, which is his way of both dismissing the rights of Palestinian refugees, especially as derived from the massive dispossession of Palestinian in 1948, and insisting on the Palestinian recognition of Israel as “a Jewish state”. This insistence combines demographics with democracy, contending that ever since the promise of Lord Balfour on behalf of the British government to a leader of the Zionist movement in 1917 there were continual acknowledgements that Israel was a Jewish state.

Netanyahu made short shrift of the claims to dignity and equality of the 1.5m Palestinians existing under an array of discriminatory burdens – by saying merely that Israel treats its minorities in a manner that respects their human rights. It should be recalled that the Balfour declaration, a notoriously colonial disposition, did not promise the Jewish people a state, but rather “a national home”, and that it was to be established in a manner that did not interfere with the “civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”. Human rights and democracy have become significantly universalised during the past several decades. This development implies that the governing structures of society embodied in the state must renounce any claim of ethnic or religious particularity.

Religious declaration

Political legitimacy in the 21st century should not be accorded to any state that claims to be a Jewish state, an Islamic state, or a Christian state. Such statist neutrality should be set forth as an element of legitimate statehood by formal action at the United Nations. Such a declaration would impose a limit on the right of self-determination by denying to peoples the right to establish ethnic or religious states. In a globalising world, ethnic and religious diversity are present in every major state, and this needs to be respected by unfurling a banner of equality that grants religious freedom to all faiths and allows collective identities to be expressed without prejudice.

For some widely respected Palestinian activists and NGOs, these assurances were not enough. With the formidable intellectual support of Oxford professor, Guy Goodwin-Gill, the very idea of Palestinian statehood compromises the representational rights of diaspora Palestinians within UN arenas of decision – and potentially deforms future negotiations by according predominance to territorial priorities. Goodwin-Gill’s analysis was built around the general view that a state could never adequately represent people outside its borders.

Given existing realities, this would mean disenfranchising the Palestinian refugee and exile population that comprises a majority of “the Palestinian people” who are as a collectivity the holder of the overarching entitlement embodied in the right of self-determination. Such a view may be technically correct, and operationally prudent, but it overstates the clarity of the legal implications of Palestinian statehood and UN membership, while understating the degree to which what is being questioned are the psycho-political priorities of the current PA/PLO leadership.

To further strengthen and promote the unity of the Palestinian global solidarity movement, it is crucial to continue to seek accommodation between territorial and non-territorial dimensions of the Palestinian struggle, and thus to minimise intra-Palestinian divergences, including the ongoing rift with Hamas. Here again Abbas had some reassuring words to say about the future implementation of the reconciliation agreement reached between the PLO and Hamas in June, but the failure of Hamas to endorse the statehood/membership bid at this time raises doubts about whether cooperation between these two political tendencies of Palestinians living under occupation will be forthcoming in the future.

There are, against this background, some further grounds for concern that result from gaps or disappointing formulations in the Abbas speech. One glaring gap was the failure to address the accountability issues associated with the non-implemented recommendations of the Goldstone Report, arising out of war crimes allegations associated with massive attacks (Israeli code named “Operation Cast Lead”) on Gaza between December 27, 2008 and January 18, 2009. In an important statement issued by the Palestinian Centre of Human Rights, jointly with several respected human rights NGOs, the PLO was given responsibility for doing their best to see that these recommendations for referral to the International Criminal Court be carried out.

In the words of the statement: “Should the PLO choose not to pursue the accountability process initiated by the Report of the UN Fact-Finding Mission – at the expense of the Statehood initiative – this will amount to the prioritisation of political processes over victims’ fundamental rights; indicating acceptance of the pervasive impunity that characterises the situation in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory.”

International law

Although implicit in the Abbas speech, the systematic refusal of Israel to comply with international law, was not accorded the emphasis in deserves. Given this reality, it was comic irony for Netanyahu to invoke international law in relation to the captivity of a single Israel soldier, Corporal Gilad Shalit; of course, international law should be observed in relation to every person, but when Israel subjects the whole of Gaza to a punitive blockade that has lasted for more than four years, imprisons thousands of Palestinians in conditions below international legal standards, and refuses to implement the near unanimous Advisory Opinion of the World Court on the unlawfulness of its annexation wall, it has lost all credibility to rely on international law on those few occasions when it works to its advantage.

Even more disturbing, because so relevant to the present posture of the conflict, was the rather bland expression of willingness on the part of the PLO to resume direct negotiations – provided that Israel imposes “a complete cessation of settlement activities”. As there is no chance that this condition will be met, it may not be so important for Abbas to question the value of direct negotiations, given their repeated failure to move the parties any closer to peace during the past 18 years. In fact, Israel has cloaked settlement expansion, ethnic cleansing, and a variety of encroachments on what might have at one time become a viable Palestinian state, with the charade of periodic peace talks held under the non-neutral auspices of the United States.

What Abbas could have done more effectively, given the unlikelihood of an affirmative Security Council recommendation on UN membership, is to couple the statehood/membership bid with the demand of a new framework for future negotiations which includes both Israeli commitments to abandon settlement expansion in East Jerusalem as well as the West Bank, and more importantly, selects a state or regional organisation to provide non-partisan auspices for the talks. Such a demand would have made clear that the PLO/PA was no longer willing to play along with the Oslo game that has more than doubled the settler population and allowed Israel to invest in an expensive settler-only infrastructure that is unlikely to be ever voluntarily dismantled. It is past time to declare the Oslo framework of direct negotiations as terminally ill, futile, and illegitimate, and incapable of drafting a roadmap that leads anywhere worth going. For the UN to be one of the four Quartet members, especially given the American hegemonic control over the diplomacy on the conflict, also warranted a harsh comment by Abbas.

What the future holds is more uncertain than ever. The mainstream media has tended to criticise both Israel and the PA/PLO asif their respective behaviour was equivalent. For instance, the Palestinian statehood/membership initiative is treated as equally provocative as the Israeli announced intention to expand the unlawful Gilo settlement. Such an attitude does belong in the “theatre of the absurd”, equating a completely legal, arguably overdue plea to be given an upgraded status at the UN with a criminal encroachment on basic Palestinian rights associated with territory under occupation, as recognised by Article 49(6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention. The equating of what is grossly unequal is a common form of misrepresentation in relation to the Israel/Palestine conflict, making Israeli violent forms defiance of international law somehow no more objectionable than Palestinian nonviolent pursuit of diplomatic options.

Whether Israel will follow through on its threats to “punish” the PA for undertaking this completely legal initiative remains to be seen. Already there is troublesome indications of widespread settler violence in the West Bank that is either unopposed or backed by Israeli military and security units. As has been observed by the Israeli president, Shimon Peres, Israel will never have a more moderate partner for peace than the Ramallah leadership, and if it undermines its viability it will be demonstrating once again that it has lost its capacity to promote its national interests. It has shown this aspect of decline most dramatically by picking a fight with a resurgent Turkey, and then missing one opportunity after another to repair the damage, which is what Ankara hoped would happen.

As regional developments move toward greater support for the Palestinian struggle, Israel is allowing what might have been a historic opportunity for a sustainable peace to slip away. An acute problem with extremism, whether of the Likud or Tea Party variety, is that it subordinates interests and rationality to the dictates of an obsessive and emotive vision that is incapable of calculating the balance of gains and losses in conflict situations, being preoccupied with all or nothing outcomes, which is the antithesis of diplomacy. This is a path that inevitably produces acute human suffering and often leads to disaster. It is time for Israelis to abandon such a path, for their own sake, and for the sake of others.

Richard Falk is Albert G Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University and Research Professor in Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has authored and edited numerous publications spanning a period of five decades. His most recent book is Achieving Human Rights (2009). He is currently serving his fourth year of a six-year term as a United Nations special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights.

Article and photo courtesy Al Jazeera English online

By Yousef Munayyer

The statehood bid didn’t change the occupation, but it did force international players to show their cards.

1. Washington is broken and won’t be fixed any time soon

The Palestinians came to the United Nations in the hopes of putting forward a membership application because they had come to understand that domestic dynamics in the United States made it impossible for Washington to be an even-handed broker. If the Obama administration can’t get Netanyahu’s right-wing government to halt settlement expansion – an Israeli obligation under international law and the US-initiated Road Map for Peace – how could they possibly press Netanyahu to dismantle settlements, divide Jerusalem and admit refugees when the time came to get serious?

The United States is an exceptional place and it is a country that believes in its exceptionalism. Washington likes to believe it can do anything, and it can do and has done many things. But there is one thing it simply cannot do and that is even-handedly broker a deal between Israel and Palestinians. This has to do almost entirely with US domestic politics. Whether you blame the Israel lobby or accept the narrative that Americans en masse have a special connection with Israel, there is no doubt that America is solidly in Israel’s corner.

The Israelis have long since recognised this; that is why they insist no other state or alliance of states mediates this conflict. Most Palestinians have long since recognised this and now, after 20 years of failed negotiations, even those among the Palestinians which have been most committed to a US-led peace process have come to the same conclusion.

If there was any doubt about how Washington’s domestic politics handicaps its ability to broker, it was erased by President Obama’s speech at the United Nations General Assembly. Without even a modicum of recognition of Palestinians’ suffering and without one word of condemnation for Israeli colonialism, President Obama rang in the US election season.

Might this change in the future? Sure. There are certainly signs that indicate that Americans in general are becoming more educated about the Palestinian plight and are becoming more hesitant to automatically support Israel’s every move. Yet this nascent change has not transcended into the level of America’s political elite, and lawmakers are probably as solidly pro-Israel today as they have ever been. Continued Israeli intransigence, colonisation and massacres such as the 2008-2009 war on Gaza might expedite this process, but Palestinians cannot afford to wait until American policy actually changes. For Palestinians, there is already too little of Palestine left to wait another day.

Every credible Republican candidate for president in 2012 is hammering Obama for being too hard on Israel when in reality he has defended Israel at every critical juncture and made military aid to Israel the single largest expenditure in the 2010 foreign aid budget. Obama, who came to Cairo backed with the “hope and change” momentum that put him in office, was at the same time secretly providing Israel with one-tonne bombs months after the war on Gaza. Can you imagine the political storm Obama would be embroiled in if he actually exerted any real pressure on Israel?

Because of these domestic politics, the Palestinians have realised what the Israelis have long sought after: the reality that Washington won’t make Israel do what is necessary to create a Palestinian state. Frankly, it’s about time.

2. Palestinian unity is a necessity

Many people might put the beginning of divisions in the Palestinian polity at 2006 when the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) routed Fatah in Legislative Council elections. In reality, divisions have been developing for decades – in large part due to the decaying of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and its unofficial marriage to the Palestinian Authority.

For months, PLO Chairman and Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas travelled the world in the hopes of securing votes and recognition for Palestinian statehood. The PLO leadership executed a series of complex and calculated diplomatic manoeuvres to bring Palestine’s case for statehood to the United Nations. Indeed, this was planned for some time and required a significant investment of time from the leadership. Yet, when the moment of truth arrived and when Palestine’s case was brought before the UN, despite dramatic pressure from the United States and its allies, the Palestinians, who needed more than ever to be united, were split on this critical issue.

Hamas refused to endorse the statehood bid and much of the Palestinian diaspora, as well as advocates on behalf of Palestinian refugees, did not back the endeavour because they either believed it would leave them disenfranchised or that it would fail to change the status quo. In the mere weeks prior to the confrontation in New York, an intense legal debate was taking place over whether or not this statehood bid would jeopardise various Palestinian rights.

Regardless of what one’s position or political affiliation is, it is hard to deny that the UN bid underscores the significant challenge facing Palestinians: the desperate need for reformed and representative institutions to speak for them. As Palestinians brace for what is to come and formulate strategy on how best to achieve their goals, there has never been a better or more urgent moment for Palestinian leaders and advocates of all stripes to unite in the face of Israeli occupation.

Mahmoud Abbas made important strides toward aligning himself with Palestinian public opinion and popular regional sentiments by standing up to the United States under pressure and delivering a strong speech at the UNGA. This is the kind of stance that most Palestinians can unite behind as they have grown tired of the failed strategy of negotiations. He could be doing himself and Palestinians a favour if he takes this opportunity to create a broad and representative coalition of allies, based on confronting the Israeli occupation despite its main sponsor the United States. Of course, his words must be followed by actions.

3. Security collaboration is very valuable to Israel

The extremely pro-Israel Chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, did her best impression of the big, bad wolf when she convened a hearing the week before the UN General Assembly and invited some of the most right-wing analysts on this issue to testify on the question of cutting aid to the Palestinian Authority in the wake of the UN bid. But as much as the Chairwoman, her pro-Israel colleagues and the witnesses huffed and puffed, no one was ready to blow the PA house down.

Why? Well, as a number of the witness pointed out, the prospect of cutting aid to the PA meant the likely collapse of the US-funded and trained PA security apparatus which is in close and consistent communication with the IDF on security.

At a time when the Palestinians were moving to further isolate Israel in the international community by requesting statehood at the UN, the Israel-friendly US Congress was hog-tied. They couldn’t use PA funding as leverage because of the risk it posed to Israel, and if there was any doubt, one only had to read a report from the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs supporting continued aid to the PA despite the UN bid. Ultimately, Congress may have passed non-binding resolutions on the PA aid issue, but it’s unlikely they will use the power of the purse in ways that might indirectly cost Israel.

What this means is that the Palestinians have gained a better understanding of the precise value of security collaboration with the Israelis. It is clear that Israel would rather risk further isolation than risk losing PA security collaboration. One of the main reasons why the occupation persists is because Israel reaps the benefits of the occupation including land and water resources, but pays minimal costs in exchange.

Completely disbanding Palestinian security so that chaos ensues will not help anyone, especially not the Palestinians, but there is also no sense in the Palestinians providing Israel with cost-free security and getting nothing in return – except continued settlement expansion. Now that it is clear just how valuable this security coordination with the Israelis is, the Palestinians should use it for leverage and halt all coordination.

4. Israel is vulnerable to international isolation, but so is Washington

Remember in February when the US Ambassador to the United Nations essentially vetoed US policy on Israeli settlements when she cast the lone “no” vote in a UN Security Council session? Fourteen states voted for the resolution and only the United States voted against, even though the resolution was actually pieced together from statements made by US officials. It was not an unfamiliar position for the United States. In fact, before that veto, the United States has been the sole veto on 41 previous UN Security Council resolutions condemning Israeli violations of international law since 1972.

But something was different this time. The United States was furiously lobbying to secure “no” votes on the Security Council, precisely because it did not want to be seen as the primary obstacle to Palestinian statehood. Why do the optics suddenly matter after decades of automatic and contempt-free American vetoes for Israel’s sake?

Simply put, the world is a different place today than it was a mere eight months ago. When Susan Rice had last raised her hand alone, Hosni Mubarak was one week out of power and the United States was still trying to figure out what was happening in a region where they have traditionally held sway. Egypt has since demonstrated that public opinion is likely to play a much greater role in policy toward Israel. Turkey, another major regional player and long time NATO ally, has all but terminated relations with Israel after the travesty of justice called the Palmer Report.

This is yet another sign of America’s waning influence in the region. But it is also another important signal to the Palestinians. Yes, America may continue to support Israel blindly because of its domestic politics, but at the same time the costs for doing so continue to increase. Going forward, Palestinian strategies that further expose the incongruence between US policy vis-à-vis Israel and its interests in the region will only force more American elites to ask the all important questions that too few are asking today.

5. Real – not symbolic – changes alone will alter the status quo

The UN General Assembly came and went and, just as most serious observers expected, there is little change on the ground. The Israeli occupation – the status quo – still persists. The reason the status quo has continued is because there are entrenched interests on both sides which make it difficult for either party to make game-changing decisions. The Israeli occupation will only end when the costs of maintaining it exceed the benefits of further entrenching it. Right now, the costs of the Israeli occupation to the Israelis are minimal. It benefits from usurping land and resources and avoids the politically costly move of dismantling settlements.

For its part, the Palestinian Authority is assisting in alleviating the costs of occupation through extensive security collaboration with Israel. International donors are largely footing the bill for the PA’s security apparatus.

The Ramallah-based Authority’s most significant challenge to this, thus far, has been in the form of the statehood bid. While further international isolation will raise the costs of occupation for the Israelis, it won’t have an immediate impact.

Palestinians must recognise that shifting the dynamic that perpetuates the status quo involves real changes on the ground and not simply symbolic gestures. If the statehood bid results in the ability to redress grievances with Israel in the International Criminal Court than that might raise the costs of occupation in the long term, so long as other states are compliant in enforcing legal decisions. But that’s the long term, and in the long term we will all be dead, and given the rate of Israeli settlement expansion, aiming for the long term means there will not be anything of Palestine left for the Palestinians.

The shift away from the cost-free occupation dynamic has to happen immediately and Palestinians can begin to do this in the way their counterparts across the Arab world made revolutionary change happen. Through mass mobilisation, ending no-strings-attached security collaboration and encouraging sanctions on the state and popular level against Israel until it meets it obligations, the Palestinians can begin to do to the Israelis what the so-called broker Washington failed to do: make them realise the occupation has to end.

The UN statehood bid didn’t change the world – it didn’t even change things on the ground in occupied Palestine – but what it did do is to make a number of international players show their cards. The Palestinians would be remiss if they did not use this information to build strategies for the future.

Yousef Munayyer is a writer and political analyst based in Washington, DC. He is currently the Executive Director of the The Jerusalem Fund for Education and Community Development.

Article courtesy Al Jazeera, Yousef Munayyer, and The Jerusalem Fund for Education and Community Development

By 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.

Article courtesy Jonathan Cook and CounterPunch.org

By Michael Gillespie

People for Justice in Palestine hosted a presentation titled “A Long Wait for a State: Palestine on Hold” at the Iowa City Public Library on September 15.  Dr. Patrick Hitchon, an Iowa neurosurgeon; Shams Ghoneim, Coordinator of the Iowa Chapter of the Muslim Public Affairs Council; and John Dabeet, President of Americans and Palestinians for Peace, spoke to an audience of about 60.

Hitchon spoke first providing his listeners with an overview of the history of Palestine from its earliest period to the present.

“The state of Israel was never a negotiated settlement between Arabs and Israelis,” said Hitchon.

“It was approved and divided by the United Nations, thousands of miles away from the land of Palestine,” said Hitchon, noting that Palestinian Arab interests were not adequately or fairly represented in the process.  Hitchon quoted U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk saying, “‘The pressure and arm-twisting applied by American and Jewish interests in capital after capital to get that affirmative vote is hard to describe.’”

“About 700,000 to 800,000 Palestinians were forcefully expelled,” said Hitchon, who noted that his own family was among those forced to leave Palestine.

“These people did not leave of their own accord,” said Hitchon, adding that in many cases Israelis demolished Palestinian homes and villages while expropriating other Palestinian homes for use by Israelis.

Hitchon quoted Israeli historian Ilan Pappe to document his claim.

“‘Israelis made a concerted effort to forcefully expel and terrorize 800,000.  They demolished 530 villages, and 11 urban neighborhoods were displaced.  This is a true example of ethnic cleansing.’  I’m not saying this was ethnic cleansing.  Ilan Pappe, a Jew who was a professor of history at Haifa and who now teaches at the University of Exeter in the UK, says this was ethnic cleansing,” said Hitchon.

“These refugees are now scattered in more than 50 refugee camps across the Middle East.  They’re in Lebanon, they’re in Syria, they’re in Jordan, and they’re in Gaza,” said Hitchon.

Hitchon reminded his audience that United Nations General Assembly Resolution (UNGAR) 194 declares the refugees right to return to their land and homes and if not they have a right to compensation.

Many Israelis scoff at USGAR 194 because General Assembly resolutions are recommendations that lack the force of international law, unlike Security Council resolutions (UNSCR), which are binding upon member states.  UNSGR 273 admitted Israel to the United Nations on May 11, 1949 after Israel consented to implement other UN resolutions including resolutions 194 and 181.

“Israel has refused to accept a single Palestinian refugee back to his homeland or to provide compensation.  The US has done nothing to enforce [the resolutions.]  Similar resolutions 242 and 338 after the 1967 war again stated that it is inadmissible to acquire territory by military means.  Israel should withdraw from acquired territories and acknowledge the sovereignty and the territorial integrity of the indigenous population,” declared Hitchon.

“Dealing with Israel on a one-to-one basis has taken us nowhere.  I think it’s high time we go ahead and apply for full membership to the United Nations just like Israel did,” said Hitchon.

Ghoneim, who is originally from Egypt, spoke about her experiences and about interfaith relations.

“The world is actually at the dawn of a potential new age in the history of the Holy Land,” said Ghoneim, “one that, if Israel and Israeli voices everywhere in the world are smart, they will take advantage of.  It’s an opportunity, and it can be lost very soon.

“The region, all around the state of Israel, is flowing with freedom seekers, from Egypt to Tunisia to Libya to Jordan to Bahrain and the list goes on.  Those who are for equity and a two-state solution – it’s not too late – really think that there is no way under heaven the status quo will remain,” said Ghoneim.

Intransigence on the issues of Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine and Palestinian self-determination and sovereignty is only increasing Israel’s isolation in the international community, said Ghoneim, who called her listeners’ attention to the fact that in most of the countries where the Arab Spring has broken out, the protests are peaceful, even in the face of violent repression, “guns and bullets.”

“I believe, from looking at what has happened in Egypt and Syria, that the time has come for people to come together and get really serious,” said Ghoneim.

Pointing out the obvious, Ghoneim characterized the Palestinians effort to be recognized as a state by the UN as, “another way – a peaceful way – of resolving their long-running struggle for freedom.”

Noting that interfaith conversations are vitally important in times of great social and political change, Ghoneim gave credit to and encouraged Christians and Jews to continue speak out in behalf of peace and cooperation.

It is difficult for Muslims to speak to Jews about issues related to Israel if the Jewish person has always looked at the matter from one side, and the same is true vice versa, said Ghoneim, not least because the issues are very emotional ones in the aftermath of so much violence, so many wars, and so much death and destruction since the founding of Israel in 1948.

Everyone in the region, Muslim, Christian, and Jew, has been touched by loss and has a story of loss, said Ghoneim.

“It takes patience, but once you build respect and trust, I believe it is possible,” declared Ghoneim.

Dabeet, a Palestinian American who recently returned from Ramallah and consultations with Palestinian leaders, addressed many of the political issues involved in the Palestinian bid for statehood recognition.

“Palestine’s bid for United Nations statehood has the intention of peace and is not a declaration of war,” declared Dabeet.

“We need everyone to know that we are standing for justice.  We are standing for self-determination.  We are standing to live side-by-side, but in dignity – and that’s very important – in dignity and in freedom,” said Dabeet.

Dabeet described different scenarios that Palestinian leaders are evaluating and considering.  Palestinian leaders may apply for full UN membership through the UN Security Council, but the United States has vowed to use its veto in the council to block recognition there.  Were nine of the fifteen members of the Security Council to approve of the Palestinian application for full membership, and were there no veto, Palestine could then be admitted upon a vote of two-thirds of the General Assembly.  Second, Palestinian leaders may decide to apply to the UN General Assembly for non-member state observer recognition, which Palestine would be granted upon the vote of a simple majority of the member states of the General Assembly, which is seen as very likely because about 120 nations have already recognized Palestine as a state.  The UN General Assembly currently has 193 member states.  At present, there is only one non-member state observer, the Vatican, said Dabeet.

“With [non-member state observer recognition], you get a lot of advantages,” said Dabeet, who noted that, currently, the Palestinians can only take an issue before the UN by going through a member state, asking that member state to speak in behalf of Palestine.

“If we become a non-member state observer, we can go straight to the issue.  Not just that, this will give us the advantage of serving on many, many organizations that are part of the United Nations,” said Dabeet.

Dabeet said he is confident that Palestinian leaders will present a request to the United Nations very soon.

During a Q&A that followed their formal remarks, Dabeet declared, “I don’t think that there is any Palestinian refugee living in a camp in poverty and squalor who wants to continue living as a refugee.”

Ghoneim spoke about Palestinian unity saying, “I think it is very important for the Palestinian people to have a unity government.”

PJP is a nonpartisan group of people from the Iowa City community who have joined together to support a just and lasting peace for the peoples of the region on the basis of their understanding that a lasting peace is impossible while the Israeli occupation continues.

By Richard Falk

Even if nothing further were to happen, the proposed Palestinian initiative for statehood, combined with the furious negative responses in Tel Aviv and Washington, has given a much-needed visibility to the ongoing daily ordeal of the Palestinian people, whether living under the rigours of occupation, consigned for decades to miserable refugee camps, or existing in the stressful limbo of exile.

The only genuine challenge facing the world community of states and the UN is how to end this ordeal – which has lasted now for 63 years – in a manner that produces a just and sustainable peace. It is the entanglement of geopolitics with this unmet challenge that signifies the moral, legal, and political inadequacy of the contemporary world order.

The Israel-Palestinian conflict, along with the continued presence of nuclear weaponry and the persistence of world poverty, exhibits the failure of international law and morality, as well as of common sense and enlightened realism, to guide the behaviour of leading sovereign states.

In the face of this failure, the frustrations, injustice, and extraordinary suffering experienced by the Palestinian people has come to dominate the moral and political imagination of the world. No issue has generated this level of solidarity among the peoples of the world since the anti-apartheid campaign toppled the racist regime in South Africa more than twenty years ago.

To the surprise of many and the comprehension of few, it is not only Israel that opposes this initiative of the Palestinian Authority (PA). A crucial part of the background is the division among Palestinians as to the wisdom and effects of the statehood initiative at the UN.

Criticism of the bid

Palestinian critics consider the statehood application diversionary and divisive, arguing that it will shrink the dispute to territorial issues, place approximately seven million Palestinian refugees and exile communities in permanent limbo, and allow Israel to treat the outcome of this UN shadow play as the end game in their long effort to transform what was to be a temporary occupation of East Jerusalem and the West Bank into a condition of permanent, if de facto, annexation.

The question that underlies this debate is whether the diplomatic claim of statehood in this form legitimately represents the Palestinian people in their several dimensions, or merely fulfills, at a price, the ambitions of the PA. In the background is the organisational complexity of the Palestinian community, with the future of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) drawn into question.

Whereas the councils of the PLO include representatives of the Palestinian diaspora, the PA is a political formation intended to address the circumstances of occupation in the post-Oslo period, and has as its primary goal the promotion of the withdrawal of Israeli occupying forces. To carry out this mission it has been seeking with some success (achieving favourable progress reports from the World Bank and IMF) to demonstrate that it possesses the institutional capabilities needed for stable governance, including maintaining security and preventing anti-Israeli activism.

How this sense of political priorities relates to the claims of refugees confined in camps in neighbouring Arab countries, as well as the several million Palestinians living around the world, seems to be the deepest issue dividing the Palestinian people as a whole. A closely related concern, but one that is more widely appreciated, is the refusal of Hamas to lend support to this initiative, despite the fanfare surrounding the unity agreement brokered by Egypt in early June.

What Palestinian opponents of the statehood bid most fear is that the issue of representation will be wrongly resolved from their perspective. This issue of representation lies at the political core of the internal Palestinian struggle to achieve their rights under international law, above all to define the Palestinian “self” that is entitled to self-determination.

There are worries among Palestinians living outside of the occupied territories that the statehood bid, whatever its outcome, will have an adverse spillover effect on the still-unresolved representation issue. In addressing this concern, the non-participation of Hamas in this kind of Palestinian diplomacy cannot be ignored, nor can Hamas be dismissed due to its alleged refusal to accept an Israel that lies within its 1967 borders.

It should be appreciated, without necessarily being accepted as reliable, that Hamas leaders have periodically indicated a willingness to sign onto a long-term coexistence agreement of up to 50 years if Israel withdraws completely to the Green Line that was treated as Israel’s border until the 1967 War.

Such an agreement is highly unlikely to overcome genuine Israeli anxieties or correspond to Israeli perceptions of Hamas and its intentions; furthermore, its implementation would thwart Israel’s territorial ambitions by requiring the dismantlement of the settlements. At the same time, the realisation that what has been tried has not worked suggests that this admittedly imperfect alternative to negotiations in the search for a sustainable peace should not be unconditionally rejected.

Doesn’t Israel want peace?

Against such a background, how can we explain the furious Israeli and US opposition to this Palestinian initiative? Should not Israel and the United States welcome, even encourage, this PA initiative as a way of reducing the conflict to its land-for-peace dimensions, maybe getting rid of the right of return issue once and for all?

Joseph Massad has perceptively analysed the statehood bid as presenting Israel with a win/win situation. Even so, the intensive US efforts to thwart the bid by vetoing or getting a majority to vote against it in the Security Council is easy to understand.

On any question that comes before the UN in which Israeli policy is seriously questioned or its behaviour is subject to criticism, the United States leaps to Israel’s defense, regardless of the merits, whenever necessary using its veto power in the Security Council. This has been true during the Obama presidency on UN efforts to censure unlawful settlement expansion, to carry forward the accountability recommendations of the Goldstone Report, or to allow civil society to break the unlawful blockade that has entrapped the people of Gaza for more than four years.

Casting a veto here or working behind the scenes to cobble together a majority, as the respected international law expert Balakrishnan Rajagopal has noted in a recent column in the Huffington Post, is both politically imprudent and unmindful of UN members’ responsibility to uphold the legal rights of every political community to enjoy the privileges of statehood if it qualifies as a state.

It is a tribute to the UN that the most important of these privileges is now access to the United Nations system with the status of a sovereign state. It should be observed that another highly-regarded international jurist, John Quigley, in a scholarly book published by Cambridge University Press two years ago, argued that Palestine was already a state from the perspective of international law, and had been so recognised by well over 100 governments.

This diplomatic crusade to block Palestinian statehood also undermines confidence in US claims to serve as a world leader promoting the global public good. This primacy of hard-power geopolitics will raise serious questions about the capacity of the UN to serve as a vehicle for the realisation of global justice and to uphold the basic rights of peoples.

‘We the hegemon’

Need we be reminded once again that the inspiring opening words of the UN Charter, “we the peoples”, has always given way to “we the governments”? More starkly since the end of the Cold War, as this controversy sadly highlights, it has been replaced by “we the hegemon”.

We should by now understand that the United States government does whatever Israel wants it to do, but why does Israel seem to mind so much if the Palestinian initiative were to succeed? After all, even the Netanyahu leadership claims it supports Palestinian statehood and the two-state solution.

And if the Palestinian critics of the PA are even partially correct, would not the further territorialisation of the conflict and its narrowing of the negotiating agenda serve Israeli interests?

This interpretation seems reinforced by Mahmoud Abbas’ reassurances that PA security forces will prevent any Palestinian violence targeting Israelis, that the path to direct negotiations is more open than ever, and that this initiative in no way is meant to challenge the legitimacy of the Israeli state. Since the events of the Arab Spring, Israel has shown almost no capacity to act in support of its real interests in the region, as exemplified by its botched relations with Turkey and Egypt, and perhaps this response at the UN is just one more illustration. Such an explanation cannot be ruled out, but there are more sinister interpretations that seem more plausible given Israel’s overall pattern of behaviour.

By insisting that only “direct negotiations” can produce statehood Israel is providing itself with a gold-plated pretext for refusing to negotiate at all for years to come. Netanyahu almost comically suggested that the delay could last 60 years. And for what reason? Another line of explanation gives the settler leadership its own veto power, and it has already vowed to carry out provocative “sovereignty marches” into the West Bank during the UN discussions.

In this conflict, time has never been static, or neutral. Each extra day of occupation, refugee status and involuntary exile, in effect, lengthens a prison sentence imposed on the entirety of the Palestinian people. This is bad enough, but, in addition, Israel has taken consistent advantage of the passage of time to expand its unlawful settlements, alter the demographics of East Jerusalem in its favour, build a separation wall found to be a violation of international law by a vote of 14 to 1 in the World Court, and to isolate Gaza from the rest of the Palestinian territories and the world.

‘Creating facts on the ground’

During the Oslo peace process that gave rise to the mantra of direct negotiations or nothing, Israel has more than doubled the settlement population, and steadfastly refuses to impose even a temporary freeze on expansion in the West Bank during negotiations, and has never been willing even to consider a freeze on settlement construction in East Jerusalem.

Israeli leaders talk openly, even boast, about “creating facts on the ground”, more discreetly referred to by Hillary Clinton as “subsequent developments”, and more realistically understood as the ratification of massive illegality. Such a political posture exposes the lie beneath an Israeli claim of a commitment to “direct negotiations” as a path to peace. Direct negotiations for almost 20 years have brought the parties no closer to peace, and arguably have had as their main effect the undermining of the conditions for a sustainable two-state solution.

What direct negotiations have done is to buy time for Israel’s unacknowledged ambitions and to calm international criticisms of this prolonged and cruel occupation.

Unfortunately, however the diplomatic confrontation unfolds, little is likely to be resolved. The charade of direct negotiations remains on the table. Parties on all sides ignore the revelations of the Palestine Papers, published a few months ago by Al Jazeera English, that showed beyond reasonable doubt that even the supposedly more moderate Olmert government of Israel seemed totally disinterested in a resolution of the conflict, even in the face of repeated PA concessions on fundamental issues made in confidential backroom talks at the highest levels.

Add to this the mockery of fairness that arises from allowing the United States to play the role of intermediary, the “honest broker” in such negotiations. Imagine trying to settle a marriage breakup by asking the elder brother of the wealthy husband to arbitrate a fight over assets with his penniless wife. How could such a framework ever hope to achieve peace that is just and sustainable? And what seems deeply flawed in theory has been shown to be even worse in practice. The parties are further from peace than ever: Palestinian rights and expectations have been continuously shrunk as time passes, and the occupation helps to consolidate a permanent Israeli presence.

Gallows humour

In the end, these questions of tactics and principle bearing on the right of self-determination need to be resolved by the Palestinian people.

Neither Israel, the United States, nor even the United Nations can displace this fundamental Palestinian responsibility for selecting a road that they believe will lead to peace with justice. But it is a display of gallows humour to expect most Palestinians to look with favour at the resumption of peace talks under the framework that has been used since the Oslo framework was agreed upon in 1993.

It has repeatedly demonstrated the futility of direct negotiations, especially given the continuing refusal of Israel to make even the most minimal gestures of real commitment, such as suspending settlement expansion indefinitely and dropping their deal-breaking insistence on being confirmed as “a Jewish state”, a claim that flies in the face of the presence in Israel of a Palestinian minority numbering more than 1.5 million.

If Israel is to retain its claim to be a democratic state, it must not insist on such an exclusivist formal identity. There is no way for claims of ethnic or religious exclusivity to be reconciled with the legal, moral, and political promise of human rights that have become the main signifiers of legitimate government at this time in history.

Richard Falk is Albert G Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University and Research Professor in Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has authored and edited numerous publications spanning a period of five decades. His most recent book is Achieving Human Rights (2009).

He is currently serving his fourth year of a six-year term as a United Nations special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights.

Article and photo courtesy Al Jazeera English online

By Joseph Massad

What is at stake in Barack Obama’s vehement refusal to recognise Palestine as a mini-state with a disfigured geography and no sovereignty, and his urging the world community not to recognise it while threatening the Palestinians with retribution? What is the relationship between Obama’s refusal to recognise Palestine and his insistence on recognising Israel’s right to be a “Jewish state” and his demand that the Palestinians and Arab countries follow suit?

It is important to stress at the outset that whether the UN grants the Palestinian Authority (PA) the government of a state under occupation and observer status as a state or refuses to do so, either outcome will be in the interest of Israel. For the only game in town has always been Israel’s interests, and it is clear that whatever strategy garners international support, with or without US and Israeli approval, must guarantee Israeli interests a priori. The UN vote is a case in point.

Possible outcomes

Let us consider the two possible outcomes of the vote and how they will advance Israeli interests:

The ongoing Arab uprisings have raised Palestinian expectations about the necessity of ending the occupation and have challenged the modus vivendi the PA has with Israel. Furthermore, with the increase in Palestinian grass-roots activism to resist the Israeli occupation, the PA has decided to shift the Palestinian struggle from popular mobilisation it will not be able to control, and which it fears could topple it, to the international legal arena. The PA hopes that this shift from the popular to the juridical will demobilise Palestinian political energies and displace them onto an arena that is less threatening to the survival of the PA itself.

The PA feels abandoned by the US which assigned it the role of collaborator with the Israeli occupation, and feels frozen in a “peace process” that does not seek an end goal. PA politicians opted for the UN vote to force the hand of the Americans and the Israelis, in the hope that a positive vote will grant the PA more political power and leverage to maximise its domination of the West Bank (but not East Jerusalem or Gaza, which neither Israel nor Hamas respectively are willing to concede to the PA). Were the UN to grant the PA its wish and admit it as a member state with observer status, then, the PA argues, it would be able to force Israel in international fora to cease its violations of the UN charter, the Geneva Conventions, and numerous international agreements. The PA could then challenge Israel internationally using legal instruments only available to member states to force it to grant it “independence”. What worries the Israelis most is that, were Palestine to become a member state, it would be able to legally challenge Israel.

This logic is faulty, though, because the Palestinians have not historically lacked legal instruments to challenge Israel. On the contrary, international instruments have been activated against Israel since 1948 by the UN’s numerous resolutions in the General Assembly as well as in the Security Council, not to mention the more recent use of the International Court of Justice in the case of the Apartheid Wall. The problem has never been the Palestinians’ ability or inability to marshal international law or legal instruments to their side. Instead, the problem is that the US blocks international law’s jurisdiction from being applied to Israel through its veto power. The US uses threats and protective measures to shield the recalcitrant pariah state from being brought to justice. It has already used its veto power in the UN Security Council 41 times in defense of Israel and against Palestinian rights. How this would change if the PA became a UN member state with observer status is not clear.

True, the PA could bring more international legal pressure and sanctions to bear on Israel. It could have international bodies adjudicate Israel’s violations of the rights of the Palestinian state. The PA could even make the international mobility of Israeli politicians more perilous as “war criminals”. This would render Israel’s international relations more difficult, but how would this ultimately weaken an Israel that the US would shield completely from such effects as it has always done?

Implications of the UN vote

This presumed addition of power the Palestinians will gain to bring Israel to justice will actually be carried out at enormous cost to the Palestinian people. If the UN votes for the PA statehood status, this would have several immediate implications:

(1) The PLO will cease to represent the Palestinian people at the UN, and the PA will replace it as their presumed state.

(2) The PLO, which represents all Palestinians (about 12 million people in historic Palestine and in the diaspora), and was recognised as their “sole” representative at the UN in 1974, will be truncated to the PA, which represents only West Bank Palestinians (about 2 million people). Incidentally this was the vision presented by the infamous “Geneva Accords” that went nowhere.

(3) It will politically weaken Palestinian refugees’ right to return to their homes and be compensated, as stipulated in UN resolutions. The PA does not represent the refugees, even though it claims to represent their “hopes” of establishing a Palestinian state at their expense. Indeed, some international legal experts fear it could even abrogate the Palestinians’ right of return altogether. It will also forfeit the rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel who face institutional and legal racism in the Israeli state, as it presents them with a fait accompli of the existence of a Palestinian state (its phantasmatic nature notwithstanding). This will only give credence to Israeli claims that the Jews have a state and the Palestinians now have one too and if Palestinian citizens of Israel were unhappy, or even if they were happy, with their third-class status in Israel, they should move or can be forced to move to the Palestinian state at any rate.

(4) Israel could ostensibly come around soon after a UN vote in favour of Palestinian statehood and inform the PA that the territories it now controls (a small fraction of the West Bank) is all the territory Israel will concede and that this will be the territorial basis of the PA state. The Israelis do not tire of reminding the PA that the Palestinians will not have sovereignty, an army, control of their borders, control of their water resources, control over the number of refugees it could allow back, or even jurisdiction over Jewish colonial settlers. Indeed, the Israelis have already obtained UN assurances about their right to “defend” themselves and to preserve their security with whatever means they think are necessary to achieve these goals. In short, the PA will have the exact same Bantustan state that Israel and the US have been promising to grant it for two decades!

(5) The US and Israel could also, through their many allies, inject a language of “compromise” in the projected UN recognition of the PA state, stipulating that such a state must exist peacefully side by side with the “Jewish State” of Israel. This would in turn exact a precious UN recognition of Israel’s “right” to be a Jewish state, which the UN and the international community, the US excepted, have refused to recognize thus far. This will directly link the UN recognition of a phantasmatic non-existent Palestinian state to UN recognition of an actually existing state of Israel that discriminates legally and institutionally against non-Jews as a “Jewish state”.

(6) The US and Israel will insist after a positive vote that, while the PA is right to make certain political demands as a member state, it would have to abrogate its recent reconciliation agreement with Hamas. Additionally, sanctions could befall the PA state itself for associating with Hamas, which the US and Israel consider a terrorist group. The US Congress has already threatened to punish the PA and will not hesitate to urge the Obama administration to add Palestine to its list of “State Sponsors of Terrorism” along with Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria.

All of these six outcomes will advance Israeli interests immeasurably, while the only inconvenience to Israel would be the ability of the PA to demand that international law and legal jurisdiction be applied to Israel so as to exact more concessions from that country. However, at every turn the US will block and will shield Israel from its effects. In short, Israeli interests will be maximised at the cost of some serious but not detrimental inconvenience.

The second possible outcome, a US veto, and/or the ability of the US to pressure and twist the arms of tens of countries around the world to reject the bid of the PA in the General Assembly, resulting in failure to recognise PA statehood, will also be to the benefit of Israel. The unending “peace process” will continue with more stringent conditions and an angry US, upset at the PA challenge, will go back to exactly where the PA is today, if not to a weaker position. President Obama and future US administrations will continue to push for PA and Arab recognition of Israel as a “Jewish state” that has the right to discriminate by law against non-Jews in exchange for an ever-deferred recognition of a Palestinian Bantustan as an “economically viable” Palestinian state – a place where Palestinian neoliberal businessmen can make profits off international aid and investment.

Either outcome will keep the Palestinian people colonised, discriminated against, oppressed, and exiled. This entire brouhaha over the UN vote is ultimately about which of the two scenarios is better for Israeli interests. The Palestinian people and their interests are not even part of this equation.

The question on the table before the UN, then, is not whether the UN should recognise the right of the Palestinian people to a state in accordance with the 1947 UN Partition Plan, which would grant them 45 per cent of historic Palestine, nor of a Palestinian state within the June 5, 1967 borders along the Green Line, which would grant them 22 per cent of historic Palestine. A UN recognition ultimately means the negation of the rights of the majority of the Palestinian people in Israel, in the diaspora, in East Jerusalem, and even in Gaza, and the recognition of the rights of some West Bank Palestinians to a Bantustan on a fraction of West Bank territory amounting to less than 10 per cent of historic Palestine. Israel will be celebrating either outcome.

Joseph Massad is Associate Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University in New York.

Article courtesy Joseph Massad and Al Jazeera Engilish on-line

By William Pfaff

Most Americans would likely agree that the main shock delivered to Americans and the American government by the 9/11 attacks was that of vulnerability. Another such shock is impending. It is the national vulnerability that will be revealed this month by the American veto of a Palestinian demand for full United Nations membership.

During the century and a half preceding 9/11, Americans enjoyed national and individual invulnerability to devastating foreign attack, unlike the people of any other major nation. Much has been made in recent years of how nuclear dread lay over the land in the 1950s. My own experience was that even the Cuban Missile Crisis was not what it subsequently was made out to have been. I am sure that the people actually making decisions in Washington quaked in their boots and prayed, which is why nothing happened. The menace was on the one hand so great that there was nothing to do about it (crouching under a table or possession of a shovel notwithstanding), but on the other hand no one in power was so stupid as to initiate a nuclear attack.

The American conviction of national invulnerability marched on. The Vietnam outcome threatened it, but it was easy for Americans, especially those who were not in authority, to say well, yes, but of course we could have won if we had really wanted to use our power.

Iraq is not today really perceived by public opinion as a defeat, only as mistake, muddle and incompetence, and, besides, our troops will (supposedly) be gone by 2012, and what’s past will be past.

In Kabul, Gen. David Petraeus in 2009 promised Barack Obama and the nation that the United States Army could be relied upon for victory in 2010. Now Petraeus has left the army to pursue higher aspirations. Christopher Edley Jr., a member of the Obama presidential transition team and dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkrley, said that the team deemed the President-elect, with no military experience, vulnerable to official blackmail on national security and retroactive Bush administration justice issues, and so advised him to do whatever military and security officials proposed. Public confidence in President Obama on Middle Eastern issues may not be high today, while confidence in the Republicans seems even lower, but few Americans feel vulnerable to Middle Eastern risk. Least of all do they feel threatened by Israel’s actions.

This is likely to prove a serious mistake. National vulnerability has returned. A State Department official has confirmed that the United States intends to veto the expected Palestinian demand for U.N. Security Council recognition as a member state. The U.S. Congress, moreover, under pressure from Israel’s American friends, has declared that it will then cut off funding for the Palestinian Authority.

Egypt and the Arab governments will be angry, but the Arabs have been angry before with the invulnerable United States, and nothing has come of it—except for the 9/11 attacks and a war “on terror” that has gone on for a decade.

Turki al-Faisal, the former head of Saudi intelligence and former ambassador to the U.S., has rather desperately been trying to warn America. He has published his warning in articles in The Washington Post and The New York Times, and circulated it on the Web. He writes that, if Washington vetoes the Palestinian petition, “American influence will decline further, Israeli security will be undermined and Iran will be empowered, increasing the chances of another war in the region.”

A veto will provoke uproar among Muslims everywhere. Everyone already knows this, but the Obama administration ignores it.

Al-Faisal indirectly forecasts that, in the case of a veto, the American “special relationship” with Saudi Arabia will come to an end, and says that the Saudis will “adopt a far more independent and assertive foreign policy”—as Turkey already has done, one notes. The Saudi kingdom would oppose the American-supported Maliki government in Iraq, refuse to open an embassy there, and possibly end its support for American policy in Afghanistan and Yemen.

Al-Faisal also says that Saudi Arabia, by far the largest supporter of the Palestinian Authority, would be unable to give the Palestinians all of the financial aid and religious and political legitimacy that they would need to deal with Israel in such changed circumstances. He notes that, in recent polls, 70 percent of Palestinians anticipate a new intifada if they are vetoed at the U.N.

He warns that the region and the nations principally involved are far better served by continuing cooperation and good will between longstanding allies Saudi Arabia and the United States, and that “Saudi Arabia is willing and able to chart a new and divergent course if America fails to act justly with regard to Palestine.”

The American nation and economy, and its relations with nations far beyond the Middle East, are deeply vulnerable to the political catastrophe against which al-Faisal warns.

However, what al-Faisal does not say is that the U.S. is the only nation to possess the strength and opportunity to act preemptively to solve this crisis. Israel now is incapable of rescuing itself because of its quasi-permanent internal political deadlock.

President Obama could spectacularly reverse policy and save the day. He could declare that the U.S. will vote in support of Palestine’s full membership in the U.N. It will use all of the means at its disposal to support Israeli withdrawal of illegal settlements from territory designated as part of the Palestinian state in the 1948 U.N. partition of Mandate Palestine. It will do all in its power to impose the solution that everyone—including realistic Israelis and the Palestinians—understand to be the inevitable, permanent and just solution of this problem.

The world would be dazzled. Barack Obama’s place in history would be assured.

Article courtesy William Pfaff and Truthdig

By Stephanie Nebehay

Israel’s naval blockade of the Gaza Strip violates international law, a panel of human rights experts reporting to a U.N. body said on Tuesday, disputing a conclusion reached by a separate U.N. probe into Israel’s raid on a Gaza-bound aid ship.

The so-called Palmer Report on the Israeli raid of May 2010 that killed nine Turkish activists said earlier this month that Israel had used unreasonable force in last year’s raid, but its naval blockade of the Hamas-ruled strip was legal.

A panel of five independent U.N. rights experts reporting to the U.N. Human Rights Council rejected that conclusion, saying the blockade had subjected Gazans to collective punishment in “flagrant contravention of international human rights and humanitarian law.”

The four-year blockade deprived 1.6 million Palestinians living in the enclave of fundamental rights, they said.

“In pronouncing itself on the legality of the naval blockade, the Palmer Report does not recognize the naval blockade as an integral part of Israel’s closure policy toward Gaza which has a disproportionate impact on the human rights of civilians,” they said in a joint statement.

An earlier fact-finding mission named by the same U.N. forum to investigate the flotilla incident also found in a report last September that the blockade violated international law. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) says the blockade violates the Geneva Conventions.

Israel says its Gaza blockade is a precaution against arms reaching Hamas and other Palestinian guerrillas by sea.

The four-man panel headed by former New Zealand Prime Minister Geoffrey Palmer found Israel had used unreasonable force in dealing with what it called “organized and violent resistance from a group of passengers.”

Turkey has downgraded ties with Israel over the incident.

Richard Falk, U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories and one of the five experts who issued Tuesday’s statement, said the Palmer report’s conclusions were influenced by a desire to salve Turkish-Israeli ties.

“The Palmer report was aimed at political reconciliation between Israel and Turkey. It is unfortunate that in the report politics should trump the law,” he said in the statement.

About one-third of Gaza’s arable land and 85 percent of its fishing waters are totally or partially inaccessible due to Israeli military measures, said Olivier De Schutter, U.N. special rapporteur on the right to food, another of the five.

At least two-thirds of Gazan households lack secure access to food, he said. “People are forced to make unacceptable trade-offs, often having to choose between food or medicine or water for their families.”

The other three experts were the U.N. special rapporteurs on physical and mental health; extreme poverty and human rights; and access to water and sanitation.

Article courtesy Reuters – Photo courtesy Gulf News

By Ahmed Moor

Israel is under pressure. The decline of American influence in the Middle East has combined with the Arab revolutions, Turkey’s regional ascendancy and the Palestinians’ statehood bid at the UN, to erode its global position.

Additionally, an increased awareness of Israeli apartheid around the world has worked to undermine the historically sufficient “security” argument used to justify the occupation of Palestine. It has been a short 20 years since the theatrical Arafat-Clinton-Rabin lawn party, and Israel has already traversed most of the distance to comprehensive global isolation.

Israeli analysts were right in their assessments of the consequences of the revolution in Egypt. In that country, most people are sensitive to the Palestinian point of view. Many of them believe that Zionism, which is Jewish nationalism in historical Palestine, is only the most recent iteration of European colonialism.

They are unsympathetic to the argument that it was necessary to ethnically cleanse Palestine in order to establish Israel. Moreover, they believe apartheid – the system by which Israel governs the Occupied Territories - is an atrocity.

For decades an imperious Egyptian dictatorship worked to protect Israel from popular opinion in Egypt. Its primary inducement was American money – about $2bn of it annually. But the revolution capsized Hosni Mubarak’s American jackboot and today Israel is forced to confront the irrepressible Egyptian call for Palestinian freedom.

Now Hosni Mubarak is on trial and the Egyptian-Israeli relationship is being similarly scrutinised. The Israeli ambassador’s recent flight from Cairo is a reasonable indication of where the relationship stands today. It is also probably a forward indicator.

History blindsided the Israelis in February; there was nothing they could do to preserve their strongman in Cairo. With Turkey, however, Israel’s political leadership worked with bizarre zealousness to undermine a reliable ally. By orchestrating a series of moves that showcased Israel’s contempt for Turkish lives, pride, property and humanitarian concerns, Tel Aviv succeeded in poisoning the only normal relationship it had with a Muslim-majority country.

Significantly, this occurred as Turkey sought to play a greater leadership role in the region.

Ignoring all the signals

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan signalled in 2009 – during Israel’s war on Gaza, which killed 1,400 Palestinians – that Israeli attacks on civilians would not be tolerated. The following year, Israeli commandos killed eight unarmed Turkish civilians and an American on international waters. The Turkish response was to demand an apology and compensation for the victims’ families. The Israelis refused, further incensing the Turkish leadership.

The relationship between the two countries worsened in recent weeks with the leak of a UN report on the flotilla. The report had been pushed by the Americans, who sought to use it as a vehicle for mending Ankara’s relationship with Tel Aviv. Significantly, it was to have been published after the Israelis apologised for the deaths of eight of the nine civilians (Obama has not asked Netanyahu to apologise for killing the American teenager).

Absent the apology, however, the report appeared to absolve Israel of its responsibility for the deaths, even going so far as to justify its illegal maritime siege of the Gaza Strip. The Turks reacted angrily and instructed the Israeli ambassador to return to Tel Aviv. The Israeli diplomatic mission was formally downgraded, and Turkey suspended all military ties between the two countries. Ankara also announced that Turkish naval vessels would accompany the next humanitarian mission to Gaza. The move is a direct challenge to de facto Israeli control of the Eastern Mediterranean.

Tel Aviv’s serial miscalculations vis-a-vis Ankara can be attributed to a myopic analytical scope.

The Israelis failed to successfully interpret macro-level developments in Europe and their impact on Turkey’s regional alignment; the advantages of joining the European Union have steadily declined as the financial crisis has grown more severe.

Simultaneously, the prospect of playing a regional leadership role has grown to outweigh the bit-player role Europe seemed to offer. NATO, of which Turkey is a member, has decreased in strength and influence, permitting the Turkish leadership to exercise greater national autonomy.

It is understandable, then, that the Israelis have reacted to an insistent Turkey with bewilderment. Historically, US influence in both Ankara and Cairo insulated the Israelis from the consequences of their boastful and bellicose self-regard.

Today, however, hegemonic decline means that for the first time in decades Washington cannot rescue Israel’s leaders from their own bad decisions. That reality continues to go unrecognised in Israel, where the leadership persists in making bad decisions.

Last week, for instance, Israeli Major General Eyal Eisenberg threatened the region with “all-out total war“ and the “possibility of weapons of mass destruction being used“ (Israel is the only country in the region with nuclear armaments). More recently, Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman suggested that Israel ought to arm and support PKK terrorists in Turkey.

Meanwhile, the Palestinians are taking action on their own behalf.

The Palestinian observer delegation at the United Nations formally submitted its bid for statehood this week – a move that has long been anticipated by observers. The Americans, who still enjoy defending Israeli belligerence, have promised a veto. Despite that, the vote will result in greater Israeli isolation internationally due to widespread recognition that apartheid is wrong.

Most indications suggest that Israel’s increased global isolation will continue apace. The new Egyptian leadership – no matter who it is comprised of – will continue to object to Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. An increasingly assertive Turkey will not be mollified by American entreaties and will continue to apply pressure on behalf of the Palestinians, who will pursue their right to freedom through international forums.

Indeed, the only way for Israel to gain acceptance in the broader Middle East is by ending the occupation. But that is a decision the Israelis don’t appear ready to make.

Ahmed Moor is a Palestinian-American freelance journalist based in Cairo. He was born in the Gaza Strip, Palestine.

Article courtesy English Al Jazeera.net