Palestinian Statehood

Sep 26, 2011 Editorial

Last Friday, the Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas, submitted to the U.N. Secretary General an application for full membership for his country: recognition of statehood on the basis of the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as a capital.
Palestinians currently have permanent observer entity status at the UN. Full membership status at the UN will give them full rights in the comity of nations and the legitimacy to remove Israel rule.
The US government claims that a unilateral step of this kind will damage the chances of a negotiated peace with Israel. The only real path to peace, they argue, is through talks with Israel. This has been going on for over two decades with no end in sight.
Worse, says the US, a failed bid would raise and dash expectations on the Palestinian street, with the possibility of violence as a result. And then there is the supposed clincher: legal recognition of statehood will not affect the facts on the ground. Might, it would appear, has trumped right.
As mandated by the rules of the UN, the Secretary General has passed on the application to the Security Council where the US has a veto. The next best thing is “observer state” status, which can be awarded by the UN General Assembly (the PLO already holds non-state observer status).
Such a move would have no legal significance, but would provide symbolic recognition of Palestinian statehood by the majority of the world’s nation-states. It is expected that the Palestinians will easily exceed the two-thirds of state support required, since at present, the State of Palestine is recognised by 122 governments.
Even without the legal force of full UN member status, the backing of the General Assembly will be a powerful statement of world opinion. It will confer tremendous moral and political strength to the Palestinian cause, and the intangible quality of political momentum.
Key to the entire process is the United States. In the book, ‘The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy’, the authors, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt pointed out: ‘Since the October War in 1973, Washington has provided Israel with a level of support, dwarfing that given to any other state.
It has been the largest annual recipient of direct economic and military assistance since 1976, and is the largest recipient in total since World War Two, to the tune of well over $140 billion (in 2004 dollars). Israel receives about $3 billion in direct assistance each year, roughly one-fifth of the foreign aid budget, and worth about $500 a year for every Israeli.
This largesse is especially striking since Israel is now a wealthy industrial state with a per capita income roughly equal to that of South Korea or Spain.’
With President Obama’s rating dipping precipitously because of the US economic crisis and the attendant mammoth unemployment rate, he will certainly not buck the powerful Israeli lobby and threaten his re-election bid for 2012.
Coincidentally, the UN’s observation of the 10th anniversary of the World Conference against Racism, last week ,was boycotted by the US, Israel and12 other western nations because it equated Zionism with racism. Recognition of Palestinian statehood would offer ammunition against the actions of Israel that are premised on the ideology of Zionism – a fusion of racism and colonialism according to the Palestinians and their allies.
Ironically, the new approach of the Palestinians echoes the successful Zionist strategy of the early twentieth century. By the time of the First World War, many Zionist leaders believed that their aims could not be realised without the declared support of the major powers of the day.
In 1917, the British government declared its support for a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine. In 1922, the League of Nations, predecessor of today’s UN, approved the terms of British rule in Palestine, which were based on the promise of its support for Zionism.
In this transformed political and legal framework, the Zionists went on to build the facts on the ground that made statehood possible.

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Palestinian Statehood

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