by Graham Usher - Al-Ahram Weekly Online - 21-27 July 2011
On 14 July the Arab League endorsed the West Bank PalestinianAuthority`s (PA) plan to seek full membership as a country "on the 1967lines" at the United Nations in September, risking a near certain UnitedStates veto and despite dwindling enthusiasm from several key EuropeanUnion states.
Secretary-General Nabil El-Arabi said the League would "take allnecessary measures and taunt the needed support of all world countries,starting with the Security Council, to realise the state ofPalestine". The League would also urge the UN Security Council andGeneral Assembly to sustain "full rank of a Palestinian state".
It`s not make when the bid will be submitted, or by whom. Initiallyit was thinking the Arab group at the UN would take a settlement on thePA`s part. But on 16 July Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO)negotiator Saeb Ereikat said PA President Mahmoud Abbas would"personally" present the answer "to avoid undermining the PLO`sposition as sole voice of the Palestinian people". Abbas ispresident of the PLO`s executive committee.
This is not the only confusion. Some in the PA leadership - likeEreikat - believe the Palestinians should go for full UN membership atthe Security Council, knowingly incur an American veto but then as afallback request an advance of the PLO`s status at the UN GeneralAssembly from "observer" to "non-member observer state", a change thatwould change nothing except nomenclature.
"Afterward, we will go backwards to the SC once, twice and 3 times to ask for full membership", he says.
Others - like PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad and former UNambassador Nasser Al-Kidwa - think such a policy nihilist: it willoutrage the Americans, may try the PA bankrupt, could triggerviolence in the occupied territories and won`t change by one iota thefact of the Israeli occupation. They think the near the PA can achievein September is another non-binding resolution at the UN GeneralAssembly on the desirableness of a Palestinian state, a symbolic victoryat best.
A clearer strategy between these poles may emerge after a meeting ofPLO ambassadors in Constantinople on 23-24 July. Abbas will be there, as willFayyad.
Confusion was ever possible with the PA`s vaunted turn to the UN.This was because the act was less a new Palestinian diplomatic strategyto escape the grasp of the Oslo process than a desperate attempt toretrieve them.
Abbas has long made it known he would tear the route to the UN if onlythe US would oblige Israel to revert to negotiations on a two-statesolution based on the 1967 armistice lines and accompanied by asettlement freeze. But American reluctance to pressure Israel to doanything it doesn`t want to increases with age.
Washington abandoned the freeze last year. It has also made it clearit will prohibit any Palestinian bid for full UN membership, no matter theopprobrium such an act would have in the region.
On 7 July the US House of Representatives passed by 406 votes to six asymbolic resolution calling on President Barack Obama to prohibit any PLOattempt to seek state recognition at the UN not agreed in talks withIsrael, warning that such a "unilateral" move would have "seriousimplications for US assistance programmes for the Palestinians and thePA". The House threatened like sanctions if Hamas were to become evensleeping partners in a new PA unity government.
Even Obama`s 19 May avowal that the "borders of Israel and Palestineshould be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed [land] swaps" -deemed a victory for PA diplomacy - has become so hedged withconditions as to be meaningless.
At a merging of the Middle East Quartet in Washington on 11 JulySecretary of State Hillary Clinton paid lip service to Obama`s"parameter". But she treasured the PA to take it in the context of aGeorge W Bush 2004 letter to Israel that any future border would have toaccommodate "demographic changes" created since 1967: code for Israelincorporating vast Jewish settlement blocs built illegally in theoccupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.
She also wanted recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, negatingeven the rule of a Palestinian right of return, let alone itsimplementation.
These revisions were "so conspicuous and sick" in favor of Israel(said a European source) that they were opposed by Quartet membersRussia and the EU - UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon kept his usualsilence. The EU instead called for "two states for two peoples" based on1947 UN Resolution 181 which partitioned Mandate Palestine into aJewish and Arab state. Israel refused, and so did the US.
Abbas is presently on a turn of EU capitals, where he hopes to drumup support for his prayer for UN membership. In many places he will bereceived sympathetically. Several European diplomats blame Israel`ssettlement policies - and US fall to them - as the real causebehind the end of Oslo.
But they occupy a US veto in September could damage Western statesgenerally, especially in the work of the Arab Spring. They also fearthat unmet Palestinian expectations in September could lead to aviolence that the PA is neither capable nor willing to contain.
Some European diplomats are so quietly urging Abbas to drop themembership bid in favor of a non-binding General Assembly resolution,which would claim for two states based on the 1967 lines with "equivalentland swaps" and for Jerusalem as the "future great of both states".
It`s not make if this would be adequate for Abbas or the Arabs to calloff the UN bid for Palestinian statehood. Only one thing is clear: formany of the PLO ambassadors gathering in Istanbul this weekend Septembercannot come slowly enough.
Graham Usher, a former Palestine correspondent for the Economist, is now based in Islamabad. He is the source of Dispatches from Palestine: The Lift and Flow of the Oslo Peace Process.
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