Latest update: 20/09/2011 
- diplomacy - Israeli-Palestinian conflict - Mahmoud Abbas - Palestinian Authority - United Nations

Palestinian UN bid seeks 'to level the playing field'

Palestinian UN bid seeks 'to level the playing field'

With the UN set to vote on the Palestinian bid for full membership on Friday, FRANCE 24 spoke to Khaled Elgindy, a Middle East specialist at the Brookings Institution, about the political, diplomatic and practical implications of the move.

By FRANCE 24 (text)
 

FRANCE 24: What is the probable outcome of the Palestinian bid for full UN recognition?

Khaled Elgindy: There is virtually no chance that Palestine will be admitted as a full member of the UN. Given the certainty of a US veto at the Security Council, the most likely scenario is for the UN General Assembly to adopt a resolution that recognises Palestine as a “non-member state”, similar to the status of the Vatican.

F24: What are the political consequences of this move, regarding both Palestinian negotiations with Israel and relations between rival Palestinian factions?

UN member, non-member and observer status

There are currently 193 nations that are official UN members. According to the charter of the United Nations, “membership is open to peaceful nations that are willing and able to carry out the duties required by the charter”. Upon the recommendation of the Security Council, the General Assembly decides whether to approve a nation’s candidacy.

“Non-member” status can also be conferred, allowing certain countries, organisations or entities to benefit from collaborations with any of the UN’s specialised agencies, such as the World Health Organisation or the Food and Agriculture Organisation.

Non-member status comes with the right to file for “permanent observer” status, which grants permission to attend UN General Assembly meetings. The Vatican and the Palestinian Authority currently have observer status.

KE: The political consequences of the Palestinian UN bid will, to a large extent, depend on how Israel, the US, and other international actors respond to whatever vote takes place in New York. Both Israel and the US Congress have threatened major punitive measures if the Palestinians go through with the UN bid, many of which could ultimately harm American and Israeli interests at least as much as – if not more than – those of Palestinians. Should Israel carry through with its threats to annex large swaths of West Bank territory, cancel the Oslo Accords or withhold tax revenues to the Palestinian Authority, any or all of these could easily backfire by hastening the Palestinian Authority’s collapse, which would probably mean the end of the two-state solution itself. Congressional threats to cut off aid to the PA may be equally self-defeating, given the importance of Palestinian security coordination for Israel and, over the long term, could lead to the same end.

F24: How does the UN bid alter the diplomatic situation for the United States, European countries and other intermediary players in the Mideast peace process?

KE: The extent to which the UN bid will alter the diplomatic situation depends on how various international actors – particularly the United States and Europe – behave before, during and after the UN vote. By going to the UN, the Palestinians are in effect violating two central tenets of the Middle East peace process: one, that only the US can lead the process, and two, that the Quartet (comprising the US, EU, Russia and the UN) is the only suitable international forum for dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Obviously, this has not been well received by the US administration. A US veto will certainly harm America’s credibility in the Arab world – though perhaps not as significantly as may be feared, given that US standing in the region is already quite low in the context of the Arab Spring and the failed peace process.   

This may also spell the end of the Quartet, which had already outlived its usefulness long ago – with one member openly opposing the move (US), another openly supporting it (Russia), the EU divided and the UN serving as the venue where it all takes place.

While there is also some apprehension in Europe about the Palestinian plan, the EU is far less hostile to the move than the US, and in fact may have its own reasons for opposing American domination of the peace process. Indeed, Europe has emerged as the crucial battleground in the diplomatic battle between those who support Palestinian UN recognition and those who oppose it, which has given the EU and key European actors like France unprecedented prominence and leverage – certainly more than its involvement in the Quartet could have offered.

F24: What would be the tangible, day-to-day consequences of this outcome for Palestinians living in the territories?

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KE: The recognition of Palestine as a “non-member state” would have no impact on the day-to-day living conditions of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. But that is not what it is intended to do. Rather, in going to the UN, Mahmoud Abbas is attempting to regain some badly needed political leverage vis-à-vis Israel and the US, as well as help shore up his leadership’s sagging legitimacy and declining domestic political standing. It is motivated by a belief, long held by ordinary Palestinians and only recently arrived at by Abbas’s leadership, that two decades of “peace processing” has not only failed to bring Palestinians closer to freedom but has actually helped deepen Israel’s occupation and weaken Palestinian institutions. Twenty years after the launch of face-to-face talks, the West Bank is more fragmented, Gaza’s population more besieged, Israeli settlers entrenched, and the Palestinian political leadership more divided and dependent on foreign support than ever. By going to the UN, the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organisation) is trying to level the playing field rather than change the game altogether.

 

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UN Resolution Partitioning

UN Resolution Partitioning Palestine to Create Israel
US blackmailed poor countries in the UN

By Latheef Farook

Palestine, now called Israel, which was under Turkish rule, was brought under British mandatory power in the aftermath of World War 1.

Since then the British authority in collaboration with Zionist Jews brought in Jews from all over and settled them in Palestinian lands .To grab Palestinian lands Zionist Jews massacred Palestinians village after village and driven them to refugee camps in neighbouring countries where they still live in unprecedented misery.

Once sufficient Jews were brought in Zionists turned to United Nations to partition Palestine and create a separate country in the robbed Palestinian lands. Most newly independent countries were bought over by US backed by international Jewry. However six countries– Haiti, Philippines, Liberia, China, Ethiopia and Greece – were against the partition proposal .All except Greece were blackmailed and pressured either to vote in favour of the proposal or to abstain.

US President Truman was in no festive mood on that Thanksgiving Day. According to the Chicago Daily Tribune of February 9 1948, “President Truman cracked down harder on his State Department than ever before to swing the United Nation’s vote for the partition of Palestine. Truman called Acting Secretary Lovett to the White House warning him he would demand a full explanation from nations which usually line up with the US, who failed to do so on Palestine”.

Addressing the US Congress on 18 December 1947, Lawrence H. Smith had this to say: “The decisive votes for the partition cast by Haiti, Liberia and the Philippines. were sufficient to make the two-thirds majority. The pressure by our delegates, by our officials and by the private citizens of the US constitutes reprehensible conduct against them and against us”.

The ideologically divided United States and the Soviet Union stood together like comrades-in-arms in solidarity in creating the Zionist state in Palestine - showing to what extent the Jews had control over the two super powers and effectively the world at large. Thus, on November 29 1947, the UN voted in favour of a partition of Palestine violating its own charter. Of the total population of 1,008,900 in the proposed Jewish state, the Arab-Jew ratio was 509,780 to 499,020. In other words, at the outset, the Arabs had a majority in the proposed Jewish state too.

The Arabs in Palestine rejected the UN resolution to partition their country into two halves because that would be tantamount to cleaving their own motherland. You will recall that it was through her willingness to abandon her own baby, rather than have it halved into two, that the woman in the famous Biblical story helped Solomon the Wise to identify her as the disputed baby’s true mother. But unfortunately sitting on judgment in this case was not Solomon the Wise but the UN, the impotent tool that has become notorious for legalising the conspiracies of the US and Europe to dominate the world.

Speaking of the unjust nature of the UN move to partition Palestine renowned author and historian H.G. Wells said, “If it is proper to reconstitute a Jewish state which has not existed for more than 2,000 years, why not go back another two thousand years, and reconstitute the Canaanite state? The Canaanites, unlike the Jews, are still there”.

There was more widespread condemnation of this injustice from all right thinking people. In an article which appeared in The New York Review of Books I. F. Stone said:“There is a good deal of simplistic sophistry in the Zionist case. The whole earth would have to be reshuffled if claims 2,000 years old to ‘irredenta’ were suddenly to be allowed. Zionism from its beginning, tried to gain its aims by offering to serve as an outpost in the Arab world for one of the great empires. The argument that the refugees ran away “voluntarily” or because their leaders urged them to do so until after the fighting was over not only rests on a myth but is irrelevant. Have refugees no right to return? Have German Jews no right to recover their properties because they too fled?”

Emboldened by the UN Partition Resolution, the Zionists committed a series of reprehensible massacres against the Palestinian Arabs who were later forced into exile by the millions. The US supplied, as it does even now at the cost of American tax payers, the Israeli Zionist terror gangs with weapons and other means of destruction such as a huge quantity of TNT which was shipped to Tel Aviv.

Designed to destroy the Palestinian resistance, the Zionist terrorist gang Haganah, led by Menachem Begin on a murderous rampage and within a week butchered hundreds of innocent Palestinian men, women and children – 100 in the derailment of Haifa Cairo express and 254 in Deir Yassin, a village a few miles off Jerusalem. The Deir Yassin massacre has been one of the most barbarous crimes ever committed against humanity and could be coupled with the infamous “My Lai massacre in Vietnam”.

Menachem Begin boasted about his crime as a memorable day in Jewish history. All the Jewish forces proceeded to advance through Haifa like a hot knife through butter. The Arabs, unarmed and unorganised, began to flee in panic shouting “Deir Yassin”. Menachem Begin and Ben Gurion, joining hands unofficially, coordinated and aligned the underworld terrorist forces into the regular army of Haganah.

Commenting on this massacre, renowned historian Arnold Toynbee had this to say in his book “A Study of History”: “The evil deeds committed by the Zionist Jews against the Palestinian Arabs that were comparable to crimes committed against the Jews by the Nazis, were the massacre of men, women and children at Deir Yassin which precipitated a flight of the Arab population in large numbers from districts within range of the Jewish armed forces, and the subsequent expulsion of the Arab population from districts conquered by the Jewish forces between 15 May 1948 and end of the year...The blood at Deir Yassin was on the head of the Irgun,Menachem Begin; the expulsion of Palestinians after 15 May 1948 were on the head of all Israelis.”

The irony is that Begin was not even a Palestinian. He was a Polish. He joined the Irgun, an underground Jewish militia, which launched a war of ambush and sabotage against the British Authorities in early 1944. The British put a price of 10,000 Sterling Pounds on Begin’s head for all his heinous crimes. Begin was also condemned as a terrorist by the official Jewish leadership of Palestine.

However he was awarded coveted Nobel Prize Peace.

This was not the end of the story. In the same cold blooded vein Jewish terror gangs massacred people in a number of other villages. This included the village of Nassiruddin, on April 14 1948, where all except forty, who managed to escape, were butchered by the Irgun-Stern force. The following day, on May 5 1948, Haganah troops committed a wholesale massacre in the area of Mazraat El Khoury, overlooking Tiberias. The bodies of many slain women and children were mutilated and a number of old people were beheaded and their limbs cut off. Young people were roasted alive when the Haganah locked them inside a house and set it on fire before the few surviving old people were finally set free by the Haganah and advised to tell their story to the Arab world and sarcastically asked the Arab states to come to their rescue. A mosque was blown up on 6 May 1948, over the heads of villagers who were locked in by the Zionists at Al Zeitoon, Safad. The entire population of Beit Drass in Gaza was wiped out on 13 May 1948 in another savage attack by the Zionists similar to the Deir Yassin massacre. There the pregnant women were bayoneted in the womb, bodies of others atrociously mutilated and all the houses in the villages were finally dynamited.

Since then the Palestinians, driven out of their homes and lands, are still lingering and suffering in the refugee camps. Tired mothers and hungry and sick children still hope in vain the UN would settle their problems, and let them return to their homes again. They still have the keys to their houses and the deeds to their lands now occupied by immigrant Jews. About a quarter million Palestinian Arabs took refuge in neighbouring countries. Visiting a refugee camp some forty-five years later, in 1990, the former British Foreign Secretary Waldergrave described the conditions there as appalling – thanks to his country.

In the midst of the Palestinian bloodbath the state of Israel was proclaimed on 14 May 1948, over a much larger part of the country than that was allotted to the Zionists even by the UN Partition Resolution. What actually emerged as the Jewish State was anything but the “state” planned for under the partition plan. It was the upshot of brute force, created in violation of the principles of the UN Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the very resolution under which the Israelis now claim sovereignty. Fifteen minutes after the proclamation of the Zionist state, recognition came from the White House in the USA followed by the Soviet Union, which played a crucial role in the creation of the Zionist state.

The US and the European imperialism, led by Britain and the Zionists, achieved their goals as earmarked in their World Zionist Conference of 1897 and the London Colonial Conference of 1907. The imperialists wanted to create this alien and hostile entity of Israel to prevent the Arabs from uniting and emerging as a powerful force threatening the interests of colonial powers.

Rejecting the idea of a Jewish state, Albert Einstein, the world renowned scientist said “the state idea is not according to my heart. I cannot understand why it is needed. It is concerned with narrow-mindedness and economic obstacles. I believe it is bad. I have always been against it.” Commenting further on the Jewish question Einstein said in his book Out of My Later Years, “I should much rather see a reasonable agreement with the Arabs on the basis of living together than the creation of a Jewish state. Apart from practical considerations, my awareness of the essential nature of Judaism resists the idea of a Jewish state, with borders, an army and a measure of temporal power no matter how modest. I am afraid of the inner damage Judaism will sustain.”

In the summer of 1948, Zionist propagandists filled the streets of New York with loudspeakers calling on the public to contribute money with slogans such as “Pay a Dollar and Kill an Arab” and “every time Stern militia killed an Arab the Jews rejoiced in their hearts.” Mickey Cohen, a notorious American underworld racketeer, helped Begin and Irgun receive accolades and a medal as “Fellow Fighter for Hebrew Freedom”.

The Arab states appealed to the UN and other bodies, of course in vain, to find a peaceful solution by restoring Palestine to Palestinian Arabs and to prevent their exodus into neighbouring countries as refugees. Sixty three years later, Arab regimes are still turning to these very same hostile UN and other forces to help find solutions to their problems.
The UN Mediator Count Bernadette arrived in Jerusalem in June 1948, the day after the four week truce became effective in the 1948 war, to inspect thousands of refugees in the nearby town of Ramallah, announced his plan for a peaceful solution to the Palestine question. His plan was to create an Arab-Jewish confederation that would cover the whole of Palestine, but with a much smaller portion allotted to the Jews than by the UN partition scheme. The Zionists did not like the idea and to lay it to rest once and for all, they killed Count Bernadotte himself.

What happened since then is history. According to some reports Israel has committed around 60 massacres under the watchful eyes of US-UK and France- the three imperial powers calling themselves the international community.

In one of the most shameful and disgraceful episodes in American history American Congressmen received the Prime Minister of this entity, Benjamin Netanyahu, with red carpet. They also provided Netanyahu the honour of addressing the Congress with a unanimous. In its wake most Congressmen were awarded with free trips to Israel .

It was under such circumstance that the toothless Palestine Authority, created by Israel and its US-European partners is turning to this very same United Nations to create a state of their own in their own country .This happens amidst open threats by US President Barrack Obama, product of Jewish lobby, to veto this move.Ends

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