Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Abbas Flips US and Israel the Bird; Goes Back to UN — Judith Levy
Here we go again.
Mahmoud Abbas has announced that he is bypassing the US-sponsored peace talks with Israel and going directly to the United Nations to claim some of the benefits of de facto statehood. You might recall that in 2012, when Abbas first went to the UN, that august body granted Palestine nonmember observer-state status, which enables it to join 63 international agencies. Abbas has signed (but apparently not yet filed) the necessary paperwork to join 15 of them, thereby “gain[ing] the benefits of statehood outside the negotiations process,” according to the New York Times. The Americans adamantly oppose Palestinian membership in any of the agencies, “which under a law passed by Congress could prompt a withdrawal of financial aid to the Palestinian Authority and a shutdown of the Palestinian diplomatic mission in Washington.” The Palestinians have decided that’s a gamble worth taking, and it’s entirely possible that they’re right.
The embarrassed Americans are busy insisting that reality is as they choose to perceive it. Though he cancelled a planned trip to Ramallah today, John Kerry had this to say about the Palestinians’ gambit: “What is important to say about the Middle East right now is it is completely premature tonight to draw any kind of judgment, certainly any final judgment, about today’s events and where things are…And President Abbas has given his word to me that he will keep his agreement and that he intends to negotiate through the end of the month of April.”
Yes, well. Abbas’s solemn word to Kerry notwithstanding, this move a) torpedoes Kerry’s efforts to get the two sides to sit down; b) confirms Israeli suspicions about the Palestinians’ bad faith; and c) directly contravenes — again! — the terms of the Oslo peace accords, which expressly forbid unilateral moves prior to a negotiated agreement on permanent status.
Here are some points to take away from all this.
1. The Palestinians, not the Israelis, derailed the negotiations. The Israelis have been willing to extend talks despite the Palestinians’ categorical refusal to recognize Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people, a point one could argue would have been a reasonable deal-breaker for the Israelis. The Israelis have instead decided to elide that point and continue the time-honored tradition of making concessions while receiving nothing in return. This time around, the Israelis’ “confidence-building” concession took the form of three mass prisoner releases — already completed — with the promise of a fourth if the Palestinians agree to keep talking. Abbas’s response was to pocket the prisoner releases, push Kerry off a cliff, and run to the UN. (That fourth release might still happen if Netanyahu gets Kerry to sign off on the release of Jonathan Pollard, which would — controversial as it is — constitute a domestic political win for Bibi. It’s rumored that that concession to Bibi — the only thing Israel would have gotten in exchange for any of the prisoner releases, and it’s not even a concession from the Palestinians — was what pushed Abbas over the edge.)
2. The Palestinians are explicitly and deliberately humiliating John Kerry and, by extension, Barack Obama. One imagines Vladimir Putin, the Zen master of the art of humiliating Barack Obama, observing all this with warm satisfaction. As Omri Ceren at TIP (The Israeli Project) points out in a digest of these events, “The entire basis of the 9 months-long peace initiative by Secretary of State John Kerry had relied on the Palestinians abstaining from seeking membership in UN institutions.” The American position on this has been stated and restated for years:
Sec. Clinton in 2011: “a negative scenario”; Jay Carney in 2011: “not productive or helpful”; President Obama in 2011: “peace will not come through statements and resolutions at the United Nations”; Ben Rhodes in 2011: “we would have to oppose any action at the UN Security Council including, if necessary, vetoing.”; Sec. Clinton in 2012: “unfortunate and counterproductive“; Ambassador Rice in 2012: causes “the prospects of a durable peace [to] recede”; Victoria Nuland in 2012: “only realistic path for the Palestinians to achieve statehood is through direct negotiations”; President Obama in 2012 during a call with Abbas expressed “opposition to unilateral efforts at the United Nations”.
3. The Palestinians intend to use the UN not to hasten peace with Israel but to enable more effective attacks on her, including the prosecution of Israel for war crimes in the International Criminal Court (ICC). And as bad as that is for Israel, it’s not too healthy for the UN either. Omri points out that by politicizing UN institutions, the Palestinians delegitimize and destabilize them for their own ends. UNESCO is a good example:
The ultimately successful Palestinian campaign to join UNESCO is the critical precedent. It was opposed and criticized by the White House (“premature and undermines the international community’s shared goal of a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East”); the State Department (“very clear redlines in U.S. legislation and that if those are crossed in UNESCO, that the legislation is triggered”) and Susan Rice (“today’s vote to grant Palestinian membership in UNESCO is no substitute for direct negotiations, but it is deeply damaging to UNESCO.”). The US immediately cut off its funding to UNESCO, costing the organization more than $78 million per year. The loss of 22% of its core budget has crippled UNESCO.
The Palestinians’ intentions with regard to the ICC also have potentially damaging implications:
The Hague would be torn between the anti-Israel politics of some member-states and relatively clear black-letter law. It would also bring the ICC into conflict with a range of U.S. institutions and laws, risking a diplomatic crisis in which the U.S. would use financial leverage and diplomatic capital to reassert its interests. Either scenario would badly damage the credibility and viability of the ICC and of international law.
Well, them’s the breaks. You can’t unilaterally declare statehood and co-opt international bodies for the purpose of ultimately destroying your eternal enemy without breaking eggs. Kerry, zany old coot that he is, has decided that Israeli-Palestinian peace is his personal mission, so he’ll keep twisting reality to suit him, and Abbas is smart enough to dangle just enough of a carrot in front of Kerry to keep hope alive. The only way this negotiations charade will finally limp to a close will be if Obama tells Kerry to knock it off, and that’s unlikely at best. The rest of the world’s conflicts give Obama the vapors, but he still sees “legacy” possibilities somewhere between Jerusalem and Ramallah.
Lucky us.
Published in General
What further incentive toward peace talks (let alone peace actions) would the country of Palestine have? Statehood is theoretically the carrot to lead to peace. Granting it would only embolden those who have no interest in peace, both within Palestine and without.
On the one hand, statehood would offer new avenues of lawfare against Israel. On the other hand, there is not a chance that international law will be enforced against the country of Palestine.
No one is arguing the Arabs need to accept any deal, just that they should look to themselves when their position gets worse after they reject an offer.
The Arabs already agreed not to go to the UN at Oslo. Why should they be paid anything to keep an agreement they already signed? Why should the Israelis continue to negotiate with a party that cannot keep the agreements it has already made?
Imo statehood is a carrot because it stands as proxy to not being colonised and displaced. And a carrot only works when the target believes they might really get it. Right now that doesn’t seem to be the case for Palestinians – especially given the settlements. (Because where is this State going to be? Just in Gaza? Nothing else seems a safe bet.)
Re enforcing international law – I’m slightly stunned that you think the problem is that the Palestinians aren’t complying with international law. Who colonised and ethnically cleansed whom here? In reality.
Yes, what did Israel and Palestine agree to at Oslo?
Also this piece by Spengler (David Goldman)
The Arabs agreed in part not to attempt to change the status of the disputed territories outside the framework of the agreement. Going to the UN for recognition is an attempt to do just that.
The Israelis agreed to allow the PA to be formed and to control portions of the territory in dispute.
No one. If Israel had were guilty of ethnic cleansing, there would be no Arab citizens of Israel and no Arabs in the disputed territory.
Now that isn’t necessarily true. You don’t have to have 100% efficiency to call it ethnic cleansing. The goal of the practice is to remove the native majority and replace it with your own, and that is the charge being brought against Israel. Heck the Turks didn’t kill of all the Armenians, and Milosevic didn’t get all the Bosnian’s either.
The Israelis have not acted to remove the Arab populations from either Israel proper or the disputed territories. You may benefit from reading this.
Actually both sides basically agreed not to act unilaterally – to negotiate changes and progress towards an agreed solution.
For the Palestinians this meant not going to the UN – which is something they did not do for almost two decades after Oslo. The PA overwhelmingly met its commitments – albeit for corrupt reasons and arguably at the expense of the people it was supposed to represent.
For the Israelis the Oslo agreement meant not further changing the demographics of the West Bank – but during the two decades after Oslo the number of settlers in the West Bank rose from 100,000 to 500,000. Which looks like acting in bad faith. This is something that the Right never addresses – which seriously reduces its moral credibility on the subject.
Klaatu, even most Israeli historians don’t try and peddle that line. It makes no sense at all. The Mufti was a Nazi and Egypt and Jordan treated Palestinians badly? Even if all this is true, it doesn’t excuse the Stern Gang and Irgun’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine to make a Jewish majority.
Zochrot is an excellent Israeli organisation that’s committed to acknowledging the truth about the creation of Israel. It collects eye witness statements, it’s really worth a look.
Article 31 of the Interim Agreement states, “Neither side shall initiate or take any step that will change the status of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip pending the outcome of the permanent status negotiations.”
I do not understand how that can be read to prohibit demographic changes. It simply states Israel would not annex any area and the PA would not declare statehood.
Do you believe the Arabs were also prohibited from changing the demographic make up of the area? How exactly is this to be accomplished by either side? No children? No new homes built?
I do not doubt there were occasionally cases of Jews removing Arabs from their villages but these instances were limited and cannot be reasonably termed ethnic cleansing. The vast majority of Arabs left at the behest of the Arab leadership or voluntarily to escape the conflict.
Forgive me if I am not surprised Israeli historians are as subject to political correctness as are American historians.
#43 Klaatu
Re the political correctness problem plaguing Israeli academe, your citation(s) of Efraim Karsh further up the thread serves as your answer:
Karsh has done yeoman’s work over the years to demonstrate not merely the irrationally self-flagellatory bias afflicting the soi-disant “New Historians” of the post-Zionist camp in Israel, but also their often outright fabrication-driven practices and writings.
And I would second the recommendation Kay in MT makes for Caroline Glick’s important new work “The Israeli Solution” (http://carolineglick.com/).
Indeed, this Michael Barone review of Glick’s book (http://washingtonexaminer.com/time-for-an-israeli-one-state-solution-in-the-middle-east/article/2546638) ought to remind us in very stark terms just how brazenly and vilely cynical the “ethnic cleansing” canard is:
Either the Palestinians’ population growth is indeed continuing so explosively such that Israel’s hands ought to be tied in both moral and policy terms, and Israel owes the Palestinians the creation of a state post haste — or Israel has been diabolically successful in committing ethnic cleansing such that, again, its hands ought to be tied in both moral and policy terms, as it tenders the Palestinians a state.
Do settlements change the de facto status of an area? If you ascribe to the ‘facts on the ground’ school, they do.
It’s a little deceitful to conflate settlements with the natural growth of the already resident population.
Let’s put that aside. As far as the Geneva Conventions (ratified by Israel) are concerned it’s irrelevant whether the Palestinians left to escape the conflict or were forced out at the point of a gun.
The war crime (ethnic cleansing) is refusing to let the civilian population (the Palestinians) return to their homes when they want to and to change the demographics of occupied territories (the West Bank) by importing your own citizens (ie settlers).
It’s not a war crime. Israel has to do what it takes to secure its survival. Territorial integrity and security trumps these other values you mention. If tomorrow Muslims started, in large numbers, developing a hostile animus against Christians and Jews in the US, Americans in still larger numbers would embrace kicking them out of the country with consciences clean. The Israelis are entitled to make a secure, really secure environment to live in. If Arabs in their midst threaten that goal, any other dispensation makes the Israeli’s lives and future peace of mind untenable.
Wars have been fought and won to secure this arrangement. Israel must live – and this has been ordained by all civilized peoples who have watched holocaust after pogram and said, “Enough. The Jews shall have their own homeland, safe and secure, now and forever”. The Arabs have millions and millions of square miles of territory that they conquered. They don’t need anymore. And the UN has rampant anti-semitism running through it. It is not a guide for anything.
Judith’s article is spot on. The Palestinian “leadership” ill-serves the people whom they claim to represent. We’ve made little progress since Barak tried to give everything away in 2000. I see no solution to this problem, until a responsible and sustainable leadership for the Palestinians emerges.
As soon as I turn to a site which begins with the word “Nakba”, I know exactly what to expect and “excellent” is not an adjective I would apply in this case. If you really want to know “the truth” about the creation of Israel, there are plenty of other sources I can recommend to you.
What I see is that Palestinian leadership, or “bleedership” as I think it should be called, gains much by not entering into talks, in the form of a constant stream of Israeli concessions under pressure from misguided US pressure or simply from the Israeli’s own sense of rachmones. Abbas has calculated that if you can’t destroy Israel in several wars or after a few Intifadas, just wait. Israel will be the cause of its own undoing.
We’ve had this discussion before. Read this. The point was “an opportunity for citizenship”. It means, inter alia, proving that you’re not a security risk. I understand your biases and prejudices only too well.
No, it foundered on the Palestinian bleedership’s continued refusal to countenance the existence of a Jewish state (which is the very point at stake in the idea of “return”) and Arafat did a huge disservice to the Palestinians. It’s the same position that has existed ever since the idea of a Jewish state was first mooted. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
Once Israel indicated that all prisoners would not be released, as per the agreement, why would the Palestinians feel obliged to keep their end of the bargain?
There’s nothing “peddled” and many historians do actually support the argument. Just because you won’t find it in the pages of Al-Jazeera or Ilan Pappe doesn’t mean that it’s not true. You need to widen your sources.
It’s a little deceitful to gloss over the meaning of the word “status” and assume that it supports your own rather biased viewpoint.
This is your definition of “war crime” and I disagree with it. In any case, the question of “return to their homes” is too vague and contentious to have useful meaning. If there is ever a lasting solution to Judea and Samaria which admits of the creation of a Palestinian state, it may well involve the inclusion of Jewish populations, something that was envisaged in the Partition Plan of 1947. I hardly think this is a war crime.
I am currently reading Yossi Klein Halevi’s excellent book Like Dreamers. It works on different levels, as an interesting biography of seven of the paratroopers with the IDF’s 55th brigade and also as a work of history. In particular, it provides a very timely and interesting insight into how and why the Israeli settler movement started, who supported it, who did not, and what happened. I was surprised to learn a lot of new things. As a taster, you might want to listen to John Batchelor’s interview with the author which can be found here.
No, the settlements change nothing about the status of the area. Your argument presumes the Arabs are rightfully present in the area but Jews are not. The territory in question is not Arab by default but disputed, each side has a valid legal claim to it. The Arabs rejected the partition of the territory in 1948, their claim to any territory west of the Jordan was arguably lost upon that rejection.
I know of no aspect of international law that requires a state to allow a hostile population to enter it. Can you specify the provision of international law you are relying on?
Territories in question are not occupied, they are disputed. They have never been recognized as part of any sovereign nation since the Ottoman Empire. Israel has no less a claim on the land in question than any other.
GCM – history is not just “narrative”. History is also our understanding of what actually took place – based on eye witness accounts, physical evidence and textual reports from the time. “Narrative” is our argument about what these events mean (Birth of Israel/Nakba) – but what actually took place (who did what, who lived where, who moved, when) are facts that can be supported by the evidence (eye witness, physical, textual) or not.
Zochrot brings its eye witness accounts and its physical evidence (all those Palestinian villages hidden by Canada Forest, for eg). I’d love to see respectable evidence (so beyond ‘Mark Twain thought it looked empty’) to support the ‘there were no Arabs there’ claim. Is there any?
What happens when you have two contradictory eye witness accounts about the exact same event? Let’s say Deir Yassin. Show me the evidence.