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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
If you prefer, here are the same basic population statistics from the Jewish Virtual Library. Please don’t engage in the sophistry that Jordan is Palestine. (Or do you argue that Jews make up 75% of the population of Israel and Jordan combined today?)
And please don’t engage in the sophistry that it’s reasonable to compare the Jordanian desert with the fertile Galilee and Jordan River Valley and thickly populated Mediterranean coast and try and use a 1:1 equivalence when arguing that ‘the Arabs got more’.
We can disagree about the justifications, but this kind of kitchen sink junkie logic argument is crazy – why?
Obviously there were more Arabs in the fertile parts of the region – obviously when Israel took those parts it displaced those Arabs.
(If Israel had been formed in the Jordanian desert there would have been a lot fewer Arab refugees.)
It was not I who attempted to make a comparison of percentage of population to amount of land given, it was you. Your comparison was flawed now you call pointing that out to be sophistry. Sorry Zafar but that is not how it works.
FWIW, Jews would make up about 41% of the combined Israeli/Jordanian population not 75%.
I did not claim Jordan was Palestine. Jordan is, however the Arab state formed from the British Mandate. Jordan and Israel have comparable amounts of arable land 418 thousand hectares (Israel) vs 401 thousand hectares for Jordan.
The point you refuse to acknowledge is the Arabs were offered another state in 1948 and they refused. They then went to war and lost (multiple times). You simply want to erase that history and pretend such actions should have no consequence. If the Arabs had accepted the Partition there would be virtually no Arab refugees.
At the time of the Balfour Declaration Jews made up 13% of the population between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. (Or 5%, from memory, of the entire Mandate territory.) Despite this the State of Israel was allocated a bit more than half the area between the river and the sea. On the face of it this seems completely unfair to the Arab population of the area. Bringing the Kingdom of Jordan into it (although caveats in the Balfour Declaration excluded the area East of the Jordan River) seemed like sophistry to me – but if I was rude, please do excuse me.
They refused because it was unjust. Why is that hard to understand? The fact that Israel was and is stronger than the Arabs does not make Israel’s actions just or palatable.
Given the number of present absentees – and the condition of many Arab communities within Israel itself – you’ll forgive me if I find your thoughts on no refugees if Partition was accepted unpersuasive. But of course there’s no way to tell about “what ifs”.
There were no such caveats in the Balfour Declaration. From the time the Declaration was made in 1917, through the San Remo Conference in 1920, and the ratification of the San Remo Treaty by the League of Nations in July 1922, the Declaration applied to the whole of the Mandate area. It was only after the Hashemites lost control of their kingdom in Arabia to Ibn Sa’ud that the British separated the Mandate along the Jordan and created Transjordan for the Hashemites in Sept 1922. This just seems like more history you wish to ignore.
I guess justice is in the eye of the beholder. I see little to define as unjust in the Partition Plan except for the lack of Jewish control over Jerusalem.
My mistake – it was the Transjordan Memorandum as you say – but all of this ignores whether any of it belonged to the British to dispose of as they wished. What moral right did they have to give away other people’s homes? Why would those people accept that? If you were in their place would you have?
Well it allocated 50% of the land to 13% of the population. That’s hardly even handed.
Justice, as I see it, is when people lose their homes because they have done something to deserve it. If they lose their homes without deserving it, just because they’re Arabs, then it isn’t just at all. Honestly – how would you feel if you were Palestinian?