If the UN Security Council Grants Full Membership Status to Palestine and Obama Vetoes It, Palestinians Will Probably Seek a Status Upgrade at the General Assembly from 'Observer' to 'Nonmember Observer State'
The United States has spent weeks of wrangling to persuade Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas to drop the bid for UN statehood and return to the bargaining table with Israel. Israel and the United States can now only twist arms among Security Council members to vote against it, or to slow the process in the Security Council to avoid a U.S. veto. In forceful speech before the UN, the Palestinian leader made it clear Friday that the time for compromise was past, and he wanted rapid action. And he said that return to negotiations would only take place if there were an end to Israeli settlements. Abbas said talks would be “meaningless” as long as Israel continues its occupation, and attempts “to change the demography of our country in order to create a new basis on which to alter the borders.” - Palestinians, resisting U.S.-led pressure, submit request for UN membership, The Star, September 23, 2011Can Palestine's Bid for UN Statehood Revive the National Movement?
The NationAs we go to press, the Palestinian Authority has announced it will request full membership as a state at the UN Security Council. If Washington vetoes the move or the PA backs down, the Palestinians will probably seek a status upgrade at the General Assembly, from observer to nonmember observer state.
The PA’s appeal to the world body arises from the collapse of a two-decade Oslo “peace process” that has brought the Palestinians neither peace nor a state. But there is confusion at the heart of the move: is it an elaborate ruse to strengthen the PA’s hand in negotiations, or is it a new diplomatic strategy grounded in international law and political mobilization but born of the opportunities opened by the Arab revolutions?
It’s certainly a risk. Any bid before the Security Council will incur not only a US veto but Congressional sanctions and Israeli retaliation, including a possible ban on transfer of PA revenues to pay its 180,000 employees. Even an upgrade, which carries a lesser status, could incur Israeli reprisals. And both could trigger violence in the occupied territories and beyond. UN membership is said to be the preference of PA president Mahmoud Abbas, his Fatah movement, most Palestinians and the Arab League. The upgrade already has the support of most nations at the General Assembly, including several European states. The EU’s official position as a bloc, however, is to support a return to negotiations.
The Obama administration sees both a veto and a no vote as a train wreck. Either action would deepen—at a time of revolutionary upheaval—the already widespread Arab perception of America as Israel’s defender and Palestine’s enemy. Embassies in Cairo and Damascus have been burned for less. Former Saudi US ambassador Turki al-Faisal has warned that if Washington vetoes a Palestinian state, it will lose Saudi Arabia, historically its closest Arab ally.
The PA’s turn to the UN is an act of last resort. Since Obama was elected there have been just two weeks of PA-Israeli negotiations. Obama’s last throw on the PA’s part was a plea last year for Israel to obey a partial freeze on settlement construction. Israel refused, for the third time. Obama later vetoed a unanimous Security Council resolution calling for a freeze, something that had been Washington policy.
UN membership would strengthen the PA legally and politically. Even an upgrade may allow it to join bodies like the International Criminal Court; there, say legal experts, it could potentially prosecute Israel for grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions, including the illegal transfer of settlers into occupied territory. The PA also knows that an overwhelming show of support for nonmember observer state status would not only strengthen its claim to eventual statehood. It would expose the United States and Israel as the real holdouts in the conflict, and “finally extract a price for US shameless pandering to Israel,” says Palestinian analyst Rashid Khalidi.
It could also help revive mass grassroots activism, which had largely vanished from the Palestinian struggle. In May refugees from Syria, Lebanon, Israel and the territories marched in protests commemorating the Nakba, the dispossession and exile caused by Israel’s creation. Similar marches are planned around the UN bid. Activists say the aim is not simply to endorse “a last chance for a two-state solution,” as PA slogans put it. Indeed, some activists worry that the UN move could weaken the Palestine Liberation Organization’s status as the representative of the Palestinian people as a whole, and especially the refugees’ right of return. But others see the bid as a potential mobilizer to unite a people that during the Oslo era became “un-nationed” into its fragments: West Bankers, Gazans, East Jerusalemites, Israeli Palestinians and stateless refugees. To them, the UN move is part of a new strategy that replaces the Oslo paradigm of unequal and bilateral negotiations with international law, popular protest, regional solidarity and national unity.
Is this the PA’s vision? For many in the current leadership, the UN bid is not about the death of Oslo but its resurrection. Abbas has said he would scrap the UN move if only Washington would compel Israel to return to negotiations based on 1967 lines and a settlement freeze. He has also said he will return to negotiations no matter what happens at the UN.
More seriously, he has stalled reconciliation talks with Hamas for fear they would harm international (read US and European) support at the UN. For many Palestinians, the rapprochement with the Islamists not only ended the conflict between rival authorities; it paved the way for new PA elections in the territories, and the hope of a democratically reconstituted PLO beyond them. The partial collapse in unity talks has aroused suspicions among some Palestinians that Abbas’s UN move is less about reinvigorating the national cause than retaining political control.
Likening the PA’s UN bid to the Arab revolutions is attractive but facile. Palestinians’ primary enemy is not autocracy; it is occupation. And their primary goal is not democracy; it is freedom. Where their struggle chimes with those of their kin in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Syria is in the fact that no change will come via leaderships or alliances that remain wedded to the ancien régime. If the UN bid really marks a break with a negotiating paradigm based on US control, Israeli domination and Palestinian retreat, then it may be the start of a new strategy. But if it is only brinkmanship meant to force a US-guided return to negotiations on slightly better terms, then it is the ancien régime dressed in new UN clothes. That paradigm was tried for twenty years, and the only thing it delivered was US-guaranteed impunity for Israel to colonize another people’s country. It’s as over as Oslo.
Israel Seeks Allies to Halt Palestine’s U.N. Bid
The Washington TimesSeptember 14, 2011
Israel is bracing for one of the greatest diplomatic challenges since its founding — a Palestinian bid for U.N. membership that has galvanized the Jewish state’s adversaries and left it searching for friends.
With a U.N. vote less than a week away, U.S. lawmakers threatened Wednesday to cut aid to the Palestinian Authority, while Israel weighed its own response.
The Obama administration, which says Palestinians should gain statehood only as part of negotiations with Israel, has vowed to veto the application if it comes before the U.N. Security Council.
Palestinians still could petition the General Assembly, where they have majority support, to upgrade the Palestine Liberation Organization’s (PLO) status from “observer” to “nonmember observer state” — a designation that allows membership on several U.N. panels.
Analysts have debated the consequences of the U.N. gambit, and some fear an outbreak of violence in the Middle East after the vote.
The U.N. showdown comes as Israel finds itself embroiled in separate diplomatic crises with Turkey and Egypt, two erstwhile regional allies.
Israel’s ambassador to Turkey was expelled this month after Israel refused to apologize for a deadly 2010 raid on a Turkish-sponsored Gaza-bound flotilla. Israel’s envoy to Egypt was forced to return home Friday after protesters stormed the Israeli Embassy.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who met with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in Cairo on Wednesday, has threatened to refer Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip to the International Court of Justice and have Turkish warships escort flotillas.
The confluence of diplomatic crises has given ammunition to domestic opponents of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with opposition leader Tzipi Livni accusing his right-wing government Wednesday of leading the Jewish state to “to the worst possible diplomatic situation.”
“People must ask themselves, after all the slogans, if Israel today is stronger or weaker,” she said. “Is Israel’s security better or in greater doubt?”
Ms. Livni, who as foreign minister in the previous government led Israel in final-status talks with the Palestinians, said that “the only way to protect Israel’s interests is through a diplomatic process.”
The Palestinians walked out of short-lived, U.S.-sponsored talks in September after Israel refused to extend a 10-month freeze on West Bank settlements that it had imposed at the behest of the Obama administration.
The Palestinians have been a people without a state since Israel was founded in the land formerly known as Palestine in the aftermath of World War II. They reside in divided territories — the West Bank, which is controlled by the Palestinian Authority, and the Gaza Strip run by Hamas, an Islamist militant group that seeks Israel’s destruction.
Their resort to unilateral action in the U.N. stems from a widely held Palestinian belief that Mr. Netanyahu is unwilling to offer the same sort of concessions that his predecessor Ehud Olmert did in talks with Mr. Abbas.
On Wednesday, a senior aide to Mr. Abbas said the Palestinians would return to negotiations if the Israeli government announces another freeze on Jewish settlements in the West Bank and agrees to talks based on President Obama’s formulation proposed in May that the borders of the two states be based on Israel’s pre-1967 frontiers with “mutually agreed swaps.”
“We believe that both the conditions need to exist together, because they are connected to one another,” Nimmer Hammad, the Abbas aide, told Israeli Army Radio, claiming that dovish Israeli President Shimon Peres had “tried to get Netanyahu to agree to only one condition and he refused.”
Having abandoned hopes of averting a U.N. vote, Israeli officials have begun debating their actions on “the day after.” Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman warned the Palestinians on Wednesday that their bid would bring “harsh and grave consequences.”
Israel argues that by unilaterally seeking statehood — a violation of the 1993 Oslo Accords — the Palestinians are freeing Israel to renege on its own promises, such as not annexing West Bank territory or withholding tax revenues it collects on behalf of the Palestinian Authority.
“Many different options are being discussed — and seriously,” an Israeli official told The Washington Times.
In Washington, lawmakers from both parties threatened the Palestinians with their own response: a cutoff of U.S. aid.
“By providing the Palestinians with $2.5 billion over the past five years, the U.S. has only rewarded and reinforced their bad behavior,” Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said during a hearing on the topic.
“It raises tough questions as to just what are the tangible benefits for the U.S., or for lasting peace and security between Israel and the Palestinians, derived from decades of assistance provided by the United States taxpayers,” the Florida Republican said.
Rep. Eliot L. Engel, New York Democrat, argued that the Palestinians’ U.N. move “dooms peace.” He said he is not “prepared to send one red cent more to the Palestinian Authority unless they prove to me that they’re serious about peace with Israel.”
Mr. Engel also claimed that in a meeting last week, Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad “said to me that he thinks the Palestinians going to the U.N. is the stupidest thing that they could possibly do.”
Ghaith al-Omari, a former Palestinian negotiator, said some Palestinian officials are concerned that the U.N. move would damage U.S.-Palestinian relations and jeopardize Mr. Fayyad’s hard-fought gains on the economy, security and institution building.
Like Mr. al-Omari, Middle East analysts who testified during Wednesday’s hearing warned that a cutoff of U.S. aid would be counterproductive, potentially leading to a collapse of the Palestinian Authority.
“Policymakers must always ask themselves: ‘Who benefits from these actions?’ I think the group that stands to benefit most from a cutoff of aid to the PA would be Hamas, which does not recognize Israel’s existence at all,” said David Makosvky, director of the Project on the Middle East Peace Process at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Elliot Abrams, a former deputy national security adviser, told lawmakers that they should “keep some powder dry” before seeing how Palestinian leaders word their U.N. resolution and act after the vote. But he recommend closing the PLO’s Washington office.
“What they’re basically saying if they go forward in the U.N. is, ‘The status we have … that’s not good enough,’” he said. “So my argument is that you would be responding, ‘OK, if the PLO doesn’t work anymore for you, why do we need to have a PLO office in Washington?’”
Finally, Palestine Statehood in UN
Dr. Abdul RuffSeptember 20, 2011
Palestinians have taken entire western a terrocracies by shock by its decision to move for a UN vote to ensure statehood for the besieged Palestinians. The Palestinian leader informed U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon during their meeting that he would present him with a letter requesting full membership on Friday, ahead of Abbas' speech to the General Assembly.
Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas is pressing ahead with his diplomatic campaign to gain full UN membership for Palestine. As the Palestinians edged closer to seeking statehood recognition from the UN, Israeli terror PM B. Netanyahu called for Abbas to meet with him in New York followed with a series of such useless meetings in Jerusalem and Ramallh. He provided no other details or indications that Netanyahu was willing to cede to any of the Palestinians' demands.The Israel hawkish leader said he wanted to resume "peace talks", upping the pressure on Abbas and building on the frenzied diplomacy swirling around the Palestinians' bid.
The unilateral USA is talking with all sides to defuse the standoff in favor of Israel. Hoping America is capable of overcoming the Palestinian firmness and stopping them form becoming a full fledged UN member to exist with human dignity, Madam Clinton said, however, there was still time to find a solution to the diplomatic crisis. The US gives some $500 million a year in aid to the Palestinians. The dictatorial USA effectively control the notorious UNSC and Madam Clinton thinks it USA could stop the Palestinians form raising their legitimate demand by disapproving it.
UN chief and a US agent Ban ki Moon reiterated his support for the two-state solution and stressed his desire to ensure that the international community and the two parties can find a way forward for resuming negotiations within a legitimate and balanced framework.
Any candidate for UN membership must submit a letter to the secretary-general stating it is a "peace-loving" state and accepts the U.N. Charter. Ban is expected to examine the Palestinian letter and then send it to the 15-member UN Security Council, which must give its approval before a vote in the larger General Assembly. Ban "reiterated his support for the two-state solution and stressed his desire to ensure that the international community and the two parties can find a way forward for resuming negotiations within a legitimate and balanced framework. The comment underscored the desires of some members of the Quartet of Mideast mediators that Palestinian statehood should not be granted before a resumption of peace talks. While the four international mediators have repeatedly called for renewed negotiations, while China remains non-commital, Russia supports UN membership for Palestine.
Since the notorious UNSC controlled by USA by coercive diplomacy and arms-aid gimmicks, Palestinians must take up the statehood issue directly with UN in stead of depending on an insane forum like UNSC that sends NATO terror syndicates to invade sovereign states like Libya for making them client stats of USA, especially when the dictatorial USA has already threatened to use its fascist veto to obstruct the establishment of Palestine state.
Western pro-Israeli strategists suggest that the Palestinians could seek the approval of a majority of the General Assembly's 193 member states to upgrade their status from a permanent observer to a nonmember observer state — a designation that would leave them with a symbolic victory despite years of failed negotiations and waning hopes for statehood. However, brushing aside heated Israeli objections and a promised US veto against the Palestinian statehood the issue takes center stage with world's fanaitc leaders with terrorist insticts gathering for the opening of the UN General Assembly session.
If USA reamins a perpetual threat to Palestine and other coccupied nations, and if general Council could enact a new law to directly offer membership to besigned nations like Palestine without the involvement of UNSC, Abbas must present the Palestine Statehood case directly in UN. By already threatening a veto in the notorious UNSC, the USA has blocked that course for the Palestinians before they even submit the request. Last ditch efforts to dissuade the Palestinian president from approaching the Security Council have failed and the Palestinians, threatened with harsh punitive measures, have decided to move ahead nonetheless.
II
As per the joint conspiracy of USA, UK and Israel, Israel captured both areas in the 1967 Mideast war. The long-stalled negotiations have been unable to solve key issues including Israeli settlement building in the West Bank and the status of east Jerusalem, which the Palestinians want as their capital.
USA and Europe are puzzled by the firm conviction of the Palestinians to approach the UN for formal recognition of Palestine as a full member. USA, Quartet and Israel jointly played gimmicks with the Palestinians for decades now letting the Zionist criminals to kill Palestinians and confiscate their lands to expand the illegal proliferation of colonies inside Palestine. Envoys of the Quartet of Mideast mediators — the USA, the UN, the EU and Russia — planned to meet again on 20th Sept in an effort to avert a divisive showdown over Palestinian statehood as usual by skillfully crafting a way forward that would be enough to persuade the Palestinians to drop their bid and have enough caveats for Israel to get its support. The great idea of these powers is to somehow prolong the occupation and settlements until further orders and to help fascist Israel with its fascist pursuits and fool the Palestinians.
For the first time, Palestinians and Abbas are undaunted by US threats of punitive measures and Israel protests. Abbas rightly says that 20 years of negotiations are more than enough, it's horribly enough, the world should intervene and end the Israeli occupation as long as the USA can't.
The UNSC which is supposed to protect the nations and peoples from enemy attacks but it protects only NATO sttes, pro-US nations and destroys those nations that oppose weastern militarism, American imperialism or European colonialist ambitions. And if this notorious UNSC objects to Palestine's case for an independent nation for themselves son their own lands, now under Israeli fascist occupation, then, this organization must face dismantlement. Of course, it is time the UN general council abolished the UNSC and replaced it with a new UN peace council without veto facility for any nation to play with the fate of weak nations.
An illegal Israel is more important to the western terrocracies than a terrorized and besieged Palestine. The West is opposed to any Fatah-Hamas unity government and also opposed to an independent Palestine but is deadly keen to see Palestine as Israel's permanent colony in Mideast. This is not in contradiction to the policy of US-NATO converting many sovereign Muslim nations into US colonies - and not exactly as NATO's own collective colonies. Meanwhile, the Quartet envoys are to discuss the sensitive diplomatic work towards a joint Quartet statement that would include a modest upgrade to Palestinian status at the UN, address Israel's demand that it be recognized as a Jewish state, and set a broad timeline for renewed negotiations.
Extra hardliners in Netanyahu's government being controlled by the illegal settlers have called for a variety of measures, including annexing parts or all of the West Bank or withholding tax funds that Israel collects on behalf of the Palestinians. After killing all agreements they signed with Palestinians, just like the Israeli criminals kill the besieged Palestinians, the hard headed Jews in Israel threaten the Palestinians saying that by going to the UN, the Palestinians are violating "the spirit and the word of signed commitments" that pledged to resolve disagreements through negotiations.
When Zionist criminals, being untrustworthy and intransigent participants in the "peace" process, cut jokes it does not create humor at all!
III
Any country, democracy or autocracy, opposing the the Palestinian bid for a permanent membership in UN as its legitimate right is in fact a condemned criminal state.
Despite the decades' terror efforts of Israel-US terror twins, Palestine is a peace-loving state and has contributed to human civilization, that it has succeeded in building state institutions." It would also cite the need to consider the pre-1967 Mideast War borders as those of the Palestinian state
Upon the UN vote in its favor, the Palestinians will have shown they have the power to force action on the issue at a time when Israel is feeling increasingly isolated in the region. But their worry is not about Israeli weaknesses or US cowardice, but rather how to strengthen their own future nation to let the people live peacefully with prosperity.
When entire western world, essentially anti-Islamic rogue states are converging on how to deny the Palestinians a statehood on their lands and how best to help maintain the Zionist terror interests in the region, the Arab nations and Islamic world at large are not taking a collective stand on Palestine and support them with a plan strategy to end opposition to Palestine state once for all. That is the biggest advantage for the western terrocracies.
USA has yet again exposed as enemy of peace with its open, shameless opposition to statehood bid through UN by Palestine struggling under the terrorist Zionist regime for years since 1948 to obtain sovereignty and peace from an arrogant Israel. this funny terrosit gimmicks would go on for ever unless the fascist onward process is stopped by a joint effort by all Muslm nations, mainly the Arab states.
Terrorism is caused by anti-Islamic forces. Fake democracies like USA and India have zero-tolerance to any criticism of their anti-Muslim and other aggressive practices. Anti-Muslimism and anti-Islamism are more dangerous than "terrorism" Anti-Islamic forces & terrorists are using criminal elements for terrorizing the world and they in disguise are harming genuine interests of ordinary Muslims. Global media today, even in Muslim nations, are controlled by CIA & other anti-Islamic agencies.
Dr. Abdul Ruff, Specialist on State Terrorism;Chancellor-Founder of Centor for International Affairs(CIA); Independent Analyst;Chronicler of Foreign occupations & Freedom movements(Palestine,Kashmir, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Xinjiang, Chechnya, etc);Former university Teacher;/website:abdulruff.wordpress.com/91-9961868309/91-9961868309
Palestine Has Every Right to be a Full UN Member!
Dr. Abdul RuffSeptember 25, 2011
The Quartet comprising the USA, EU, UN and Russia now led by British dictator a collaborator of Bush Jr in Sept-11 and post-Sept-11 terror war strategies in Islamic world, still promotes Zionist interests and do not care for what the Palestinians demand- in fact they do not even consider them as people who deserve any rights. Resumption of bogus and long-stalled negotiations mediated by USA and Egypt is still regarded as the only way to establish a Palestinian state in spite of continuous blood shed in Palestine deliberately perpetuated by the “negotiating” Israel to stall peace process.
Abbas, who returned to the West Bank, strongly suggested Saturday that he would reject a peacemaking blueprint put forward by international mediators, saying he would not agree to any proposal that disregarded Palestinian conditions for the resumption of peace talks. "we will not deal with any initiative" that doesn't demand a halt to Israeli settlement construction or negotiations based on borders before the 1967 War when Israel captured land the Palestinians claim for their state. The Quartet statement siding with Israel made no such demands for peace.
Talks and plans for Mideast peace have failed to produce a peace agreement in the past, and this latest proposal offered no program for bridging the huge differences that have stymied negotiations for most of the past three years.
Abbas noted, without elaborating, that some unspecified Arab states, obviously the pro-US puppet autocracies, had also tried to pressure him to drop the statehood application. The pressure "didn't affect our spirits to reach the target and to deliver the Palestinian message officially," he said.
The glittering outcome of the current UN meet, however, is the elevation of stature of Palestinians and their leader Abbas as wrongly besieged humanity while the western terrocracies harp on “democracy” elsewhere in Mideast. His willingness to stand up to Washington has won Abbas newfound respect across globe as well as at home, where he had been considered a lackluster leader. The unilateral bid for statehood and UN membership reflects deep-seated Palestinian exasperation over 44 years of Israeli occupation.
U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon relayed the Palestinians' statehood request to the Security Council on Friday, shortly after Abbas formally submitted it. Israel expects it to be shot down there by USA to save itself and its illegal protege in Mideast. The UN Security Council will meet on 26th Sept to deal with the membership request, but final action is likely to take weeks or months.
Washington, the bogus mediator and the chief manipulator in international politics, has been lobbying hard to deny any easy win for the Palestinians muster enough support in the Council to block the statehood application so the US won't have to resort to a veto if the required support of nine of the Council's 15 members is not met otherwise.
USA wants the Palestinians to skip the full membership and instead ask the UN General Assembly, where they enjoy broad support, to grant them a more modest status upgrade to nonmember observer state from permanent observer. Palestine can be a nonmember observer on UN but why should it not be a full member like Israel, USA, France, UK, Italy, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait, etc?Palestine has every right to be a full member of UN and USA must now has got the opportunity to prove its democratic credentials and peace instincts by openly supporting the UN resolution for the creation of Palestine by being a full member of UN. The sleeping Quartet while innocent Palestinians are being butchered by Zionist state terrorists has no credibility whatsoever! After all the Quartet works of NATO terror syndicate against Islam. USA leads the NATO’s global terror operations against Islam and oil rich Muslim nations and is not rust worthy either. But it cannot, by playing foul games, let Zionist fascists also destroy Palestine.Peace cannot be achieved in Mideast or world at large by simply engaged in bogus talks that Israel, USA and Quartet insist on. Palestine state can be created only by legal means and only through UN but further details could be worked by negotiations if necessary! Israel and USA can help both ways.
