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[Ed. Note: President Obama spoke to the UN General Assembly this a.m., followed by French President Sarkozy. C-SPAN has live coverage here. ]
The Obama Administration is frantic about stopping the Palestinian effort to secure a vote on statehood at the UN. Today the President meets with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to try and dissuade him from introducing the statehood resolution at the UN Security Council.
The US has already said it would veto such an effort, but the Administration manifestly doesn’t want to do that and risk alienating the Muslim world. So they are working the diplomatic angle pretty hard. Here’s the plan Western leaders want Abbas to accept:
International efforts to forestall a showdown in the UN security council over the declaration of a Palestinian state are solidifying around a plan for the Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, to submit a request for recognition but for a vote on the issue to be put on hold while a new round of peace talks is launched.
The deal is being pushed by the Middle East “Quartet” of the UN, EU, US and Russia, which is attempting to persuade Abbas to back away from a diplomatic confrontation with Washington, which says it will veto the Palestinian bid.
The US president Barack Obama is expected to meet the Palestinian leader at the UN on Wednesday as Abbas comes under intense pressure from the US and Europe to compromise.
Apparently the French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, will personally ask Abbas to go along with this, along with Obama. And both Presidents will make this case publicly in their General Assembly speeches.
It’s a very United Nations solution, to have Abbas submit the letter and then have the Security Council just not act on it. But the only way for Abbas to accept this is for direct negotiations to result, apparently negotiations that would include a timeline for statehood. Otherwise he gets nothing in the compromise. I’d say he also needs a settlement construction halt as well.
Neither side can back down now. A two-state solution is the central part of the Quartet’s plan for Israeli-Palestinian peace; disallowing a statehood petition makes no sense in that context. Abbas fully committed to the statehood process after being stymied on any progress by an Israeli leader who really doesn’t want progress. So while Abbas is under enormous pressure, that pressure is as much to reject the West and dare them to veto the bid the West has said it wanted all along – two states peaceably living side by side in the Middle East.
Gershom Gorenberg writes that it would be in Israel’s best interest to have the statehood process go forward.
Incrementally, legislation and military orders have insured that settlers enjoy all the rights of Israeli citizens as if they lived inside Israel. Most basically, Israelis living in the West Bank vote in Israeli elections; Palestinians in the same territory cannot. The democratic principles of equality and government by the governed have unraveled.
Nor can the unmarked border with the West Bank keep the decay from infiltrating Israel itself. Under Netanyahu, a flurry of anti-democratic bills has been introduced in parliament. One new law is aimed at circumventing court decisions that blocked a form of housing discrimination against Arab citizens. Another, eroding the right of free speech, bans any call for consumer boycotts of goods produced in settlements. The longer Israel holds the West Bank, the less is left of what Israel once was [...]
Dividing the contested and bloodied land is still a prerequisite for peace. With Israeli and American input rather than opposition, a U.N. resolution could serve as the basis for renewed and effective negotiations. But Palestinian statehood is not just an opening toward peace. It also a means to rebuild Israel and restore its democracy.
Clearly Netanyahu will not jump at that chance, despite the near breakdown in Israeli democracy, as evidenced by the tent city protests this summer. It’s a missed opportunity, and it remains to be seen whether Abbas will let the West off the hook.
UPDATE: The US is apparently also indicating now that it would not stand in the way of a UN General Assembly petition from Palestine for “Observer Status,” a step forward but short of statehood. This kind of motion cannot be vetoed, and at least 2/3 of member nations of the UN already have formal bilateral recognition of Palestine, so it would be extremely likely to succeed. More from CBS.
UPDATE II: A Pew research poll shows that Americans give plurality support to the US recognizing a Palestinian state.
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Would this mean Obama is racist and a tool of the Zionists?
I guess his Cairo Speech was just fluff for the masses.
From Ma’an…
…Sources close to the negotiations, that asked to remain anonymous, said a focus was on trying to buy time to allow a broader path toward resuming the direct Israeli-Palestinian peace talks which have stalled since September 2010.
One possibility was that Ban does not hand over Abbas’s letter straight away to the Security Council, one European source said, adding there were other “diplomatic airbags” that could be used to defuse tensions.
And Al Jazeera has this must read op-ed from Robert Grenier…
The humiliation of Barack Obama
As he prepares to singularly veto Palestine’s statehood bid, he must be thinking to himself: ‘This isn’t right’.
1) this is all kabuki 2) Abbas is no hero
Why the push by “Western Leaders” to prevent the Palestinians from having their official state 65 years after Israel got theirs carved out from Palestinian and Israel land? In reality there should be one country and with all peoples in that region and not an apartheid situation where Jews are permitted to be separate from others. This is especially true since Israel has now expanded beyond its 1948 designated borders.
Yes, Abbas is demonstrating how you make people push hard for negotiations, and humiliate them if they don’t.
What good is a state without rights? This push doesn’t just hurt the US, it hurts the Palestinians as well. I’m with bmull.
http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/09/20119158427939481.html
Pull out your balls Abbas and ask the UN to recognize statehood! :)
why would abbas agree to put this on hold unless he was given a guaranteed timeline and a stop to more development. If he does it would be very odd.
called it a week or so ago that europe would try to help O wiggle out of this. Europe needs Fed money and america weapons for libya
I suppose Obama could just slip Abbas some big $$$ under the table. If Abbas is anything like our pols, he’ll dance like a circus poodle.
You beat me to it. This is what I was typing: Since Abbas is an Israeli/U.S. tool, may we assume there has been a large deposit made in his Cayman Island bank account.
An excerpt from Bertrand Russell’s statements on the conflicts of the Middle East dated January 31, 1970.
…”The refugees who surround Palestine in their hundreds of thousands were described recently by the Washington journalist I.F. Stone as “the moral millstone around the neck of world Jewry.” Many of the refugees are now well into the third decade of their precarious existence in temporary settlements. The tragedy of the people of Palestine is that their country was “given” by a foreign Power to another people for the creation of a new State. The result was that many hundreds of thousands of innocent people were made permanently homeless. With every new conflict their number have increased. How much longer is the world willing to endure this spectacle of wanton cruelty? It is abundantly clear that the refugees have every right to the homeland from which they were driven, and the denial of this right is at the heart of the continuing conflict. No people anywhere in the world would accept being expelled en masse from their own country; how can anyone require the people of Palestine to accept a punishment which nobody else would tolerate? A permanent just settlement of the refugees in their homeland is an essential ingredient of any genuine settlement in the Middle East.
We are frequently told that we must sympathize with Israel because of the suffering of the Jews in Europe at the hands of the Nazis. I see in this suggestion no reason to perpetuate any suffering. What Israel is doing today cannot be condoned, and to invoke the horrors of the past to justify those of the present is gross hypocrisy. Not only does Israel condemn a vast number. of refugees to misery; not only are many Arabs under occupation condemned to military rule; but also Israel condemns the Arab nations only recently emerging from colonial status, to continued impoverishment as military demands take precedence over national development…”
The peoples who call themselves Israeli and Palestinian need to non-violently remove those who supposedly represent their interest. These so-called leaders of the world are only interested in greed and hate and care for nothing of the innocents on both sides. They promote old tribalism that only increases the blood in the streets and the fattening of their pockets.
“Abbas is no hero.”
He will be to the Palestinians if:
He succeeds at forcing this vote, no matter the outcome.
No, he’s not a hero as the wikileaks papers made clear.
However, even though he was willing to give the Israelis everything they demanded–and more–Israel still turned him down.
So perhaps he realizes that being Israel’s patsy gets him nothing from either Israel or the Palestinians, who reviled him after that disclosure.
Maybe that realization is the cause of his belated spine in going to the UN. And in his late seventies maybe he’s decided to do something useful in his life for once.
But I too don’t trust him.
No, most are against this because he will trade away diaspora rights to secure his own power. He’s cancelled elections repeatedly and refuses to come to terms with Hamas. The Palestinian people want solidarity. Read @avinunu on twitter, he’s the founder of electronic intifada. He calls it #fakestatehood.
Only if he can stop evictions and settlements and doesn’t recognize Israel as a “jewish state” will he be seen in a good light.
So exactly what is the group of Four offering Abbas in return for withdrawing his request? You don’t get something for nothing.
I think that is the point. This is just kabuki on the world stage level. The cash flow the U.S. Corporations and other internationl arms dealers get from selling weapons either directly to the Israelis or through back door channels to the Palestinians is too great of a deal. Therefore continued conflict and death is needed.
I think you’re wrong. Whatever Abbas’ shortcomings, and there surely are some, if he’s at the U.N. even apparently trying to force a statehood vote, and IF he’s racking western ass to do it, it will increase his status with a lot of Palestinians.
There have been decades of parsed-to-death bullshit about this, punctuated with wars and atrocities. It’s been all about protecting the Israeli-desired status quo, as they grab more land. For the U.N. to even have an up-or-down vote on statehood would be a victory for the Palestinians.
Which is why Obama and Netanyahu and Sarkozy, etc. are so feverishly trying to prevent it.
If it came to a vote, and the United States, as Obama has promised, vetoed even the consideration of statehood, “solidarity” in, not just the Palestinians, but in all Muslims, will be enhanced.
There will be no progress on peace talks until Isreal stops expanding the settlements and land grabbing.
Peace is not the Israeli nor U.S. objective.
One more reason for ∅bama to never again have my work, my $, my vote.
Hold firm, Abbas.
Amen.
This is one more Obama chicken coming home to roost. 3 months into his presidency, he had the clout to lean on Isreal for real concessions, and on the Palestinians for recognition. If the right had ginned up the bullshit that we’re seeing now, about his “selling out” Israel, he could have told them where to go, and that would have been that.
Now, Netanyahu knows that he’s dealing with a political “castrati”, who can’t even sing. Netanyahu can say anything he wants to, and there will be no White House rebuttal. Of course, he’s currently praising Obama for his “courage” in killing yet another opportunity to do the right thing, but Obama now has no real choice. He has no mojo left.
If he supports the Palestinians the right will instantly tear him apart, politically. That they are, to some extent, doing it as he caves to Israel yet again, is instructive of just how feeble he is.
For the moment, at least, it looks like Abbas is steady:
http://apnews.myway.com//article/20110921/D9PT45980.html
I like to think I grasp some of the fundamentals of the I/P question. But can someone please explain:
a) Is it ONLY because of AIPAC and elections that Obama is opposing the Palestinian UN move?
b) Why Russia should be helping Obama try to dissuade Abbas?
c) Is anticipated anger on the Arab street really the driver it is being made out? People there read the papers after all; they know that they US is maneuvering to stop the bid, whether we end up vetoing or not. . .
Also, accounts of Sarkozy’s UN address in the NYTimes seem to suggest France is behind the move for statehood, not working with the US to oppose it. Are we getting this wrong in the piece above?
Maybe he regrets the missed opportunities to create a Palestinian State?
Olmert offered it: Abbas turned him down.
Barak offered it: Arafat turned him down.
Hell, way back at the beginning (1937) the Brits proposed a two state solution, if I recall.
Nor is peace the objective of the NATO nations that rely on “small wars” to keep the cash flows to their MICs going, while instituting austerity measures in their domestic policies and maintaining control of the population through fear of the “terrorists”.
No other country has a MIC with the power of the US MIC.
Nor the same hunger for election money.
it’s not my opinion. Our problem is the white mans burden. No one listens to the natives. Do you?
Why should Obama lean on the Palestinians for recognition? The PLO already did that. This is a case of moving goals posts to disenfranchise Palestinian Israelis.
How’s the kool-ade today?
And why did the Brits have any right to say anything about land belonging to Palestinians in 1937?
Kinda reminds me of Biden wanting to third Iraq.
It’s not just small wars which MIC stands to gain from continuation of the status quo.
Israel is also a neoliberal beach-head into the middle east. The people must be controlled, to keep them from throwing off their oppressors.
Our Free Trade Agreements with Egypt and Jordan have written into them a requirement for a percentage of Israeli source product or privatization of state industries by Israel. What Palestinians refer to as normalization.
This neoliberal cash cow is one reason for supporting dictators: economic stabilization. Not only do the 13 richest families in Israel benefit from this, billionaires like Sheldon Adelson (who owns a good portion of the Israeli media and supports Netanyahu), makes millions from property development on palestinian land – both stolen and appropriated, in the West Bank.
http://wikileaks.org/cable/1986/11/86CAIRO26111.html
http://www.maxajl.com/israeli-workers-flee-egypt/
http://972mag.com/top-newscaster-resigns-on-air-over-apology-to-netanyahu-patron/
But but but but, RWMs know better than anyone else in the whole globe, if not the universe (U.S. militarization of space comes to mind), how every piece of real estate should be divided and what kind of govt it should have.* Didn’t you learn that in your formative years? /s
*Not to mention exactly what share of “our” riches happen to be located NOT within our (stolen) borders and how all of those resources should be allocated to corps who donate pipsqueak sums to put puppets in the WH.
This is all a lie which you coud find out if you wanted to but you wouldn’t be able to justify and excuse your biases.
Jimmy Carter said last week that the Israelis didn’t fulfill their obligations under the Oslo Accords.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMRCopA9J3I&feature=player_embedded
* yeah. God was pretty stupid to put all of our shit over there and park arabs on it, no less!
This assumes facts not in evidence, e.g., that he thinks for himself at all.
Izzy’s Underground to Palestine is a wonderful book.
And all the real estate that god “gave” to the Jews in the ME had no oil. Tsk tsk. What an impotent god.
And spectacular hubris. The humiliation of Barack Obama was done to himself, as he had access to versions to his own versions of the Palestinian papers. Let’s not forget he assigned Dennis Ross to the project after letting AIPAC pressure him into dumping Chas Freeman.
Anyone who was familiar with the situation knew his strategy was a foregone conclusion.
Well, some of it does. It’s under the sea bed and they share it with Lebanon and should have to share it with the Palestinians. It’s supposedly one reason they wont let the Gaza fishermen go out more than 5 nautical miles, when the oslo accords allows them 20.
One (of many) of my pet poke-in-the-eyes of Peak Oil is that there are more oil reserves under the crust than you can shake a stick at. Greg Palast put me onto this obviousness about 5 years ago when he pointed out that since the Brits in the 1920s, the reason for keeping Iraq’s Sunni triangle under dictator wraps was to keep oil off the market. There is geological reason to think that there are fields there that rival Ghawar, but oil corps make more profits by keeping oil off the market & charging higher prices than actually, you know, paying money to drill for the shit &, you know, actually selling it.
More recently I read that everywhere a delta flows into the sea (think Nile, but evidence=Nigeria) there are scads of buried black gold.
Just off the top of my head, one answer to both a & b involves arms dealing. The US and Russia, and France btw, supply tons of weapons to the Israelis and others also deal with the Palestinians whether it’s above or below the table.
IOW, it’s all about the money, ideology and religion aside.
I posted in comments twice earlier today, so this is my final one, that O is U.S. Ahmedinejad. In addition to being chosen & trained by PTB, both were accompanied by huge amounts of hopey-changey, and both have (legitimately) become global laughingstocks.
Since when did anything the UN do or say amount to a hill of beans? I seem to recall we have been going through all this bullshit and wasting our time and our money on this for over 50 years.
Why do they permit and even enforce fraking then? To improve the technology?
You gotta give them Palestinians credit for perserverence.
The UK hosts an annual arms show, so they’re not that far behind in encouraging conflict. After all, doesn’t the USA strive to be the modern day British Empire?
The French need markets for their armaments as well, and most of the NATO countries seem nostalgic for the days when they were colonial powers.
The UN provides useful cover for the imperialistic dreams of the USA.
:) except Ahmadinejad actually represents the rural poor, and that other joker Mousavi in the Green Revolution was representing the inroads for the west.
http://clipmarks.com/clipmark/902AA497-7AE8-4533-9211-743928CC8F51/
I think Obama wins the contest.
And I thought our unconditional support for Israel was due to the fact that both countries consider themselves to be “chosen” and “exceptional” when their actions only serve as evidence that their leaders are “special” as in Special Olympics.
Thanks for the links, but I’m well aware of what’s going on in the ME and the role of the US in meddling wherever it can to stifle democracy and freedom.
Not to mention the lack of fresh water sources that Israel covets even more than oil.
Obama is one sick MF. Always promising something and then pulling it back.
“And why did the Brits have any right to say anything about land belonging to Palestinians in 1937?”
I guess you’re not aware that it didn’t belong to Palestinians but had been part of the Ottoman Empire (Turkish) until the Treaty of Sèvres gave control to the British.
Always thought statehood was a good thing–adding organization, security and support to people in an area. Why is statehood good for the Israel goose but not for the Palestine gander? If the people of Palestine would like to work together to be a nation, they should be allowed. It isn’t as though they or their land ‘belong’ to Israel or anything. Funny, the people of Israel once wanted to become a nation more than anything in the world. They should know more than anyone or any nation. A lot of BS, manipulation and pimping going on. All the supression of Palestine seems to be getting very old. I’m going to watch the movie ‘Exodos’ this evening and try not to feel anything for anyone in Israel ever again. Need to look at others, too, in the Mid East who may have something to lose by Palestine becomming a state. I would not want to always be the people in the Strip, or the people in the valley or the people on the hill. I’d want a state. You’d think Israelis, if anyone, would know it is a sin to covet.
The UN vote is only about Palestine’s membership application. It is not about the UN declaring a Palestinian state.
Palestine declared independence as a state in 1988.
That state has been recognized by approximately 2/3 of the world’s nations.
Israel offered a bantustan.
Diff corps. One of the rivalries among corp giants. Gotta give a lot to a few.
Oh silly me. I forgot when the Ottoman empire broke up the Europeans stole it fair & square and Wilson’s 17 points were just cover.
Just like it was Lincoln’s right to give away stolen Indian land for nothing to monopoly RRs under cover of the civil war.
It does suck to lose a war, doesn’t it? Still, the point is that the land in question was already under foreign rule and did not — as you said — belong to the Palestinians.
Yes, it was “silly” of you to forget that.
How many typos is one allowed here? Sorry.
Israel shouldn’t give in at all. They should just eat that Iranian nuke and fart manna from heaven. After all, they are the chosen people (snark).
Yesiree, winnahs write the history & laws & treaties are only for the 98%ers.
That will never stop the 98%ers from pointing out the moral depravity of the winnahs.
“This is all a lie”
Really? The Peel Commission didn’t recommend “that the Mandate be eventually abolished… and the land under its authority (and accordingly, the transfer of both Arab and Jewish populations) be apportioned between an Arab and Jewish states.”? Maybe you should go correct the Wikipedia entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peel_Commission#Recommendations
I could dig up sources on the other two, but I’m actually supposed to be doing my job atm, not giving remedial history lessons.
TE Lawrence was employed to rouse the population to fight the ottomans in return for sovereignty over the land in which they lived, and fight they did.
You don’t get to go through all historical agreements and pick and choose parts of the ones that you like.
Oslo was the latest agreement which superseded the others.
The peel commission was in 1937.
The arabs did not agree. I think this bit is a violation of human rights- population transfer.
“The population exchange, if carried out, would have involved the transfer of approximately 225,000 Arabs and 1,250 Jews.”
See, the civilized world has come to the view that population transfers amount to ethnic cleansing and they are immoral and unjust. Time to evolve.
The Oslo Accords were agreed to made to follow the 1967 armistice lines. If the UN were to insist on going all the way back, the borders would expand Palestinian territory by quite a bit.
Simplified for brevity:
If Briton had no moral right to the land because they took it from the Turks by force, what moral right did the Turks have to it in the first place seeing as they took it from the Egyptians by force?
Excuse me, but “going back” was my point: I said there had been missed opportunities for a Palestinian state in the past. You said that was a lie.
400 years of intervening history during which freedom rhetoric on the part of the west served as a “moral” excuse for subjugating all & sundry. Hypocrisy is not unique to religion or democracy, it’s just heavily concentrated there.
Well, we all need our myths.
It’s a common misperception that those that suffer will be more sensitive when it happens to others. It’s actually the other way around. The abused becomes the abuser.
Skip the movie: read the book.
I presume you’d be an equally strong defender of the Palestinians if Arabs had won the 1948, 67 wars & given all the land to the Palestinians who, in turn, forced out the Jews.
No, your purpose was to blame the victims for not crying uncle when the boot was ever so lightly lifted off their neck.
In reply to eCAHNomics at 5:20 pm
Hard to say, since those were wars of aggression in modern times. Put it this way, if the Allies had lost WWI I’d be strongly defending Turkey’s position that the land was theirs, is that close enough?
Or maybe this is what you’re asking: yes, I’d be taking the exact same position if the Palestinians were Jewish and the Israelis were Muslim.
You funny. Jews are right no matter who wins the war. Just as I suspected.
“You funny.”
You illiterate. I just said I would still be on Israel’s side if it was a Muslim State instead of a Jewish State. The religious issue is apparently important to you, but not to me.
shekissesfrogs–that theory is a bit iffy for me.
No, you said that you would defend Palestinians if they were Jewish.
Sorry, different exodus, although Jerry Haber is a scholar… Did you mean the 1960 Movie based on the Leon Urdi’s 1958 Novel based on the ship named Exodus?
Thanks.