There is no such thing as a Palestinian state, and the United Nations can’t conjure one into existence. That apparently won’t stop the Palestinians from seeking recognition as a state in the Security Council this week. We should veto the Palestinian effort without hesitation.
On top of its legal nullity, the push for recognition at the U.N. trashes the spirit of the Oslo Accords, which commit both the Israelis and the Palestinians to addressing their differences through negotiations. Thwarted at the Security Council, the Palestinians will likely go to the rabble in the General Assembly, where we don’t have a veto and they will presumably succeed in putting a fig leaf on a fraud.
The General Assembly can change the status of the PLO from an observer “entity,” as it is now, to a “non-member state” observer, like the Vatican, and thereby recognize it indirectly as a state. But this won’t create a real state, either in law or in fact. Under international law, the Montevideo Convention of 1933 explicitly provides that the existence of a sovereign state is independent of recognition by other states, and further provides that a state must have a permanent population, a defined territory, a government, and the capacity to enter into relations with other states. The Palestinians arguably have none of those things. By their own admission, they don’t have a defined territory. Their government, meanwhile, is riven: Terrorists control one half of the territories and the other half is controlled by a former terrorist whose term of office expired two years ago.
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Nobody would like to see the Palestinians under a functioning state of laws more than the Israelis. But a state must have a monopoly of violence, and Hamas has always rejected the monopoly of violence in favor of the inherent individual right of resistance to occupation. The Palestinians have barely managed to maintain political institutions of any kind, and a declaration of statehood will do nothing to solve that problem.
Any action in the cause of Palestinian statehood at the U.N. will serve to isolate Israel further, and could make its government subject to international legal proceedings. But the main danger is the effect it could have in the Muslim world, including the occupied territories. Another intifada would force Israel to resort to military measures, giving Egypt and Turkey another excuse to express their growing hostility to the Jewish state.
The Middle East has come to this pass despite President Obama’s blithe belief at the inception of his administration that he could forge an Israeli-Palestinian peace. From the start, Obama cast his role in the Middle East as one of impartial mediator, not realizing that America’s influence among the Palestinians requires Israel’s confidence that we will protect the Jewish state come what may. Anyone can play the role of mediator, but only America can underwrite the risks of a negotiated settlement for both sides. The strategic prerequisites for Israeli-Palestinian peace are the same as they were for peace between Israel and Egypt in the 1970s: We must convince the Arabs that they can get what they want from the Israelis only by going through us, and we can deliver Israeli concessions only if we can guarantee Israel’s security.
Yet the Obama administration has reprised the Clinton administration’s childish schoolyard spats with Israeli prime minister Bibi Netanyahu. By embracing the Palestinian insistence on a halt to settlement construction as a precondition for talks, Obama encouraged the Palestinians to dig in their heels. Now the Palestinians think they can get what they want by forcing the issue at the U.N. and encouraging Egyptian and Turkish belligerence.
The new government of Egypt is seeking legitimacy by embracing the worst anti-Israeli sentiments of its populace. The army recently stood by as a Cairo mob ransacked the Israeli embassy. The Camp David Accords of 1979 are starting to crumble. Because no combination of Arab states could afford to go to war with Israel without Egypt’s help, Henry Kissinger realized that peace between Israel and Egypt would end the era of Arab-Israeli wars. The fraying of the Camp David Accords, which preserved a tenuous peace for more than three decades, is ominous. So is the reemergence of Turkey as a regional power. Turkey has pledged a military escort for the next “humanitarian flotilla” aimed at forcibly breaching the Gaza blockade, a fully legal blockade even according to the United Nations.
The Middle East is again on the cusp of crisis, with the U.N. about to stoke the flames and the Obama administration caught in a self-imposed impotence.
Unfortunately, Jimmy Carter (or President Barack the First) is on record that he believes that the "Palestinians" should go to the UN and that the UN should recognize them. He is helping to dissolve the peace he helped forge!
True, MikeB. Over at "Weekly Standard" they consider Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, and some parts of Saudi Arabia to be "Arab-occupied Greater Israel".
The "Palestinian Arab People" were invented in 1964 by the Soviet dissimulators. See: Brand, Soviet Russia, The Creators of the PLO and the Palestinian People, External Link
Is there some reason the Palestinians are exempt from the consequences of their actions?
We're considered the "Great Satan." Nothing short of turning on Israel (which we should not do) will change that - the sooner we come to grips with that, the sooner our policy in the Middle East becomes rational.
The Muslim world accepting Israel as a Jewish homeland is an absolute condition precedent to any kind of negotiated peace. Otherwise, "peace" won't occur until one side or the other can dictate terms, i.e., by winning the ultimate war.
The only coherent policy for us is (1) Israel's existence is not negotiable; (2) absent which, Israel has every right to defend herself; (3) when both sides want peace, we'll be there to support its implementation.
The Muslim world (especially the Palestinians) must accept Israel's right to exist in its society's current form, but i don't think that accepting them "as a Jewish state" is a reasonable prerequisite to negotiations (though I am not sure that that is what you are saying here).
This demand, near as I can see, is novel to the second Netanyahu administration (though even he has dropped it, others continue to push for it). The Palestinians rightly fear that this means foregoing their demands for right of return up front. While a full right of return is never going to fly, demanding concession as a price to just get the negotiations going would be wrong coming from either side.
By exactly the same reasoning, why should Israel give us ITS precondition of being recognized as a Jewish state? It is, and that's that.
But frankly, if you were sitting opposite me at a negotiating table --which the Pal-Arabs, who are JORDANISNS, regard as a DEMANDING table--and held up to me your recognition of my own right to exist, of all things, as a bargaining chip, I'd answer, "fine. I don't cede YOUR right to exist. Want to swap, or do you want to continue playing foolish games?"
But of course the Arabs are interested only in Israel's destruction, that much has been CRYSTAL clear for decades.
First of all, I have to know, did you choose Vandervecken because of reading Larry Niven's book, "Protector"?
Because, omg, after Tolkien, that's like the best book ever!
But back to business...
I have no problem with Israel calling itself a Jewish state. I don't think that the Palestinians have any problem with what Israel calls itself. In fact, they've told Israel that before.
The problem is with requiring (which Netanyahu is no longer doing, but others talk as if it ought to be required) that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state AS A PREREQUISITE TO BEGIN NEGOTIATIONS.
That smacks too much of giving up on right of return before the talks even start. Again, I think that the Fatah negotiators know full well that there isn't going to be any full right of return. But they aren't going to do anything that smacks of this as the price of just sitting down at the table.
blsdaniel, hiya. Oh yes, I've read Protector many times. The whole Protector concept is one of the most interesting ideas in all of SF. Some of the implications of the "luck gene" being real are also kind of interesting if you start thinking about them. For one thing, Vandervecken (aka, the Brennan-Monster), was the one who manipulated the birthright lotteries into existence! Did Vandervecken deliberately breed for this, experimenting with all breeders (humanity for him) in the hope of creating what starts to look like a Frankenstein.
And I'd eat Tree-of-Life in a second, but I think I'm just past the age where I can make the change and live.
Ahem. Ok, geek detour over. Well, I will simply have to say here that I don't agree that there is any such bargaining chip as a Pal-Arab "right-to-return"; you might as well call this "right-to-invade." It appeared some years ago and Israel will never regard this as anything to be discussed, and more than they would discuss the Pal-Arabs placing military installations in Israeli cities. Israel is NEVER going to import 100,000s of potential homicide bombers and other terrorists, and enemy political subversives intent on manipulating Israel's political process toward its end (much as Democrats do to the United States, but with more honesty), and essentially death-by-demography. And if THAT'S a bargaining chip, then I suggest Israel put some of its own on the table, of, maybe something like all regional fresh water sources will remain under Israeli military control in perpetuity, or Israel will have military bases situated at strategic points in all Pal-Arab territories. It's about as fair and reasonable.
In other words, the so-called Pal Arab "right of return" is no more than another Arab attempt to destroy Israel, and is actually even more insulting--and, by the way, WEAK--as a bargaining chip than witholding recognition, because it's actually an act of war, a stratagem. Anyone can see that. It's not hidden. To suggest that there is any other agenda in this is to suggest absurdity.
The Protector concept was fascinating. I was glad to see it developed a bit more in the fourth Ringworld book. I always wondered how different things would have been if Brennan / Truesdale had been around for the Kzinti showing up. I think that the protectors would have had the kitties for lunch. Of course, the existence of protectors with FTL ships would have flipped out the Puppeteers no end, and that could have gotten ugly!
As for right of return, I absolutely agree. X million Palestinians are never going to be allowed to come back. It will have to be negotiated away for compensation for the refugees. Still, you might be able to let a few thousand or a (VERY) few tens of thousands come back. Israel will be ditching hundreds of thousands by giving up the Arab sections of East Jerusalem (assuming that that is also in the deal, as seems very likely). But it seems very unlikely that the Palestinians are going to do anything that even smacks of giving up on right of return just to get the Israelis to sit down with them. And, in fact, the Israelis aren't asking for that as a precondition.
While I sympathize with the suffering of the Palestinians and will happily dispute with anyone the Israel-is-100%-right-in-everething-she-does meme that is so common on the right, any bid by the Palestinians for full statehood that comes before the Security Council now must be vetoed.
The fact is, the Palestinians are the one currently refusing to sit down at the negotiating table. One half of them (the PA) won't sit down until Israel declares a full moratorium on construction in the occupied territories, while the other half is run by a terrorist organization dedicated to Israel's destruction.
That the Israeli government is willing to sit down and negotiate with all Palestinians via the less unreasonable half of that government is commendable in and of itself. Why they should be forced to make concession merely the have the honor of doing so is out of the question.
Had the Palestinians gone to the bargaining table and not been able to get something resembling a fair deal (full sovereignty over the Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem and Muslim holy sites, one-for-one land swaps, etc.), I'd have fully backed them circumventing a failed negotiation via the UN. But rewarding intransigence is out of the question.
MikeB, what an ignorant comment. If NR denied there were Palestinians, then they would have had to ignore the fact that Jordan, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, etc. closed their borders to them and bottled them up. So all Arab countries had no trouble with pinpointing Palestinians and keeping them out of their countries. (And seeing what happened to Lebanon when they did get in, no wonder.)
If I recall correctly, Israel did not meet the 1933 requirements for statehood when it was formed. Why the double standard? The understated fear seems to be that recognition of Palestine would open a path for them to take their allegations against Israel to the International Courts.
