Palestinians Fight For UN Recognition Continues Despite Pressure From the U.S. and Israel

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/24/world/palestinians-submit-statehood-bid-at-un.html?_r=1&emc=na

All,

This is great news...Long Live Palestine!

Kofi


September 23, 2011

Palestinians Formally Request U.N. Membership
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
New York Times


UNITED NATIONS — Resisting American pressure, President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority formally requested full United Nations membership on Friday as a path toward statehood, rejecting arguments by the United States and Israel that it was not a substitute for direct negotiations for peace in the Middle East.

Mr. Abbas handed a letter requesting the membership to Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations Secretary General, before delivering his speech at the annual General Assembly. Mr. Ban was submitting the request to the Security Council.

Speaking to Palestinian Americans who came to his hotel Thursday night, Mr. Abbas said the United States had aggressively sought to deter him from the move but that he had insisted on proceeding.

“There are small countries in the world that have gained their freedom and independence but we still haven’t got ours,” Mr. Abbas told his guests. “So we are going to demand this right.”

The request for Palestinian statehood on land occupied by Israel has become the dominant issue at this year’s General Assembly, refocusing global attention on one of the world’s most intractable conflicts.

The Security Council will likely take up the issue in earnest next week, diplomats said, when the question becomes whether the United States and its allies can stall it. Washington is also working to prevent the Palestinians from gathering the nine votes needed for it to pass in the full council and thus avoid further wrecking the image of the United States in the Middle East by casting yet another veto against something Arabs want.

The final vote is not expected to take place for more than a month.

Among the 15 members, some are expected to stay solidly in the Palestinian camp including Russia, China, Lebanon, South Africa, India and Brazil. The United States is a solid vote against, and the five European members—Britain, France, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Portugal and Germany—are all question marks. The positions of Colombia, Nigeria and Gabon are also not entirely clear.

The African Union supports membership, but it is not entirely clear if Gabon and Nigeria will go along. President Goodluck Jonathan of Nigeria did not mention the issue in his speech to the General Assembly, unlike many leaders from the developing world who support Palestine, and the statement by President Ali Bongo Ondimba of Gabon, was somewhat enigmatic. He said he hoped to soon see a Palestinian state, but noted that both the Palestinians and the people of Israel are friends of Gabon.

In Latin America, Colombia is the only nation that does not have diplomatic relations with the Palestinians, and it is an American ally. In his General Assembly speech, President Juan Calderon seemed to echo the line from Washington, saying “progress can be made if consistent dialogue and effective mediation are favored.”

In Europe, Germany tends to lean against, its relations with Israel always overshadowed by the legacy of World War II. France leans the other way, while Britain sits on the fence. Portugal and Bosnia have been close to the Palestinians and the Arab world in the past, but their support is not assured this time around.

In theory, United Nations procedures demand that the special 15-member committee — one from each state — that studies the membership issue report back in 35 days, but nothing is more flexible than a deadline at the United Nations. Security Council members can stall things for weeks and weeks by requesting more information or by saying they are waiting for instructions from their capitals.

Behind them, though, looms the policy enunciated by President Nicholas Sarkozy of France, who said that the Palestinians should get enhanced membership in the General Assembly, moving from an observer entity to a non-member observer state.

Alain Juppe, the French foreign minister, said it would wait to see what happens in the Security Council before moving forward. By tradition, the General Assembly does not take up an issue when the Security Council is studying it and vice versa, but it is not impossible.

The historic day of speeches engendered a sense that the issue of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict had come full circle. The Palestinians call their membership application a desperate attempt to preserve the two-state solution despite encroaching Israeli settlements, as well as an attempt to shake up the negotiations that they feel have achieved little after 20 years of American oversight.

The question is whether trying to bring the intractable problem back to its international roots will somehow provide the needed jolt to get negotiations moving again.

The general point of view of the Israeli government and its supporters is that the Palestinians and their Arab allies gave up the right to the United Nations resolutions detailing a two state solution by rejecting that original plan and waging war against Israel for six decades.

But after every war, the United Nations resolutions and indeed the peace treaties with other Arab states have all reaffirmed the resolutions that outline the two-state compromise, starting with General Assembly resolution 181 in 1947. In the annex of their membership application submitted to Mr. Ban today, the Palestinians listed every United Nations resolution that envisioned a two-state solution that has not been implemented, they said.

Bypassing the Opposition of the United States and Israel Palestinians Assert Desire for Official UN Recognition of Palestine

Damon Winter/The New York Times
The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, listened Wednesday as President Obama spoke at the United Nations.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/22/world/obama-rebuffed-as-palestinians-pursue-un-seat.html?_r=1&nl=us&emc=politicsemailemb1

All,

This is an extremely significant and progressive step for the Palestinians and their decades long struggle for national statehood and the concrete realization of the guiding principle of self determination in fact and not just in theory. It is especially groundbreaking to see the Palestinian Authority leadership via President Abbas and his diplomatic team make both implicit and explicit demands on the United States and Israel to acknowledge them formally as a representative sovereign state within the larger political, economic, and cultural context of the global community of nations without simply passively submitting to the overweening "guidance", "requirements" and "advice" of either the United State or Israel. By demanding an equal and reciprocal role in establishing and defining the actual political, economic, and cultural parameters of the tripartite relationships between Palestine, Israel, and the U.S., the Palestinians have eloquently and forthrightly put the entire world on notice that no matter what the U.S. State Department, President Obama, or the Likud government of Israel thinks or does, Palestine itself will also now take a leading role in forcefully asserting and determining what the true contours of working for Independence, Peace, and Justice will be and mean not only for Israel and Palestine as mutually responsible (and respectful) independent nation states in the region known as the "Middle East", but for the many residents, governments, and regional/global supporters of both Jews and Arabs in these two nations. And this will be so no matter what their various individual religious or cultural identities happen to be or what nation(s) they happen to "belong" to...

Kofi


Obama Rebuffed as Palestinians Pursue U.N. Seat
By HELENE COOPER and STEVEN LEE MYERS
September 21, 2011
New York Times

UNITED NATIONS — A last-ditch American effort to head off a Palestinian bid for membership in the United Nations faltered. President Obama tried to qualify his own call, just a year ago, for a Palestinian state. And President Nicolas Sarkozy of France stepped forcefully into the void, with a proposal that pointedly repudiated Mr. Obama’s approach.

Doug Mills/The New York Times
President Obama addressed the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday, saying, “Peace will not come through statements and resolutions at the U.N.”

The extraordinary tableau Wednesday at the United Nations underscored a stark new reality: the United States is facing the prospect of having to share, or even cede, its decades-long role as the architect of Middle East peacemaking.

Even before Mr. Obama walked up to the General Assembly podium to make his difficult address, where he declared that “Peace will not come through statements and resolutions at the U.N.,” American officials acknowledged that their various last-minute attempts to jump-start Israeli-Palestinian negotiations with help from European allies and Russia had collapsed.

American diplomats turned their attention to how to navigate a new era in which questions of Palestinian statehood are squarely on the global diplomatic agenda. There used to be three relevant players in any Middle East peace effort: the Palestinians, Israel and the United States. But expansions of settlements in the West Bank and a hardening of Israeli attitudes have isolated Israel and its main backer, the United States. Dissension among Palestinian factions has undermined the prospect for a new accord as well.

Finally, Washington politics has limited Mr. Obama’s ability to try to break the logjam if that means appearing to distance himself from Israel. Republicans have mounted a challenge to lure away Jewish voters who supported Democrats in the past, after some Jewish leaders sharply criticized Mr. Obama for trying to push Israel too hard.

The result has been two and a half years of stagnation on the Middle East peace front that has left Arabs — and many world leaders — frustrated, and ready to try an alternative to the American-centric approach that has prevailed since the 1970s.

“The U.S. cannot lead on an issue that it is so boxed in on by its domestic politics,” said Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator in the government of Ehud Barak. “And therefore, with the region in such rapid upheaval and the two-state solution dying, as long as the U.S. is paralyzed, others are going to have to step up.”

Mr. Obama himself seemed to forecast this back in May when, speaking to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, he warned that events in the Middle East could lead to a challenge to the status quo if the Israelis and Palestinians did not move quickly toward a peace deal.

“There’s a reason why the Palestinians are pursuing their interests at the United Nations,” Mr. Obama said then. “They recognize that there is an impatience with the peace process, or the absence of one, not just in the Arab world, in Latin America, in Asia, and in Europe. And that impatience is growing, and it’s already manifesting itself in capitals around the world.”

The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, delivered on the threat. He announced last Friday his plans to go to the Security Council in a quest for Palestinian membership in the United Nations and international legal recognition of statehood, putting Mr. Obama in the position of having to stand in the way. Israel and its allies in Congress, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel enjoys broad influence, were sharply opposed.

So on Wednesday, Mr. Obama “did exactly what he had to do,” said David Rothkopf, a former Clinton administration official and a visiting fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “He made a clear statement for what is a clear U.S. position and put himself squarely as a champion of the status quo.”

Mr. Netanyahu, Mr. Rothkopf said, “has managed to read the U.S. political situation perfectly, making Obama acutely aware that he could be losing part of his base, and that, I think, in turn is what has locked Obama in.”

The Palestinians have never fully trusted the United States to serve as an honest broker with Israel. But its credibility with the Palestinians has crumbled with the recognition that Mr. Obama may not have the clout to press the Israelis into a peace deal that requires significant compromises.

“The president in his speech at the U.N. today admitted that the U.S. somehow failed in bridging the gap between the two sides,” the Palestinian representative in Washington, Maen Rashid Areikat, said in an interview on Wednesday. “He said that he feels frustration and he understands the frustration of everybody. That’s good, but I think it goes much deeper. I think what the U.S. administration needs to say is why it failed.”

He acknowledged the administration’s efforts — with the appointment of George J. Mitchell Jr. as special envoy to the region and Mr. Obama’s own speeches, especially in Cairo — but said the momentum of his early presidency flagged as the administration bound itself so closely to the Israelis and their supporters in the United States, especially Congress. The Palestinians ultimately decided that the best hope for breaking an impasse with the Israelis rested with making their case to a larger international forum.

“One big reason for losing that momentum,” he said, “was the failure of the administration to use its leverage with an Israeli government that adamantly was opposed to the efforts of the United States to bridge the gap in the Middle East.”

After Mr. Obama laid out his defense of the peace process, Mr. Sarkozy took to the same podium in a forceful disavowal of Mr. Obama’s position. “Let us cease our endless debates on the parameters,” he said, calling instead for a General Assembly resolution that would upgrade the Palestinians to “observer status” as a bridge toward statehood. “Let us begin negotiations, and adopt a precise timetable.”

The outcome of the Palestinian bid for membership remains uncertain. The administration still hopes that the process of considering the Palestinian bid at the Security Council could provide a fresh opportunity for new talks. The move puts new pressure on Mr. Netanyahu’s government, reeling from setbacks to its security from the turmoil of the Arab Spring, with results that analysts say are hard to forecast. But a quick return to the status quo, when the United States dictated the terms of talks, seems unlikely, given strong Russian and French support for a new approach by the Palestinians.

Alain Juppe, the French foreign minister, told reporters after Mr. Sarkozy’s speech that the United States “cannot do it alone” in negotiations for a Middle East peace, and that a collective approach was needed. Mr. Juppe said he thought this time that the five permanent Security Council members should have a direct role in shepherding talks.

Somewhat incongruously, Mr. Sarkozy visited Mr. Obama’s hotel on Wednesday afternoon for a previously scheduled meeting with the president, and was effusive, in front of the cameras before the meeting, in his praise for Mr. Obama. Mr. Obama, for his part, refused to engage with reporters assembled for the photo op. “Do you support the French one-year timeline?” one reporter asked. Mr. Obama responded, “I already answered a question from you before.”

Another reporter asked Mr. Obama if he agreed with the French position on Palestine. Mr. Obama smiled and replied, “Bonjour.” A third reporter queried if that response constituted a “no comment.” The president’s response: “No comment.”



Neil MacFarquhar contributed reporting.