By Henry Siegman

September 22, 2011

The National Interest

The outpouring of commentary on the request that Palestinians intend to submit to the United Nations to affirm their right to statehood within the pre‐1967 borders has fallen into two categories. The first supports the Israeli and American view that sees the Palestinian initiative as endangering the Oslo Accords and prospects for a two‐state solution. As described by President Obama, it is a “distraction” from the serious business at hand. The second view supports the Palestinian right to apply for UN membership, or for non‐member‐state observer status, and rejects the notion that this would set back the peace process.

However, both approaches believe that UN action will not result in any practical changes on the ground and that Palestinians will have to return to the U.S.‐orchestrated “peace process” to achieve a two‐state solution. And both have in common a profound misreading of the significance of the Palestinian initiative, which is likely to be transformative, changing the rules of the game for Israeli‐Palestinian peacemaking.

According to the prevailing rules, every aspect of the Palestinians’ existence depends on Israel. Whether Palestinians can travel from town to town within the areas to which they are restricted, open a new business venture, see their homes demolished by an Israeli bulldozer—indeed whether they will live or die—are Israeli decisions, often made by armed Israeli eighteen‐year‐olds just out of high school.

The Oslo Accords, requiring as they do that Israel withdraw its occupation in stages from the West Bank, were intended to change that reality. But Oslo was quickly undermined by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who declared—“unilaterally”—that the dates established in the accords for the withdrawals are not “holy” and can be ignored by Israel. Furthermore, as noted by Uri Savir, who headed Israel’s Foreign Ministry at the time, Rabin had no intention of returning the Jordan Valley or of sharing Jerusalem. (He might well have changed his views on these issues, as he did on some others, had he not been assassinated by a settler.)

Although the Oslo Accords did not mention a Palestinian state, statehood was the goal implicit in the agreement’s terms and the permanent‐status issues slated for negotiations between the parties. But the peace process overseen by the United States was based on an unstated principle that fatally undermined the achievement of a Palestinian state: that any change in the Palestinians’ status as a people under Israel’s occupation depended entirely on Israel’s consent. This effectively excluded everyone other than the occupiers from a role in deciding the Palestinians’ fate. The UN, which was established to assure compliance with international law and to facilitate the self‐determination of peoples living under colonial domination, was shunted aside. Above all, this principle excluded the Palestinian people themselves.

To be sure, President Obama recently proposed that negotiations begin at the 1967 lines, with territorial swaps. What he failed to say is that if the parties cannot reach agreement on the swaps, the lines will be drawn by the Security Council. Indeed, he said the opposite—that peace terms cannot be imposed on Israel. His proposal therefore changed nothing. Netanyahu can continue to make demands he knows no Palestinian leader can accept, and the occupation persists.

The real meaning of the Palestinians’ decision to defy the United States is that they will no longer accept their occupier’s role in their quest for statehood. They demand national self‐determination as a right—indeed, as a “peremptory norm” that in international law takes precedence over all other considerations—and not as an act of charity by their occupiers.

The American insistence on aborting the Palestinians’ initiative and returning them to a peace process in which their fate remains dependent on Israel is shameful. It stains America’s honor. It will not succeed, for the Palestinian decision to defy the American demand is itself a declaration of independence; that genie cannot be returned to the bottle.

On the ground, little will be changed by a UN affirmation of Palestinian statehood. But nothing will be the same again in the Palestinians’ dealings with Israel and the United States. The notion that Israel will decide where negotiations begin and what parts of Palestine it will keep is history. It is sad that America, of all nations, has failed to understand this simple truth, even in the wake of the Arab Spring. Sadder still is Israel’s continuing blindness not only to the injustice but also to the impossibility of its colonial dream. That dream may now turn into a nightmare as the international community increasingly sees Israel as a rogue state and treats it accordingly.

Henry Siegman is President of the U.S./Middle East Project. He is also a non‐resident research professor at the Sir Joseph Hotung Middle East Program, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

By Henry Siegman

September 15, 2011

Foreign Policy Mideast Channel

Shelly Yachimovich, an Israeli Knesset Member who is a leading candidate for the Labor Party’s leadership, recently declared that Israel’s settlement project is “not a sin or a crime” since it was initiated by a Labor government, and therefore “a completely consensual move.” Leaving aside the bizarre notion that the consensus of thieves legitimizes their theft, if these are the views of candidates for Labor Party leadership in today’s Israel, what prospect can there possibly be for an acceptable peace accord to emerge from the peace process?

And is there anyone who witnessed the frenzied applause that greeted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s most recent speech before the U.S. Congress in which he left no doubt about his government’s intentions for East Jerusalem and for the West Bank, or heard President Obama’s assurances to AIPAC’s conventioneers that the ties that bind the U.S. to Israel are forever “unbreakable,” who still believes that the U.S. will ever exert the kind of pressure on Israel that will finally change its cost/benefit calculations with regard to its colonial project?

These incontestable realities give the lie to America’s absurd insistence — expressed most recently by President Obama on September 12 — that a Palestinian state can be achieved only as a result of an agreement between Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Abbas. Surely President Obama must know that left to their own devices, Netanyahu and Abbas will never reach a two state agreement, and that the only purpose a resumed “peace process” would serve is to continue to provide a cover for further Israeli land grabs in the West Bank.

The U.S. might have persuaded President Abbas to abandon the U.N. initiative in favor of resumed negotiations had it reassured him that if the Netanyahu/Lieberman government does not offer them a peace plan within a reasonable period of time based on the 1967 borders, agreed-upon equal territorial swaps and the sharing of Jerusalem, the U.S. would itself present such a plan to the Security Council.

Unfortunately the U.S. lacked the political courage to do so. Instead of enabling President Abbas to withdraw his U.N. initiative by providing him with a justification for such a move, the U.S. has sought to intimidate Palestinian leadership into changing course by threatening to exercise its veto in the Security Council and ending America’s financial support for the Palestinian Authority. Leaving aside the perverseness of this threatened “punishment” — which will not only end Israeli-Palestinian security collaboration but will increase the likelihood of a third Intifada — when has an American president recently threatened an Israeli government with any kind of punishment for their rejection of U.S. advice, even when Israeli actions have been in clear violation of international law?

The Palestinian “crime”– turning to the U.N. for relief from one of the longest military occupations in modern history, in part to deter those within its own ranks who have lost all hope from resort to violence — that has elicited so draconian an American response might in fact be seen as an act of statesmanship, to be encouraged and rewarded. But stealing the Palestinian people’s territorial patrimony — which is how the U.N. Partition Resolution of 1947 defined not only the West Bank but territory twice its size — is a crime in international law, as is the transfer of Israel’s citizens to those territories. Yet these crimes have never drawn more than empty American reproaches, invariably followed by solemn reaffirmations of the immutability of America’s bonds with Israel.

The contrast between America’s reaction to Israeli and Palestinian transgressions dramatically illustrates the futility of relying on the U.S. to present the parties with a fair and balanced framework for a final status solution and then using its considerable clout to see to its implementation. Instead, the U.S. can be counted on to make the protection of Israel’s interests — as defined even by its most reactionary and xenophobic governments — its first priority. The U.S. Congress, if not the White House, will see to that.

President Abbas and his supporters have reason to be confident that in refusing to withdraw their U.N. initiative they have chosen the right course. For Palestinians, as well as the international community, must come to terms with the hard reality that a two state solution will have to be achieved not only without U.S. help but in the face of its opposition. A General Assembly resolution affirming the Palestinians’ right to statehood within the 1967 borders and granting them “non-member state” observer status will not produce immediate progress in ending Israel’s occupation. But it is likely to trigger a global reaction to Israel’s continuing efforts to dispossess Palestinians from the 22% of Palestine that has been left them. That reaction will have a far better chance of bringing Israelis back to their senses, and to the values of the Jewish state’s founders, than any of America’s feckless efforts have to date.