AIM Report

The Palestinian Authority’s (PA) actions at the U.N. on September 23 have effectively ended the near-future possibility of a peaceful two-state solution between Israel and a Palestinian state. On that day, PA president Mahmoud Abbas made a speech at the United Nations formally requesting the Security Council to grant full UN membership to an independent Palestine. He followed that up by seeking to gain the required two-thirds of the Security Council to approve his request, though a promised veto by the U.S. would end that effort. President Obama is hoping he doesn’t have to exercise that veto, but says he is prepared to do so.

If his bid at the Security Council fails, Abbas could file a petition directly with the General Assembly, where the U.S. has no veto, to gain recognition as a non-state observer member of the United Nations. The Vatican, for example, holds that position. This would give Palestine certain privileges without granting it full statehood.

Even if the U.S. doesn’t veto the Palestinian request for statehood, how would it be achieved through this process? The only way, presumably, would be through war. Israel certainly isn’t going to give up half of Jerusalem because the Palestinians claim it as their own. And there won’t be any so-called “right of return.” It would certainly harden the positions, and be a de facto end of any sort of peace process, which has largely been a charade anyway for the past two decades.

These facts remain incontrovertible. Until 1967, Israel didn’t control the West Bank, Gaza or East Jerusalem, and yet the Arabs went to war against Israel three times—in 1948, 1956 and 1967. Israel offered statehood to the Palestinians three different times: in 2000, 2001 and 2008, each time rejected. The first two times it was with the terrorist PLO leader Yasser Arafat, and in 2008 with Abbas. Israel can never agree to the “right of return,” especially one that includes descendants of the Palestinians who voluntarily left Israel after being warned by the Arab countries that were about to attack Israel in1948, because it would overwhelm their Jewish population and end Israel’s existence as a Jewish state. But the Palestinians were offered East Jerusalem as their capital, and the West Bank with sufficient land swaps and all of the Jewish settlements removed from what would have been the new state of Palestine.

So why won’t they accept such an agreement today? Former President Bill Clinton told Foreign Policy magazine’s blog, The Cable, that Israel is at fault for the supposed failure of the peace process, because the government of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has moved the goal posts. He said that Palestinian authorities have told him that they would now accept the terms of the deal that they passed on in 2008.

But Charles Krauthammer begged to differ, in a September 30th Washington Post column: “Because saying yes would have required them to sign a final peace agreement that accepted a Jewish state on what they consider the Muslim patrimony.” He said they were prepared sign interim agreements, such as the Oslo accords. But not “final” agreements, like the ones they walked away from, because doing so would be an acknowledgement of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, which so far they have been unwilling to do.

Krauthammer argued that the purpose of Abbas going to the UN to make his speech was to get land without peace. Sovereignty with no reciprocal recognition of a Jewish state. Statehood without negotiations. An independent Palestine in a continued state of war with Israel…..

Media Complicity For years, the Palestinians have gotten away with saying one thing in Arabic, very hostile to Israel’s right to exist, while saying conciliatory words in English that keep the financial aid flowing and sympathetic treatment from the American press. But thanks to MEMRI, the Middle East Media Research Institute, founded in 1998 by Yigal Carmon, a former colonel in the Israeli Defense Forces Intelligence, many of the speeches and comments are translated.

MEMRI recently translated an interview from Al Jazeera on September 23 with Abbas Zaki, a member of the Fatah Central Committee, part of Abbas’s governing body in the West Bank. “The settlement should be based upon the borders of June 4, 1967,” said Abbas Zaki. “When we say that the settlement should be based upon these borders, President [Abbas] understands, we understand, and everybody knows that the greater goal cannot be accomplished in one go.”

He added that “If we say that we want to wipe Israel out… C’mon, it’s too difficult. It’s not [acceptable] policy to say so. Don’t say these things to the world. Keep it to yourself….”

But even on American television, some vile, baseless charges are allowed to stand. Hanan Ashrawi, a familiar face to many Americans, who holds a Ph.D from the University of Virginia and whose father was one of the founders of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), was on ABC’s This Week with Christiane Amanpour the weekend after the UN speeches in late September.

“I’m not prone to hyperbole or lies or anything,” she told Amanpour. She then said that “Israel has maintained the enslavement of the whole Palestinian people.” These sorts of baseless and absurd accusations go unquestioned by Amanpour, and much of the Western media. It is despicable.

Another problem with this whole process is that the UN doesn’t have the authority to grant the Palestinians statehood. According to Lee Casey and David Rivkin, writing in The Wall Street Journal, the UN does not decide who becomes a state. They can only admit states to the UN, as a full-fledged nation, or with observer status. Casey and Rivkin were Justice Department lawyers under Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

According to their analysis, “putting the U.N.—and particularly the General Assembly—in the business of state recognition is inconsistent with international law and the U.N. Charter, and it is manifestly not in their interests.”

They argue that “The right to recognize statehood is a fundamental attribute of sovereignty and the United Nations is not a sovereign. Those who cite as precedent the General Assembly’s 1947 resolution providing for the partition of Palestine misread that instrument and its legal significance.”

In that case, “Resolution 181 outlined a detailed (and rigorous) process whereby the British Mandate in Palestine was to end and two new states, one Jewish and one Arab, were to be established. It recommended that process to Great Britain (as the mandate-holder) and to other U.N. members. It did not create or recognize these states, nor were the proposed states granted automatic admission to the United Nations. Rather, once the two states were established as states, the resolution provided that ‘sympathetic consideration’ should be given to their membership applications.”

Casey and Rivkin say that it is “unfortunate that the Obama administration has failed to present the case against a Palestinian statehood resolution in legal rather than tactical terms, even though these arguments are obvious and would greatly reinforce the U.S. position, also providing a thoroughly neutral basis for many of our allies, particularly in Europe, to oppose Mr. Abbas’s statehood bid.”

The reality is that the only thing that will ultimately lead to a stable peace between the Israelis and Palestinians is for some Palestinian reformer to step up, as Anwar Sadat did in Egypt, prepared to give his life if necessary, to say “enough” to the violence, the hatred, and the incitement against the Israelis. The plight of these people exists because it has been in the interests of Arab leaders to have this as a festering issue, to take their own people’s minds off their lack of freedom and opportunities.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu followed Abbas at the UN with his own impassioned speech about the steps and risks that Israel has taken, and is willing to take. “The truth is,” said Netanyahu, “that Israel wants peace. The truth is that I want peace. The truth is that in the Middle East at all times, but especially during these turbulent days, peace must be anchored in security. The truth is that we cannot achieve peace through U.N. resolutions, but only through direct negotiations between the parties. The truth is that so far the Palestinians have refused to negotiate. The truth is that Israel wants peace with a Palestinian state, but the Palestinians want a state without peace. And the truth is you shouldn’t let that happen.”

While President Obama generally received high marks from many Jewish leaders and groups for his speech at the UN that same week, some of those same people are wondering if this is the speech he would have given if it wasn’t for the fear that ran through the Democratic Party following the previous week’s special election results in New York’s ninth congressional district. In that race to fill the seat vacated by the disgraced Democrat, Anthony Weiner, a conservative Republican Catholic won a significant victory over a Democratic Orthodox Jew in a heavily Jewish district. The seat was also previously held by Democrats going all the way back to 1923, including Sen. Chuck Schumer and VP candidate Geraldine Ferraro.

Many in the media are focusing on the claim that the Palestinians have made this request for statehood at the UN because of their “frustration” with Israel’s “intransigence.” But the reality is that Israel has, three times in the past 11 years, offered them statehood, and Palestinian leaders have rejected the offers. And today, it is very unlikely that the Palestinians will receive as generous an offer as they did in 2000/2001 and 2008.

Read More: http://www.aim.org/aim-report/palestinian-un-declaration-exposes-media%e2%80%99s-agenda/