[News] Palestine - State of recognition

[Anti-Imperialist News]

State of recognition
Whether the UN grants the PA status as a state or refuses to do so, 
either outcome will be in Israel's interest.

<http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/profile/joseph-massad.html>Joseph 
Massad Last Modified: 15 Sep 2011 13:44
http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/09/20119158427939481.html

What is at stake in Barack Obama's vehement refusal to recognise 
Palestine as a mini-state with a disfigured geography and no 
sovereignty, and his urging the world community not to recognise it 
while threatening the Palestinians with retribution? What is the 
relationship between Obama's refusal to recognise Palestine and his 
insistence on recognising Israel's right to be a "Jewish state" and 
his demand that the Palestinians and Arab countries follow suit?

It is important to stress at the outset that whether the UN grants 
the Palestinian Authority (PA) the government of a state under 
occupation and observer status as a state or refuses to do so, either 
outcome will be in the interest of Israel. For the only game in town 
has always been Israel's interests, and it is clear that whatever 
strategy garners international support, with or without US and 
Israeli approval, must guarantee Israeli interests a priori. The UN 
vote is a case in point.

Possible outcomes

Let us consider the two possible outcomes of the vote and how they 
will advance Israeli interests:

The ongoing Arab uprisings have raised Palestinian expectations about 
the necessity of ending the occupation and have challenged the modus 
vivendi the PA has with Israel. Furthermore, with the increase in 
Palestinian grass-roots activism to resist the Israeli occupation, 
the PA has decided to shift the Palestinian struggle from popular 
mobilisation it will not be able to control, and which it fears could 
topple it, to the international legal arena. The PA hopes that this 
shift from the popular to the juridical will demobilise Palestinian 
political energies and displace them onto an arena that is less 
threatening to the survival of the PA itself.

The PA feels abandoned by the US which assigned it the role of 
collaborator with the Israeli occupation, and feels frozen in a 
"peace process" that does not seek an end goal. PA politicians opted 
for the UN vote to force the hand of the Americans and the Israelis, 
in the hope that a positive vote will grant the PA more political 
power and leverage to maximise its domination of the West Bank (but 
not East Jerusalem or Gaza, which neither Israel nor Hamas 
respectively are willing to concede to the PA). Were the UN to grant 
the PA its wish and admit it as a member state with observer status, 
then, the PA argues, it would be able to force Israel in 
international fora to cease its violations of the UN charter, the 
Geneva Conventions, and numerous international agreements. The PA 
could then challenge Israel internationally using legal instruments 
only available to member states to force it to grant it 
"independence". What worries the Israelis most is that, were 
Palestine to become a member state, it would be able to legally 
challenge Israel.

This logic is faulty, though, because the Palestinians have not 
historically lacked legal instruments to challenge Israel. On the 
contrary, international instruments have been activated against 
Israel since 1948 by the UN's numerous resolutions in the General 
Assembly as well as in the Security Council, not to mention the more 
recent use of the International Court of Justice in the case of the 
Apartheid Wall. The problem has never been the Palestinians' ability 
or inability to marshal international law or legal instruments to 
their side. Instead, the problem is that the US blocks international 
law's jurisdiction from being applied to Israel through its veto 
power. The US uses threats and protective measures to shield the 
recalcitrant pariah state from being brought to justice. It has 
already used its veto power in the UN Security Council 41 times in 
defense of Israel and against Palestinian rights. How this would 
change if the PA became a UN member state with observer status is not clear.

True, the PA could bring more international legal pressure and 
sanctions to bear on Israel. It could have international bodies 
adjudicate Israel's violations of the rights of the Palestinian 
state. The PA could even make the international mobility of Israeli 
politicians more perilous as "war criminals". This would render 
Israel's international relations more difficult, but how would this 
ultimately weaken an Israel that the US would shield completely from 
such effects as it has always done?

Implications of the UN vote

This presumed addition of power the Palestinians will gain to bring 
Israel to justice will actually be carried out at enormous cost to 
the Palestinian people. If the UN votes for the PA statehood status, 
this would have several immediate implications:

(1) The PLO will cease to represent the Palestinian people at the UN, 
and the PA will replace it as their presumed state.

(2) The PLO, which represents all Palestinians (about 12 million 
people in historic Palestine and in the diaspora), and was recognised 
as their "sole" representative at the UN in 1974, will be truncated 
to the PA, which represents only West Bank Palestinians (about 2 
million people). Incidentally this was the vision presented by the 
infamous "Geneva Accords" that went nowhere.

(3) It will politically weaken Palestinian refugees' right to return 
to their homes and be compensated, as stipulated in UN resolutions. 
The PA does not represent the refugees, even though it claims to 
represent their "hopes" of establishing a Palestinian state at their 
expense.  Indeed, some international legal experts fear it could even 
abrogate the Palestinians' right of return altogether. It will also 
forfeit the rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel who face 
institutional and legal racism in the Israeli state, as it presents 
them with a fait accompli of the existence of a Palestinian state 
(its phantasmatic nature notwithstanding). This will only give 
credence to Israeli claims that the Jews have a state and the 
Palestinians now have one too and if Palestinian citizens of Israel 
were unhappy, or even if they were happy, with their third-class 
status in Israel, they should move or can be forced to move to the 
Palestinian state at any rate.

(4) Israel could ostensibly come around soon after a UN vote in 
favour of Palestinian statehood and inform the PA that the 
territories it now controls (a small fraction of the West Bank) is 
all the territory Israel will concede and that this will be the 
territorial basis of the PA state. The Israelis do not tire of 
reminding the PA that the Palestinians will not have sovereignty, an 
army, control of their borders, control of their water resources, 
control over the number of refugees it could allow back, or even 
jurisdiction over Jewish colonial settlers. Indeed, the Israelis have 
already obtained UN assurances about their right to "defend" 
themselves and to preserve their security with whatever means they 
think are necessary to achieve these goals. In short, the PA will 
have the exact same Bantustan state that Israel and the US have been 
promising to grant it for two decades!

(5) The US and Israel could also, through their many allies, inject a 
language of "compromise" in the projected UN recognition of the PA 
state, stipulating that such a state must exist peacefully side by 
side with the "Jewish State" of Israel. This would in turn exact a 
precious UN recognition of Israel's "right" to be a Jewish state, 
which the UN and the international community, the US excepted, have 
refused to recognize thus far. This will directly link the UN 
recognition of a phantasmatic non-existent Palestinian state to UN 
recognition of an actually existing state of Israel that 
discriminates legally and institutionally against non-Jews as a "Jewish state".

(6) The US and Israel will insist after a positive vote that, while 
the PA is right to make certain political demands as a member state, 
it would have to abrogate its recent reconciliation agreement with 
Hamas. Additionally, sanctions could befall the PA state itself for 
associating with Hamas, which the US and Israel consider a terrorist 
group. The US Congress has already threatened to punish the PA and 
will not hesitate to urge the Obama administration to add Palestine 
to its list of "State Sponsors of Terrorism" along with Cuba, Iran, 
Sudan and Syria.

All of these six outcomes will advance Israeli interests 
immeasurably, while the only inconvenience to Israel would be the 
ability of the PA to demand that international law and legal 
jurisdiction be applied to Israel so as to exact more concessions 
from that country. However, at every turn the US will block and will 
shield Israel from its effects. In short, Israeli interests will be 
maximised at the cost of some serious but not detrimental inconvenience.

The second possible outcome, a US veto, and/or the ability of the US 
to pressure and twist the arms of tens of countries around the world 
to reject the bid of the PA in the General Assembly, resulting in 
failure to recognise PA statehood, will also be to the benefit of 
Israel. The unending "peace process" will continue with more 
stringent conditions and an angry US, upset at the PA challenge, will 
go back to exactly where the PA is today, if not to a weaker 
position. President Obama and future US administrations will continue 
to push for PA and Arab recognition of Israel as a "Jewish state" 
that has the right to discriminate by law against non-Jews in 
exchange for an ever-deferred recognition of a Palestinian Bantustan 
as an "economically viable" Palestinian state - a place where 
Palestinian neoliberal businessmen can make profits off international 
aid and investment.

Either outcome will keep the Palestinian people colonised, 
discriminated against, oppressed, and exiled. This entire brouhaha 
over the UN vote is ultimately about which of the two scenarios is 
better for Israeli interests. The Palestinian people and their 
interests are not even part of this equation.

The question on the table before the UN, then, is not whether the UN 
should recognise the right of the Palestinian people to a state in 
accordance with the 1947 UN Partition Plan, which would grant them 45 
per cent of historic Palestine, nor of a Palestinian state within the 
June 5, 1967 borders along the Green Line, which would grant them 22 
per cent of historic Palestine. A UN recognition ultimately means the 
negation of the rights of the majority of the Palestinian people in 
Israel, in the diaspora, in East Jerusalem, and even in Gaza, and the 
recognition of the rights of some West Bank Palestinians to a 
Bantustan on a fraction of West Bank territory amounting to less than 
10 per cent of historic Palestine. Israel will be celebrating either outcome.

Joseph Massad is Associate Professor of Modern Arab Politics and 
Intellectual History at Columbia University in New York.

The views expressed in the article are the author's own and do not 
necessarily represent Al Jazeera's editorial policy.




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