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href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/12/03/fragmentary-notes-from-the-united-nations/">http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/12/03/fragmentary-notes-from-the-united-nations/</a>
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style="margin: 6px 0px 0px; padding: 0px; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); line-height: 20px; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">December
3, 2012</div>
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style="margin: 6px 0px 0px; padding: 0px; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); line-height: 20px; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">Sharper
Than a Serpent’s Tooth It Is…</div>
<h1 class="article-title"
style="margin: 3px 0px 0px; padding: 0px; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 36px; line-height: 36px; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">Fragmentary
Notes from the United Nations<br>
<br>
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style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); line-height: 21px; position: relative; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">by
VIJAY PRASHAD<br>
<br>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">The media huddle around a
frigid United Nations Plaza. Fox has the best parking space. Rarely
does one see such a sight before the UN building, where, on a sunny
day, busloads of tourists from Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America
descend. Occasionally a gaggle of American school children, but not
often. The US pretends that the UN does not exist, or if it does, it is
not relevant to its children. Few consider the UN Charter or read the
1948 Declaration of Human Rights. In June, Jimmy Carter wrote a <em
style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">cri de coeur</em> in the <em
style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">New York Times</em> (“A Cruel and
Unusual Record,” June 24). He pointed to the Declaration, which has
become a standard for human rights activists who fight against
dictatorship and want to promote the rule of law. “It is disturbing,”
Carter wrote, “that, instead of strengthening these principles, our
government’s counterterrorism policies are now clearly violating at
least 10 of the declaration’s 30 articles, including the prohibition
against ‘cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.’” The
pity is that most engaged citizens and certainly most journalists would
not be able to name even five of those thirty articles.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">An otherwise curious
reporter and I began a conversation about Palestine’s UN vote to become
a Non-Member Observer State. “Washington will veto it,” he said. I
tried to explain that the veto does not operate in the General
Assembly, only in the Security Council, and that what he had in mind
was what happened last November, not what was to take place on November
29, 2012. He was adamant. Another joined us, this one from a cable news
channel. She was also sure that the US could stop anything it wanted in
the UN. Fair enough, but wrong.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><strong
style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Europeans</strong></p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">France voted for
Palestine; the UK and Germany abstained. They would normally have stood
with the US. After all, the Europeans are part of the Quartet, set up
to manage the Israel-Palestine “peace process” after the Madrid meeting
in 2002. The EU is one of the main sources of funds for the
multilateral and Palestinian Authority institutions. Europe has old
colonial obligations that it has now transformed into human rights
investments. But the Europeans have their own theory for action in the
region. There is great concern among European policy makers about what
the right-wing calls <em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Eurabia</em>,
the Muslim population inside Europe. Alienation of this population,
they suggest, is dangerous, and an adverse position toward Palestine –
one of the touchstones of global Muslim attitude to the Middle East –
would cause further disaffection. That is why EU foreign policy chief
Javier Solana said last year that a solution to the Israel-Palestine
conflict is “fundamental to Europe’s own security.”</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">An official from one of
the permanent missions of Europe to the UN tells me that the EU states
believe that a favorable vote in the UN would strengthen Mahmoud Abbas’
Fatah to the detriment of Hamas. “This recent war by Israel on Gaza
delivered legitimacy upon Hamas,” she said. “Abbas was isolated in the
West Bank. It was Hamas, in Gaza, that is seen to have resisted and to
have survived. It was Hamas that signed the ceasefire. If we vote
against the seat today,” she said, “it will mean Abbas will be further
isolated.”</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">I ask her about rumors of
a trip by Abbas to Gaza (now confirmed), and about talks at unity
between Hamas and Fatah. “Whatever unity takes place,” she said, “a
weak Abbas isolated in Ramallah or a weak Abbas in a unity with Hamas
is still a weak Abbas. If he gets the UN vote he will be a stronger
Abbas in these unity discussions.”</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><strong
style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">A Vote for 18%</strong></p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">Despite immense pressure
to eject them, Columbia University in New York has been a good home to
voices of sanity for the Middle East. It was the redoubt of Edward
Said, a clinically fierce advocate for the rights of the Palestinians,
and it is now home to the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies Rashid
Khalidi as well as to the political scientist Joseph Massad. In October
1998, Said wrote in <em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">al-Ahram</em>against
Yasser Arafat’s promise to declare a Palestinian state in May 1999. The
demographic and geographic realities of a “Palestinian state,” eaten
into by Israeli settlements and hemmed in by the security barriers of
Israeli paranoia, would not allow anything close to a state with actual
sovereignty to become reality. What Arafat’s declaration would do, Said
argued, is to accept the social conditions of apartheid – to invalidate
the tradition of liberation and self-determination and to accept the
crumbs of Bantustan. Those who believed that this was a first step to
true self-determination, Said cautioned, were thinking illogically. “If
by declaring that what, in effect, is a theoretical abridgment of true
statehood is the first step towards the realization of actual
statehood, then one might as well hope to extract sunlight from a
cucumber on the basis of the sun having entered the cucumber in the
first place.”</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">After the current vote,
Joseph Massad weighed in at <em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The
Guardian</em>. Massad correctly points out that the UN vote offers the
Palestinians at most 18% of historic Palestine. “The vote is
essentially an update of the partition plan of 1947,” Massad argues,
“whereby the UN now grants Jewish colonists and their descendants
80-90% of Palestine, leaving the rest to the native inhabitants, and it
risks abrogating the refugees’ right of return.” In other words, the
Palestinian political project has been reduced to possession of a
statelet.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">Both Said and Massad
drive their analysis away from the two-state solution toward
binationalism – better to create one secular state where Palestinians
and Israelis can live together. Such a state would abrogate Zionism,
which is a form of supremacy, and end the apartheid social conditions
that would otherwise be institutionalized in the two-state arrangement.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">Logically, this is an
impeccable argument. But politics does not conform to the unfolding of
logic. A one-state solution, a worthy goal, is far from the horizon of
current possibility, with <em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">no</em> political
platform inside Israel having adopted it. The exhaustion in the
neoliberal Palestine Authority has reduced its imagination. Hamas and
the left groups have come to this UN process by default. It is not
their politics, but they will not oppose it. They will not stand for
18%, nor will their constituencies cower before the kind of neoliberal
policies enacted by Abbas and his<em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">consigliere</em>,
Salam Fayyad. Their theory is neither to accept the 18% and build a
state on it, nor to believe that this is the first step toward a second
step. My friends in the Palestinian Left say that the UN vote is simply
part of the political arsenal – building up the legitimacy of the
Palestinian cause, furthering the political isolation of the Zionist
argument and of the US as enabler of its client state. The political
momentum is on the side of the Palestinians. It is useful to move in
all directions to build on that momentum. They recognize the Bantustan
argument and acknowledge it. But that is not their destination.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><strong
style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Regionalism</strong></p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">In the UN General
Assembly (UNGA), the US and Israel have only once been able to command
a majority. In 1975, the UNGA overwhelming voted to consider Zionism as
a form of Racism. With the fall of the USSR, and with US power
demonstrated in the wars against Panama and Iraq, US President George
Bush went to the UN to put a bit of stick about. He called for the 1975
resolution to be revoked. In December 1991, 111 nations voted to repeal
the statement, with 25 voting against, thirteen abstaining and
seventeen failing to show up for the vote (including Egypt). Of those
who reversed themselves the most significant were the former Communist
bloc and two stalwarts of the Non-Aligned Movement (India and Nigeria).
It was the only time the US and Israel had their way in the UNGA.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">Looking back over the
past decade it is remarkable how familiar the voting pattern has become
on Israel-related resolutions. The US and Israel vote to block any
censure of Israel, joined by former US protectorates in the Pacific,
the settler republics of Australia and Canada, some former Communist
states (Czech Republic, Poland, and Romania) and the occasional
European state if its ruling party leans rightward (Italy under
Berlusconi, Denmark under Rasmussen). No significant country in the
Non-Aligned Movement has joined ranks with this bloc.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">It was the regional
states (Egypt, Qatar and Turkey) that brought Israel to the ceasefire
table at Cairo, states that have voted overwhelmingly to sanction
Israel in the UNGA. Hamas has handled this emergent regionalism
cleverly. Its break with the Syrian regime of Assad could have meant
that it would have to distance itself from Iran, but that has not been
the case. Hamas’ Khaled Meshal decamped for Doha, Qatar, where he is
now based, and the Emir or Qatar visited Gaza in October: again signs
to Tehran that Hamas, which had relied upon it for<em
style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">matériel</em>, was drifting to the
Gulf Arab bloc. But this is too formal a delineation of a real
realignment in the region.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">There is not merely a
Sunni and a Shia bloc that are asserting each other, against each
other. The divides are complex, and contradictory. At the Cairo
ceasefire, Meshal thanked Iran for its logistical help and criticized
its support of the Assad regime; he thanked Qatar, but his silence on
the emirates lack of <em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">matériel</em> support
was important. Billboards in Gaza thank both Iran and Qatar. At the
website <em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Jadaliyya</em>, Mouin
Rabbani correctly points out that Qatar is more opportunistic about its
politics than ideological, willing to adopt any political formation to
insert itself into the politics of the region. And Iran’s role
vis-à-vis the Palestinians is, as Tehran University’s Mohammed Marandi
told me, going to be hard to undermine. “While Hamas is under enormous
pressure to move away from Iran,” he said, “it is clear that no one can
replace Iran in order to help them maintain an adequate deterrence
against further Israeli aggression.” If the Gulf Arabs decide to supply
weapons to the Palestinians, he points out, this will put them in a
collision course with the US and Israel, and so will strengthen Iran’s
position.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">As the UN vote took
place, the NAM members released a statement for a Middle East Nuclear
Free Zone. Iran is the current chair of the NAM, and despite pressure
on Tehran over its nuclear program, the government has endorsed the
Nuclear Free Zone. In 2010, the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) review
promised to hold a conference for a Middle East Nuclear Free Zone in
2012. This conference has now been indefinitely postposed. NAM
expressed its “regret that Israel by not declaring its intention to
participate in the Conference continues to undermine its convening.”
Israel is currently the only country in the region that has not joined
the NPT and it has refused to renounce possession of nuclear weapons.
The NAM and the regional powers are going to use this particular
political line to undermine Israel’s claim of the high ground on
security matters.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">Regional powers
engendered the Israeli ceasefire after Egypt and Turkey sent their
foreign ministers to Gaza during the bombardment. Regional powers, in
the maw of immense geopolitical cynicism, attempted to form a Syrian
Contact Group (Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey) to deal with the
bloodbath being conducted by the Assad regime. Regional powers will
increase their authority through such platforms as the Nuclear Free
Zone idea. At the last Delhi meeting of the BRICS states, the general
tenor was to promote regional solutions over the now discredited mode
of allowing US primacy to dictate the way forward. The US and Israel
have refused to come to terms with this new reality. History is against
them. The UN vote underlines this new reality. It does not answer the
hunger of the Palestinian political project. It simply legitimates it.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><strong
style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Settlements as Dowry</strong></p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">The day after the vote,
Israel decided to extend its settler-colonial project in the moth-eaten
West Bank with a pledge to build 30,000 more homes for Israeli Jews.
This was its response to the vote, and it’s snub at the UN. In July,
the UN set up a Fact Finding Mission (FFM), led by the French jurist
Christine Chanet, to study illegal settlement activity by Israel.
Israel refused to allow the FFM to enter Israel and the Occupied
Palestinian Territory. A few days before the Israeli bombing of Gaza
began, the FFM closed its operations, with Judge Chanet bemoaning their
lack of access.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;">A few days after the
vote, on December 1, eight Israeli soldiers and two settlers beat a
seventy-year old farmer, Ahmed Miheimeed, who was planting seeds on his
land just east of Bethlehem. They wanted him to get out of the 18%. The
story is not going to be reported in the US media, just as not one
periodical did a serious story on Israel’s refusal to let the FFM do
its UN-mandated job. A UN vote is symbolic and limited. But it is part
of a long struggle, a dialectical struggle, one that has seen many
losses and few victories, and a great deal of simple, tragic human
suffering.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><em
style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><strong
style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Vijay Prashad’s</strong> most
recent book is <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1849351120/counterpunchmaga"
style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; color: rgb(207, 16, 40);">Arab
Spring, Libyan Winter</a> (AK Press). On December 8, in Boston, he will
moderate the first ever meeting of Angela Davis and Noam Chomsky. For
more info, <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://criticalresistance.org/angela-davis-and-noam-chomsky-in-conversation-for-the-first-time-ever/"
style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; color: rgb(207, 16, 40);">http://criticalresistance.org/angela-davis-and-noam-chomsky-in-conversation-for-the-first-time-ever/</a>.</em></p>
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