by A. G. NOORANI
FOR a variety of reasons, the cause of Palestine`s claim to statehood faces a grim future today. The Palestinians were quite resigned to losing their battle for a two-thirds majority support in the United Nations Security Council, of 15 members, for their application for full membership of the UN, Harriet Sherwood of The Guardian reported three weeks ago from Jerusalem.
The US will be spared the embarrassment of having to use a veto. The 193-member General Assembly can only approve upgraded observer status, but not full membership.
It is perhaps wrong to think that exercise of a veto would have embarrassed the US. In pre-election year it would have come as a boon for President Barack Obama whose sympathies for Israel were well advertised during his presidential campaign in 2008. He won 78 per cent of the Jewish votes. He will do nothing to weaken that asset. It is vain, therefore, to expect any help from the US even for a significant improvement in the plight of Palestinians under Israeli occupation.
The powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) supports the hawks in Israel. The news organisation, J Street, formed in Washington, D.C. by Jeremy Ben-Ami, a former government official, to counter AIPAC, cannot alter the situation very much.
Within Israel there has been a radical shift to the hard-line stand of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He has stipulated conditions in addition to the old ones; for example that the Palestinians should not only accept Israel as a state but also as “a Jewish state”. This implies necessarily that they acquiesce in its claims to “the Biblical State of Israel”; accept an inferior status for Arabs in Israel and wipe out their own identity forged by history.
Indeed, Israel`s supporters like Henry A. Kissinger go so far as to ask the Palestinians to abandon any assertion of having been wronged by Jewish immigrants. At the time of the partition resolution of the UN General Assembly in 1947, there were a mere 630,000 Jews in Palestine facing about 1.3 million Palestinian Arabs. No Palestinian Arab can possibly submit to such Stalinist rewriting of history. Recognition of Israel`s existence as a state is one thing. It is another to deny the historical fact of the forcible occupation of Arab lands by the Jews.
Dawn for more