Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas may back off of his demand that the U.N. Security Council this week recognize Palestine as a full-fledged state. If Abbas stands down, it will be good for the U.S., good for Israel … and good for the Palestinians.
Intense negotiations late Tuesday appeared to have a good chance of avoiding the showdown. If that’s the result, it won’t be easy for Abbas to swallow. Demand statehood and he would get a sympathetic hearing from many countries at the U.N. Demand statehood and he would score political points back home with Palestinians who are frustrated by years of unfulfilled promises of a peace deal.
What he wouldn’t achieve is a Palestinian state. President Barack Obama has rightly pledged that the U.S. would veto the Palestinians’ bid in the Security Council. The only proper place for the Palestinians to draw their borders is at the negotiating table with Israel.
If a U.N. resolution could magically fix this intractable problem, it would have been fixed a long time ago.
A mountain of U.N. resolutions wouldn’t allay Israeli concerns about its security next to a fledgling Palestinian state. Or set the ground rules for peaceful relations between Israel and a newly formed Palestine. Only a settlement between the two sides, with the world’s affirmation, can do that.
Fouad Ajami, a Johns Hopkins University professor, wrote in The Wall Street Journal about the folly of the Palestinians’ U.N. strategy:
“The illusion that the U.N. can break the stalemate in the Holy Land is vintage (Yasser) Arafat. It was Arafat who turned up at the General Assembly in 1974 with a holster on his hip, and who proclaimed that he had come bearing a freedom fighter’s gun and an olive branch, and that it was up to the U.N. not to let the olive branch fall from his hand. For the Palestinians there can be no escape from negotiations with Israel.”
Abbas knows he wouldn’t emerge victorious at the Security Council. Plan B: He could ask for approval from the U.N. General Assembly to upgrade the Palestinians’ status to something called a nonmember observer state.
That would be all about stirring more trouble for Israel. Such an upgrade would allow the Palestinians to press their case against Israel in the International Criminal Court or other venues. There’s speculation that the Palestinians could seek to control their air space and national waters off Gaza, now under Israeli patrol. Or perhaps the Palestinians will join the infamous U.N. Human Rights Council, which never flags in its eagerness to find fault with Israeli actions.
Abbas may hope that such moves will boost his leverage in future talks and push Israel to make more concessions. The opposite is more likely. If the Palestinians were to bring a case against Israel in the International Criminal Court, for instance, “it would be a declaration of war, diplomatic war,” an Israeli government official told a Tribune Newspapers reporter. “We are not going to sit down and talk to someone who accuses us of war crimes.”
If Abbas relaxes his demands, it would likely allow the Palestinians to continue to receive some $600 million a year in aid from the U.S. And it just might prompt a new start for peace negotiations. That would reflect a sober recognition: Everyone will lose in a diplomatic showdown.
A U.S. veto in the Security Council could trigger more anti-American fervor across the Middle East at a time when America is trying to encourage Arab Spring democracy movements and establish stronger alliances in the Arab world.
The diplomatic blowback could further isolate Israel, already reeling from badly strained relations with Turkey and Egypt.
And the Palestinians would lose aid, devastating the financially shaky Palestinian Authority and bolstering the terrorists of Hamas, who control Gaza.
Lose. Lose. Lose.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has invited Abbas back to negotiations without preconditions. Abbas should accept. And Netanyahu should realize how close Israel has come to a diplomatic disaster.
