A fresh wind is blowing through the Middle East ? one with which the US has still to come to terms
There are two options facing what is still referred to ? with increasing irony after 18 years of failure ? as the Middle East peace process: a bad one, and something worse. The bad option is for the Palestinian Authority to go this week to the United Nations and apply to be admitted as a member state.
Such a status would not remove a single settlement or roadblock. If a state with observer status is created instead by a vote in the general assembly, giving it the right to take Israel to the international court of justice over settlements, and the ICJ rules that all settlements are illegal, this could remove the one remaining tool for resolving the issue ? land swaps. To swap land for illegal settlements would be to legitimise them. What future negotiator could do this?
Statehood could well tempt some in Israel to push for retaliatory measures which, unlike the declaratory state, would be concrete enough: a major construction push in the settlement blocs or the annexation of the Jordan valley. Binyamin Netanyahu's partners have long pushed to tear up the Oslo accords. Some want Israel to declare sovereignty over the whole territory. Others want to exact revenge on the very people the US has been training to keep security in the West Bank. When Michael Oren, Israel's ambassador to the US, said that his country had a lot of agreements with the PA but none with a "government of Palestine", his comments were taken as a threat to agreements on which thousands of Palestinian households depend, not least the transfer of funds that Israel collects on behalf of the PA. All this mayhem for what ? a virtual state?
It is, however, an even worse option not to go to the UN. This was made clear on Friday by Nabil Shaath, a senior Palestinian official. He revealed the "compromise" they had been pressed to sign, drawn up by Tony Blair, the representative of the Quartet. It called on the Palestinians to accept Israeli settlement growth, call Israel a Jewish state, and tear up the agreement with Hamas. The first would make any real negotiation on land swaps impossible. The second would pre-empt discussion on the right of return for Palestinian refugees and cast Israeli Arabs into the wilderness. The third would relaunch the conflict with Hamas. And that is before any discussion started with Mr Netanyahu. Mr Shaath put it correctly: Mr Blair, he said, sounded more like an Israeli diplomat than a neutral one.
This crisis is doing any future negotiators a favour in showing how skewed the process has become. The bar of success is continually being raised rather than lowered. The demand that Israel be recognised explicitly as a Jewish state was not made in previous rounds of negotiations. Similarly, the last Israeli premier, Ehud Olmert, was prepared to talk about a symbolic return of Palestinian refugees. His successor refuses to let one refugee back ? not even Mahmoud Abbas, a refugee himself.
Israel will only lower the bar of success if the cost of its occupation goes up. That price is already being raised by what is happening in Egypt, Jordan and Turkey, and it will go up further if Mr Abbas continues to call the US's bluff. The US will try hard this week to avoid a veto in the UN security council, because it would be vetoing its own policy. But it is worse than that. There is little Washington can do to penalise Mr Abbas without weakening every structure it has been trying to build in the West Bank. It wants to keep the prime minister, Salam Fayyad, in place. Do you encourage him to stay by cutting off his funds? If that lever does not work, what lever does? Barack Obama has said in two speeches that America would veto a UN bid, and Mr Abbas is defying him. Contrast that to what happened over the Goldstone report, when Mr Abbas was forced to drop his support for a report that was critical of the Gaza war. A fresh wind is blowing through the Middle East ? one with which the US has still to come to terms.
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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/sep/18/palestine-virtual-state
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