The blow back from Obama’s insane speeches in front of the U.N. is upon us. The Palestinians want to be able to bring Israel before the International Criminal Court (an evil institution) and to wage further diplomatic war based on isolating and delegitimizing the Jewish nation. Abba Eban once said that if the Arab League put forward a resolution announcing the world is flat, they would get at least a 2/3rd majority supporting it. Watch Obama veto the statehood resolution with a sickening apology to the Palestinians.
by Caroline Glick
If nothing else, the Palestinians’ UN statehood gambit goes a long way towards revealing the deep-seated European and US pathologies that enable and prolong the Palestinian conflict with Israel.
In a nutshell, the Palestinian Authority – or Fatah – or PLO initiative of asking the UN Security Council and the General Assembly to upgrade its status to that of a sovereign UN member state or a sovereign non-UN member state is an act of diplomatic aggression.
Eighteen years ago this week, on September 13, 1993, the PLO signed the Declaration of Principles with Israel on the White House lawn.
There, the terror group committed itself to a peace process in which all disputes between Israel and the PLO – including the issue of Palestinian statehood – would be settled in the framework of bilateral negotiations.
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By abandoning negotiations with Israel two years ago, and opting instead to achieve its nationalist aims outside the framework of a peace treaty with Israel, the Palestinians are destroying the diplomatic edifice on which the entire concept of a peace process is based. They are announcing that they have no intention of living at peace with Israel. Rather they intend to move ahead at Israel’s expense.
In truth, there is little new in the Palestinians’ behavior. They have been using the UN to weaken Israel diplomatically since the early 1970s. Moreover, even if their bid does provide them with upgraded diplomatic status, it won’t change the reality on the ground, nor are the Palestinians particularly interested in changing the situation on the ground.
As the PLO ambassador in Lebanon, Abdullah Abdullah, made clear in an interview Wednesday with that country’s Daily Star, in the event that the UN recognizes some form of Palestinian statehood at the UN, the new “State of Palestine” will still expect the UN to support the so-called Palestinian “refugees.” This is true, he said, even for the “refugees” who live in Gaza, Judea and Samaria. That is, the same UN that the Palestinians seek recognition of statehood from will be expected to provide relief to Palestinian “refugees” living inside “Palestine.” As he put it, “Even Palestinian refugees living in [refugee camps] inside the [Palestinian] state, they are still refugees. They will not be considered citizens.”
So if nothing will change on the ground, why do the US and the EU care what the Palestinians do at the UN next week with their automatic General Assembly majority? Why have the senior peace-processors of Washington and Europe descended on Jerusalem and Ramallah, begging and pleading with the Palestinians to cancel their plans? Why have the Americans and the Europeans been pressuring Israel to make massive concessions to the Palestinians in order to convince them to put out the diplomatic fire there have set at the UN? Why are the White House and the State Department telling the media that the US will consider it a major diplomatic embarrassment if the Palestinians go through with their threats? Why in short, do the Americans and the Europeans care about this?
THE PALESTINIANS have certainly never given either the Americans or the Europeans a good reason to support their cause. Just this week, the PLO representative in Washington told reporters that the future state of Palestine will ban Jews and homosexuals.
And yet, the Obama administration and the EU have made the establishment of a racist, homophobic Palestinian state the greatest aim of their policies in the Middle East.
Every single Palestinian leader from the supposedly moderate Fatah party has rejected Israel’s right to exist and said that they will never set aside their demand that Israel accept millions of foreign-born Arabs – the so-called Palestinian “refugees” – as citizens. They say this with the full knowledge that this demand is nothing less than a demand for Israel’s destruction.
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Every year, the US and Europe transfer collectively approximately a billion dollars in various forms of aid to the Palestinian Authority and yet, the PA has failed to develop a market economy capable of supporting the Palestinians without foreign assistance. Rather, they have developed a welfare society where most economic activity stems from foreign handouts.
Rather than feel embarrassment at their failures, PA leaders use their economic corruption to continuously threaten their patrons. If aid is cut off, they say, the PA will disintegrate and the far more popular Hamas movement will take over, and then, woe of woes, the peace process will be destroyed.
Of course, Hamas is also sustained by Western aid money. Every month, the same PA that warns of the dangers of a rising Hamas transfers tens of millions of dollars in foreign aid to Hamas-controlled Gaza to pay salaries of Hamas “government” employees.
Yet despite its mafia economy, and its exploitation of their aid funds to support a terrorist organization, the US and EU insist on maintaining the PA’s status as the largest per capita foreign aid recipient in human history. And they do so even as the Eurozone is on the brink of collapse and the US is descending rapidly into a new recession.
Finally, in the interest of maintaining the peace process, aside from periodic pro forma statements, the US and the EU have turned blind eyes to the PA’s routine and institutional glorification of terrorist mass murderers and Nazi-style anti-Semitic indoctrination and incitement of Palestinian society.
Given their absolute commitment to the so-called peace process, it would be reasonable to expect the US and the EU to oppose the Palestinians’ decision to move their conflict with Israel from the negotiating table to the UN.
After all, in acting as they are, the Palestinians are making clear that they are abandoning the sacrosanct peace process.
Alas, this is not the case.
The Obama administration is engaging in desperate eleventh hour diplomacy to convince the Palestinians to cancel their UN plan, because it does not wish to oppose it. Most EU member states are expected to support the Palestinian bid at both the Security Council and the General Assembly.
The fact that the US and the EU are reluctant to oppose the Palestinian UN initiative, despite the fact that it destroys the foundations of the peace process, tells us two things about the Americans and the Europeans. First, their support for the Palestinians has more in common with a psychological obsession than with a rational policy decision.
The Obama administration, the EU bureaucracy and most EU member states are obsessed with the Palestinians. There is nothing the Palestinians can say or do to convince them that the Palestinian case is anything other than wholly and completely just.
There are many possible explanations for how they arrived at this obsession. But the fact is that it is an obsession. Like all obsessions, their faith in the justice of the Palestinian cause is impermeable to contrary facts or rational interests.
The flip side of this obsession is, of course, a complementary obsession with blaming Israel for everything that goes wrong. For if the Palestinians are always in the right, and they are fighting Israel, then it naturally follows that Israel is always in the wrong.
This “Blame Israel First” mindset was exposed in all its madness in a New York Times editorial on Thursday.
Despite the Palestinians’ refusal to negotiate with Israel, despite Fatah’s unity-government deal with Hamas, and despite their rejection of Israel’s right to exist, the Times argued that Israel is to blame for the current crisis in relations.
In the paper’s view, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu “has been the most intractable” party to the conflict. Netanyahu’s crime? He has permitted Jews in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem to exercise their property rights and build on land they own.
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On Thursday, Netanyahu announced that he will address the UN General Assembly in New York next week and put the truth about the Palestinian cause on the table.
Perhaps someone will be moved by his words.
Perhaps not.
But whether he makes a difference or not, at least reason will have one defender at the UN next week.
Read the rest: The Palestinian Obsession
Tags: Caroline Glick
