Frustrated with the secession of Israeli Governments' who have shown a complete lack of interest in good faith negotiations with the Palestinian Authority toward a framework settlement to the conflict over the last 13 years P.A. President has turned to the UN Security Council for help.
Palestinian leader wants a two-state solution imposed on Israel
By: Olivia Ward
Looking as weary as his words, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas told the UN General Assembly on Friday that he is calling time on long-drawn-out negotiations with Israel, and seeks to set a deadline for ending the occupation of Palestinian land.
To “correct the deficiency” of earlier negotiations, he said, there must be “a specific timeframe for the implementation” of a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians. It would follow a plan worked out with the Arab Group, and linked with “immediate resumption” of talks to set out the borders of a Palestinian state and arrive at a comprehensive agreement.
On Friday he castigated Israel for its assault on Gaza, and vowed that Palestinians would not “allow war criminals to escape punishment,” an implicit threat that Palestine might join the International Criminal Court and call for a war crimes investigation against Israel.
Abbas’s speech did not lay out a timetable for ending occupation of Palestinian land. But aides have said that negotiations should be finished within nine months, and Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and East Jerusalem would take place within three years. Israel officially withdrew from Gaza in 2005, but with Egypt, controls its land and sea entry points, which blocks free movement of people and goods.
But even as Abbas announced that “the hour of independence of the State of Palestine has arrived,” the odds on gaining an accelerated settlement appeared dim. The U.S. would be certain to veto any resolution that lacked agreement from Israel, and it is likely to die on the table.
Abbas’s speech might be a watershed moment in Israeli-Palestinian conflict
By William Booth
Abbas, his associates say, will appeal to the world body to “internationalize” the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to support an end to the Israeli occupation and the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state, with borders based upon the 1967 lines and with East Jerusalem as its capital.
Abbas told an audience of university students in New York this week that he is old and wants to see a map of what his future state might look like.
Then things might get interesting.
The Israeli Government's Likud Party is officially opposed to creating a Palestinian State in their party platforms. Likud if the most moderate party in Bibi's ruling coalition too.
Rebuffed by the Americans and egged on by restive advisers, such as former chief peace negotiator Saeb Erekat, Abbas announces that Palestine will become a party to additional U.N. treaties, conventions and bodies. The Palestinians in April signed 15 United Nations protocols dealing with social and human rights, such as the Declaration of the Rights of the Child.
In retaliation, Israel announces new construction in the Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
“We are writing the text now,” said Hanan Ashrawi, a member of the PLO executive committee, who added that the draft resolution was being shared with the Americans.
“If they do not want us to do this, what do they want us to do? Armed struggle?” she said.
Settlement expansion and creating a "Greater Israel" is Bibi's ultimate goal so this new diplomatic move was welcomed by his Likud lead coalition as a pretext for more naked territorial expansion relying on Israel's founding principals that Might Makers Right.
Israel punishing Palestinians for resorting to international diplomacy suggests that Israel's leaders would be more comfortable faced with a violent struggle as long as Israel continues to be armed to the teeth with American provided weapons.
The US Government is likely to support Israel's permanent occupation of the West Bank with a Security Council veto. That will showcase the UN's impotency in being able to carry out its core mission it was created for.
WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED
to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and
to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and
to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and
to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom
The UN Security Council system's need for consensus takes precedence.
Its worth noting that after 47 years Israel's Apartheid Occupation Regime is the only government the vast majority of Palestinians in the West Bank have ever known since birth. They shouldn't be forced to wait another 47 years until they are treated with the dignity every people deserves.
From Husam Zomlot writing in Haaretz:
Israel’s moment of choice
In hindsight, successive Israeli governments have instead used the 'peace process' for the exact opposite purpose: to avert and delay that moment of choice. Neither in 1993 nor today Israel is ready to answer the one basic question: where it wants its final border to be? Instead negotiations have been used by Israel as a conflict management tool and a smoke screen for the ongoing colonization of East Jerusalem and the West Bank. In short, the 'peace process' has been used by Israel to delay and prevent the outcome of a Palestinian state.
The recent and biggest land grab in years, confiscating 4,000 dunams (about 1,000 acres) south of Bethlehem, the very heart of where the Palestinian state is supposed to be established, is another confirmation that the current Israeli government’s master map has nothing to do with the 1967 lines. Rather, facts on the ground follow the map of the 'Greater Israel project.' That is, Israel is the only state, controls the whole of Palestine, and is unilaterally partitioning the occupied territories by a complex system of military rule, annexation (colonization), exclusion (ethnic cleansing) and separation (siege and apartheid), keeping Palestinians disconnected, atomized, and unable to function as one political and economic unit.
Twenty one years of a failed 'peace process’ are enough to conclude that the bilateral route to ending occupation is working - but in the wrong direction. We must try something else. Israel must be denied access to its 'we are talking' comfort zone, and the Palestinians must exit the state of limbo we have been in since Oslo.
Today we are saying this is Israel’s moment of choice. Either Netanyahu must declare that the status quo is a military occupation of the territory occupied in 1967, in which case after 47 years it must come to an end. Or he must declare that the status quo is not an occupation and that Israel intends to continue taking effective control of the entire territory of historic Palestine and denying basic individual and collective rights to Palestinians living inside and in exile. Netanyahu’s habit of giving lip service to the first, while following the second, can no longer continue.
Israel can’t have it both ways: land without people, control without responsibility. This has gone on for far too long. Either Israel takes full responsibility or it gives up control of the lives and territory of millions of Palestinians.
But unfortunately this truth is unlikely to alter the US's unconditional support for the Likud led government's permanent occupation scheme.