The Upcoming UN Vote on Recognizing a Palestinian State

Rami Khouri's new, customarily eloquent piece on the upcoming UN General Assembly vote on recognizing a Palestinian state makes the case forcibly: the US and Israel are terrified of losing control over a "peace process" that has done nothing for the cause of peace, not to mention justice:

The argument that Israelis and Americans make most often against the UN move is that it would detract from attempts to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict via direct bilateral negotiations. They say this with a straight face, and seem to be serious, though their incredulous argument flies forcefully in the face of history and reality.

The fact is that the United States and Israel have largely had their way in defining how Palestinian-Israeli negotiations have proceeded since the 1991 Madrid peace talks and the subsequent 2003 Oslo Accords. Israel has dominated diplomatic engagements because it controls events on the ground with its occupation army, siege tactics, and settler-colonizers, and holds the Palestinians hostage via its controls of their land, water, air, trade, security and financial resources.

The United States has dominated the mediating role in the on-and-off bilateral negotiations, and has generated a track record of consecutive and cumulative failures that must go down in history as among humankind’s greatest examples of diplomatic incompetence.

Historians will one day recount whether this is due to amateurism or to strong pro-Israel bias that totally negates the US’ mediator role.

In either case, bilateral negotiations as we have known them have no chance of success on the basis of the current balance of power and with American mediation favoring Israel so sharply.

I suspect the real reason the United States and Israel so vehemently oppose the Palestinian move at the UN is that it represents a rare step to seek political movement on the Arab-Israeli issue that is not totally controlled by Tel Aviv and Washington, but instead uses international law and the global consensus of nations as a reference point for diplomacy.

This would be such a worrying precedent for Israel and the United States that they are using all possible tools and threats to kill it before it moves ahead any further.

This is also why the same United States and Israel reacted with such hysteria to the Goldstone Report process when that happened last year. 

They simply cannot allow any political deliberation or diplomatic process related to Israel and Palestine to occur outside the context of Israeli priorities and the obsequious American response to all that Israel wishes, which is enforced through the formidable powers of the pro-Israel lobby groups in Washington and at local levels across the United States (as the current “I love Zion” jamboree by most Republican presidential candidates and the US Congress attests again).

So let us not be fooled by the diversionary debates about the largely symbolic September vote on Palestinian statehood at the UN. 

The real issue is whether the history of Palestine and Israel will be shaped by law and the determination of the global community of nations to treat both sides equally, or by the muscle of a robust Zionism and its American diplomatic partner that resembles a ventriloquist’s dummy more than an independent actor - let alone an impartial mediator.