The Palestinian Authority has applied to the UN Security Council for admission to the United Nations as a full member. The application will be sent to a committee of the Council and if it is supported at that level and brought up for a vote, the United States will veto. Action will shift to the General Assembly and the Palestinians will most likely seek upgraded observer status, perhaps as a “non-member state.”
This is the culmination of a process that began shortly after the latest attempt by the United States to broker peace talks blew up last winter in a dispute over a freeze on settlements in the West Bank. It is not a seismic shift in the landscape of Middle East conflict nor is it “... a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury, signifying nothing ...” It is a significant moment with consequences.
There are so many dimensions to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians and the issues cut so deeply into people’s sense of themselves and their existence, that it is impossible to discuss it without implicitly taking stands and introducing bias. There is no clinically detached language, no omniscient observer prospect. All I can claim is a serious attempt to avoid unreflective partisanship.
[If only it were that simple ... I once read an article analyzing the conflict over “Jerusalem” which argued that you could remove that intensely emotional issue from the equation by renaming the city. The author did not offer any suggestions.]
The United Nations arena.
Since the application for recognition is being considered right now, let’s start with trying to disentangle several ideas.
1) What does it mean to be a “sovereign, independent, equal nation-state”
Maybe the noted international legal scholar Frank Zappa said it best, “You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline. It helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons but at the very least you need a beer.” Professor Zappa’s more formal colleagues would cite three conditions: defined territory, population, and a functioning government. Ultimately each of those is a political criterion, decided upon by other nation-states. The real criterion is: you’re a nation-state if enough other nation-states say you are. And in the 21st century the members of the United Nations are the ones who decide who’s in and who’s not.
All states are equal at the UN but some are more equal than others. It’s one state, one vote in the General Assembly (yup, the 1.3 billion citizens of China have the same formal status as the approximately 10,000 citizens of Tuvalu.) But when one of the five permanent members of the Security Council votes “no,” that’s the end of that.
Regardless of the quality of your beer, you cannot be a full member of the UN until the Security Council says so. But the General Assembly grants several different levels of observer status with different rights of participation in conferences and debates. Right now the Palestine Liberation Organization is an official observer at the General Assembly and can participate in debates and discussions but not vote. The Assembly, unencumbered by the veto and with an overwhelming majority of members sympathetic to the Palestinians, could easily decide to grant the Palestinian Authority upgraded status as a non-member state. This would matter for two primary reasons. First of all, it is the Palestine Liberation Organization that has been recognized since the 1970s as the entity that is the observer. The PLO is the umbrella organization formed to represent all the groups involved in the Palestinian resistance. The largest group in the PLO has always been al Fatah, which was created and led by Yassir Arafat. Changing the identity of the observer to the Palestinian Authority means it is a governing body not just a political party that is represented at the UN. And that leads to the second crucial dimension -- “governing body” implies there is something to be governed, meaning a nation-state. For everyone in Palestine, Israel, and the rest of the world who believes that a two state solution is the only viable option, this is a progressive step. It will make it more difficult to maintain that the status quo is tenable.
The months of maneuvering leading up to the Security Council and General Assembly votes and the increased status and legitimacy for the Palestinian Authority will have consequences for all the major players in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
All politics is local
The major immediate impacts of this week’s activity will play out in the internal politics of the Palestinians, Israelis, and the United States. The most important longer term international impacts will be on the United States.
The Palestinians.
The territory of Palestine is physically divided into two geographic and political regions: the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The West Bank (of the Jordan River) has some relatively fertile farmland and grazing areas and some relatively developed urban areas. The Gaza Strip contains one very large, poor city and desert. It is one of the poorest areas in the world. Since the end of the Six Day War in 1967 the two areas have been physically separated by Israeli controlled territory. But until 2007 there was a set of functioning government institutions (The Palestinian Authority) that united both sections. Since Hamas took control of Gaza and expelled both military and civilian representatives of the Palestinian Authority in 2007 the political divide has been as sharp as the physical separation. The Palestinian Authority (PA), headquartered in Ramallah, shares effective control of the West Bank with the Israel Defense Forces. One major difference between Hamas and the PA is public position on Israel. The PA has been willing, even eager, to negotiate; Hamas has disavowed any contact with what they scornfully refer to as “The Zionist Entity.” The failure of the U.S. sponsored talks, plus growing tensions between Palestinian villagers and Israeli settlers in the Jordan Valley, have weakened the authority and credibility of the PA and allowed Hamas to build political support outside its base in the Gaza Strip. If Hamas became the major force in both the West Bank and Gaza, it would end any hope of negotiations or other strategies for a Palestinian state and would pit the religiously conservative leadership of Hamas against the far more secular and modern majority of West Bank citizens.
The PA government in Ramallah has portrayed the entire UN saga as a triumph. The official line is that for the first time Palestinians are controlling the initiative and forging a bold new path to the future. The PA is organizing laudatory demonstrations (which both Israel and the PA fear will get out of hand and turn into real mass protests) to underscore the message that it can deliver the goods. The great hope is that this diplomatic success, coupled with the real improvements in governance and delivery of services that have taken place in the past two years, will cut deeply into support for Hamas and forestall the kind of mass based expressions of discontent that have been the hallmark of the “Arab Spring” in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and elsewhere.
Israel
Public opinion surveys in Israel have been very consistent for a long time. The hypothetical “average Israeli” believes 1) some kind of negotiated settlement that gives the Palestinians their own entity is a good thing; and 2) there is no one with whom Israel can negotiate right now because the Palestinian Authority does not control the Gaza Strip and Hamas as seen as a terrorist group dedicated to the destruction of Israel. The show at the UN will reinforce that perception, especially because the official line from the government of Israel that this “unilateral action” is contrary to the need for direct negotiations.
In the short run a General Assembly vote to upgrade the Palestinian’s status will probably increase approval of the Netanyahu government’s hard line. The UN is seen by many Israelis as hopelessly biased against Israel. Many Israelis, inside and outside the government, are deeply ambivalent about the popular movements that have toppled Arab regimes, especially Egypt. Mubarak may have been a dictator and oppressor, but he was a reliable Israeli ally, helping the effort to tame and control Hamas and stifling any public opposition to Israel. The current interim regime is far less cooperative in the blockade of Gaza and the recent assault on the Israeli embassy in Cairo is taken as a frightening example of the wide spread animosity that could be expressed by a democratically elected regime.
The Netanyahu government is actually quite weak and not wildly popular in Israel. In the last elections for the Knesset, no party got a majority of the seats so there had to be a coalition government. Netanyahu’s Likud (the major conservative party) got fewer seats than Kadima (a centrist party.) But Netanyahu put together a coalition of small parties that included a very hard line nationalist party largely representing immigrants from Russia and two extremely conservative religious parties to get a very slender majority.
A telling example of both how hard line some parties are and how weak Netanyahu is came a year ago. On the very day that Prime Minister Netanyahu met with President Obama to promote the new round of peace talks, the Foreign Minister gave a speech in which he said the talks were useless and bound to fail. Not only does this reflect his and his party’s distaste for negotiations, but it also shows that Netanyahu cannot insist that members of his own cabinet support an official government position.
There were public demonstrations against the government’s economic policies this summer. The tremendous influence of the 300,000 or so settlers living in the West Bank and the conservative religious establishment on policy are resented by many Israelis. But the “rally ‘round the flag” effect of increased support for the government in the face of negative events abroad is likely to kick in. There is a great fear in Israel of being isolated and friendless in the world. The inability of the U.S. to control the outcome in the UN plus the growing role of Europe (which is seen as pro-Palestinian) will reinforce that fear. Even those in Israel who have been sharply critical of Netanyahu for picking a fight with President Obama and blame Netanyahu for the deterioration of the US-Israeli relationship are likely to show more support.
The United States
Support for Israel is coming to play an unprecedented role in American partisan politics. American Jews have long been concerned about Israel for obvious reasons. But this has never translated into a monolithic, unthinking, automatic approval of whatever the current government does. Increasingly conservative, evangelical Christians have become strong partisans of Israel. Readers of the Book of Revelations know that restoration of Israel is a precursor to Armageddon and the end times and Second Coming. And that has translated into a knee-jerk, uncritical support for Israel. The position of some evangelicals that Islam is evil and satanic reinforces the bias.
Prime Minister Netanyahu was warmly applauded when he addressed a joint session of Congress, even when he directly repudiated the positions of the United States government. Seemingly obscure and quite conventional statements of U.S. policy, such as the status of the 1967 borders as a starting point for negotiations, have been met with sharp criticism and damned as “selling out” Israel.
The idea that “politics’ stops at the water’s edge” and foreign policy is the particular domain of bipartisan warmth and fuzziness has always been more fantasy than fact. But it is very rare for a hot button foreign policy issue to become so embedded in rigidly partisan politics.
Many observers think Republican strategists see portraying anything less than complete agreement with the Netanyahu government as the same thing as being anti-Israel as the wedge issue that will split a significant portion of the Jewish vote away from its customary home in the Democratic party. The conventional wisdom is that the Republican candidate won the recent special election in New York city because he appealed directly to conservative older Jewish voters by blaming Obama for all the difficulties with the Netanyahu government and for not backing Israel completely. Conservative Republicans have already begun to try to use the issue, sometimes in bizarre ways. For example, over 40 Republican members of the House of Representatives issued a call for Israel to annex the West Bank and make it part of Israel. (Why do I think that is bizarre? It would essentially make Jews a minority in the expanded Israel.)
The White House is going to try to spin the UN actions as anything other than a major defeat for the United States. That will be a major challenge because the U.S. has worked very hard for months to avoid a Palestinian application for full membership that we would have to veto.
I think this week has very significant international implications. The Palestinian application for full membership will be interpreted as sign that the Palestinians no longer regard the U.S. as an honest (albeit strongly biased) broker in potential peace talks. The U.S. is widely perceived to have failed to exert any influence over Israel when it could not get even a very temporary freeze on settlement activity. The assumption the U.S. is the indispensable player in peace talks because of its influence on Israel has been shattered. And now the U.S. seems unable to influence either the Palestinians or the overwhelming majority of UN members.
While I think this is significant as another symptom of the evolution of an international system in which the United States is not as dominant as we have been (a topic for another entry), I do not think it affects the prospects for an enduring agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians, which look as distant today as they did twenty years ago.
No comments:
Post a Comment