I notice that Israel is charging ahead with its illegal settlements. Nothing will stop them, apparently. Israel knows that it can get its client state, the US government, to support it in all its actions. The US did oppose Palestine’s bid for statehood; presumably that opposition was due to instructions from Israel.
Here’s an intriguing article in The New Republic, pointed out by James Fallows. It’s by John Judis and it begins:
The Obama administration, after failing to head off a Palestinian request to the Security Council for United Nations membership, is prepared to use its veto against it. In an undistinguished address to the General Assembly on Wednesday, President Barack Obama advised the Palestinians to bypass the UN and to confine their campaign for statehood to negotiations with Israel. Obama’s position would have made sense if the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu had made generous offers at the negotiating table that the Palestinians have been spurning, but the Netanyahu government has not; and there is little likelihood, in the absence of a dramatic change of heart, that it will do so. By threatening a veto, Obama appeared to contradict his past support for Palestinian self-determination.
Since 1919, the United States has favored in principle, if not always in practice, the national self-determination of peoples. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush applied it to the Palestinians’ demand for a state of their own; and Obama has done so repeatedly. Given the breakdown in negotiations between the Israeli and Palestinians, and the continued Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands, the U.S. could have reaffirmed its support for Palestinian self-determination by supporting Palestinian membership in the UN—or at the least, an orderly and imminent transition toward membership. That may not have been politically expedient, but it would have been politically just.
Moreover, it would have followed an important historical precedent. Behind Obama’s current stance lurks an unpleasant irony. In 1947, the United States faced a very similar situation in the UN and took exactly the opposite position—to the benefit of Palestine’s Jewish population. After World War I, the British had maneuvered the new League of Nations into granting them a mandate to rule Palestine, but in February 1947, after having failed to get the Jews and the Arabs to agree on a future state, the British threw the question of Palestine into the hands of the newly established United Nations. In May of that year, the General Assembly established a committee to make recommendations on resolving the conflict.
At the UN, the Arabs insisted, as they had in talks with the British, on a unitary Arab majority state, but officials from the Jewish Agency, representing Palestine’s Jews, argued for a partitioned Palestine. They looked to the United States for support, but the Truman administration was initially unwilling to give it. Within the Truman administration, some White House officials backed partition, but influential State Department and Pentagon officials held out the hope of bringing the Jews and Arabs together within a federation. In September of 1947, Truman decided to back the Zionist demand for a state in part of Palestine, and American representatives were able to win support within the committee and the General Assembly for a plan that within three years would have created two states and an internationalized Jerusalem. That didn’t establish at once a Jewish majority state, but was a very important step toward doing so.
The U.S. did, I believe, the right thing. Perhaps in 1919, there was not as strong a moral case for a Jewish-controlled state in a land inhabited primarily—about 90 percent—by Arab Muslims and Christians. (A case could be made for a homeland for the persecuted from Russia’s Pale of Settlement, but not necessarily for a state, and certainly not, as Zionists of the time advocated, a state that encompassed what would be Palestine and Jordan.) But the Nazi-led genocide in Central Europe that began in the 1930s and the restrictions that Western Europe, the United States, and the British Commonwealth nations placed on Jewish immigration made Palestine the only recourse for Europe’s Jews. By the end of World War II, there was a geographical and economic basis for a divided Palestine. Jews made up about 30 percent of the population and were concentrated in Jerusalem and on the coast. The Jews, with the Arabs opposed to negotiations and to Jewish immigration into Palestine, urged the UN to agree to partition, and the United States, after some hesitation, supported them.
Now the situation is reversed. After the 1967 war, Israel annexed Jerusalem, took control over the West Bank and Gaza, and began establishing settlements there in violation of the Geneva rules of war and in defiance of UN resolutions. Whatever their original purpose—and some of the earliest settlements had a rationale coming out of 1967 war—the settlements have evolved into an attempt by the Israelis to colonize land that is not theirs, to create incontrovertible facts on the ground that no treaty can contradict. There are now about 500,000 Israeli settlers in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
In 1993, the PLO, which the UN acknowledges as the sole representative of the Palestinian people, recognized the existence of Israel, and since then negotiations have taken place fitfully, with both sides stalling, equivocating, and sending mixed signals. Certainly, in retrospect, . . .