Palestinian UN statehood in a couple weeks?

[Justin 05 STi]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/palestinianauthority/8740426/US-plan-to-delay-Palestinian-bid-for-statehood-at-UN.html


Speaking on condition of anonymity, an Israeli official told the Daily Telegraph yesterday: “There is activity going on behind the scenes as we speak to see if it is possible to find a formula to restart the peace process and to make the Palestinians take a rain check on going to the United Nations.”

The New York Times yesterday reported that Washington has embarked on a plan to convince Palestinians to renew direct negotiations with Israel rather than appeal to the United Nations Security Council on September 20.

A spokesperson for the Palestinian Authority (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/palestinianauthority), however, said President Abbas knows nothing of the new diplomatic effort. Direct negotiations would only be possible, he added, if Israel agreed on clear terms of reference for the talks, including the formation of two states along the 1967 borders, with agreed land swaps, and the participation of a mediator from the international community.

Palestinian negotiators have repeatedly complained that Israel refuses to agree terms of reference prior to bilateral talks, frustrating the negotiating process. President Abbas has said he is open to renewed talks with Israel if these terms are agreed in advance.

When asked if the US had secured a commitment from Israel to agree terms of reference for peace talks, the Israeli official responded, “I believe so”.

The Obama administration has said it will exercise its power of veto in the Security Council to block a Palestinian bid for statehood. The Palestinian Authority would then make its application to the UN’s General Assembly, where there is no power of veto and the Palestinian bid is supported by the majority.

US diplomats are said to be keen to avoid a situation in which the United States is among a handful of opponents to Palestinian statehood.

The European Union is also struggling to find a comfortable position on the Palestinian bid as September 20 looms. Germany and France want the Palestinian government to refrain from making a full bid for statehood at the UN while other EU countries such as Spain would support it.

Speaking at a meeting of EU of foreign ministers in Poland on Saturday, France’s Alain Juppe warned it would “be a failure for the EU if Palestine made a bid for membership as it would expose Europe’s differences”.It will be interesting to see where this goes. Turkey is already giving Israel a big middle finger. Obama was all for the '67 borders a while back but quickly changed his tune.

[FOACAD]

Gonna be interesting any way it goes.

Israel wont sit idle and allow it to happen. And if they do then they will proptley take them over and say 'oh your new country now belong to us....'

[phreakdna]

should be interesting to see how the vote comes out. the matter is just so contentious but I'm wondering if the more hard-liner members of Israel's gov't/military will soften based on evolving Israeli opinions... there are even some polls coming out of Israel with majority support for statehood:
http://www.jta.org/news/article/2011/04/29/3087251/more-israelis-favor-palestinian-recognition-than-not
(to be fair they are published at the same time as others showing majority opposition)

Obama was all for the '67 borders a while back but quickly changed his tune.
when was this? Obama maintained the position of past Presidents and endorsed the '67 borders with land swaps... just as Israel itself has discussed for years... and as far as I know, didn't 'change his tune' at all in the face of the manufactured "controversy".

for reference here he was on May 19th saying it:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/20/world/middleeast/20speech.html
and here he was on May 23rd saying it again to AIPAC (Israeli interest group)
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/05/22/remarks-president-aipac-policy-conference-2011
“[I]t was my reference to the 1967 lines — with mutually agreed swaps — that received the lion’s share of the attention, including just now. And since my position has been misrepresented several times, let me reaffirm what ‘1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps’ means.

“By definition, it means that the parties themselves — Israelis and Palestinians — will negotiate a border that is different than the one that existed on June 4, 1967. (Applause.) That’s what ‘mutually agreed-upon swaps’ means. It is a well-known formula to all who have worked on this issue for a generation. It allows the parties themselves to account for the changes that have taken place over the last 44 years. (Applause.) It allows the parties themselves to take account of those changes, including the new demographic realities on the ground, and the needs of both sides. The ultimate goal is two states for two people: Israel as a Jewish state and the homeland for the Jewish people — (applause) — and the State of Palestine as the homeland for the Palestinian people — each state in joined self-determination, mutual recognition, and peace. (Applause.)
the fact that this is some kind of meme is a joke... from the joint statement released by SoS Clinton and PM Netanyahu last year before this was manufactured:
http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Government/Communiques/2010/Joint_statement_PM_Netanyahu_US_Sec_Clinton_11-Nov-2010.htm
The Prime Minister and the Secretary agreed on the importance of continuing direct negotiations to achieve our goals. The Secretary reiterated that "the United States believes that through good-faith negotiations, the parties can mutually agree on an outcome which ends the conflict and reconciles the Palestinian goal of an independent and viable state, based on the 1967 lines, with agreed swaps, and the Israeli goal of a Jewish state with secure and recognized borders that reflect subsequent developments and meet Israeli security requirements." Those requirements will be fully taken into account in any future peace agreement.

[Ryan Stewart]

It annoys me that we are still vetoing this bullshit. I wish we wouldnt support Isreal no matter what. The typical argument is they are our only stable ally in the region but they create as much volatility as anyone else.

[Beowulf]

It annoys me that we are still vetoing this bullshit. I wish we wouldnt support Isreal no matter what. The typical argument is they are our only stable ally in the region but they create as much volatility as anyone else.

Amen. Can't stand all the support israel is getting.



http://www.presbyteriandivestment.org/media/palestine.jpg

[Justin 05 STi]

when was this?

It was at the end of 2010. The peace talks broke down after Netanyahu didn't stick to the West Bank construction moratorium. South American countries started recognizing Palestine and he tried jumping on the bandwagon, but left out (forgot?) the bit about the land swaps at first. That is why everybody freaked out and in early 2011 he was going out of his way to mention / define them to the AIPAC and anybody else that would listen.

Swaps are the core issue and a warm and fuzzy way to refer to the unidirectional border changes since the creation of Israel. Land is cleared for occupation with bulldozers, white phosphorous, and the best weapons we can sell them while Palestine retaliates / attacks with mortars, RPGs, and suicide bombers. The majority of the world knows this and it's why they want recognition of the '67 borders without any "swaps". The really bad joke is as soon as Palestine is ready to make concessions and give up land to move the process forward, Israel increases its demands and the whole mess repeats itself.

[Justin 05 STi]

http://www.jpost.com/DiplomacyAndPolitics/Article.aspx?id=237183


The Palestinian Authority officially launched its bid to making Palestine the 194th state to join the UN Thursday, announcing a series of "peaceful events" before the opening of the UN General Assembly on September 20, the Press Association reported Thursday.

The plans were announced in a letter that was submitted to UN chief Ban Ki-moon at a ceremony in Ramallah's UN offices and was attended by about 100 Palestinian officials and national activists, Press Association said.

The letter itself was presented by an elderly Palestinian woman who had reportedly lost a son and had seven other sons serving jail time in Israeli prisons because of terrorist activities. She was chosen, the report said, because her story is representative of the plight of the Palestinian people.

On Wednesday, the US - which sees the unilateral UN move as undermining chances to revive peace negotiations with Israel - officially asked (http://www.jpost.com/DiplomacyAndPolitics/Article.aspx?id=237120) the Palestinian Authority to abandon its plan to ask the UN later this month to recognize a Palestinian state along the pre-1967 lines.

The request was relayed to PA President Mahmoud Abbas by US Middle East envoy David Hale during a meeting in Ramallah, Palestinian officials said. The meeting was attended by senior White House official Dennis Ross and US Consul-General in Jerusalem, Daniel Rubenstien.

The officials said that the US envoys did not carry any new proposals for reviving the peace process.

[phreakdna]

It was at the end of 2010. The peace talks broke down after Netanyahu didn't stick to the West Bank construction moratorium. South American countries started recognizing Palestine and he tried jumping on the bandwagon, but left out (forgot?) the bit about the land swaps at first. That is why everybody freaked out and in early 2011 he was going out of his way to mention / define them to the AIPAC and anybody else that would listen.
links to this?

[Justin 05 STi]

links to this?

I'll try to find some (assuming they haven't been scrubbed). I just remember reading it on the alt news outlets at the time.

edit - Here's one (April 29, 2010):

http://www.dore-gold.com/2010/04/the-myth-of-the-1967-borders.php


In rejecting, the proposal for a Palestinian state with temporary borders, that Haaretz reported last Friday, Abu Mazen insisted that the only basis for any future political arrangements with Israel is "the 1967 borders". He is not the only one today talking about the 1967 lines. President Carter's, national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, just wrote an article in the Washington Post on April 11, along with former congressman Steve Solarz calling for a territorial solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict "based on the 1967 borders." Brzezinski had recently been invited to discuss the Middle East with the President Barack Obama's National Security Adviser Jim Jones.

Even Secretary of State Hillary Clinton seemed to slip by using the same language during a visit to Bahrain on February 4, 2010: "we believe that the 1967 borders, with swaps, should be the focus of the negotiations over borders." That sentence contradicted the formal policy of the Obama administration, that she carefully crafted herself, which said that the U.S. believed that it was possible to reconcile the Palestinian position demanding the 1967 lines with the Israeli position calling for secure boundaries, which took into Israeli security requirements and realities on the ground. Clinton subsequently corrected herself.



...


Under President Obama, the 1967 lines have become a reference point for the peace process again. President Bush made clear in his 2004 letter to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon that "it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949".

But while the Bush letter was approved by massive bipartisan majorities in both houses of the US Congress, the Obama administration has avoided stating that it is legally bound by the contents of the letter. This came out in a long exchange between a Fox News reporter and the State Department's Deputy Spokesman, Robert Wood, on June 1, 2009. At the UN General Assembly in September 2009, Obama used in his address the road-map phrase of "ending the occupation that began in 1967," but he did not refer to Resolution 242 as his predecessors did.

[Justin 05 STi]

Another good read on the land swaps:

http://www.dore-gold.com/2011/06/land-swaps-and-the-1967-lines.php


So where did the idea of land swaps come from? During the mid-1990s there were multiple backchannel efforts to see if it was possible to reach a final agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. The Palestinians argued that when Israel signed a peace agreement with Egypt, it agreed to withdraw from 100 percent of the Sinai Peninsula. So they asked how could PLO chairman Yasser Arafat be given less than what Egyptian president Anwar Sadat received.
As a result, Israeli academics involved in these backchannel talks accepted the principle that the Palestinians would obtain 100 percent of the territory, just like the Egyptians, despite the language of Resolution 242, and they proposed giving Israeli land to the Palestinians as compensation for any West Bank land retained by Israel. This idea appeared in the 1995 Beilin-Abu Mazen paper, which was neither signed nor embraced by the Israeli or the Palestinian leaderships. Indeed, Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas) subsequently denied in May 1999 that any agreement of this sort existed.



...


In July 2000 at the Camp David Summit, the Clinton administration raised the land swap idea that had been proposed by Israeli academics, but neither Camp David nor the subsequent negotiating effort at Taba succeeded. Israel's foreign minister at the time, Shlomo Ben-Ami, admitted in an interview in Haaretz on September 14, 2001: "I'm not sure that the whole idea of a land swap is feasible." In short, when the idea was actually tested in high-stakes negotiations, the land swap idea proved to be far more difficult to implement as the basis for a final agreement.
After the collapse of the Camp David talks, President Clinton tried to summarize Israeli and Palestinian positions and put forward a U.S. proposal that still featured the land swap. But to his credit, Clinton also stipulated: "These are my ideas. If they are not accepted, they are off the table, they go with me when I leave office." The Clinton team informed the incoming Bush administration about this point. Notably, land swaps were not part of the 2003 Roadmap for Peace or in the April 14, 2004 letter from President Bush to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
It was Prime Minister Ehud Olmert who resurrected the land swap idea in 2008 as part of newly proposed Israeli concessions that went even further than Israel's positions at Camp David and Taba. It came up in these years in other Israeli-Palestinian contacts, as well. But Mahmoud Abbas was only willing to talk about a land swap based on 1.9 percent of the territory, which related to the size of the areas of Jewish settlement, but which did not even touch on Israel's security needs. So the land swap idea still proved to be unworkable.