Palestine and the UN: The dead-end of the ?peace process?

24 September 2011

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas received standing
ovations from the United Nations General Assembly Friday for a speech
announcing his submission of a request for UN recognition of a
Palestinian state.

While the speech included passages detailing the death, destruction
and humiliation wrought by Israeli occupation, Abbas? audience of
foreign ministers, heads of state and UN delegates was hardly unaware
of the six-decade-old plight of the Palestinian people. Not a few of
their governments, particularly in the Arab world, have been complicit
in it.

The enthusiastic response may have been driven more by hostility to
Washington, which announced in advance that it would use its veto on
the Security Council to kill recognition of a Palestinian state.

US officials have carried out a shameful campaign of threats and
intimidation to force countries sitting on the Security Council to
abstain or vote no. Portugal, for example, was reportedly told that the
US would pull the plug on aid to the country?s crisis-ridden economy if
it voted in favor of the application.

The display of US hypocrisy and bullying served to undercut the
message that Washington had wanted to deliver at the UN. Its aim was to
hail the US-NATO war for regime-change in Libya as both a victory for
UN-sponsored multilateralism and an extension of the popular upheavals
of the ?Arab Spring.?

While Obama included these claims in his speech to the General
Assembly, he was forced to acknowledge with bitter resignation that
they were overshadowed by the controversy over Palestine.

In reality, Washington?s unconditional support for Israeli oppression
of the Palestinian people is entirely of a piece with its predatory
imperialist policy throughout the region, which has found its most
naked expression in the war for regime-change in oil-rich Libya. As for
the ?Arab Spring,? the Obama administration fought, together with
Israel, until the last possible moment to keep their close allies,
Mubarak in Egypt and Ben Ali in Tunisia, in power. Now they are working
to consolidate regimes in the two countries that will defend the
interests of imperialism and stifle the revolutionary strivings of the
workers and youth.

Why does the Obama administration feel compelled to block the
Palestinian Authority?s bid for UN recognition? The official story is
that this ?unilateral? action will undermine the ?peace process,?
disrupting the ?bilateral? talks that are supposedly the only road to a
settlement.

The so-called ?peace process? is a charade that has gone on for two
decades, producing neither peace nor any realization of the aspirations
of the Palestinian people. Rather, it has served as a cover for the
unilateral actions of the Israeli state, which has consolidated its
control over ever-larger parts of the occupied West Bank and East
Jerusalem, with the number of Zionist settlers doubling in the last 10
years alone. This has gone together with the proliferation of military
checkpoints and ?Jewish-only? security roads that render not merely a
national existence, but life itself, impossible for the Palestinians
under occupation.

While the turn to the UN is a tacit admission of the bankruptcy of the
US-brokered ?peace process,? Abbas and the bourgeois leadership of the
Palestinian Authority are not posing any alternative. Rather, they have
voiced the insubstantial hope that the UN gambit will somehow reanimate
the talks.

If the UN were to recognize Palestine as a member state, it would do
no more to change the conditions of the Palestinian masses than the
scores of other resolutions passed by the UN on the Israeli-Palestinian
question over the past 50 years. It would not spell an end to Israeli
occupation and military attacks. It would not secure for the millions
of Palestinians in exile the right of return. And it would not win
equal rights for the 1.5 million Palestinian Arabs living inside
Israel.

Abbas and the PA leadership have turned to the UN in a desperate bid
to win some credibility among the Palestinian population that they
claim to represent. In some respects, the Palestinian Authority is not
so dissimilar from regimes toppled by the masses in Egypt and Tunisia.
Unelected, it rules by decree, while maintaining a massive police
apparatus that is funded by the US and works in collaboration with the
Israeli occupation. It represents the interests not of Palestinian
workers and oppressed, but a thin layer of government officials and
businessmen who have enriched themselves off of foreign subsidies and
corruption.

As demonstrated by the ?Palestine Papers,? the secret minutes
documenting a decade of Israeli-Palestinian talks released by Al-
Jazeera earlier this year, the PA leadership has capitulated all down
the line, effectively renouncing the right of return for the
Palestinian diaspora, giving up virtually all of East Jerusalem, and
agreeing to collude in ethnic cleansing aimed at securing Israel?s
status as a ?Jewish state.?

Washington?s intransigence is generally explained with references to
the 2012 elections and the so-called ?Jewish vote,? a euphemism for a
powerful and lavishly financed Zionist lobby that represents not the
majority of American Jews?nor for that matter those in Israel?but
rather the most right-wing elements in the Israeli political
establishment. No doubt, organizations like the American Israeli
Political Action Committee (AIPAC) exert a monstrously disproportionate
influence on the policies of America?s two capitalist parties.

There are, however, more fundamental underlying interests. Israel has
served for half a century as a bulwark of US imperialist intervention
in the Middle East. Moreover, going all the way back to the Camp David
accords signed by Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat in 1978, the pretense
that Washington serves as some sort of ?honest broker? in negotiations
for ?peace? has provided US imperialism with an instrument for
furthering its interests in the region.

US hostility to a UN vote on statehood is driven in large part by its
determination to maintain its monopoly over the so-called ?peace
process.? Significantly, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, fresh from
using warplanes and mercenaries to advance the interests of French
imperialism and Total Oil in Libya, seized on the debate over the
Palestinian statehood bid to argue that the peace talks directed by US
had failed and to advance his own French solution.

Driven by the interests of the ruling clique in the Palestinian
Authority on the one hand, and imperialist machinations on the other,
the UN debate on Palestinian statehood will do nothing to secure the
democratic and social demands of the Palestinian masses. In the end,
they can be achieved only by means of revolutionary struggle.

The insoluble crisis of world capitalism that produced the mass
uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt is also fueling growing upheavals in
Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories as well, manifested
recently in the massive nationwide demonstrations over social
conditions within Israel itself. The decisive question is that of
uniting Arab and Jewish workers on the basis of a common socialist and
internationalist program in the fight for a Socialist Federation of the
Middle East as part of the struggle to put an end to capitalism on an
international scale.

Bill Van Auken

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