Thursday, September 22, 2011

Will the US Veto the Palestinian State?

The Palestinian government is going to submit their application for a full statehood in the UN tomorrow, 23 September, US time. It is a historic proposal. It is hoped that the UN will accept it in an equally historic decision. Already more than half of the UN members have recognized Palestine as a state. In a recently announced opinion polls the majority of the respondents in all the countries surveyed, even in the US, have supported the expected application. If the US will veto the move in the Security Council, she will disregard all those writings on the wall. It will also greatly damage her own national interests.
Mr.Obama's General Assembly speech yesterday, 21 September, naturally gave some portion of it(7 minites out of 40) to this question. But it was all on a trodden path. He said peace should be worked out in the direct talk of Israel and Palestine. But the US have heavily supported Israel, and have been arming her from the head to the foot for many years. When certain elements in Palestine were duly elected by the people, the US and Israel refused to recognize them as the legitimate partner to talk to.
Mr.Obama referred to the recent history of the persecution of the Jewish people and said 'Those are the facts'. Nobody is disputing those facts. It is irrelevant to talk about them here. It is irrelevant also in the sense that the current issue is not the Jewish people versus the Palestinians, but between the present state of Israel versus the Palestinians.
Moreover those are by no means all the facts. The Israelis, no matter how they might have been persecuted, have come to a land already inhabited by the Arabs. Some may say that it is their ancient home. If that claim is to be accepted, the whole of North America, for example, could be claimed by their original inhabitants, their own indigenous peoples.
Obama said 'there are no short-cuts'. He is not even offering a one year's time for the negotiations to be over, as he did last year. Few speeches can be so welcome to one side and so unwelcome to the other. It must have been for pure home consumption. If so it will speak a lot of the anti-Muslim feelings in the US.
Just before he turned to this issue he was talking of the Arab Spring, and specially of the rights of the Syrian people. It seems that the Arab Spring and the Palestinian issue are totally compartmentalized, and there seems to be very little to learn from one in order to enrich the thinking on the other. So there was nothing new in the speech, which would have been more befitting to an Israeli president. This is not the way to enthuse the world with the hope for change, of which Obama once spoke so often.
Palestinian question is not the only one about which the US may very well change their policy so that the existing tensions can be blown off--Iran, DPRK, Cuba, and so on. It is still within the US' power to do this. The fully-packed audience at the General Assembly may have expected something more conducive to peace, and change, while hoping against hope, and have been disappointed. The 'fact' that there was hardly any applause would testify to this.

No comments:

Post a Comment