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An e-newsletter delivering updates and analysis on current issues about Israel and the Middle East conflict

June 14, 2011

To avoid negotiating with Israel, President Abbas will prevail on the UN to unilaterally declare Palestinian statehood

Dear Friend of FLAME:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave an historic speech to the United States Congress a couple of weeks ago, in which he received standing ovations usually reserved for a State of the Union address. About midway through, Netanyahu clarified for the entire world what the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is truly about:

"You see, our conflict has never been about the establishment of a Palestinian state. It has always been about the existence of the Jewish state. This is what this conflict is about. In 1947, the United Nations voted to partition the land into a Jewish state and an Arab state. The Jews said yes. The Palestinians said no. In recent years, the Palestinians twice refused generous offers by Israeli Prime Ministers to establish a Palestinian state on virtually all the territory won by Israel in the Six Day War."

Indeed, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas could have achieved peace AND a Palestinian state long ago. What has been (and seemingly will continue to be for the foreseeable future) an insurmountable barrier to the peace process is that real peace would force the Palestinians to accept the existence of a Jewish state.

In fact, it's clear that the Arab goal isn't a Palestinian state alongside a Jewish state at all, but rather just a single Palestinian state dominated by Arabs. Since this end goal obviously cannot be achieved through negotiation with Israel, Abbas instead plans to take his case to the United Nations in September in the hopes of unilaterally declaring Palestinian statehood. Once the Palestinians have their state, they reason, they can move on to achieving their actual goal of eliminating the neighboring Jewish state.

What will happen in the UN is still unclear: If a vote is taken in the General Assembly, it will likely pass. But decisions by the General Assembly are not binding, and it's a virtual certainty that a deciding vote by the Security Council would fail to ratify such a declaration. In any case, it is now unequivocally clear that Abbas has no intention of negotiating with Netanyahu, nor to formally recognize the right of the Jews to their ancestral homeland, including its capital of Jerusalem.

Step one in Abba's flawed plan was his reconciliation with Hamas in mid-May, and step two will be the United Nations bid. Let no one be fooled. Peace and a legitimate Palestinian state can only be achieved through face-to-face negotiations with Israel. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is awaiting Abbas' call.

In this week's FLAME Hotline, Fouad Ajami, the Lebanese-born professor at Johns Hopkins University and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, exposes the Palestinians' misreading of history and their bankrupt leadership, represented by its unilateral pursuit of statehood via the United Nations. This cynical effort to avoid negotiations in fact proves Netanyahu's argument about the conflict.

While chances are good that the Palestinian effort in the U.N. will fail, it will likely also make Israel again look like the bad guy, and the Jewish state will be beaten up in the press. That's why it's crucial for us to stand by her side and continue our grassroots efforts to defend her. I would urge you, using the Forward to a Friend button below, to pass this Ajami's powerful article to your friends, family, and colleagues. Israel needs you now.

Best Regards,

Dave Nogradi
FLAME Hotline Contributor

P.S.

As you know, Israel gets regularly battered in the media, and we pro-Israel advocates too often find ourselves on the defensive. But FLAME has begun to take a different tack in its hasbarah (clarifying) messages: Most recently we're calling the world's attention to the hypocrisy of unrelenting attacks on Israel by the U.N. in the face of horrible crimes against humanity committed by the Arab world. If you, too, believe we should seize the offense against Israel's enemies, I recommend you review FLAME's latest position paper: "Apartheid in the Arab Middle East: How can the U.N. turn a blind eye to hateful, state-sponsored discrimination against people because of their race, ethnicity, religion and gender?" This piece is just now appearing in magazines and newspapers, including college newspapers, with a combined circulation of nearly 5 million people. In addition, it is being sent to every member of the U.S. Congress. If you agree that this kind of public relations effort on Israel's behalf is critical, I urge you to support us. Remember: FLAME's powerful ability to influence public opinion comes from individuals like you, one by one. I hope you'll consider giving a donation now, as you're able---with $500, $250, $100, or even $18. (Remember, your donation to FLAME is tax deductible.) To donate online, just go to http://www.factsandlogic.org/make_a_donation.html. Now more than ever we need your support to ensure that Israel gets the support it needs---from the U.S. Congress, from President Obama, and from the American people.

P.P.S.

If you are not already a subscriber to the FLAME Hotline, I urge you to become a part of Israel's word-of-mouth public relations campaign . . . by signing on for a free subscription. The weekly Hotline will help you stay abreast of critical issues regarding Israel and help you become a more forceful advocate for her cause. Use the Subscribe Now button below this article.

The U.N. Can't Deliver a Palestinian State
By Fouad Ajami, The Wall Street Journal, June 1, 2011

It had been quite a scramble, the prelude to the vote on Nov. 29, 1947, on the question of the partition of Palestine. The United Nations itself was only two years old and had just 56 member states; the Cold War was gathering force, and no one was exactly sure how the two pre-eminent powers, the United States and the Soviet Union, would vote. The Arab and Muslim states were of course unalterably opposed, for partition was a warrant for a Jewish state.

In the end, the vote broke for partition, the U.S. backed the resolution, and two days later the Soviet Union followed suit. It was a close call: 10 states had abstained, 13 had voted against, 33 were in favor, only two votes over the required two-thirds majority.

Now, some six decades later, the Palestinians are calling for a vote in the next session of the General Assembly, in September, to ratify a unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood. In part, this is an appropriation by the Palestinians of the narrative of Zionism. The vote in 1947 was viewed as Israel's basic title to independence and statehood. The Palestinians and the Arab powers had rejected partition and chosen the path of war. Their choice was to prove calamitous.

By the time the guns had fallen silent, the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine, had held its ground against the combined armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Iraq. Its forces stood on the shores of the Red Sea in the south, and at the foot of the Golan Heights in the north. Palestinian society had collapsed under the pressure of war. The elites had made their way to neighboring lands. Rural communities had been left atomized and leaderless. The cities had fought, and fallen, alone.

Palestine had become a great Arab shame. Few Arabs were willing to tell the story truthfully, to face its harsh verdict. Henceforth the Palestinians would live on a vague idea of restoration and return. No leader had the courage to tell the refugees who had left Acre and Jaffa and Haifa that they could not recover the homes and orchards of their imagination.

Some had taken the keys to their houses with them to Syria and Lebanon and across the river to Jordan. They were no more likely to find political satisfaction than the Jews who had been banished from Baghdad and Beirut and Cairo, and Casablanca and Fez, but the idea of return, enshrined into a "right of return," would persist. (Wadi Abu Jamil, the Jewish quarter of the Beirut of my boyhood, is now a Hezbollah stronghold, and no narrative exalts or recalls that old presence.)

History hadn't stood still. The world was remade. In 1947-48, when the Zionists had secured their statehood, empires were coming apart, borders were fluid, the international system of states as we know it quite new. India and Pakistan had emerged as independent, hostile states out of the partition of the subcontinent in 1947, and Israel had secured its place in the order of nations a year later. Many of the Arab states were still in their infancy.

But the world is a vastly different place today. The odds might favor the Palestinians in the General Assembly, but any victory would be hollow.

The Palestinians have misread what transpired at the General Assembly in 1947. True, the cause of Jewish statehood had been served by the vote on partition, but the Zionist project had already prevailed on the ground. Jewish statehood was a fait accompli perhaps a decade before that vote. All the ingredients had been secured by Labor Zionism. There was a military formation powerful enough to defeat the Arab armies, there were political institutions in place, and there were gifted leaders, David Ben-Gurion pre-eminent among them, who knew what can be had in the world of nations.

The vote at the General Assembly was of immense help, but it wasn't the decisive factor in the founding of the Jewish state. The hard work had been done in the three decades between the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the vote on partition. Realism had guided the Zionist project. We will take a state even if it is the size of a tablecloth, said Chaim Weizmann, one of the founding fathers of the Zionist endeavor.

Sadly, the Palestinian national movement has known a different kind of leadership, unique in its mix of maximalism and sense of entitlement, in its refusal to accept what can and can't be had in the world of nations. Leadership is often about luck, the kind of individuals a people's history brings forth. It was the distinct misfortune of the Palestinians that when it truly mattered, and for nearly four decades, they were led by a juggler, Yasser Arafat, a man fated to waste his people's chances.

Arafat was neither a Ben-Gurion leading his people to statehood, nor an Anwar Sadat accepting the logic of peace and compromise. He had been an enemy of Israel, but Israel had reached an accord with him in 1993, made room for him, and for a regime of his choice in Gaza. He had warred against the United States, but American diplomacy had fallen under his spell, and the years of the Clinton presidency were devoted to the delusion that the man could summon the courage to accept a practical peace.

But Arafat would do nothing of the kind. Until his death in 2004, he refrained from telling the Palestinians the harsh truths they needed to hear about the urgency of practicality and compromise. Instead, he held out the illusion that the Palestinians can have it all, from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean. His real constituents were in the refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria and Jordan, and among the Palestinians in Kuwait. So he peddled the dream that history's verdict could be overturned, that the "right of return" was theirs.

There was hope that the Arafat legacy would go with him to the grave. The new Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas had been a lieutenant of Arafat's, but there were hints of a break with the Arafat legacy. The alliance between Fatah and Hamas that Mr. Abbas has opted for put these hopes to rest. And the illusion that the U.N. can break the stalemate in the Holy Land is vintage Arafat. It was Arafat who turned up at the General Assembly in 1974 with a holster on his hip, and who proclaimed that he had come bearing a freedom fighter's gun and an olive branch, and that it was up to the U.N. not to let the olive branch fall from his hand.

For the Palestinians there can be no escape from negotiations with Israel. The other Arabs shall not redeem Palestinian rights. They have their own burdens to bear. In this Arab Spring, this season of popular uprisings, little has been said in Tunis and Cairo and Damascus and Sanaa about Palestine.

The General Assembly may, in September, vote to ratify a unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood. But true Palestinian statehood requires convincing a decisive Israeli majority that statehood is a herald for normalcy in that contested land, for Arabs and Jews alike.

Mr. Ajami is a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is co-chair of the Hoover Working Group on Islamism and the International Order.

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