NAM
to boost Palestinian cause at
UN Kaveh L Afrasiabi
Led by
Iran, the Non-Aligned Movement is gearing up to
boost the Palestinian cause at the United Nations
summit in New York this month. With tensions
mounting in the occupied territories and virtually
no sign of any Western initiative to address the
long-dormant Middle East peace talks, NAM's
prioritization of the Palestinian issue, reflected
in the pro-Palestinian declarations at its recent
summit in Tehran, is a timely antidote that may
well breathe new life into last year's Palestinian
bid at the United Nations for full statehood.
Although Israel has by and large succeeded
in burying the Palestinian issue in the Western
media through its constant alarms about Iran's
"nuclear threat", both the Tehran NAM summit
and the upcoming UN
General Assembly gathering represent new
opportunities for the Palestinian leadership to
refocus global attention on the plight of its
people, that is, millions of refugees, thousands
of prisoners in deplorable conditions, Israeli
settlement expansionism and continuing blockade of
Gaza, and so on.
Much to the chagrin of
Israeli authorities, Mahmoud Abbas, the head of
Palestinian Authority, received a warm welcome by
his Iranian hosts and utilized the NAM summit to
the best of his ability to underscore the
importance of international solidarity.
Not only that, the NAM declaration on
Palestinian solidarity clearly recognized the
Palestinian Authority as the "sole legitimate
representative of Palestinian people", albeit with
some reservations by Iran, which nonetheless
endorsed this statement (which also called for
Palestinian unity). [1] Also, the same statement
called for a Palestinian state based on the
pre-1967 borders, that is, a "two state" solution.
This is significant because its endorsement by
Iran shows the latter's political flexibility and
pragmatism lurking underneath the harsh rhetoric,
thus portending a future softening of Tehran's
position as a direct result of the need to bring
its foreign policy in greater harmony with the NAM
declarations.
This aside, according to
Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator,
"The Tehran summit showed that Palestine is still
the prime issue, indicating that we can take a
common decision ... We are happy that all [the
speeches of the NAM leaders] were focused on
Palestine, and I hope that the representatives of
the Arab and Muslim world will speak for the
national interests of Palestine."
In his
inaugural speech, Iran's Supreme Leader, Grand
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, paid special attention to
the Palestinian issue and called on Israel's
Western backers to consider Iran's proposal for a
referendum in the "Palestinian territory" to
determine the country's fate.
Egyptian
President Mohamed Morsi in his NAM speech
criticized Israel's mistreatment of Palestinians
as well, thus reminding both Israel and the US
that in the new "post-Arab Spring" milieu they
should expect greater regional pressures on this
issue in the near future, given the new hints by
Israel that it may "reoccupy" parts of Gaza for
security reasons, the same rationale that was used
to erect the "apartheid wall" that has chewed up a
significant chunk of Palestinian property in the
West Bank.
Henceforth, the stage is set
for clashing views (and priorities) at the UN
summit, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu planning to use the podium at the
General Assembly to make his case against Iran's
purported nuclear threat. He is hoping meanwhile
that this week's meeting of International Atomic
Energy Agency's governing board will pave the way
to a new anti-Iran resolution by the UN Security
Council, this while Iran and its Arab and non-Arab
allies in the Non-Aligned Movement seek to
prioritize the oppressed rights of Palestinians,
aided by a recent UN report that deplores the
increasingly "uninhabitable" conditions in Gaza.
An important question is, of course,
whether UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon will
accommodate the Israelis or the Palestinians and
their (NAM) supporters, who are also prioritizing
another issue unwanted by Israel, namely a Middle
East nuclear weapons-free zone.
Regarding
the latter, fully endorsed by Ayatollah Khamenei
in his NAM speech, this constitutes another
important priority area for both Iran and a core
group of NAM nations, in light of an upcoming
international meeting in Finland in December. So
far, Tehran has not indicated whether it will
participate in the Finland meeting, yet assuming
that it will, now that it wears the hat of the NAM
presidency, then the UN gathering may prove a
timely warm-up for the Helsinki meeting, thus
complicating Israel's policy agenda.
According to a Tehran policy analyst who
spoke to this author on the condition of
anonymity, the "weight of the Palestinian problem
is growing daily with a near-explosive situation
in the occupied territories, and this is
recognized by everyone in the Arab world. However,
a distracting issue might turn out to be Syria."
In other words, the Palestinians and their
supporters will be competing for attention, since
so much of the regional focus is on the ongoing
conflict in Syria, as well as Israel's military
threat against Iran.
Shifting the
political and diplomatic discourse toward the
nearly forgotten Palestinian issue, which did not
receive a word of endorsement in the recent
political conventions in US, will not be easy,
however, particularly since the mainstream US
media have a tendency to accommodate Israel. As
for incumbent President Barack Obama, whose bid
for a second term in the Oval Office hinges partly
on his ability to secure powerful Jewish support,
don't count on him to cause any waves at the UN
regarding Middle East peace talks, the missing
agenda of his first term.
But with Obama
leading his Republican contender Mitt Romney in
the opinion polls, expectations on the part of
some NAM experts are that by elevating the
Palestinian issue at the UN summit, for example
through a resolution condemning Israel's land grab
contrary to international law, a re-elected Obama,
unhinged from election worries, will be more
amenable to breathing a new lease of life into the
deadlocked Israel-Palestinian negotiations.
But will this come at the expense of
Tehran, given the occasional hints by Israel that
it will appease the White House on the Palestinian
issue only if the US adopts a more hawkish
position vis-a-vis Iran? For as much as Iran would
like to view these as discrete issues, the
Israelis and their US supporters are keen on
forging a link between them that, however
artificial, is bound to be a complicating factor
in the overall scheme of things.
Kaveh L Afrasiabi PhD is the
author of After Khomeini: New Directions in
Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) and
co-author of "Negotiating Iran's Nuclear
Populism", Brown Journal of World Affairs, Volume
XII, Issue 2, Summer 2005, with Mustafa Kibaroglu.
He also wrote "Keeping Iran's nuclear potential
latent", Harvard International Review, and is
author of Iran's Nuclear Program: Debating
Facts Versus Fiction.
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