Palestinian 'state' vote a crisis
moment By Victor Kotsev
Thursday is shaping up as a big day in
Palestinian history. Exactly 65 years after the
United Nations resolution partitioning British
Mandatory Palestine was adopted (and rejected at
the time by the Arabs), the General Assembly will
vote on Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's
proposal for non-member state status for Palestine
within the borders of the period between the 1948
and the 1967 wars.
Abbas is expected to
win overwhelming approval, and while legal experts
differ on what exactly the new status would
entail, a heated and potentially explosive
diplomatic confrontation with Israel is
guaranteed.
Meanwhile, though some predict
violence and chaos in the days ahead, a surprising
new moderate reappeared miraculously on the
Palestinian horizon. His
internal rivals blown away by Israeli air strikes,
Hamas's politburo chief Khaled Meshal, the
erstwhile hardliner once targeted by a
high-profile assassination fiasco ordered by
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu some 15
years ago (during his first term in office),
endorsed a Palestinian state in the 1967 lines and
embarked on a renewed push for reconciliation with
Abbas's Palestinian Authority. He even hinted that
Hamas could switch to "non-violent resistance".
This is no less than a tectonic shift in
the militant organization's rhetoric. Meshal still
refuses to recognize Israel officially, but his
support for Abbas's UN bid is a big step up from
recent times when hardliners sidelined him,
arguing among other things that declaring a
Palestinian state in the 1967 borders would
implicitly recognize the "Zionist entity".
Moreover, amid victory celebrations and
boastful threats, the militants vowed to re-arm,
but at the same time, a prominent Gaza cleric,
Suleiman al-Daya, issued a fatwa (religious
decree) against breaking the truce. [1]
It
is hard to say how much of the rhetoric will hold
up with the passage of time. Meshal and Abbas
tried to reconcile last year when their agreement
was torpedoed by Hamas's Gaza faction. Now the
Gazan leaders took a beating, and despite that the
organization itself was strengthened, within Hamas
a more pragmatic and moderate faction appears to
have gained the upper hand. Whether this will last
depends on a myriad of factors and in no small
part on the developments in neighboring Egypt,
which are hardly predictable at present.
Other foreign actors could also upset this
fragile balance. The ceasefire in the Gaza strip
was widely perceived as a coup against Iranian
influence in the Levant, both diplomatic and
military, and Tehran might conceivably seek to
torpedo it and to silence the moderates. The
Iranian dominos in the region seem to be falling:
the Syrian rebels, for example, are constantly
progressing against the regime and have captured
at least five important army and air force bases
in the past 10 days.
Diplomacy is also in
high gear. The Palestinian missiles in the strip
arguably served as both a military deterrent
against Israel and a bargaining chip in the
nuclear negotiations with the West.
Most
importantly, however, all three native
protagonists on the Israeli-Palestinian diplomatic
scene - Israel, the Palestinian Authority and
Hamas - have gone into high gear positioning and
repositioning among themselves, and it is hard to
predict the outcome of this complicated three-way
bargaining. Last week Israel and Hamas hijacked
the spotlight with their brief but violent
military confrontation, and it looked as if Abbas
was going to be the big loser. Now all of a sudden
Hamas is making a show of extending him a hand,
while Israel is watching threateningly from the
sidelines. On Thursday, the next major act is set
to start with the UN debates and vote.
Symbolism matters a lot in the Middle
East, and becoming the leader of an implicitly
recognized state would certainly be a major
symbolic victory for Abbas. He has hinted that the
boost to his popularity may be sufficient to
empower him to lead a new round of direct peace
negotiations with Israel, perhaps even without
preconditions. While darker scenarios also exist,
this appears to be a legitimate possibility for
the mid-term future.
Practically, in terms
of international law, things are much less clear.
Legal experts say that the precise meaning of
Palestine's expected new status is dubious, and
that several controversies, most importantly
related to lawsuits at the International Criminal
Court, could arise. The Palestinian Authority
attempted to accept the court's jurisdiction and
to sue Israeli leaders and soldiers after the end
of Operation Cast Lead in Gaza in 2009 but was
turned down. Nevertheless, the ICC's prosecutor
worded his decision in such a way that in theory
the upgrade could turn things around. [2]
A UN expert who did not wish to be named
dismissed this possibility, calling the idea that
Palestine could become a de-facto state "wishful
thinking".
Professor Aeyal Gross of Tel
Aviv University, a prominent Israeli legal expert
and human rights activist, said that there is "no
singular answer" and that much depends on how much
political recognition Palestine gets. "Although
the question of what is a 'state' is factual," he
said, "in reality political recognition by other
states and the international institutions will
determine how successful the bid is."
Professor Mary Ellen O'Connell, a
professor of law and international dispute
resolution at the University of Notre Dame, wrote
in an email that "the bottom line is that full UN
membership is the only way for an entity to remove
all doubt about status as a a sovereign state."
She noted also that "the UN Secretary
General acts as depositary for the Rome Statute,
meaning he takes in the ratifications of the
treaty…. If the Secretary General were presented
with an instrument of ratification for various
treaties by Palestine, it would be very
interesting to see what he does. He could, for
example, refuse to accept it, saying Palestine is
not a state, noting it is not a UN member or has
some other impediment, such as being occupied by
Israel."
For Israel, the ICC question is
particularly pertinent, and the Israeli government
has characterized such lawsuits as "lawfare"
intended not so much to right an injustice (as the
Palestinians claim) as to put pressure on and to
create difficulties for Israeli officials and
military commanders for several years while a suit
lasts. According to a report in the Israeli site
Ynet, the top Israeli decision-makers are split
about how to respond to the UN vote, but most
would support measures such as toppling the
Palestinian Authority in case such suits are
filed. [3]
It is practically certain that
Israel will hit back at the Palestinians, most
likely backed by its traditional allies in the US
Congress. Various media reports have mentioned
possible measures such as aggressive
settlement-building or withholding funds from
Abbas's administration. The Daily Beast cautions
that the UN move could "explode [the] West Bank."
[4]
Last month, the Israeli daily Ha'aretz
warned "of a scenario in which Israel's government
'goes crazy' the day after the UN vote," mostly
because of the ongoing Israeli election campaign.
[5] The symbolism of Abbas's move is also not lost
on the Israeli public, most of which refuses to
give up East Jerusalem and the main settlements in
the West Bank. The Israelis are further worried
that this step would bring full UN membership of
Palestine closer.
Recent polls show a
further shift to the right among voters, in part
after the recent confrontation in Gaza which,
though causing more death and destruction in
strip, crossed several critical Israeli redlines.
These included hundreds of rockets fired straight
at Israeli population centers, a sustained missile
barrage on the country's heartland (including on
Jerusalem and Tel Aviv) and a bus bombing in Tel
Aviv. The diplomatic confrontation and the
reconciliation initiative threaten to push Israeli
voters even further to the right, and most
politicians can hardly afford to ignore this trend
right now.
A further sign of caution is
that Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, a
moderate on the Palestinian issue, announced that
he would not run for re-election. This happened on
the same day as hardliners inside Netanyahu's
right-wing Likud party received a significant
boost in pre-election primaries. Barak was
incidentally Netanyahu's semi-official liaison
with the United States (in place of hardline
Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman), and one way
of interpreting his surprising move is that he saw
a big storm coming.
Overall, while
Thursday's vote at the UN seems to carry more
symbolic than real weight, it comes at a very
sensitive moment and could trigger major
consequences. A crisis is at the same time a
moment of opportunity, as the saying goes, and a
significant crisis is expected.
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