PALESTINIAN PRESIDENT Mahmoud Abbas decided to make an initial appeal for recognition of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders and full UN membership of the Security Council rather than the General Assembly after the US failed to deliver an acceptable deal for the relaunch of negotiations with Israel.
Immediate results are not expected. According to UN regulations, experts could take a month or more to study the proposal before putting it to the council for debate.
The Palestinians had been counting on nine out of 15 council members to vote in favour of their proposal and, on the eve of Abbas’s address, had the support of seven – India, Brazil, South Africa, Lebanon, Russia, China and Gabon. However, the US may have persuaded Gabon to abstain. Portugal, Nigeria, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Colombia have, apparently, also been pressured by Washington not to back the bid. Germany, Britain and France are expected to abstain. Therefore, if there is a vote in the council, the bid could be deprived of the nine votes it needs to pass without the US casting a veto.
If the Palestinian petition is rejected, or the bid is not taken up by the council, as a fall-back option Abbas could submit a proposal to the General Assembly for recognition of a Palestinian state and an upgrade in status from “observer” to “non-member state observer”. The Palestinians need only a simple majority to achieve this objective. They have garnered the backing of at least 130 out of 193 members.
Achievement of “non-member state” status could be a breakthrough for the Palestinians.
Their state would be recognised internationally, and its boundaries would be fixed on the 1967 ceasefire lines. Israel would be seen as having an illegitimate presence in a “state” rather than an “occupied territory” or, in the view of some Israelis, a “disputed territory”. Once recognised, the state of Palestine could lodge cases with the International Criminal Court against Israel for occupying Palestinian land and against the Israeli state and individual Israelis for violations of Palestinian human rights.
The US and EU seek to prevent Abbas from going the assembly route by trying to relaunch negotiations in the window of opportunity provided by consideration of the Palestinian bid by the council. Prospects for negotiations are poor.
Abbas is in no position to renew negotiations with Israel as long as settlement construction continues in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, eating up land the Palestinians demand for their state. Furthermore, while Israel may, in theory, say it is prepared to negotiate on the basis of the 1967 line, in practice, Palestinians do not believe this is the case.
Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu flatly rejects a settlement freeze and insists on a Palestinian commitment to major territorial “swaps” in exchange for pledging to negotiate on the basis of the 1967 line. Israeli experts say such “swaps” would involve Israeli retention of major West Bank settlement blocs.
In exchange, the Palestinians would receive Negev land adjacent to Gaza and, perhaps, a corridor linking Gaza to the West Bank. For Palestinians, the West Bank is the heartland of their homeland and they are not prepared for “swaps” that could diminish the size of this territory, 21 per cent of geographic Palestine.
Abbas was driven to go to the council by outrage over the latest US proposal presented to him last weekend. It drops a previous reference to the 1967 line and, instead, calls for Palestinians’ acceptance of “demographic changes” since 1967 – the planting of half a million Israeli settlers in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, in violation of international law and the Fourth Geneva Convention.
Abbas cannot agree to three key Israeli demands.
He cannot accept Israeli annexation of strategic settlements located deep in the West Bank, as these colonies would prevent the emergence of a Palestinian state with territorial contiguity.
He must insist on east Jerusalem as the capital of the Palestinian state.
And finally, he is obliged to reject an Israeli military presence along the Jordan river, as this would mean Israeli control of the border of Palestine with Jordan.
