a Middle East settlement based on a two-State solution, one for Israel and one for Palestine.

(*Socialist Worker*–21/09/2011) The fierce opposition of the U.S. and Israel to UN recognition of Palestinian statehood obscures an important current of criticism coming from Palestinians themselves.

Palestinian Authority (PA) President **Mahmoud Abbas** is vowing to press ahead with a bid for United Nations recognition of Palestinian statehood this week, even though the U.S. has vowed to veto the proposal if it comes to a vote in the UN Security Council.

Hard-right Israeli Foreign Minister **Avigdor Lieberman** has warned that there will be “harsh and grave consequences” if the Palestinians persist with their plan to seek UN membership, and the U.S. has threatened to cut off $500 million in aid to the PA.

**Twenty Years of Negotiations**

Israel and the U.S. are denouncing the Palestinian bid as a “unilateral move” that would jeopardize the “peace process.”But despite nearly 20 years of negotiations under the rubric of the 1993 Oslo Accords, Israel continues its expansion of settlements in the West Bank and has imposed a brutal siege on Gaza.

**War on Palestinian People**

This bitter hostility toward statehood from Tel Aviv and Washington is another facet of the Israeli war on the Palestinian people. But there is opposition to Abbas’ proposal coming from a very different source.

Many Palestinians are raising their voices in opposition to the PA’s statehood strategy.

Given the long history of UN resolutions and votes on Palestinian rights that have gone unheeded, these voices make the case that the statehood strategy carries little prospect of tangible progress, while putting at risk the national rights of millions of Palestinians, both within Israel and in refugee camps throughout the region.

What’s more, the secret negotiations over the terms of the statehood bid make it impossible to tell what concessions the PA is considering in its effort to get U.S. support–even as one of the brightest opportunities in decades to push for Palestinian liberation has come into being.

**Global Boycott**

The Arab Spring of revolts and revolutions reshaping the Middle East–as well as the mounting successes of the global boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel–provide an alternative to two decades of negotiations that have only reinforced Palestinian subjugation.

The Palestinian national movement and its allies around the world must mount a sustained campaign to demand genuine self-determination.

**A Strategy to Push forward on Negotiations?**

PA officials are touting the statehood bid as a strategy to push forward on negotiations over a “two-state solution,” in which Israel and Palestine would exist side by side in peace.

For a generation now, the PA, Israel and the U.S. have agreed on paper on the concept of such an arrangement.

But for years, Israel has used a myriad of techniques to forestall any meaningful progress at the negotiating table–so it can continue moving settlers into the West Bank, demolishing Palestinian homes and carrying out its war of annihilation in Gaza.

PA officials argue that UN recognition of statehood would give Palestinians the power to draw on the authority of international courts and other bodies to increase pressure on Israel to abide by international laws governing occupations and human rights.

**Refusing to Abide by UN Resolutions**

But the Palestinian cause has never suffered for a lack of strongly worded resolutions or rulings at an international level.

The problem is that Israel consistently refuses to abide by, for example, UN resolutions that guarantee the right of return to Palestinian refugees or the International Criminal Court ruling that its apartheid wall is a violation of international law.

What’s more, the U.S. has repeatedly and consistently used its diplomatic clout to run interference for Israel’s refusal to abide by these decisions.

**The Settlements**

As a consequence, more than 300,000 settlers today live in the West Bank (excluding the 190,000 Jews living in East Jerusalem)–a territory that was annexed by Israel after the Six Day War in 1967. This figure is nearly three times the number of settlers living in the West Bank when the 1993 Oslo Accords were signed.

Now Israel and the U.S. are working furiously to dissuade Abbas from seeking a vote at the UN on the “two-state” solution they ostensibly favor–on the grounds that the UN bid amounts to a “unilateral move.” Somehow Israel’s settlement-building binge and its wars of aggression against Gaza don’t count as “unilateralism.”

For years, the PA has considered the U.S. an “honest broker” in its negotiations with Israel, even though the U.S. has a substantial interest in a strong Israel that is willing and able to defend U.S. interests in the region.

**Obama**

The Obama administration has not deviated in the slightest from the decades-long policy of unswerving U.S. support for Israel.

In addition to Washington’s threats to cut off aid to the PA, a group of 58 House Democrats sent a letter to 40 European heads of state urging them to reject the PA’s statehood bid–asserting that “a vote on a unilateral UN resolution will likely set prospects for peace back years.”

And even though the U.S. is struggling to burnish its image in a region rocked by uprisings against U.S.-backed dictators, the Obama administration seems to be relishing the opportunity to use its UN Security Council veto to torpedo the statehood bid–as a way to curry favor with pro-Israel voters before the 2012 election.

**Grave Concerns**

Another current of opposition to the statehood bid comes from an entirely different place: Prominent organizations and individuals in the Palestinian national movement who have grave concerns that UN recognition of statehood under the present circumstances could enshrine the lack of basic rights for large segments of the Palestinian population.

Put another way, the Arab Spring has inspired, mobilized and rejuvenated mass popular resistance against corrupt, unaccountable and ineffective leaders who have become pawns (or worse) in the U.S. drive to dominate the Middle East.

The PA, which has embraced its collaborationist role with respect to the U.S. and Israel, fits this mold and has already faced protests animated by the sense that the PA has failed to deliver on its promises. Shifting the struggle to the safe sphere of “diplomacy” is an effective way to defuse and deflect popular anger.

**Plain Urgency**

The urgency of this moment in history should be plain. In a few months, a number of developments have reshaped the balance of forces facing the Palestinian struggle for liberation.

The collapse of the pro-Israel regime of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, the dissolution of the military alliance between Israel and its other key regional partner Turkey [9] and the mounting successes of the BDS movement globally [10] all show that popular resistance and organized movement-building can yield significant results–and quickly.

**Bankrupt Peace Process**

Meanwhile, the whole history of the bankrupt “peace process” shows that the U.S. and Israel will win as long as the struggle is confined to vain appeals to the very powers who stand in the way of Palestinian liberation–whether in negotiations with the U.S. and Israel, or at the UN.

**“If There Is No Struggle, There Is No Progress”**

These episodes in the Palestinian struggle provide fresh confirmation of the famous words spoken 150 years ago by the great Black abolitionist leader **Frederick Douglass**:

If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters…

Find out just what any people will quietly submit to, and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both.

The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.

*Editorial published on September 21st, 2011 by the International Socialist Organization*

[http://socialistworker.org/2011/09/21/will-statehood-bring-justice](http://socialistworker.org/2011/09/21/will-statehood-bring-justice)

[http://human-wrongs-watch.net/2011/09/23/2312/](http://human-wrongs-watch.net/2011/09/23/2312/)
2011 Human Wrongs Watch