Position: United Nations should vote to recognize a Palestinian state
This position addresses the topic 2011 United Nations recognition vote of Palestinian state.
For this position
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The statehood bid is an effort to alter this dynamic. It is an attempt to shake the U.S. out of its one-sided approach before the Arab Spring reaches the millions of Palestinians languishing under a 44-year occupation that the president never saw fit to mention in his U.N. speech.
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Against this position
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In 2005, the Israelis uprooted settlements and pulled out of the Gaza Strip. Did the Palestinians take advantage of this as an opportunity to build a society lifting the economic lives of Gaza residents? Was Israel rewarded with a peaceful neighbor? Again, the answer was no and ultimately another short war. As recently as 10 days ago, President Mahmoud Abbas said the Palestinian Authority would not recognize Israel as a Jewish state — saying no to a two-state solution.
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Israel has offered the Palestinians land for peace three times since. And been refused every time. Why? For exactly the same reason Abbas went to the United Nations last week: to get land without peace. Sovereignty with no reciprocal recognition of a Jewish state. Statehood without negotiations. An independent Palestine in a continued state of war with Israel.
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Today, the Palestine Liberation Organization is recognized by the U.N. and most of its member states as the sole legitimate representative of the entire Palestinian people: those living under occupation, those living in Israel and those living in exile or as refugees, who constitute the single largest group of Palestinians. If its place in the international body is taken by a Palestinian state identifying itself with the occupied territories, Palestinians who do not live in those territories — that is, the majority of Palestinians — could lose their representation at the U.N. and be pushed back into the shadowy silence and invisibility from which they fought to emerge in the 1960s.
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Abbas hopes this will create a new dynamic in which pressure applied through U.N. institutions forces Israel into concessions that the U.S.-brokered peace process has not attained. Sadly for the Palestinians, it is more likely to do the opposite, reviving hostility and polarization that the peace process, glacial though it may be, has contained.
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If the failure of the effort does produce violence, and possibly a third intifada, the impact will land hardest on the Palestinians. They will suffer the most casualties, and more violence -- along with shelling from Gaza -- would strengthen the hard-liners who dominate the Israeli government. It also could lead to a House of Representatives refusal to continue U.S. financial support, battering the Palestinian structure and economy.
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At risk, potentially, because of Mr Abbas's insistence on going ahead, is $US600 million a year in US aid, which the Palestinian Authority, already broke, can ill afford to lose. So is $100m-a-month in tax transfers that Israel, despite the opprobrium heaped upon it, hands to the authority. Beyond this, the harsh reality is any vote, even assuming it was successful, would not remove a single settlement from the West Bank or otherwise contribute towards the creation of a Palestinian state. On the contrary, it would make Israel even more obdurate in its determination to build settlements.
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Statehood is a responsibility to be earned. And so far the Palestinian national movement has hardly proved its willingness to live in peace beside Israel. Palestinian schools and media — those of Fatah as well as of Hamas — routinely portray Israel as an artificial and temporary creation, without any rootedness in the land. All of Jewish history — from the ancient temple in Jerusalem to the Holocaust — is dismissed as a lie. No Palestinian leader has told his people — as Israeli prime ministers since Yitzhak Rabin have told their people — that the land must be shared by two nations.
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But Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas offered a hint of his real ambition when he wrote, in the New York Times in May, that "Palestine's admission to the United Nations would pave the way for the internationalization of the conflict as a legal matter, not only as a political one. It would also pave the way for us to pursue claims against Israel at the United Nations, human rights treaty bodies and the International Criminal Court." That means not the usual feckless resolutions at the U.N.'s Human Rights Council, but travel bans and international arrest warrants for Israeli soldiers involved in the "occupation" of a supposedly sovereign state. In other words, what Palestinians seek out of a U.N. vote isn't an affirmation of their right to a state, but rather another tool in their perpetual campaign to harass, delegitimize and ultimately destroy Israel.
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The US and UN have long supported the idea that Israel and its neighbors should make peace through direct negotiations. The Palestinian leadership has dealt directly with Israel since 1993, but has refused to do so since March 2010. They seem to prefer theatrics in New York to the hard work of negotiation and compromise that peace will require.
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Mixed on this position
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