The Restless Chronicles

Where Intelligence Meets News Analysis.

The U.N., the U.S., and the Palestinian State

President Mahmoud Abbas’ decision to seek statehood recognition for Palestine at the United Nations this week has educed palpable emotions from parties on either side of the divide. Chief among them, the decision of the world’s sole superpower, the United States, to veto any such resolution at the Security Council.

While it is widely noted that the U.S. will only be pursuing its prerogative, which is, standing by an unquestionable ally, it is also no secret that such decision, no matter how endearing to Israel, carries grave burdens and consequences in a world that believes the time for a Palestinian state has come.

In spite of the public uproar that has been displayed by the Obama administration at such a move by the Palestinian Authority, the administration ought to secretly rejoice that it has come to this, at this particular junction.  For all intents and purposes, the U.S. has become as consequential as a singular bird chirping in the forest when it comes to resolving this age-old conflict between Israel and Palestine.  The leadership of Prime Minister Netanyahu has overtly frustrated any measures at resolution. For one, Mr. Obama’s insistence that Israel cease to build settlements on disputed land in the West Bank has been met by the prime minister with derision.

If anything, Mr. Obama owes Mr. Abbas a thank you note for moving this conversation forward.

But Mr. Obama and other opponents have been very vocal in their criticism of the move, largely labeling it as a unilateral effort and an obstruction to peace negotiations.  These two premises cannot be further from the truth.

By definition, the UN is a multilateral body, and since when has requests or resolutions placed for consideration at the body become a unilateral move.  If anything, it cements a communal approach, which is the spirit the UN seeks to foster.  A unilateral action would be former President W. Bush invading Iraq on suspicion of weapons of mass destruction without any sort of resolution at the UN – no matter the wisdom or foolishness of that decision.

It is what we preach, that in lieu of conflict, any aggrieved party in a conflict ought to approach the international body before resulting to violence and other unscrupulous means to achieving its purpose.  Mr. Abbas is heeding this teaching; the request for a Palestinian state at the world governing body after close to 20 years of failed negotiations represents an adherence to this principle of multilateralism, as well as respect for both international rule of law and opinion.

Speaking of the second premise; for almost two decades now, peace negotiations have persistently faltered (with either side deserving blame). Frustrations mount up, which is one of the reasons Hamas has managed to remain popular among some Palestinians. Years and years of mediation by the United States have not produced a viable Middle East. Although a two-state solution has been the official policy of the U.S. and others, moving past dialogue and actually creating visible progress on the ground in the realization of this dream has been evasive, to put it mildly.

Absent a resolution at the UN seeking statehood recognition for Palestine, what other credible alternatives are yet to be exhausted in this festering conflict? How do we propagate some measure of progress in bringing an end to futile and vexing years of back-and-forth? One thing is clear, hitherto, the Palestinian Authority has lacked leverage in negotiations with Israel.  Israel is a state. For that mere fact, one party, being Israel, has had access to resources and wherewithal that a non-state entity, such as Palestine, can’t possibly use to force or mitigate concessions. It creates a lack of urgency on the part of Israel in aggressively negotiating an end to the conflict; though, it is arguable that terrorism fear has been good enough of a reason for alacrity.  But as we can see, Israel has been able to sit back and fold it arms in certain moments of negotiations.

Palestine has not been without its fault. To a very good extent, Hamas and its violent ways have made Israel very reluctant in declaring truce with an avowed enemy.  In the past, peace agreements, such as the Oslo Peace Accord, have been torpedoed by Hamas and not given a chance at life.

But this time, things are a bit different. Hamas, earlier in the year, signed a peace deal in Cairo, Egypt with the Palestinian Authority. It should be noted that in all of these, the voice of Hamas’ officials have been largely non-existent. And that’s not a coincidence. It comes partly as a realization by Hamas officials that violence is not rapidly achieving the end they seek, which is a territory for and recognition of the Palestinian people. And, also, that unwarranted anti-Israel rhetoric at this crucial time will only inflame an international body already sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.

The bid for statehood at the UN represents an opportunity to bring Hamas in from the cold, and force it to play by and be accountable to international norms and values.  If granted statehood, I seriously doubt the Palestinian people will continue to support Hamas and its violent means, in any capacity, if it becomes obvious that such endeavors threaten to sour its standing with the global community.  Presently, an overwhelming majority of the UN favor a Palestinian state.

It is my belief that the template for peace as advanced by former Israeli PM, Ehud Olmert, ought to be the framework from which parties in this conflict find a resolution.  Among the many points of the template is that “the territorial dispute would be solved by establishing a Palestinian state on territory equivalent in size to the pre-1967 West Bank and Gaza Strip with mutually agreed-upon land swaps that take into account the new realities on the ground. The city of Jerusalem would be shared. Its Jewish areas would be the capital of Israel and its Arab neighborhoods would become the Palestinian capital. Neither side would declare sovereignty over the city’s holy places; they would be administered jointly with the assistance of Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United States.”

Even if, in the coming months, Mr. Abbas is unable to secure statehood for the people of Palestine, an upgrade to nonmember observer state at the UN would give Palestine an opportunity to seek membership in U.N. agencies and to join treaties, including possible access to the International Criminal Court. The leverage this provides in jumpstarting stalled negotiations cannot be understated.

The Arab Spring has been with us all this while, and it should come as no surprise that Palestinians, like all freedom-seeking peoples, seek a structure for self-determination.

September 23, 2011 Posted by | International, Socio-Politics | , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment

Paranoia State? 9/11 and Our Evolving Sanity

It is fascinating to think, if James Madison, the putative father of the United States Constitution, were to be alive in these turbulent times, would he still have a head full of hair.  Or, overwhelmed with exasperation and helplessness, he is on his way to pulling out the very last strand.

It’s been a decade since that fateful Tuesday, and somehow, no matter how much turbulence we experienced in our world pre-9/11, all that turbulence, through retrospective lens, now seem a distant paradise.

Not to be misunderstood, humanity has never lived without its evils, but to a greater extent, our evils have been quantifiable.  Invariably, we always had answers to them, except the times we willfully chose to ignore them.  Still, to confront our problems, we never really had to sell our souls, become a chapter in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, to make sure airplanes were not falling out of the sky like raindrops.

9/11 represents a chasm between a “prehistoric modernity” and present modernity. What Osama bin Laden and his Terror, Inc took from us, among many things, might just as well be our values and the state we seek.

For so long, we have enjoyed the civil liberties and freedoms which James Madison and other co-authors of the Bill of Rights found indispensable to a free and just society.  After all the majestic arrogance and insolence paraded by King George III at the time of the founding of the republic, the Founding Fathers thought it paramount to declare that government cannot be the beginning and end of all things: “All men are created equal,” they wrote, “…they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.”

But in the period immediately after 9/11, we eagerly surrendered most of those rights to government. That line which separated us from repressive states such as Russia suddenly became blurred.  Warrantless wiretapping, provisions of the Patriot Act such as “unsupervisable” search and seizure of property in the name of terror investigation, indefinite detention of immigrants, extraordinary rendition (where, for example, the U.S. picks up “suspected” citizens and transfers them into the custody of torture states like Libya to be interrogated on behalf of the U.S. — all cemented our status as the paranoia state.

All right, our fears have not been without reason. Our preoccupation has not being without cause. But somewhere in the midst of all the anxiety, the individual rights that defined the American state became a pariah that dared not show its face.

For a decade now, government has usurped individual rights and liberties in the name of communal good. That such usurpation has occurred is not the principal tension in this argument, but more so, the length of such usurpation.  After all, Abraham Lincoln, in fighting the Civil War that threatened to tear America apart, suspended habeas corpus – a defendant’s right to a speedy trial before a jury of his peers.  But the Civil War lasted 5 years and the quest for a constitutional state rapidly begun there afterward.

But in 2011, we are not even close to the end of such abrogation of individual rights by government, and it is beginning to take a toll. The de facto state is now the new normal, habit perpetuated for as long as we have been at “war” since 9/11 becomes the character and identity of a nation.

Now, rarely do we bat an eye when a federal agency such as the CIA or FBI wields sweeping power that hitherto we would have considered unconstitutional and provocative.  So far as it is in the name of terror, our concerns and anxieties about whatever civil rights may have been breached are suddenly allayed.  We are now in such a grey area that the only entity that polices government is government, as we have surrendered the rights that make government fearful of detaining innocent citizens based on flimsy or incoherent premises.

With no end in sight to the war on terror, our sanity has gradually evolved.  The previously insane has come to be sane and acceptable.  Heck, we chose to invade a Muslim country, Iraq, because of our fears and sensibilities. Understandably, it is indeed hard to juggle our fear of terror and our need of protection from terror.  But is there a way we get our sanity back; get back some of these individual rights and freedoms that are “inalienable”.

What Osama did was open the door to hell, and now we constantly have to devise means to close it.  Since the aftermath of 9/11, we’ve had the shoe-bomber, the underwear-bomber, and many other ingenious means of terror.  We are always reminded they need only be lucky once, whilst we need be right every time. And on this front, the executive branch, the men and women of our national intelligence, and our military have done a remarkable job.

But still, we are no military state nor do we seek a kangaroo republic.  We must note, Al Qaeda wins every time we wholesomely abdicate our centuries-old values in the name of fear. Our values are the antithesis of Al Qaeda, the very reason for which we were attacked.  Our fears are not going to go away, and rightly should not.  But our fear must not create a state where we become puppets to an alpha-and-omega government. It is indeed true, power corrupts, and absolute power, as we hereto have granted, corrupts absolutely.  Well-meaning men in government, unrestrained by the burden and fear of an alert and dutiful public, are bound to behave inappropriately at some point.  It’s been ten years, you do the math.

Government will always feel it needs to arrogate more and more power to itself to do its job efficiently.  But, it is high time we had a national parley on which of these individual rights we have forfeited for too long; which we should forfeit some more; or whether these rights, by and large, to the everlasting horror of our Founding Fathers, are forever forfeited.

September 10, 2011 Posted by | Domestic/U.S., Terrorism | , , , , , , | Leave a Comment

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