UN vote for Palestine marks diplomatic isolation of the US

Abdillah Toha, Jakarta | Opinion | Tue, December 04 2012, 10:12 AM

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When Barack Obama was elected for his first term as US president, there were high hopes in the Middle East and in the Muslim world that the US had finally installed a president who would dare to undertake new and brave foreign policy initiatives, particularly on the unabated conflict between Israel and Palestine.

Obama initially spoke out strongly against Israeli settlements and even coaxed Netanyahu into a partial freeze on settlement construction. But when that freeze expired and Netanyahu rejected Obama’s calls to extend it, Obama dropped the matter altogether.

Since then, as we later witnessed, Obama has shelved all matters relating to Middle East conflicts and imersed himself deeply in Medicare and other domestic affairs. When again early this year he proposed that peace negotiations be revived based on 1967 borders, Netanyahu hurriedly flew to Washington and lectured Obama in the White House on how wrong it was to even start thinking in this direction. Obama once again sealed his lips and dropped the matter.

When Israel bombarded Gaza in December 2008 and in the middle of November this year, to the disappointment of many who had pinned hopes on him, Obama supported Israeli actions and “Israel’s right to defend itself from outside attacks”, rather than stopping the attack on defenseless population of Gaza.

In the meantime the world saw more and more gross violations of human rights and injustice perpetrated by Israel toward Gaza, which has been besieged, blockaded and treated practically as the largest prison in the world.

When last year the UN Security Council blocked Palestinian attempts to become a member of the UN, the only way to get out of the barrier was to go straight to the General Assembly where there is no veto, and that decision was made based on simple majority.

As we now see, despite intense opposition from the US and Israel, Palestine finally got what it wanted — status as a non-member observer state — with the overwhelming majority support of the General Assembly.

The elevation in status, ironically, was granted on the anniversary of the General Assembly vote of Nov. 29, 1947, when British-ruled Palestine was partitioned into Jewish and Arab states, a step that led to the creation of Israel.

The oft-repeated rationale stated by the US and Israel for opposing the vote was that it would only create obstacles toward the peace process. This seemingly illogical reasoning was not acceptable to a majority of the members of the UN, including many European countries.

The unstated concern on the part of the US and Israel is actually a vote that would put Palestine on equal footing with Israel, meaning future talks would be conducted between two states, rather than between a military occupier and a people under occupation.

The vote also grants the Palestinian Authority overwhelming international endorsement for its key position: establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem: the territories captured by Israel in the 1967 war.

There is also an openly stated concern that once the vote is won, the doors will be opened to Palestine to join various UN institutions, including the International Criminal Court, where Palestine would be able to bring cases of war crimes against Israel.

The Geneva Convention forbids occupying powers from moving “parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies”, leaving Israeli officials potentially vulnerable to an ICC challenge. Israel says its settlements are legal, citing historical and Biblical ties to the West Bank and Jerusalem.

The fact that only nine countries voted in line with the US against the resolution shows that the US and Israel have been left isolated by a majority of the world’s nations.

This view is strengthened by the fact that even the conventional allies of US in Europe and Japan see the situation differently from the US and either voted in favor of the resolution or abstained.

Apparently trying to belittle the implications of the vote, the US representative at the UN, Susan Rice, stated: “Today’s grand pronouncements will soon fade and the Palestinian people will wake up tomorrow and find that little about their lives has changed, save that the prospects of a durable peace have only receded”.

The hectic campaigning before the vote and the statements made by various US officials before and after the vote, as well as the threat by a bipartisan US Senate group to cut off US contributions to the UN and aid to Palestine all clearly indicate that the US has failed to see the new reality and the shift in how the world views Israeli behavior thus far.

The US even has failed to appreciate the gravity of the challenge to Israel’s fundamental legitimacy in the world.

To the detriment of the US’ long-term national interest, its foreign policy when dealing with Israel has been so rigid and continuously controlled by the strong Israeli lobby in Washington. It is unfortunate that however well intentioned Obama is, his hands are apparently tied when dealing with foreign policy that involves Israel.

The fluidity of the situation in the Middle East, the rising economic and military power of China, the fiscal and debt problems of the US economy, the failure of military power in the last decade to neutralize and stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan, or for that matter to combat terrorism, all should sensibly prompt the US administration, including Congress, to seriously rethink and review its outdated foreign policy.

Present and future US presidents should face off the corporate-controlled mainstream media that regularly misleads the public and come out of their cages to speak directly to the people on the merits of changing the direction of the American way of looking at the world.

To many of us who once admired Obama’s passionate and zealous oratory as a man of principle cannot but feel dispirited by an absence of action to make the world a better place to live in.


The writer is an advisor to the Vice President of Indonesia on strategic matters. The article is his personal opinion