Abbas And The UN: No More Hysteria

Yesterday, I posted a piece by Arlene Kushner, where she address the issue of Abbas's coming appearance before the UN in September to ask them to recognize a Palestinian state.

More specifically, Kushner addresses why Abbas's appearance before the UN should not cause the alarm it has so far.

As opposed who have outlined dangers of Abbas's plan and how Israel can retaliate, others have also started to face the plan head on in terms of its practicality.

Dr. Josef Olmert, Adjunct Professor at American University’s School of International Service, addresses what a calm examination of Abbas's plan for a Palestinian state:

Now, a dose of realism seems to have taken over the direction of Israel's reaction. This is so for three main reasons:

• any inclusion of a new member state in the UN requires a Security Council decision. Judging by President Obama's repeated statements, the US will object, and that means end of story. The General Assembly will have its automatic anti-Israel majority for a symbolic resolution, but Palestine will not be a member;
  
  
• at least 4 out of the 8 G-8 Forum states, the US, Canada, Germany and Italy are likely to vote no in the General Assembly, thus depriving this resolution from most of its actual significance;
  
  
• no UN decision regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict has ever been historic in reality, rather than in rhetoric, and that includes the Partition Resolution from 29 November 1947, that was blatantly violated by the Arab invasion to the newly-established state of Israel.

Fouad Ajami, professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, deals with the same issue, but from the angle of the Palestinian attempt to copy the founding of Israel--and their failure to understand what made a state of Israel possible:

The Palestinians have misread what transpired at the General Assembly in 1947. True, the cause of Jewish statehood had been served by the vote on partition, but the Zionist project had already prevailed on the ground. Jewish statehood was a fait accompli perhaps a decade before that vote. All the ingredients had been secured by Labor Zionism. There was a military formation powerful enough to defeat the Arab armies, there were political institutions in place, and there were gifted leaders, David Ben-Gurion pre-eminent among them, who knew what can be had in the world of nations.

The vote at the General Assembly was of immense help, but it wasn't the decisive factor in the founding of the Jewish state. The hard work had been done in the three decades between the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the vote on partition. Realism had guided the Zionist project. We will take a state even if it is the size of a tablecloth, said Chaim Weizmann, one of the founding fathers of the Zionist endeavor.

Read the whole thing.

For all the honor and affection Palestinians seem to show for Arafat, the fact remains that for all his charisma--Arafat is no Ben Gurion.

Nor did he try to be.
For that matter, by choosing to bypass negotiations by going to the UN, Abbas has shown that he is not much of a leader for peace either.

Neither Arafat nor Abbas have shown themselves willing--let alone capable--to do the hard work necessary to actually create a state.

Instead, both men remain terrorists.

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