Who's Afraid The Of The UN's Declaration Of A Palestinian State?

To update the nursery rhyme, mortars and missiles from Gaza may break your bones, but Turtle Bay will never hurt you.
Benny Avni

Benny Avni, a UN-based journalist, writes about The UN statehood charade: Why Israel hasn't much to fear

He writes along the lines of the new meme that has taken hold, following the initial disaster predicted by the doom sayers:

The "nightmare" scenario: America vetoes a Security Council proposal to declare the West Bank and Gaza a state -- so the Palestinians move quickly to the General Assembly for a vote that admits the state, by a landslide vote, as a UN member. And that endorsement then renders any Israeli presence in the West Bank, including security-related patrols, illegal under international law.

Avni quotes Joseph Deiss, the president of the General Assembly, who explained at a press conference last week that according to the UN's own rules it cannot approve any new UN members unless the 15-member Security Council first recommends it.

The Palestinians are looking for ways to overcome the expected US veto, and yesterday PA Foreign Minister Riad Malki threatened to reconvene a "Uniting for Peace" emergency session--but that won't work: according to a ruling by the International Court of Justice during the 1950's that loophole does not cover UN membership.

Avni agrees that a General Assembly vote for statehood would be a small step forward for Palestinians--but there was a similar vote in 1988: the General Assembly endorsed Yasser Arafat's declaration of a "Palestinian state" overwhelmingly by 110 votes and only Israel and America opposing. As Avni points out: nobody remembers that "historic" vote.

All that vote did was change the name of the Palestinian UN Observer Mission from "PLO" to "Palestine." Legally, however, it changed nothing.

Neither will the vote this fall -- which will affect the daily lives of West Bankers much less than, say, the Palestinian Prime Minister Salem Fayyad's recent (mild) heart attack. Or, indeed, than Fayyad's political survival in the aftermath of the recent Hamas-Fatah pact.

A realist, Fayyad is trying to build a Palestinian state on the ground -- unlike fantasists Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas, the current Palestinian boss, who've tried to "build" it at Turtle Bay and in world capitals.

The September vote would also have less effect on Israel than the universal "oy vey" chorus of Jerusalem politicians and US Jewish leaders would have you believe.

Read the whole thing.

He concludes that while a group of international lawyers wrote an open letter to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon arguing that a General Assembly declaration of a Palestinian state violated signed agreements rendering such a decision "illegal"--

Israel would do much better using its legal minds to highlight such treaty violations as Egypt's Sunday opening of the crossings into Gaza.

Before that, Israel will have to internalize the fact that the September prospect of a UN recognition of a second Palestinian state is not the threat that many thought it was.

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