Israel’s Bluff

FT.com

The diplomatic crisis at the UN triggered by the Palestinians’ attempt to win recognition as a state may or may not advance their quest for justice and self-determination. But what it has started to do is strip away layer after layer of the cant and duplicity that has enveloped the so-called peace process.

The starting point for any consideration of the Palestinians’ diplomatic gambit is that the negotiations that appeared to promise so much after the 1993-95 Oslo accords have not ended the Israeli occupation of their land. Mahmoud Abbas, successor to the late Yassir Arafat as Palestinian president, has eschewed violence and staked everything on negotiations. He has nothing to show for it except the ruin of his reputation.

Whereas Arafat was a feckless negotiator who kept the option of the gun dangerously in play and preferred the trappings of statehood to the statecraft needed to win a state, Mr Abbas and his prime minister, Salam Fayyad, have chosen diplomacy and nation-building. But the occupation continues.

Going all the way back to Oslo, the peace process has served as an international smoke and mirrors screen for the inexorable expansion of Israeli settlements on Palestinian land. It cannot be stated often enough that the biggest single enlargement of the settlements took place in 1992-96, at the high-water mark of the peace process under Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, when the number of settlers grew by 50 per cent, or four times the rate of population growth inside Israel.

Since then, the colonisation of the West Bank and Arab east Jerusalem has reached the point at which no viable Palestinian state is now possible unless this is reversed. But these settlements are intended to be permanent. The so-called Palestine Papers, leaked documents to al-Jazeera in January detailing how Mr Abbas was willing to give up nearly all of east Jerusalem but was still scorned by the previous, allegedly moderate Israeli government, make this abundantly clear.

Benjamin Netanyahu, the current Likud premier who leads a coalition freighted with irredentist believers in a Greater Israel, has never himself believed in anything more than a sort of supra-municipal government for Palestinians, on roughly half the land conquered by Israel in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

The real story here, therefore, is not that UN recognition will torpedo a peaceful resolution of the conflict negotiated by these two, vastly unequal sides. There is no prospect whatsoever of that happening. It is that international recognition of the Palestinians right to a state would call Israel’s bluff and expose the hollowness of the US role as a less-than-honest broker.

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Palestinians’ attempt for UN recognition is related to Arab Spring – the message presented in front of Western public opinion is “at a time when many Middle Eastern countries rid themselves of their dictators, why shouldnt we rid ourselves of Israel?” – Israel being their own regional dictator. The timing is pretty good on their part. Nice move.