A coming catastrophe?

Editorial

What was once called the roadmap to peace has become a pockmarked cartography of failure, the latest junction of which will be charted next month. A resolution that seems certain to pass in the United Nations General Assembly would make Palestine the 194th member of the UN. The intention of the resolution is to add legitimacy to the idea of an independent Palestine, without forcing the Palestinians to sit down with Israelis and negotiate a peaceful resolution, borders and other final status issues.

The attempt to shift the movement for Palestinian statehood from the negotiating table to the UN is motivated by a single fact: successful negotiations would require Palestinians to recognize Israel’s existence as a Jewish state. Unilateral quasi-diplomacy, which a UN resolution would represent, addresses Palestinian independence in a vacuum from the right of Israel to exist. Evidence suggests that the Palestinian (and larger Arab) majority position is not coexistence in a two-state framework, but the elimination of Israel from the region. The UN vote is an important act in this drama.

A successful vote in the General Assembly would be followed by a U.S. veto in the Security Council, which would then be followed by what some have predicted as a “diplomatic tsunami.” The United States would be characterized as a dog wagged by the Zionist tail, while Israel’s legitimacy would be disputed again on the international stage.

In the West Bank, mass protests are planned. (If the UN strategy were an authentic one intended to successfully attain international recognition of Palestinian statehood, rather than another weapon in a decades-long propaganda war, Palestinians would be planning a jubilant celebration, not an angry protest.) Israel is preparing for all eventualities, reportedly doubling its riot control forces for the occasion and ordering a machine that produces nausea-inducing sound waves, as well as another that emits repellent smells, to disperse potentially violent protests.

Some predict a third intifada.

Some expect the United States to reduce or cut off funding to the Palestinian Authority. This could create a true humanitarian disaster, which would likely be blamed not on the actions of the Palestinian leadership, but on American and Zionist collusion. The Palestinian leadership and their overseas apologists cannot lose in such a situation. Their people may suffer horribly, but misery seems to be the fuel that runs the global engine of the anti-Israel machine.

Helping to congeal that PR next month into a narrative of international outrage will be the Durban III conference, not coincidentally scheduled in New York to coincide with the General Assembly vote. This second attempt to legitimize the 2001 Durban festival of global hatred and antisemitism will bring together activists who will return to their home countries with the talking points for the next stage in the anti-Israel offensive, just as attendees at Durban in 2001 returned home to disseminate the “apartheid” libel.

Of course, both sides just want to live in peace. Israel’s peace, offered and rebuffed every couple of years since 1948, involves a Jewish state economically and diplomatically integrated in peace with its Arab neighbors. Apparently, the dominant Palestinian vision of peace is the state of the region after Israel has been destroyed. This has been the majority Arab position since 1947-48, and it remains the unspoken purpose for the UN resolution, which seeks to bypass a negotiated peace, which, by definition, would require recognition of Israel. The widespread acceptance of this rejectionist position was confirmed recently in a poll of Palestinian public opinion (discussed in this space on July 22).

Writing in the National Post last Saturday, George Jonas summed up the situation: “It isn’t that Palestinians don’t want peace,” he wrote. “They want peace, all right; it’s only that they don’t want peace with Israel.”

Almost every action by the Palestinian leadership since its inception has been premised on the win-win proposition that every indignity endured by their people is a small price to pay for the cause and a victory for the propaganda war. Whatever fresh catastrophe awaits the Palestinian people after the UN vote will not be laid at the feet of those who have caused it. It will be blamed on Israel, perhaps the point of the entire exercise.

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