Informed Comment

The Pan-Arab London daily, al-Hayat, editorializes today that President Obama’s vote against Palestine’s membership in UNESCO demonstrates that his 2009 Cairo speech was “empty words.” Obama’s forays into outreach to the Muslim world are crashing and burning as he adopts anti-Palestinian positions little different from those of his predecessors.

As for the far rightwing government of Binyamin Netanyahu in Israel, it announced that it was “punishing” Palestine for joining UNESCO. Since Israel isn’t Palestine’s parents, what he really means is that Israel is taking revenge. The vengeful measures consisted of building 2000 more dwellings for Israeli squatters on Palestinian land in and around East Jerusalem, and withholding from the Palestinians tens of millions of dollars a month in custom and sales tax revenue collected for the Palestine Authority at ports and checkpoints by the Israelis, which control them.

As I have asked before, if the Israelis are the good guys, why is it that their leadership so often sounds like a James Bond villain. (“No, Mr. Abbas, I expect you to drop dead.”)

Since the Israelis regularly announce new settlement building on Palestinian land in the West Bank, moreover, this “punishment” (“revenge”) is really just business as usual, and calling it punishment is nothing more than posturing.

Palestine declines to enter into further negotiations with Israel precisely because the Israelis are gobbling up the very land over which the negotiations would be held, so that the talks would really just offer a Palestinian fig leaf to Israeli grand larceny. The Palestinians can’t see why they should do that.

As for the customs revenue, the Israelis regular freeze those payments, and they have a third of the occupied Palestinians, in Gaza, under an ongoing blockade of civilians that prevents them from exporting their made goods and keeps most of them living in penury and on the edge of food insecurity.

In other words, if these measures are actually revenge, then the Israelis have been vengeful for many years toward the Palestinians.

Israel is also excluding UNESCO from that country, probably in a bid to prevent the organization from recognizing Palestinian sites as world heritage sites, strengthening the Palestinian claim to them and the territory on which they stand.

Former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray argues that Palestine can now join the International Criminal Court. Murray writes:

“… the UNESCO membership is crucial recognition of Palestine’s statehood, not an empty gesture. With this evidence of international acceptance, there is now absolutely no reason why Palestine cannot, instantly and without a vote, join the International Criminal Court. Palestine can now become a member of the International Criminal Court simply by submitting an instrument of accession to the Statute of Rome, and joining the list of states parties.

As both the USA and Israel refuse to join the ICC because of their desire to commit war crimes with impunity, acceding to the statute of Rome would not only confirm absolutely that Palestine is a state, it would reinforce the fact that Palestine is a better international citizen with more moral legitimacy than Israel.

There is an extremely crucial point here: if Palestine accedes to the Statute of Rome, under Article 12 of the Statute of Rome, the International Criminal Court would have jurisdiction over Israelis committing war crimes on Palestinian soil. Other states parties – including the UK – would be obliged by law to hand over indicted Israeli war criminals to the court at the Hague. This would be a massive blow to the Israeli propaganda and lobbying machine.”

It is often said that the ICC cannot move against non-signatories. But since the Israelis are operating in Palestinian territory in the West Bank and Gaza, they thereby open themselves to prosecution were Palestine to join the ICC.

The Human Province blog has a complete vote tally for the UNESCO decision. It turns out that Spain, France, Ireland, Austria, Finland and Greece in Europe voted “yes,” which is a pretty big set of defections from US leadership. And, the UK, Italy and Denmark all abstained, which given the way this vote worked, essentially supported the Palestinians.

“No” votes were Australia, Canada, Czech Republic, Germany, Israel, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Palau, Panama, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Sweden, United States of America, Vanuatu.

With all due respect to the island nations, they aren’t very important in world affairs. Germany, Canada and Australia are the only medium-sized countries here, while Sweden, the Czech Republic and the Netherlands are relatively small despite being wealthy. The Rejectionist states toward Palestine are no longer very numerous or weighty, and mostly they are just being arm-twisted by the US to give Washington cover so that it doesn’t look like the US is the only one standing against basic Palestinian human rights.

As for the fall-out for the United States, an informed reader wrote to remind me that if the Palestinians are welcomed into other UN bodies, the US could well lose substantial influence and have its interests adversely affected. He notes that the International Telecommunication Union allocates radio spectrum usage globally, “including the spectrum reserved for military and commercial use.” The World Health Organization is clearly important to the US for combating epidemics. The World Meteorological Organization is a matrix of information about weather that has agricultural and military implications. The World Intellectual Property Organization recognizes patents and copyrights worldwide.

These sorts of UN organizations, which are, whether Americans want to recognize it or not, important to the United States, could be forced to expel the US and cease sharing information with it if it does not pay its dues. Congress in the 1990s, under the influence of the Israel lobbies, passed a law forbidding the US government from giving money to bodies that recognize Palestine.

The upshot: Netanyahu’s talk about “punishment” (“revenge”) seems likely to inspire buyers’ remorse in countries like Sweden and Australia that voted against the Palestinians at UNESCO, and reinforces the very image of Israel as regional bully that led to the vote in the first place. Obama’s vote against the Palestinians has cost him significant political capital in the Muslim world. And, the US now could face a series of debilitating expulsions from a whole range of essential international organizations.

The US and Israel are experiencing these setbacks because both are de facto supporting Greater Israel expansionism, which is illegal in international law. Ironically, there are very unlikely to be enough Israelis actually to displace the Palestinians from the West Bank, and they are probably just paving the way for a one-state solution after a few decades of Apartheid that likely will result in boycotts of Israel.

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The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization recognized Palestine as a full member on Monday setting off a crisis between the United States and the United Nations that seems likely to further isolate Washington in the world and reduce its influence.

The UNESCO vote could start an avalanche of such acceptances among various UN bodies. Although Palestine is unlikely now to get a majority next month at the UN Security Council, there is always next year. And the admission of Palestine by large numbers of UNO organizations might anyway have a similar effect to a UNSC majority vote.

Countries such as Norway and Ireland have signaled that they would like to raise Palestinian representation to full embassy status, and every international vote like the UNESCO one encourages them further in this direction. In turn, embassy status could begin giving Palestine standing in some countries to sue Israel in third-country courts for torts such as land and water usurpation.

Since a law passed by Congress in the 1990s forbids the US from funding UN bodies that recognize Palestine, the Obama administration has no choice but to withdraw the $80 million a year it gives UNESCO, which is a fifth of the agency’s budget. But what this step really means is that the US loses influence over UNESCO, and indeed, it might well lose its membership in the organization. UNESCO may have to close some offices and lose employees. Or someone else, such as Saudi Arabia or China, might pick up the $80 million, gaining influence over UNESCO at US expense.

If the move becomes common, the US could end up further and further isolated and helpless. What if the International Atomic Energy Agency recognizes Palestine as a member? If the US cuts it off, it loses a key arena within which it has been pressuring Iran over its nuclear enrichment program. And so on and so forth.

The overwhelming influence in the US Congress of the Israel lobbies (including those of the Christian Zionists) are leading the US down a path of increasing international isolation and weakness. The US vote against Palestine is the headline on the Arab satellite television news programs, and even in India and Russia it is a vote that makes the US look like an ogre.

The UNESCO vote was 107 for, 14 against, and 52 abstentions; 14 were absent. The vote had to be won by a two-thirds majority of states voting “yes” or “no.” Thus, to abstain in this situation was more or less to help the Palestinians win.

That voting pattern, in turn, reveals the shape of US influence in the world. The vote was not simply the West versus the Rest. Although Latin America, Africa and Asia strongly supported Palestinian membership, so too in the end did France. And Britain and Italy abstained rather than voting against. The rising BRIC bloc, of Brazil, Russia, India, and China all voted for. There appear only to be about 14 pro-Zionist countries left in the world, 12 beyond the United States and Israel itself.

The Israeli ambassador to UNESCO called the vote “science fiction,” since, he said, it recognized an imaginary state. The old Israeli inability to see the 11 million-strong Palestinian people as a nation-state, which once led Israeli consuls in the US to promote letter-writing campaigns against US newspapers that even used the word “Palestinian” in their stories, is obviously still intact.

More important, UNESCO recognition of Palestinian cultural monuments as world heritage sites could well complicate the slow Israeli theft of Palestinian territory on the West Bank and in and around Jerusalem. That usurpation of land and resources is made possible because the Israelis engineered the statelessness, i.e. the national homelessness, of the Palestinians.

Palestine had been scheduled by the League of Nations for statehood, as a Class A Mandate, and as late as 1939 the British government was pledging a Palestinian state within a decade. The ethnic cleansing campaign of militant members of the Yishuv in Palestine and then by Israelis led to the expulsion of 700,000 or so Palestinians from their homes. But they didn’t just become refugees, losing all their property. They became stateless. Statehood is the right to have rights. Palestinians not only have no rights, they don’t have the right to have them. That is why the Israeli pledges to them in the Oslo peace process could be reneged on so easily. Palestinians are the nobodies of the Levant, the non-entities, the marks and fall guys.

The vote demonstrates again the sea change that has taken place in the international community regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I believe that there are several reasons for this change:

1. Everyone can see that the Israeli government of PM Yitzhak Rabin made undertakings to the Palestinians as part of the Oslo peace accords, such as withdrawal from the West Bank, on which the Israelis reneged.

2. The Israeli attack on Lebanon in 2006 made it look like a reckless bully.

3. The Israeli blockade of basic necessities for Palestinian non-combatants and children in the Gaza Strip from 2007 made the Israelis look heartless.

4. The Israeli attack on little Gaza in 2008-2009, where 40 percent of the population is camp-dwelling refugees whose families were expelled from what is now Israel in 1947-1948, made Israel look like a reckless bully.

5. The Israeli attack on the Turkish aid ship the Mavi Marmara on May 31, 2010, in which commandos killed 9 persons, one an American citizen, made Israel look like a reckless bully.

6. Constant Israeli announcements of expanded settlements on Palestinian territory are widely seen as breaking international law, as well as a form of theft.

Disgust with these Israeli policies of continually victimizing the Palestinians is so widespread and deep that even Germany has just threatened to cancel the delivery to Israel of a submarine because of the announcement of settlements in Arab east Jerusalem. Germany, for understandable historical reasons, almost never criticizes Israel. But the Likud attempt to expel Palestinians from their long-time homes in Jerusalem has pushed even Berlin to criticize the policy publicly.

It isn’t just the world community that is dismayed at the setting in of long-term Israeli Apartheid. Even the widow of Israeli war hero Moshe Dayan now laments,

“I’m a peacemaker, but the current Israeli government does not know how to make peace. We move from war to war, and this will never stop. I think Zionism has run its course.”…

“Today we use foreign labor to work in Israel because Palestinians are not allowed. And this continuous expansion of the settlements everywhere-—I cannot accept it. I cannot tolerate this deterioration in the territories and the roadblocks everywhere. And that horrible wall! It’s not right.”

Aljazeera English reports on the UNESCO vote:

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