Palestine - Push for Independence

Flying Dutchman

shafique wrote:
Someone once said there are no Palestinians as well.

That must have been the PLO in the 70s:
"The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the State of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality, Today, there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak, Today, about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct Palestinian people to oppose Zionism. For tactical reasons, Jordan -- which is a sovereign state with defined borders -- cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa. While, as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beersheba and Jerusalem. However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan."
Zahir Muhsein, then head of the P.L.O. Military Department

As we've seen, many still cherish quaint views about history.

Well, if you think Israel had borders and not armistice lines, show me a peace agreement between Israel and its Arab neighbors before 1967...You can't, because there were only armistices between Israel and its neighbors!

Flying Dutchman

shafique wrote:
Someone once said there are no Palestinians as well.

As we've seen, many still cherish quaint views about history.

Palestinian push for an independent state causes Israeli alarm
Netanyahu to denounce Prime Minister's drive to sidestep Israel and secure support from UN Security Council
By Donald Macintyre in Ramallah
Monday, 16 November 2009
Palestinian leaders from President Mahmoud Abbas down have alarmed Israeli ministers by swinging their weight behind a planned effort to secure UN backing for a unilaterally declared independent state in the West Bank and Gaza.
In an innovative strategy which would not depend on the success of currently stalled negotiations with Israel, the leaders are preparing a push to secure formal UN Security Council support for a Palestinian state based on 1967 borders as a crucial first step towards the formation of a state.
Although there is no fixed timetable, Palestinian officials see the second half of 2011 as a plausible starting date for such a process. That is when the Palestinian Authority is due to fulfil Prime Minister Salam Fayyad's widely applauded two-year plan for completing work on all the institutions needed for a fully-fledged state.
One senior Palestinian official said here that the new plan was "the last resort of the peace camp in Palestine" given the current negotiating impasse left in the wake of the US failure to persuade Israel to agree a total freeze on Jewish settlement building in the West Bank as a preliminary to talks.
The moderate Palestinian leadership also sees the unilateral process as a viable – and, in internal political terms, significantly more credible – alternative to surrendering to intense US pressure to enter negotiations without the settlement freeze.
As the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu prepared to denounce the Palestinian plan in a speech last night, Israel's President Shimon Peres declared in Brazil, "A Palestinian state cannot be established without a peace agreement. It's impossible and it will not work. It's unacceptable that they change their minds every day. Bitterness is not a policy."
But officials here are hoping that, without any progress towards "final status" negotiations on a future state, the US could be persuaded not to veto such a resolution. Explicit UN Security Council support for a Palestinian state based on 1967 borders would, the officials believe, dramatically intensify legal and moral pressure on Israel to lift the 42-year-old occupation.
Some officials are even drawing a direct comparison with the diplomatic process by which Israel itself was established as a state: a UN resolution endorsing it in November 1947, the Declaration of Independence by David Ben Gurion in May 1948 and the subsequent swift recognition by the US and Soviet Union.
The strategy is tied closely to – though not specified in – Mr Fayyad's plan, "Palestine: Ending the Occupation, Establishing the State", and is thought to have originated with the Prime Minister, an independent who has recently publicly questioned the willingness of Mr Netanyahu's government to grant more than a "mickey mouse" state in any negotiations. But it has since had strong backing from Mr Abbas, and other leading figures in his Fatah faction.
At a commemoration of his predecessor Yasser Arafat's death, Mr Abbas declared last week, "The Palestinian state is a fact which the world recognises". Saying that more than 100 countries supported Palestinian aspirations for a state, he added: "Now we are fighting to get the world to recognise the borders of our nation." Mr Abbas, who reaffirmed his intention not to run again as President, has insisted that he will not return to negotiations without a settlement freeze and clear terms of reference specifying a state based on 1967 borders, East Jerusalem as the capital, and an agreed solution for refugees.
The leading Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat yesterday followed his Fatah colleague Mohammed Dahlan in strongly endorsing the plan. "We have taken an Arab foreign ministers' decision to seek the help of the international community," Mr Erekat told Reuters, adding that the US and other leading international players would be consulted before any UN move. "If the Americans cannot get the Israelis to stop settlement activities, they should also not cover them when we decide to go to the Security Council," he added.
Ghassan Khatib, head of the Palestinian government's media centre, said that the international community should confront Israel with a choice of a clear negotiating path towards a state based on 1967 borders, or international recognition for a Palestinian state without an agreement. "They cannot block the negotiating approach to two states and at the same time refuse the alternative," he added.
He said that progress by the current "peace camp" in charge in Ramallah was essential if it was not to "run out of ammunition" against the alternative offered by Hamas. "I honestly think there is no future for the peace camp in Palestine if this is not going to work," he said, adding that it would be "political suicide" for the present leadership to enter negotiations on present terms. He said the international community had long been striving "for an agreed end to the conflict – a two-state solution as a result of an agreement. But we are saying it's not working. Why not recognise a Palestinian state when it is ready, without necessarily relying on Israeli consent?"
Mr Khatibadded that recognition for a unilaterally declared state would parallel Israel's recognition as in 1948. "The other side was not [then] expected to accept. There was no consent by either the Palestinians or the Arab [states]." Such a strategy would be severely complicated by Gaza, if it were still controlled by Hamas at the time – but no more so than the negotiations which the US is currently trying to promote.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was quick to reject the Palestinian proposal. Addressing a forum on the Middle East in Jerusalem, he said, "There is no substitute for negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority...any unilateral path will only unravel the framework of agreements between us and will only bring unilateral steps from Israel's side."

The Q&A at the end is also interesting:
Independence: Getting past the roadblock
Q. Would a unilateral declaration of independence carry risks?
A. Even if it were underpinned by a UN endorsement of a Palestinian state based on the areas occupied in 1967, it would certainly be a lurch into uncharted diplomatic waters. But some Western diplomats believe it would remove any lingering doubts about the meaning of UN Resolution 242, on which Palestinian and international demands for an end to the occupation begun in 1967 are based.
Q. What might be the advantage for the Palestinians?
A. Israel technically regards the West Bank as a disputed territory the final status of which is a matter for negotiation. Palestinians hope that a process of obtaining UN Security Council support for independence, followed by major individual countries recognising the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza as a state, would greatly and immediately put Israel under pressure to withdraw its forces and civilian settlers from the occupied territories in the West Bank. At the most extreme interpretation, Israel would then be regarded as occupying a foreign country. The UN could also grant the new Palestine immediate and full membership, with voting and proposing rights, in major international bodies.
Q. What is Israel's main problem with the proposal?
A. Israel argues that such a unilateral declaration would not only violate its right to reach an agreement on borders with the Palestinians, but also directly cuts across the 1995 Oslo-derived agreement that neither side should take unilateral steps affecting the status of the territories.
Cheers,
Shafique shafique Rather than start a new thread, here's an article in an Israeli newspaper which shows that the reality that the world is not taking Israeli spin at face value any more is sinking in. I'm sure there were well meaning South Africans who were ostracised in the Apartheid era, so it appears that well-meaning Israelis are also feeling the consequences of their country's illegal activities.:

A thorn in the world’s side
Israel in midst of freefall on global front, yet we’re preoccupied with nonsense
I’ve been invited to deliver a lecture about Israel’s economy and society at Oxford University. As it is a short lecture, and a respectable forum, I gladly accepted the offer. The invitation was extended about six months ago. Yet now, as my trip approaches, I feel concern. I’m hesitating.
My acquaintances are warning me: Don’t go. Hostile elements will cause disturbances, protest, shout and interfere. The atmosphere at British universities is anti-Israel to an extent unseen in the past. Israel is perceived as a thorn in the civilized world’s side.
An Israeli professor who quietly left a prestigious British university told me: “My academic and social life there was intolerable. Colleagues stayed away from me as if I was a leper. I was not invited to meetings, which were shifted from university buildings to private residences in order to keep me out. The fact I openly expressed leftist views was to no avail. My objection to the occupation and endorsement of a return to the 1967 borders made no difference. In practice, I became ostracized.”
“Today you are a welcome guest in the British and European academic world only if you reject the very existence of the colonialist and imperialistic creature that methodically commits war crimes, known as Israel,” he said. “Today it isn’t enough to condemn Bibi and Barak; in order to be accepted by academia outside of Israel one must condemn the Balfour Declaration.”
British academia’s radicalism highlights the accelerated deterioration in Israel’s status and image. We are in the midst of a freefall on the foreign affairs front. The cold peace with three Muslim states – Egypt, Jordan, and Turkey – has turned into a cold war. Israelis are unwelcome guests in these and many other states, where in the past we were embraced.
Meanwhile, Israel failed in its efforts to isolate Ahmadinejad’s Iran and disqualify it as a member of the family of nations. Ahmadinejad is having a grand time.
Bibi doesn’t see the change
The intimate dialogue that in the past characterized the relationship between the US president and Israel’s prime minister is paralyzed. The pipeline of dialogue is clogged. India and China, the two emerging powers, voted in favor of adopting the Goldstone Report at the UN’s human rights commission. Ever since then, it has been etched on Israel’s forehead as a Sign of Cain.
Friendly governments, such as France and Britain, are turning their backs on us while currying favor with local sentiments. Israel’s membership in OECD, which was largely a done deal in the past, is distancing again – because of the growing negativity vis-à-vis Israel and not because any technical dispute. By coincidence, or not, large foreign investors are pulling out of Israel.
Does everyone hate us? Possibly so, yet the fact is that up until six months ago Israel enjoyed an extraordinary boom on the foreign affairs front, both in terms of its foreign ties as well as in global public opinion. This fact points to one source for the deterioration we’re seeing: The new government in Jerusalem.
Indeed, this is a government elected by the people and it reflects the preferences of voters, who wanted a coalition comprising Likud, Shas, and Yisrael Beiteinu. As such, Netanyahu appointed Lieberman foreign minister, did not agree to a government rotation with Kadima, was unable to arrange a work meeting with the Palestinian Authority president, and conveyed a message of indifference towards the peace process.
Yet worse than this, the 2009 Netanyahu does not understand the world, and he mostly fails to grasp the change taking place within conservative parties, which are close to his political positions. Today they are the source of harsh criticism against the Israeli government; Netanyahu’s government.
The current anti-Israel wave is particularly dangerous especially because it is not limited to the media and to leftist groups that traditionally were classified as “Israel haters.” This wave is rising, expending, drawing young people, and painting the perceptions of the well-established middle class and influential elites.
Israel’s image has hit a nadir; it is isolated, unwanted, and perceived as bad. The world is telling us that should we continue along the same contemptible path, we will lose our legitimacy.
Yet we’re preoccupied with nonsense.

Flying Dutchman Before 1967 there were no borders, only temporary armistice lines shafique Someone once said there are no Palestinians as well. As we've seen, many still cherish quaint views about history. Cheers, Shafique