UNITED NATIONS — The original two-state solution designed to establish separate countries for Jews and Arabs anticipated the day that both would seek United Nations membership.
“When the independence of either the Arab or the Jewish State as envisaged in this plan has become effective,” begins a paragraph deep in General Assembly Resolution 181 from November 1947, then “sympathetic consideration” should be given to the application.
Israel became a member in May 1949. The Palestinians have announced their intention to submit an application to the Security Council, setting the stage this week for the most dramatic annual gathering of world leaders at the United Nations General Assembly in years.
The Palestinians see the membership application as a last-ditch attempt to preserve the two-state solution in the face of ever-encroaching Israeli settlements, as well as a desperate move to shake up the negotiations that they feel have achieved little after 20 years of American oversight. The question is whether trying to bring the intractable problem back to its international roots will somehow provide the needed jolt to get negotiations moving again.
The issue will probably overshadow all the other meetings among the more than 120 heads of state and government expected here this week. Other issues on the table include the democratic future of Libya, the safety of civilian nuclear power programs and the famine on the Horn of Africa.
The “question of Palestine” has bedeviled the United Nations like none other since it was founded, with the original partition plan followed by hundreds of resolutions from the General Assembly and the Security Council, most never enforced.
“It started here, absolutely,” said Sir Brian Urquhart, a nonagenarian former under secretary general, recalling the birth of what he described as a sophisticated if entangled plan. “I think it is not unrealistic to try something new, or it isn’t new, to try something very old, actually.”
Supporters contend it is high time to shift the negotiations out of the State Department basement into the glare of an international forum, while acknowledging that the maneuver could just as easily retard as speed a solution. With the Arab awakening capturing global attention, they believe it is the right moment to hook the Palestinian quest for ending Israeli occupation to the trend of toppling authoritarian rule throughout the Middle East.
“What I think you are trying to do here is to internationalize the issue as far as possible so that it ceases to be the sole preserve of American foreign policy,” said Mouin Rabbani, an analyst based in Amman, Jordan. “It is a tactical maneuver to try to improve the terms of negotiations.”
The Palestinians have two main options at the United Nations, seeking either full membership through the Security Council or enhanced observer status in the General Assembly, moving from an “entity” to a nonmember observer state.
The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, announced Friday that he would go the Security Council route, which the Americans have said they would veto. Although it puts the Palestinians on a collision course with Washington, the effort could also get lost for months in a bureaucratic thicket, giving the United States time to try to restart negotiations and making an embarrassing veto unnecessary. In his speech to the General Assembly in 2010, President Obama said he hoped the Palestinians would join the United Nations now.
Going to the Council risks alienating Washington, but some analysts believe it is the only leverage left to the Palestinians.
In the past, as long as Arab despots endorsed American control over the peace process, officials in Washington usually ignored how they treated their citizens.
“One thing that they are trying to do to overcome that legacy is to present themselves as the main ally and sponsor of democratization in the region, the friend of the people’s aspirations,” Mr. Rabbani said. “That is going to be undermined as the U.S. being seen as pro-Israeli and actively being forced to show its cards by vetoing.”
Palestinians believe that their position has gradually eroded over the past 20 years, when the United States began monopolizing the negotiations with the 1991 Madrid peace conference. They remain under occupation, the number of Jewish settlers has tripled to around 600,000, and they have far less freedom of movement in the territories ostensibly meant to become their state.
“What could be discussed and what emerged from those negotiations had to do with what the United States and their Israeli allies wanted,” said Rashid Khalidi, a Columbia University professor and an advisor to the Palestinian delegation in Madrid and Washington from 1991-93.
The Obama administration objects to that characterization, saying it has poured millions of dollars into the Palestinian territories to create schools, sanitation, roads and, above all else, the security and other government infrastructure needed for an independent state.
The United States and Israel accuse the Palestinians of turning to the United Nations in a futile attempt to short-circuit the direct negotiations needed.
“There’s no magic wand, there’s no magic piece of paper, here or anywhere else,” said Susan E. Rice, the American ambassador to the United Nations. “In order to achieve the creation of a Palestinian state with clear boundaries, with sovereignty, with the ability to secure itself and provide for its people, there has to be a negotiated settlement.”
Lopsided votes against Israel are not new to the United Nations. But this time the Palestinians are hoping they can muster enough weighty support from Europe to overcome right-wing domestic constraints in the United States and Israel that have helped stall negotiations for at least 18 months. So far the Europeans remain divided among themselves, however.
A new International Crisis Group report suggests that only by fomenting a resolution that lays out the core parameters of a future solution, while addressing the concerns of both Israel and the Palestinians, might the United Nations salvage something from the membership showdown.
“Going to the United Nations is about desperation over how closed the current political horizons are,” said Robert Blecher, the report’s lead author.
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