No one with a shred of conscience can reject Palestinian membership for the UN

Today's Hot Topic, 19th September 2011. No one with a shred of conscience can reject Palestinian membership for the UN

So said Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority, in his stirring speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Friday 23rd September. Abbas’ request will go into a committee of the Security Council where America will lobby hard to find 9 countries to vote against. That would stop it from having to impose the veto that it enjoys as a permanent member of the Council, and which Obama has assured the world he will do if necessary. The General Assembly, meanwhile, is likely to confer what status it can – which means “observer” status, just as is enjoyed by the Vatican. So is this simply a question of might versus conscience? Or are there moral arguments for supposing that it would be best to reject the Palestinian demand?

YES
The peace process has been thoroughly stalled despite the fact that everyone knows a) that two states are the solution to the conflict, b) broadly what the solution looks like and c) that the party stalling is Israel dominated by its right-wing fringes. A Palestinian state with borders pretty close to those of pre-war 1967, a few land swaps and a capital in East Jerusalem – most Israelis are fine with that; Abbas and Fatah would be fine with that; you have to believe that anyone resisting any move towards it really is either a warmonger or refusing to stand up to the warmongers out of electoral cowardice.

NO
You make it sound so simple. But it isn’t. Last time a peace deal was nearly agreed, the proposals were for a space-sharing system that would make a modern airport look simple – James Ron describes it as “a tortured scenario of ethnic sub-sectors within the Palestinian enclaves. Jewish settlers were to be concentrated in fortified zones, and then connected to Israel through a network of special highways. Arab East Jerusalem – itself an enclave between the northern and southern West Bank – was to be a patchwork of "sovereign" ethnic neighborhoods, with street-by-street security arrangements.” And that is only physical space. Think of sewers, airwaves, air traffic, fresh water supplies … Arabs and Jews are living together on the West Bank. Get over it. They cannot be disentangled. There is no on-the-ground problem which partition solves. Indeed, it makes them all worse by adding another layer of complexity for miscommunication and misperception in lives that will, whether you like it or not, be joined at the hip.

YES
No one is claiming that living together is going to be easy or that creating a border magically solves problems. Cohabitation will need to exist, but why not make it between states rather than between people? Look at it in terms of who is helped and who is hindered: accepting the unilateral bid for statehood empowers Abbas. He badly needs this, because the spirit of democracy flowing through the Arab world has no tolerance for leaders who do not stand up for their people. Yet Fattah, Abbas’ movement, has as its one sole purpose of existence the creation of a Palestinian state. Tellingly, Hamas, the Islamist grouping that controls the government in Gaza, was against the UN bid. “We do not plead for sovereignty,” they said. But grant it to Abbas, and you undermine the real enemy, the fanatics who do not even see Israel as having a right to exist. Think also about the standing of Britain and America in the Arab world at this crucial moment of its political history. If we slap Abbas in the face, the revolutionaries of the Egyptian street, the moderate Islamists in Turkey, the rebels in Syria, even our recent allies in Libya – none will be able to be seen to be friendly to us. We cannot afford that now.

NO
This seems like a terribly short term view of a structural problem. If anything, the uncertainty around what exactly the Arab Spring will turn into is a good reason for doing nothing. Let’s get back instead to the fundamental question: what problem does partition solve? It certainly adds a problem which a one-state solution would not have, and that is the Palestinian right of return. It has to be abandoned in any plausible two-state solution. Living together as neighbours and sharing a crowded world is hard. It is also a common problem to the thriving multicultural world that most of us are thrilled to be a part of. Talk about autonomy, federalism, all you like. But don’t imagine that partition solves problems. Quite the opposite, probably. There will continue to be violence in this conflict whatever is agreed about borders – that is simply an inevitable consequence of the last 50 years’ history of the conflict. But do we want that violence to be between sovereign states? Or would we prefer it to be mediated within some form of democratic state? It seems clear that the latter is better: democracy, rule of law and multiculturalism. Not easy, but better.

YES
But a unitary, democratic, law-abiding state is not what is on offer. It is quite clear that Israel will persist in wanting to be a “Jewish state” rather than a “state for the Jews (and Christians, Muslims, and others with a legitimate claim to citizenship)”. This is the desire of the Israeli right, and they are ascendant. This is why the only viable option is the patchwork solution that you describe – two states with land swaps. But this has to be agreed soon – continued settlement building is making matters less resolvable every day.

NO
You talk as if the only political reality on the ground is the Israeli right and the nationalist Palestinians. But that is no longer true. The J14 grass roots democratic movement in Israel, which started as a rent protest in Tel Aviv, has evolved into a citizen clamour for ordinary, demilitarised lives. Similarly on the Palestinian side, the “Free Gaza Youth” movement has made a real stir with its demand for ordinary lives: "We want three things. We want to be free. We want to be able to live a normal life. We want peace. Is that too much to ask?" The winds of democratic change will blow through the whole region and we should be building a principled, ordinary, democratic future and not let this kind of tactical diplomatic initiative blind us with the tempting chimeras of partition.

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