Obama faces diplomatic challenge

Hardly a week had passed since Mahmoud Abbas made an impassioned plea that received a thunderous applause for full Palestinian United Nations membership at the opening session in New York of the UN General Assembly session last Friday where the two loud opponents — the US and Israel — were lambasted by Arabs, Israelis, and even some Americans.

The Palestinian president, often seen as lacking charisma and bending backwards to accommodate Israeli and US pressure, was repeatedly applauded as he highlighted the painful history of the Palestinian people after Israel was established in accordance with a UN Partition Resolution in 1947, months before Britain terminated its mandate over the Holy Land.

When the vote will take place at the UN Security Council on the Palestinian application for admission is still unclear. Besides, the US has unwisely promised to veto any such resolution at the Security Council. Nevertheless, the Palestinians are still determined to approach the General Assembly directly, and here none of the five big powers have veto power to block the membership which will have a diminished status with the rank of observer but enjoying all other non-voting privileges.

President Abbas stressed that he is ready to pursue peaceful negotiations with Israel, irrespective of which UN avenue the Palestinian application will follow. Regrettably, this point has not been stressed time and again by any the Palestinian spokesmen travelling with the president last week. Several analysts, Israeli and American, many of them Jewish, overlooked this Palestinian option — a pledge that hopefully Abbas would not abandon in the upcoming days since it puts the two negotiators on equal footing rather than one occupied and the other occupier.

After all, the Israeli occupation is illegal under international law and it is time that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu comprehends that. President Barack Obama, too, needs to forget about his threat to veto the Palestinian application.

When asked recently who is to blame for the continued failure of the so-called "peace process," now about 20 years old, President Clinton was quoted (on Foreign Policy's website) saying it is Netanyahu — whose government removed the goalposts upon taking power, and whose rise represents a key reason there has been no Israeli-Palestinian peace deal.

"The Israelis always wanted two things that once it turned out they had, it didn't seem so appealing to Netanyahu. They wanted to believe they had a partner for peace in a Palestinian government, and there's no question — the Netanyahu government has said — that this is the finest Palestinian government they've ever had in the West Bank," Clinton said.

In a roundtable with bloggers, the former president pointed out:

"The King of Saudi Arabia started lining up all the Arab countries to say to the Israelis. ‘If you work it out with the Palestinians...we will give you immediately not only recognition but a political, economic, and security partnership'," Clinton said. "This is huge .... It's a heck of a deal."

Likewise, Obama seems perplexed. A Washington Post reporter noted that Obama is nowadays facing "a vexing diplomatic challenge; to explain how his hopes of last year [for a Palestinian-Israeli agreement] square with his opposition this year to a Palestinian bid for statehood."

Attention diverted

The economic crisis that the US is currently facing, leading to a serious drop in his popularity, and the aggressiveness of the Republican challengers in next year's election seem to have diverted his attention totally to internal affairs. Even his serious drop in popularity within the Jewish community has reportedly led him to pick an official with the Department of Homeland Security as his new Jewish community liaison. (One wonders whether he would look for an Arab-American to serve in a similar capacity within the Arab-American community.)

No matter how Obama tries to divert his attention from the Middle East, he will always find himself in a corner as a consequence of Netanyahu's machinations. Believing erroneously that he was triumphant in his appearance at the UN General Assembly, news has filtered from Occupied Jerusalem that the city's District Planning Committee is to authorise the building of 1,100 new housing units in the Occupied Arab sector, now called Gilo, which is to serve as the Palestinian capital.

In 2009, the Israeli daily Haaretz recalled this week, that Obama, "referring to a plan to expand construction in Gilo, said new Gilo homes could complicate efforts by his administration to relaunch peace talks and embitter the Palestinians. Obama said at the time that additional colony building doesn't make Israel safer. He said such moves make it harder to achieve peace in the region, and embitter the Palestinians in a dangerous way."

Maybe Obama will now appreciate Abbas's stance.

George S. Hishmeh is a Washington-based columnist. He can be contacted atghishmeh@gulfnews.com