UN VOTE ON PALARAB STATE HAZARDOUS MUDAR ZAHRAN
” The Palestinians consider Jordan the eastern part of Palestine, and the Hashemites as intruders — even occupiers. Nonetheless, the heavily-armed minority Bedouin tribes have been openly calling for the Palestinians to be “kicked out.” This hostility would seriously escalate should the Palestinian Authority turn into a state. It would give the Bedouins minority the perfect excuse to expel Jordan’s Palestinians and endanger Israel’s Palestinians — all in the name of “turning the demographic bomb on Israel,”
U.N. Vote on Palestinian Statehood Hazardous to Palestinians by Mudar Zahran
http://www.hudson-ny.org/2049/un-vote-palestinian-statehood
In September, the UN General Assembly will decide on whether to welcome the Palestinian Authority as a member state, such a move will inflict serious harm on the Palestinians themselves, unlike what their leaders are promoting, as it would cut the Palestinians out from the only country in the Middle East providing them with an economic and a humane outlet, Israel, and could cause serious unrest. At the same time, this would come as a most pleasuring convenience for Arab regimes seeking anything to attract the attention of the masses they rule to anything other than the revolutionary winds blowing throughout the Middle East.
What is worse than breaking the law is abusing the law; this seems to have been the case in the UN for decades. Such a syndrome will manifest itself crudely in September when the Palestinian Authority is on a date with a UN vote to recognize it as a state.
Should that happen, Israel will be considered an “occupying force” in the lands of a sovereign state, and therefore will legally be in a position similar to that of the late Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein when he occupied Kuwait, and the UN’s Chapter Seven, requiring the enforcement of UN decisions, might be applicable; even to settlers. This by itself is a very alarming concept for those, who are already struggling for their very existence — five members of a settler family, the youngest a three month old baby, were butchered in cold blood while they slept, and a child killed the other day in a rocket attack on a bus. According to the new UN precedent in international law, if “Palestine” is a sovereign member, those settlers might be considered “part of an occupation,” and therefore possibly a legitimate target.
The UN general assembly’s vote could also bring terrifying complications and hardships to the Palestinians. The establishment of a Palestinian state in such a manner would give Israel the cause to absolutely sever its ties with the Palestinians; this act would deprive the Palestinians from working with Israel, the only country in the region where they are allowed to take employment, and the country that provides them with water, electricity, fuel and transportation outlets. Of course, such deprivation would be merely a technicality for Abbas and his colleagues in the Palestinian Authority. It would just bring them even more prominence and legitimacy to cover their corruption and abuse of their own people, while at the same time enabling them to delegitimize Israel even further by portraying themselves as Palestinian freedom fighters under siege by the “inhumane Israelis.”
The Palestinian Authority seems to be closely following in Hamas’s footsteps on the statehood issue: Hamas sought a government while knowing the Palestinians would suffer as long as Hamas capitalized on their suffering. In the same way, the Palestinian Authority is seeking statehood deliberately to destroy the remaining ties with Israel — perhaps hoping that a new Palestinian state would open a gold mine of foreign aid and sympathy for the Palestinian leaders. As with Gaza; flotillas and caravans might start flowing to the new Palestinian state, even from governments most hostile to the Palestinians, such as those of Syria and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, for the goods to be sold to the Palestinian public at premium prices.
Further, the establishment of a Palestinian state would jeopardize the presence and livelihoods of the Palestinians in Arab countries. Many of those so-called host-states of Palestinians are hostile to the Palestinian population, a situation that became more apparent recently when the Syrian government claimed that public protests against it were “the work of Palestinians.” This charge was levelled despite the fact that Palestinians in Syria are subjected to a daily curfew at night, and restrictions on their movements during the day. Less than a week after that, Jordan’s Hashemite government made a similar claim against its Palestinian majority. Such propaganda shows how vulnerable the Palestinians are in Arab countries, where, in addition to decades-long oppression, there have been calls to “kick them out.” Should the Palestinian Authority turn into a state, such calls would be sure to find a legal and technical foundation
In Jordan, for example, where Palestinians have been discriminated against for decades, the ruling Hashemites recently took things farther by stripping thousands of them of their citizenship and “ordering them to return home to Palestine.” The Palestinians consider Jordan the eastern part of Palestine, and the Hashemites as intruders — even occupiers. Nonetheless, the heavily-armed minority Bedouin tribes have been openly calling for the Palestinians to be “kicked out.” This hostility would seriously escalate should the Palestinian Authority turn into a state. It would give the Bedouins minority the perfect excuse to expel Jordan’s Palestinians and endanger Israel’s Palestinians — all in the name of “turning the demographic bomb on Israel,” as many Bedouin figures have been promoting.
Moreover, recognition of a Palestinian state by the UN General Assembly would include Eastern Jerusalem — constituting an absolute recklessness that would push the region into war. In addition, it is not what the Palestinians want: as a recent study showed, 70% of the Palestinians in Jerusalem would rather remain under Israeli rule.
It should not be a surprise that the Palestinians would prefer the Israeli administration over the Palestinian Authority’s third-world, heavily corrupted administration. Every city that has come under the Palestinian Authority’s administration has suffered a deterioration of services, a less-than-average economic prosperity and unjustified inflation. This pattern is not new. The Palestinians cities flourished significantly when the Israelis threw out the Hashemite occupation back in 1967. At the same time, in the late 1990s, upon being given to the Palestinian Authority, these same cities felt a serious economic setback.
The Palestinian Authority’s statehood stunt is backed by significant support from Arab states. Arab States have always obstructed the creation of a Palestinian state: after all, they are the reason the Palestinians did not have a state back in 1948, when the Arab League rejected the UN partition plan of the British Mandate for a Palestinian state. Just as then, Arab dictators today have an interest in seeking conflict between Israel and the Palestinians: Unrest between the Palestinian and Israel shifts the attention of these dictators’ people from protests and uprisings against them and directs them, instead, towards Israel. Other Arab countries have even more reasons to want a UN-ignited eruption. Jordan and the former Egyptian regime, for example, have thrived politically and economically on becoming alleged “peace brokers” between Israel and the Palestinians; being able to play such a role again would be a dream for them, especially the Jordanians, who have lost most of their political weight in the region after the fall of their former best ally, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.
It is clear that, at this time, UN recognition of Palestine as a member state would bring chaos and unrest — exactly what Arab regimes, especially those neighbouring Israel, would like to see happening; even countries apparently friendly with Israel. Unrest following from the unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state would “take the fight to the enemy,” Israel; and it would have the added advantage of being “by proxy,” as the Palestinians would be the burning fuel of such unrest, while the Arab and Muslim states would be watching and cursing Israel. Further, it would give Arab regimes more significance through the “security roles” they could promise the United States and others to play amid a regional unrest.
A role like this would be particularly helpful to Jordan, Egypt and most Gulf states: as they already have advanced intelligence cooperation with the US, the presence of unrest or, even the eruption of a war, would serve to magnify the value of their intelligence work, which came under scrutiny in Afghanistan in 2009, when “a trusted” Jordanian intelligence double-agent blew himself up killing seven CIA officers and the King of Jordan’s cousin. No wonder the Arabs regimes and their security agencies are in desperate need of restoring their mythical image, even if at the expense of the Palestinians and the Israelis.
A sobering fact is that, according to the Oslo Agreement by which the Palestinian Authority came into official existence, the Palestinians should not have sought international recognition as a state in this way, which seeks to abrogate all their international agreements. Their quest only builds up more doubts about the direction of the peace process as a whole, as it establishes the central lack of feasibility of the existence for a Palestinian state on Judea and Samaria because, simply, the more the Palestinian Authority gets, the more it demands. In addition, even if a Palestinian state is established from the pleas of Abbas’s leadership, what would be the legal and political status of Palestinians elsewhere? A Palestinian state at this time would only create a troubling situation that would alarmingly compromise the other Palestinians’ already fragile safety and livelihoods.
The current showdown on the proposed UN vote should serve as a reason for both the US and Israel to rethink the geographical scope of the peace process, and perhaps consider the more burdening part of it: Palestinians living in Arab countries, and ask them their desires. It also might be the time to re-examine the status and desires of the Palestinians in Jordan, where there is the biggest Palestinian population anywhere, and where, as a majority, they are yearning for some political rights, and calling Jordan their only home. It is about time these are considered as key to the solution, especially as the lengthy negotiations process with the PLO have proven fruitless for decades, painful to the average Palestinian, and profitable only to Arab dictators.
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