US vetoes UN resolution condemning Israeli settlements
Byrnzie
Posts: 21,037
Just in case there was still any confusion about the role of the U.S in this 40 year old crime:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-12512732
US vetoes UN resolution condemning Israeli settlements
18 February 2011
The US has vetoed an Arab resolution at the UN Security Council condemning Israeli settlements in the Palestinian territories as an obstacle to peace.
All 14 other members of the Security Council backed the resolution, which had been endorsed by the Palestine Liberation Organisation.
It was the first veto exercised by the Obama administration which had promised better relations with the Muslim world.
A Palestinian official said the talks process would now be "re-assessed".
Washington was under pressure from Israel and Congress, which has a strong pro-Israel lobby, to use its veto.
The Obama administration's decision risks angering Arab peoples at a time of mass street protests in the Middle East, the BBC's Barbara Plett reports from the UN.
It had placed enormous pressure on the Palestinians to withdraw the resolution and accept alternatives, but these were ultimately rejected.
While stating that it opposed new settlements, the administration argued that taking the issue to the UN would only complicate efforts to resume stalled negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians on a two-state peace deal.
"Unfortunately, this draft resolution risks hardening the positions of both sides," said the US Ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice.
The resolution, sponsored by at least 130 countries, declared Israeli settlements in Palestinian territories were illegal and a "major obstacle to the achievement of a just, lasting and comprehensive peace".
Speaking from Ramallah in the West Bank, PLO secretary general Yasser Abed Rabbo said the US veto was "unfortunate" and "affected the credibility of the US administration".
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-12512732
US vetoes UN resolution condemning Israeli settlements
18 February 2011
The US has vetoed an Arab resolution at the UN Security Council condemning Israeli settlements in the Palestinian territories as an obstacle to peace.
All 14 other members of the Security Council backed the resolution, which had been endorsed by the Palestine Liberation Organisation.
It was the first veto exercised by the Obama administration which had promised better relations with the Muslim world.
A Palestinian official said the talks process would now be "re-assessed".
Washington was under pressure from Israel and Congress, which has a strong pro-Israel lobby, to use its veto.
The Obama administration's decision risks angering Arab peoples at a time of mass street protests in the Middle East, the BBC's Barbara Plett reports from the UN.
It had placed enormous pressure on the Palestinians to withdraw the resolution and accept alternatives, but these were ultimately rejected.
While stating that it opposed new settlements, the administration argued that taking the issue to the UN would only complicate efforts to resume stalled negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians on a two-state peace deal.
"Unfortunately, this draft resolution risks hardening the positions of both sides," said the US Ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice.
The resolution, sponsored by at least 130 countries, declared Israeli settlements in Palestinian territories were illegal and a "major obstacle to the achievement of a just, lasting and comprehensive peace".
Speaking from Ramallah in the West Bank, PLO secretary general Yasser Abed Rabbo said the US veto was "unfortunate" and "affected the credibility of the US administration".
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take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
In other words, the U.S and Israel want to continue the 40 year 'peace process' sham - otherwise known as a stalling tactic to allow Israel to steal more land.
It's a fucking disgrace.
And there are Americans on this board yelling about Obama's universal health care, whilst they have no problem funding this racist land-grab to the tune of $4 Billion of tax payers money every year. Pathetic.
Israel is being dicks here by building settlements in occupied territories. We all know they are being dicks, but, we STILL fall on their side. We need to call Israel dicks, when they are being dicks (and we need to call Palestinians/non-Israeli types dicks, when they are being dicks). This one-sided support needs to end and we need to take a more, non-biased, objective view of events in that part of the world.
...
And we need to quit supporting oppressive Arab Regimes... Saudi Arabia... we're talking to you.
Hail, Hail!!!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/fe ... settlement
US vetoes UN condemnation of Israeli settlements
• Obama administration's first veto leaves US isolated
• 'This will encourage Israeli intransigence,' says Palestine
Ed Pilkington
The Guardian, Saturday 19 February 2011
The Obama administration wielded its first veto at the UN security council last night in a move to swipe down a resolution condemning Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory.
The US stood alone among the 15 members of the security council in failing to condemn the resumption of settlement building that has caused a serious rift between the Israeli government and the Palestinian authority and derailed attempts to kick-start the peace process. The Palestinians have made clear that they will not return to the negotiating table until Israel suspends settlement building in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
The decision placed the US in a controversial position at a time when it is already struggling to define its strategy in a tumultuous Middle East.
The 14 member countries backing the Arab-drafted resolution included Britain and France.
The US ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, said the decision to use the veto power – open to the five permanent members of the UN, of which the US is one – "should not be misunderstood to mean we support settlement activity".
She said Washington's view was that the Israeli settlements lacked legitimacy, but added: "Unfortunately, this draft resolution risks hardening the positions of both sides and could encourage the parties to stay out of negotiations."
But the isolated stance of the Obama administration risked the appearance of weakness in its approach to the search for Middle East peace and set it on a contradictory course to its earlier tough language against the settlements.
The Palestinian observer at the UN, Riyad Mansour, said the veto was unfortunate. "We fear ... that the message sent today may be one that only encourages further Israeli intransigence and impunity," he said.
Washington's controversial move clearly riled other members of the security council. Britain, France and Germany put out a joint statement in which they explained they had voted for the resolution "because our views on settlements, including east Jerusalem, are clear: they are illegal under international law, an obstacle to peace, and constitute a threat to a two-state solution. All settlement activity, including in east Jerusalem, should cease immediately."
William Hague said he understood Israeli concern for security, but said that was precisely why Britain had backed the resolution. "We believe that Israel's security and the realisation of the Palestinians' right to statehood are not opposing goals. On the contrary, they are intimately intertwined objectives." The US has used its veto 10 times since 2000, nine of which involved backing the Israeli side in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
'The degree of support...was overwhelming: some 130 countries co-sponsored the resolution, and all the other members of the Security Council voted for it.'
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
http://www.scribd.com/doc/49142006/Isr- ... ution-veto
(linked from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/evelyn-le ... 25482.html)
I don't speak lawyer, what does 'seized of the matter mean' (last line). Just trying to figure out what they vetoed.
They vetoed the will of the whole of the international community, and the chance for a peaceful settlement, as they've been doing for the past 40 years.
U.S taxpayers are paying for a foreign Apartheid government to commit ethnic cleansing.
This is why the U.N needs to put an end to the power of Automatic veto to prevent countries like the U.S from blocking any international consensus.
Fair enough.
Absolutely, the veto is absurd. But all five veto-empowered countries would have to approve its demise, which seems unlikely.
Palestinians plan 'day of rage' after US vetoes resolution on Israeli settlements
US decision to use UN security council veto sparks furious reaction in West Bank and Gaza
Harriet Sherwood in Jerusalem
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 20 February 2011
Palestinians are planning a "day of rage" on Friday in response to the US wielding its veto against a UN security council resolution condemning Israeli settlements.
The US decision to use its veto has sparked a furious reaction in the West Bank and Gaza.
Anti-US rallies took place in the West Bank towns of Bethlehem, Tulkarem and Jenin this weekend after the 14-1 vote on the resolution, in which the US stood alone against the rest of the security council, including Britain, Germany and France. It voted in contradiction of its own policy.
In Gaza, Hamas described the US position as outrageous and said Washington was "completely biased" towards Israel.
Ibrahim Sarsour, an Israeli-Arab member of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, said it was time to tell the US president, Barack Obama, to "go to hell".
"Obama cannot be trusted," he wrote in an open letter to the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas. "We knew his promises were lies. The time has come to spit in the face of the Americans."
The Egyptian foreign ministry said the US veto would "lead to more damage of the United States' credibility on the Arab side as a mediator in peace efforts".
The use of the veto for the first time under Obama will strengthen perceptions in the Arab world that for the US, protection of its ally Israel overrides its desire for a just outcome for Palestinians in the decades-old conflict.
The move is likely to impede US efforts to persuade the parties to return to peace negotiations, which stalled in September over the issue of settlement expansion.
With protests raging across the Middle East against repression, corruption, food prices and dismal economic prospects, Washington is acutely aware that distrust of the US is widespread in the region.
The Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyhu, said his country "deeply appreciated" the US use of its veto.
However, some Israeli commentators warned that the vote served to reinforce Israel's international isolation and said Washington would expect a payback from its ally. They suggested the US would be unwilling to use its veto in similar circumstances again.
The opposition leader, Tzipi Livni, said Israel was "now in political collapse".
"We now find that Germany, Britain and France – all friends of Israel who want to help it defend itself – voted against the positions of Israel, and the US is being pushed into a corner and finds itself with Israel against the world," she said.
The vote, on Friday night, followed frantic diplomatic efforts to prevent the tabling of the resolution, which was carefully worded to reflect official US policy on settlements.
Obama spoke to Abbas on the phone for 50 minutes on Thursday, offering a package of inducements, including public statements, to withdraw the resolution.
According to the Palestinian press, Obama also suggested US aid to the Palestinian Authority could be halted if the resolution went ahead.
The US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, made a further telephone call to Abbas on Friday to put pressure on him to abandon the resolution.
However, the Palestinian president – aware of the volatile mood in the region and the backlash he would face if he acceded to Obama's demands – refused to withdraw. One Palestinian official told Reuters that "people would take to the streets and topple the president" if he backed down.
After the vote, the US ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, told the security council that Washington agreed with "our fellow council members, and indeed with the wider world, about the folly and illegitimacy of continued Israel settlement activity".
But she added: "We think it unwise for this council to attempt to resolve the core issues that divide Israelis and Palestinians."
Underlying the growing gap between the US and Europe on the Israeli-Palestinian issue, Britain, France and Germany issued a joint statement saying settlement construction was against international law.
The veto served to unite the political rivals Hamas and Fatah in condemnation. Palestinian leaders are considering whether to take a resolution on Israel's settlement policies to the UN general assembly.
Albeit a fantasy, ending aid to Israel is probably a more effective way to make progress.
"Life Is What Happens To You When Your Busy Making Other Plans" John Lennon
It does seem like they regard it as their ace of spades.
http://www.counterpunch.org/neumann01132009.html
'...For our purposes, then, the morality of war turns not on its conduct but on the reasons for fighting. Iraq and Afghanistan offer proof that good intentions don't make for good reasons: when well-meaning idiots kill multitudes on the basis of faulty intelligence and twisted idealism, good intentions are no excuse at all. As for any alleged good consequences which might justify a war, we really have no idea what the ultimate consequences are in most cases, and certainly in this one. So the only way of assessing the rights and wrongs of this war, and most wars, is to fall back on the most universally accepted of all moral standards - a right of self-defense.
It's not complicated. The Palestinians in the occupied territories are in a state equivalent to slavery. The Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza are not sovereigns. Israel has supreme authority in both areas. That means it can do literally whatever it likes to their inhabitants. This population has no political input whatever into their sovereign's decisions; the Palestinians in the occupied territories can't vote in Israeli elections. So the Israeli government has absolute power over these people, and they have no say at all in how they are treated. This is slavery without the muss and fuss of ownership. Slave revolts frequently involved the murder of innocent civilians, but I haven't seen much hand-wringing about the terrible morals of the rebels. Slaves and occupied peoples are accorded very generous rights of resistance. I doubt anyone today would condemn antebellum slaves on a plantation outside Charleston if they had used indiscriminate standoff weapons against that city. Allegedly freedom-loving Americans should therefore be particularly sympathetic to Palestinian resistance.
But what of Israel's right of self-defense? It exists, but it doesn't apply.
Israel, when it conquered the occupied territories in 1967, could have established a sovereign Palestinian state. This would have made the Palestinians, not a subject people at the mercy of their conqueror, but an independent people, responsible for their own acts and for keeping the peace with other sovereign states. Had the Palestinians then attacked Israel, Israel would have had the right to respond in self-defense.
But Israel didn't do that. Instead, it kept the Palestinians at its mercy, and its mercy didn't materialize. Israel embarked on a settlement policy that amounted to a declaration of war on a helpless population. The settlements were part of a project to take the Palestinians' land, all of it, for the use and enjoyment of the Jewish people. Of course Israel did not explicitly say it was going to take from the Palestinians the very ground on which they stood. But the settlements kept spreading, mopping up an increasing share of vital resources, and behind them was a settler movement, hugely powerful not only in the occupied territories but in Israel itself. This bunch of coddled fanatics, many of them American, quite openly proclaimed their determination to secure the whole of Biblical Israel for exclusively Jewish use. The Israeli government backed these racial warriors with unlimited military protection and extensive financial support.
These trends continue to the present day. Sure, Israel got the settlers out of Gaza, and I'm convinced that even Ariel Sharon, not to mention his successors, truly desired to resolve the conflict by withdrawing from the occupied territories and allowing something like a Palestinian state. But my convictions have no weight against what any reasonable Palestinian, or any reasonable human being, has to conclude: that given the continued strength of the settler movement, the continued popularity of the Israeli right, the continued military protection of the West Bank settlements, their continued expansion, and the Israeli government's all-too-obvious readiness to fight for whatever is politically popular to the last drop of Palestinian blood... given all this, the Palestinians are still faced with a mortal threat. They are still faced with a sovereign whose intentions, if not entirely clear, clearly countenance alternatives leading to an extreme humanitarian disaster for the Palestinians, and perhaps to the entire expropriation of most Palestinians' necessities of life.
This means that Israel is the aggressor in this conflict, and the Palestinians fight in self-defense. Under these circumstances, Israel's right of self-defense cannot justify Israeli violence. Israel is certainly entitled to protect its citizens by evacuation and other non-violent measures, but it is not entitled to harm a hair on the head of a Palestinian firing rockets into Israeli cities, whether or not these rockets kill innocent civilians.
Self-defense gives you the right to resist attacks by any means necessary, and therefore, certainly, by the only means available. The Palestinians don't have the option of using violence which hits only military targets - apparently even the Israelis, with all their intelligence data and all their technological might, don't have that option! But suppose a bunch of thugs install themselves, with their families, all around your farm. They have taken most of your land and resources; they're out for more. If this keeps up, you will starve, perhaps die. They are armed to the teeth and abundantly willing to use those arms. The only way you can defend yourself is to make them pay as heavy a price as possible for their siege and their constant encroachment on your living space. You're critically low on food and medical supplies, and the thugs cut off those supplies whenever they please. What's more, the only weapons available to you are indiscriminate, and will harm their families as well as the thugs themselves. You can use those weapons, even knowing they will kill innocents. You don't have to let the thugs destroy you, thereby sacrificing your innocents (including yourself) to spare theirs. Since innocents are under mortal threat in either case, you needn't prefer the attackers' to your own.
This may not be the most high-minded conclusion. However it's a conclusion we are forced to accept - we who very clearly countenance the killing and maiming of civilians in situations not nearly so precarious as what it is to be a Palestinian in the conquered, shrinking occupied territories. The thugs should keep their families from harm by ceasing their onslaught and withdrawing from the scene. Israel's obligation is similar. It must defend itself at the least cost to others. It should keep its families from harm by giving the Palestinians complete control of their external borders and allowing the creation of a Palestinian state. After this, if Israel is attacked, it can respond. Before, its response is not legitimate self-defense but continued aggression.
This is not about good and bad arguments for Palestinian resistance. It's about whether the defenders of the Palestinians want to vent, or whether they want to at least try to make a difference. If the bad or evasive arguments are effective, fine. My feeling is, they're not.'
Michael Neumann is a professor of philosophy at Trent University in Ontario, Canada. Professor Neumann's views are not to be taken as those of his university. His book What's Left: Radical Politics and the Radical Psyche has just been republished by Broadview Press. He contributed the essay, "What is Anti-Semitism", to CounterPunch's book, The Politics of Anti-Semitism. His latest book is The Case Against Israel. He can be reached at: <!-- e --><a href="mailto:mneumann@trentu.ca">mneumann@trentu.ca</a><!-- e -->
It appears the US will never change.