The 193-member assembly voted 138 in favour of the plan, with only nine against and 41 abstentions. The scale of the defeat represented a strong and public repudiation for Israel and the US, who find themselves out of step with the rest of the world.
Thursday's vote marked a diplomatic breakthrough for Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas and could help his standing after weeks in which he has been sidelined by Palestinian rivals Hamas in the Gaza conflict.
Abbas, who flew from Ramallah, on the West Bank, to New York to address the general assembly, said: "The moment has arrived for the world to say clearly: enough of aggression, settlements and occupation."
...The general assembly resolution had finally given legitimacy to Palestine, he said. "The general assembly is called upon today to issue a birth certificate of the reality of the state of Palestine."
Israel and the US immediately condemned the resolution.
...the coalition against the vote was thin. Apart from Israel and the US, those voting against were Canada, the Czech Republic, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau and Panama.
...The prospect of the Palestinians applying to bodies such as the ICC is one of the main reasons for Israeli opposition, fearful that the Palestinians might try to launch a case over Jewish settlements on the West Bank or over military attacks on the West Bank and Gaza.
Palestinian officials say they have no immediate plans to do so but it remains a new and useful lever for the future.
...In Ramallah, hundreds watching on a television in the square cheered enthusiastically for Abbas as he denounced Israel's most recent assault on Gaza.
Unfortunately Steve, deep down inside we all know it means NOTHING. For some strange fucken reason that little tiny ass country has this huge big bad ass world leader of a country by the balls. Yup, the "land" of the free (for Israel) and the home of the "slave"(Palestinians). All thanks to Uncle Sam and his BIG machine.
Unfortunately Steve, deep down inside we all know it means NOTHING. For some strange fucken reason that little tiny ass country has this huge big bad ass world leader of a country by the balls. Yup, the "land" of the free (for Israel) and the home of the "slave"(Palestinians). All thanks to Uncle Sam and his BIG machine.
I wouldn't say it means nothing. If it did then Israel and the U.S wouldn't have been so desperate to stop it happening. If the ICC begin tabling a prosecuting against Israel for war crimes, and crimes against humanity, then the Israeli's won't have a leg to stand on. And the U.S could be charged with knowingly aiding and abetting Israel's crimes.
israel approves YET another round of settlement expansion ... essentially a big FU to the international community ... i do suspect they would have just done this regardless of the outcome of the vote but now they can rationalize it as such ...
israel approves YET another round of settlement expansion ... essentially a big FU to the international community ... i do suspect they would have just done this regardless of the outcome of the vote but now they can rationalize it as such ...
Just stating fact because I am out of this argument - there's no winning either way, but....
The Palestinians did apparently break the peace agreement not to go to the UN. So, you are right about "rationalizing." I'm not sure about how you characterize it, but when one side breaks an agreement, is the other expected to uphold theirs?
So, who's big FU came first?
Sorry. The world doesn't work the way you tell it to.
bastards.... sorry that i can say that i knew this was going to be the result...
who is the rogue state thumbing it's nose at the international community?
the UN is going to have to take action if this goes ahead as planned.
Official: Israel to expand settlements after UN upgrades Palestinian status
JERUSALEM -- Israel plans to build thousands of new homes for its settlers in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, an Israeli official said Friday in a briefing, defying a U.N. vote that implicitly recognized Palestinian statehood there.
The official, speaking to Reuters on condition of anonymity, said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's conservative government had authorized the construction of 3,000 housing units and ordered "preliminary zoning and planning work for thousands" more.
The official would not elaborate. The New York Times and The Associated Press, citing anonymous Israeli officials, also said Israel was planning to expand East Jerusalem settlements.
But Israeli media, including Haaretz newspaper, said the government sought to emphasize its rejection of Thursday's upgrade by the U.N. General Assembly of the Palestinians to "non-member observer state" from "entity."
Israel and the United States had opposed the resolution, which shored up the Palestinians' claim on all of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza Strip, saying territorial sovereignty should be addressed in direct peace talks with the Jewish state.
Those negotiations have been stalled for two years, however, given Palestinian anger at continued Israeli settlement expansion. The Israelis insist they would keep West Bank settlement blocs under any final accord as well as all of Jerusalem as their capital.
That status for the holy city has never been accepted abroad, where most powers consider the settlements illegal for taking in land captured in the 1967 Middle East war.
The 193-nation General Assembly overwhelmingly approved the de facto recognition of the sovereign state of Palestine after Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas urged the world body to issue what he said was its long overdue "birth certificate."
Reuters contributed to this report.
"You can tell the greatness of a man by what makes him angry." - Lincoln
Just stating fact because I am out of this argument - there's no winning either way, but....
The Palestinians did apparently break the peace agreement not to go to the UN. So, you are right about "rationalizing." I'm not sure about how you characterize it, but when one side breaks an agreement, is the other expected to uphold theirs?
So, who's big FU came first?
what peace agreement? ... if there was a peace agreement - we wouldn't be having this conversation ...
you do realize that the UN Human Rights Council has adopted more resolutions against Israel than ALL OTHER NATIONS COMBINED??? ... Israel has been expanding and expanding whether the palestinians do anything or not ...
feel free to respond to any of the plethora of articles posted in this thread that highlights the atrocities of the state you are defending ...
Just stating fact because I am out of this argument - there's no winning either way, but....
The Palestinians did apparently break the peace agreement not to go to the UN. So, you are right about "rationalizing." I'm not sure about how you characterize it, but when one side breaks an agreement, is the other expected to uphold theirs?
So, who's big FU came first?
what peace agreement? ... if there was a peace agreement - we wouldn't be having this conversation ...
you do realize that the UN Human Rights Council has adopted more resolutions against Israel than ALL OTHER NATIONS COMBINED??? ... Israel has been expanding and expanding whether the palestinians do anything or not ...
feel free to respond to any of the plethora of articles posted in this thread that highlights the atrocities of the state you are defending ...
I clearly did not indicate right or wrong. Just asked which was first and why one side is expected to uphold the agreement, and the other is not. But, you are right - it's not a peace agreement. It's a cease fire agreement. Potato/Pohtahtoh. My apologies.
Carry on.
Sorry. The world doesn't work the way you tell it to.
I clearly did not indicate right or wrong. Just asked which was first and why one side is expected to uphold the agreement, and the other is not. But, you are right - it's not a peace agreement. It's a cease fire agreement. Potato/Pohtahtoh. My apologies.
Carry on.
can you provide a source that this was part of the cease fire agreement? ... that doesn't make any sense whatsoever ...
I clearly did not indicate right or wrong. Just asked which was first and why one side is expected to uphold the agreement, and the other is not. But, you are right - it's not a peace agreement. It's a cease fire agreement. Potato/Pohtahtoh. My apologies.
Carry on.
can you provide a source that this was part of the cease fire agreement? ... that doesn't make any sense whatsoever ...
I am trying to find where I read it this morning. It was on MSN or something like that. But, quickly, I could find this on CNN.com which alludes to an old agreement (so it was probably not from the current round).
But Palestinian leaders have said they had the right to go to the U.N. because Israel failed to comply with agreements signed more than two decades ago.
"It's about a contract. Our contract is that in five years, we should have concluded the treaty of peace and all core issues. This did not happen, and we're talking about 20 years later. And going to the U.N. is not a unilateral step," Palestinian Authority chief negotiator Saeb Erakat said in September.
So, they are arguing that Israel broke the inherent agreement that allowed them to take this step (i.e. not doing it via direct negotiations with no preconditions).
I will look more, and get it more directly for you.
Sorry. The world doesn't work the way you tell it to.
"The assembly voted 138-9 in favour, with 41 nations abstaining..."
Hmm, without even looking, I would wager most common folks in those 138 nations would rather live in those 50 dissenting ones....
Yeah, ain't it funny how the allure of money and a better standard of living works? I'm sure all those millions of people wouldn't think twice about squandering human rights laws, and their own morality, if it meant filling their pockets, right?
Then again, just what is your point?
Perhaps I should have said "... would rather live under the system of government found in those 50 ..." My point being that I don't put much credence in matters voted upon by the UN General Assembly where most of them do not represent democratically elected governments that therefore least represent the will of the people.
No, I find little humor in the allure of money and better living standards - but I do see a correlation between systems of government and living standards. I have never given much thought to your next question, but you're probably right.
Perhaps I should have said "... would rather live under the system of government found in those 50 ..." My point being that I don't put much credence in matters voted upon by the UN General Assembly where most of them do not represent democratically elected governments that therefore least represent the will of the people.
No, I find little humor in the allure of money and better living standards - but I do see a correlation between systems of government and living standards. I have never given much thought to your next question, but you're probably right.
some countries that voted yes:
sweden
norway
new zealand
denmark
iceland
france
russia
brazil
costa rica
belgium
greece
the part I bolded in red.......is this believable? that Canada is interested in what's good for both sides?
OTTAWA - Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird used the podium at the United Nations General Assembly to denounce the world body Thursday for its "utterly regrettable decision" to allow a historic vote on Palestinian statehood.
Baird also suggested Canada will take retaliatory measures against the Palestinians for forcing the statehood issue onto the world stage.
The minister didn't say what Canada was contemplating, but the obvious option would appear to be suspending aid spending to the Palestinians.
U.S. lawmakers on both sides of the political divide threatened Thursday to cut off aid if the Palestinians used their newfound status against Israel.
A senior Canadian official, who would speak only on condition of anonymity, said the government would take "thoughtful and deliberate" action in the coming days.
In a detailed speech, Baird recapped the UN's 65-year efforts to find a peaceful two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians.
The enduring theme, he argued, was that neither side would take unilateral action as the Palestinians have.
And he appeared to blame the UN for indulging them.
"As a result of this body's utterly regrettable decision to abandon policy and principle, we will be considering all available next steps," Baird told the assembly, after flying to New York to personally register Canada's No vote.
Baird said Canada was voting against the initiative because "we are firmly convinced (it) will undermine the objective of reaching a comprehensive, lasting and just settlement for both sides."
The Palestinians won UN recognition handily: the resolution, which upgrades their status to that of a non-member observer state, was approved by a vote of 138 to 9, with 41 abstentions.
That left Canada in small minority that included Israel and the United States, all of which lobbied hard to block the move as unhelpful to the building of peace in the Middle East.
Baird was among a handful of foreign ministers who addressed the general assembly Thursday, winning a prime speaking slot among a roster of orators that included Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israel UN ambassador, Ron Prosor.
Israel's Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman also jetted to New York for the meeting.
"The path to peace has historically rested in direct negotiations between the two parties to resolve all outstanding issues and it remains the same today. Solutions can only come through the two sides working together," Baird said.
"This resolution will not advance the cause of peace or spur a return to negotiations. Will the Palestinian people be better off as a result? No. On the contrary, this unilateral step will harden positions and raise unrealistic expectations while doing nothing to improve the lives of the Palestinian people."
Baird said Canada was calling on both sides to return to the negotiating table without preconditions.
Most of the General Assembly's 193 countries were expected to support the motion.
Several major countries, including France, have recently said they would support elevating Palestinians from the status of UN observer to non-member observer state.
The Palestinians are calling for UN recognition of a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem, the lands Israel captured in 1967.
They want to be able to resume negotiations with Israel, and say recognition of the 1967 borders of Palestine is meant to salvage a peace deal, not sabotage it, as Israel has charged.
The non-member observer state status could also open the way for possible war crimes charges against the Jewish state at the International Criminal Court.
However, a bipartisan group of U.S. senators warned Thursday they would amend legislation to cut off U.S. aid if the Palestinians used their new status to pursue legal action against Israel in the International Criminal Court.
Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador the UN, offered a sobering warning to Palestinian supporters to not get too carried away with their victory.
"Progress towards a just and lasting two-state solution cannot be made by pressing a green voting button here in this hall," Rice said in a speech to the assembly after the vote.
"Nor does passing any resolution create a state, where none indeed exits, or change the reality on the ground," she added. "This resolution does not establish that Palestine is a state."
Like Baird, Rice said peace can only be achieved if the two sides talk to each other.
"Long after the votes have been cast, long after the speeches have been forgotten, it is the Palestinians and the Israelis who must still talk to each other, and listen to each other, and find a way to live side in the land they share."
Gimli 1993
Fargo 2003
Winnipeg 2005
Winnipeg 2011
St. Paul 2014
the part I bolded in red.......is this believable? that Canada is interested in what's good for both sides?
Baird said Canada was voting against the initiative because "we are firmly convinced (it) will undermine the objective of reaching a comprehensive, lasting and just settlement for both sides."
no it is not believeable. its simply an excuse. heres how much the israeli govt wants peace:
Israel revealed on Friday plans to build 3,000 more settler homes in east Jerusalem and the West Bank after a historic UN vote to recognise Palestine as a non-member observer state, with Washington describing the move as "counter-productive".
In the Thursday vote in New York, the United Nations General Assembly overwhelmingly backed a resolution recognising Palestine within the 1967 borders as a non-member observer state.
Israel lashed out in response on Friday, with an official confirming to AFP plans to build the 3,000 settler homes, without specifying exactly where they were to be sited.
Washington said the plan would make resuming peace talks harder.
"We reiterate our longstanding opposition to settlements and east Jerusalem construction and announcements. We believe these actions are counterproductive and make it harder to resume direct negotiations or achieve a two-state solution," said National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor.
State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said that, despite past failures, Washington would keep trying to get Israelis and Palestinians to the negotiating table.
"That's the only way that we are going to get to two states for two peoples with a sovereign, viable and independent Palestine living side by side in peace and security with a Jewish and democratic Israel," she said.
Like Israel, the Obama administration had tried to stop the Palestinian push for UN recognition, saying it would put another obstacle in the path to peace and that statehood could only come through negotiations with Israel
Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas called for a return to peace talks, but criticised Israel's latest settlement plans.
"I've said a thousand times that we want to resume negotiations and we are ready to do it," Abbas told reporters in New York.
"We are not setting any condition but there are at least 15 UN resolutions which consider settlement activity as illegal and an obstacle to peace which must be removed," he said. "Why do (the Israelis) not stop settlement?"
Palestine Liberation Organisation official Hanan Ashrawi told AFP "it is an act of Israeli aggression against a state, and the world needs to take up its responsibilities."
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had warned that by going to the UN, the Palestinians had "violated" previous agreements with Israel, such as the 1993 Oslo Accords, and that his country would "act accordingly."
Such talks have been on hold since September 2010, with the Palestinians insisting on a settlement freeze before returning to the negotiating table and the Israelis insisting on no preconditions.
Israel has long feared that if the Palestinians won the rank of a UN non-member state, they could pursue the Jewish state for war crimes at the International Criminal Court -- particularly over settlement.
With their newly acquired status, the Palestinians now have access to a range of UN agencies as well as to the ICC, but Abbas said he had no plans to immediately petition the tribunal.
"We now have the right to appeal the ICC, but we are not going to do it now and will not do it except in the case of Israeli aggression," he said.
Israeli media reports said that some new settlement construction would be in a highly contentious area of the West Bank known as E1, a corridor that runs between the easternmost edge of annexed east Jerusalem and the Maaleh Adumim settlement.
With their newly acquired status, the Palestinians now have access to a range of UN agencies as well as to the ICC, but Abbas said he had no plans to immediately petition the tribunal.
"We now have the right to appeal the ICC, but we are not going to do it now and will not do it except in the case of Israeli aggression," he said.
Israeli media reports said that some new settlement construction would be in a highly contentious area of the West Bank known as E1, a corridor that runs between the easternmost edge of annexed east Jerusalem and the Maaleh Adumim settlement.
Palestinians bitterly oppose the E1 project, as it effectively cuts the occupied West Bank in two, north to south, and makes the creation of a viable Palestinian state highly problematic.
The Palestinians want east Jerusalem as capital of their state and vigorously oppose expansion plans for Maaleh Adumim, which lies five kilometres (three miles) from the city's eastern edge.
Linking the settlement and the city is an idea espoused by hardliners within Netanyahu's rightwing Likud party but strongly opposed by Washington.
Arab east Jerusalem was captured by Israel with the rest of the West Bank in the 1967 Six Day War and later annexed in a move not recognised by the international community.
Israel considers all of Jerusalem as its "eternal, indivisible" capital, and does not view construction in the eastern sector to be settlement activity.
hear my name
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
israel approves YET another round of settlement expansion ... essentially a big FU to the international community ... i do suspect they would have just done this regardless of the outcome of the vote but now they can rationalize it as such ...
Just stating fact because I am out of this argument - there's no winning either way, but....
The Palestinians did apparently break the peace agreement not to go to the UN. So, you are right about "rationalizing." I'm not sure about how you characterize it, but when one side breaks an agreement, is the other expected to uphold theirs?
So, who's big FU came first?
Ah, the Oslo agreements - that I've heard so many people trumpeting these past few days (was this the latest proscribed talking point issued by IDF.com?).
Why don't we take a look at the Oslo accords and what they called for from both sides, and then ask who's been in breach of them these past 20 years? How many illegal Israeli settlements were built during and after those accords in breach of the agreements?
bastards.... sorry that i can say that i knew this was going to be the result...
who is the rogue state thumbing it's nose at the international community?
the UN is going to have to take action if this goes ahead as planned.
Official: Israel to expand settlements after UN upgrades Palestinian status
JERUSALEM -- Israel plans to build thousands of new homes for its settlers in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, an Israeli official said Friday in a briefing, defying a U.N. vote that implicitly recognized Palestinian statehood there.
This is no surprise. The Israeli's have never shown any interest in a peaceful settlement in accordance with international law at any time in the past 60 years. And calling for more 'peace talks' was only ever a stalling tactic allowing them to steal more land. The Zionist leadership has stated it's true intentions on many occasions: they will not be satisfied until they've stolen all of the land between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean sea.
The Great Middle East Peace Process Scam
Henry Siegman
16 August 2007
'...In fact, all previous peace initiatives have got nowhere for a reason that neither Bush nor the EU has had the political courage to acknowledge. That reason is the consensus reached long ago by Israel’s decision-making elites that Israel will never allow the emergence of a Palestinian state which denies it effective military and economic control of the West Bank. To be sure, Israel would allow – indeed, it would insist on – the creation of a number of isolated enclaves that Palestinians could call a state, but only in order to prevent the creation of a binational state in which Palestinians would be the majority.
The Middle East peace process may well be the most spectacular deception in modern diplomatic history. Since the failed Camp David summit of 2000, and actually well before it, Israel’s interest in a peace process – other than for the purpose of obtaining Palestinian and international acceptance of the status quo – has been a fiction that has served primarily to provide cover for its systematic confiscation of Palestinian land and an occupation whose goal, according to the former IDF chief of staff Moshe Ya’alon, is ‘to sear deep into the consciousness of Palestinians that they are a defeated people’. In his reluctant embrace of the Oslo Accords, and his distaste for the settlers, Yitzhak Rabin may have been the exception to this, but even he did not entertain a return of Palestinian territory beyond the so-called Allon Plan, which allowed Israel to retain the Jordan Valley and other parts of the West Bank.
Anyone familiar with Israel’s relentless confiscations of Palestinian territory – based on a plan devised, overseen and implemented by Ariel Sharon – knows that the objective of its settlement enterprise in the West Bank has been largely achieved. Gaza, the evacuation of whose settlements was so naively hailed by the international community as the heroic achievement of a man newly committed to an honourable peace with the Palestinians, was intended to serve as the first in a series of Palestinian bantustans. Gaza’s situation shows us what these bantustans will look like if their residents do not behave as Israel wants.
Israel’s disingenuous commitment to a peace process and a two-state solution is precisely what has made possible its open-ended occupation and dismemberment of Palestinian territory. And the Quartet – with the EU, the UN secretary general and Russia obediently following Washington’s lead – has collaborated with and provided cover for this deception by accepting Israel’s claim that it has been unable to find a deserving Palestinian peace partner.
Just one year after the 1967 war, Moshe Dayan, a former IDF chief of staff who at the time was minister of defence, described his plan for the future as ‘the current reality in the territories’. ‘The plan,’ he said, ‘is being implemented in actual fact. What exists today must remain as a permanent arrangement in the West Bank.’ Ten years later, at a conference in Tel Aviv, Dayan said: ‘The question is not “What is the solution?” but “How do we live without a solution?”’ Geoffrey Aronson, who has monitored the settlement enterprise from its beginnings, summarises the situation as follows:
'Living without a solution, then as now, was understood by Israel as the key to maximising the benefits of conquest while minimising the burdens and dangers of retreat or formal annexation. This commitment to the status quo, however, disguised a programme of expansion that generations of Israeli leaders supported as enabling, through Israeli settlement, the dynamic transformation of the territories and the expansion of effective Israeli sovereignty to the Jordan River.'
In an interview in Ha’aretz in 2004, Dov Weissglas, chef de cabinet to the then prime minister, Ariel Sharon, described the strategic goal of Sharon’s diplomacy as being to secure the support of the White House and Congress for Israeli measures that would place the peace process and Palestinian statehood in ‘formaldehyde’. It is a fiendishly appropriate metaphor: formaldehyde uniquely prevents the deterioration of dead bodies, and sometimes creates the illusion that they are still alive. Weissglas explains that the purpose of Sharon’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, and the dismantling of several isolated settlements in the West Bank, was to gain US acceptance of Israel’s unilateralism, not to set a precedent for an eventual withdrawal from the West Bank. The limited withdrawals were intended to provide Israel with the political room to deepen and widen its presence in the West Bank, and that is what they achieved. In a letter to Sharon, Bush wrote: ‘In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli population centres, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949.’
In a recent interview in Ha’aretz, James Wolfensohn, who was the Quartet’s representative at the time of the Gaza disengagement, said that Israel and the US had systematically undermined the agreement he helped forge in 2005 between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, and had instead turned Gaza into a vast prison. The official behind this, he told Ha’aretz, was Elliott Abrams, the deputy national security adviser. ‘Every aspect’ of the agreement Wolfensohn had brokered ‘was abrogated’.
Another recent interview in Ha’aretz, with Haggai Alon, who was a senior adviser to Amir Peretz at the Ministry of Defence, is even more revealing. Alon accuses the IDF (whose most senior officers increasingly are themselves settlers) of working clandestinely to further the settlers’ interests. The IDF, Alon says, ignores the Supreme Court’s instructions about the path the so-called security fence should follow, instead ‘setting a route that will not enable the establishment of a Palestinian state’. Alon told Ha’aretz that when in 2005 politicians signed an agreement with the Palestinians to ease restrictions on Palestinians travelling in the territories (part of the deal that Wolfensohn had worked on), the IDF eased them for settlers instead. For Palestinians, the number of checkpoints doubled. According to Alon, the IDF is ‘carrying out an apartheid policy’ that is emptying Hebron of Arabs and Judaising (his term) the Jordan Valley, while it co-operates openly with the settlers in an attempt to make a two-state solution impossible.
A new UN map of the West Bank, produced by the Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs, gives a comprehensive picture of the situation. Israeli civilian and military infrastructure has rendered 40 per cent of the territory off limits to Palestinians. The rest of the territory, including major population centres such as Nablus and Jericho, is split into enclaves; movement between them is restricted by 450 roadblocks and 70 manned checkpoints. The UN found that what remains is an area very similar to that set aside for the Palestinian population in Israeli security proposals in the aftermath of the 1967 war. It also found that changes now underway to the infrastructure of the territories – including a network of highways that bypass and isolate Palestinian towns – would serve to formalise the de facto cantonisation of the West Bank.
These are the realities on the ground that the uninformed and/or cynical blather in Jerusalem, Washington and Brussels – about waiting for Palestinians to reform their institutions, democratise their culture, dismantle the ‘infrastructures of terror’ and halt all violence and incitement before peace negotiations can begin – seeks to drown out. Given the vast power imbalance between Israel and the Palestinians – not to mention the vast preponderance of diplomatic support enjoyed by Israel from precisely those countries that one would have expected to compensate diplomatically for the military imbalance – nothing will change for the better without the US, the EU and other international actors finally facing up to what have long been the fundamental impediments to peace.
These impediments include the assumption, implicit in Israel’s occupation policy, that if no peace agreement is reached, the ‘default setting’ of UN Security Council Resolution 242 is the indefinite continuation of Israel’s occupation. If this reading were true, the resolution would actually be inviting an occupying power that wishes to retain its adversary’s territory to do so simply by means of avoiding peace talks – which is exactly what Israel has been doing. In fact, the introductory statement to Resolution 242 declares that territory cannot be acquired by war, implying that if the parties cannot reach agreement, the occupier must withdraw to the status quo ante: that, logically, is 242’s default setting. Had there been a sincere intention on Israel’s part to withdraw from the territories, surely forty years should have been more than enough time in which to reach an agreement.
Israel’s contention has long been that since no Palestinian state existed before the 1967 war, there is no recognised border to which Israel can withdraw, because the pre-1967 border was merely an armistice line. Moreover, since Resolution 242 calls for a ‘just and lasting peace’ that will allow ‘every state in the area [to] live in security’, Israel holds that it must be allowed to change the armistice line, either bilaterally or unilaterally, to make it secure before it ends the occupation. This is a specious argument for many reasons, but principally because UN General Assembly Partition Resolution 181 of 1947, which established the Jewish state’s international legitimacy, also recognised the remaining Palestinian territory outside the new state’s borders as the equally legitimate patrimony of Palestine’s Arab population on which they were entitled to establish their own state, and it mapped the borders of that territory with great precision. Resolution 181’s affirmation of the right of Palestine’s Arab population to national self-determination was based on normative law and the democratic principles that grant statehood to the majority population. (At the time, Arabs constituted two-thirds of the population in Palestine.) This right does not evaporate because of delays in its implementation.
In the course of a war launched by Arab countries that sought to prevent the implementation of the UN partition resolution, Israel enlarged its territory by 50 per cent. If it is illegal to acquire territory as a result of war, then the question now cannot conceivably be how much additional Palestinian territory Israel may confiscate, but rather how much of the territory it acquired in the course of the war of 1948 it is allowed to retain. At the very least, if ‘adjustments’ are to be made to the 1949 armistice line, these should be made on Israel’s side of that line, not the Palestinians’.
Clearly, the obstacle to resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict has not been a dearth of peace initiatives or peace envoys. Nor has it been the violence to which Palestinians have resorted in their struggle to rid themselves of Israel’s occupation, even when that violence has despicably targeted Israel’s civilian population. It is not to sanction the murder of civilians to observe that such violence occurs, sooner or later, in most situations in which a people’s drive for national self-determination is frustrated by an occupying power. Indeed, Israel’s own struggle for national independence was no exception. According to the historian Benny Morris, in this conflict it was the Irgun that first targeted civilians. In Righteous Victims, Morris writes that the upsurge of Arab terrorism in 1937 ‘triggered a wave of Irgun bombings against Arab crowds and buses, introducing a new dimension to the conflict.’ While in the past Arabs had ‘sniped at cars and pedestrians and occasionally lobbed a grenade, often killing or injuring a few bystanders or passengers’, now ‘for the first time, massive bombs were placed in crowded Arab centres, and dozens of people were indiscriminately murdered and maimed.’ Morris notes that ‘this “innovation” soon found Arab imitators.’
Underlying Israel’s efforts to retain the occupied territories is the fact that it has never really considered the West Bank as occupied territory, despite its pro forma acceptance of that designation. Israelis see the Palestinian areas as ‘contested’ territory to which they have claims no less compelling than the Palestinians, international law and UN resolutions notwithstanding. This is a view that was made explicit for the first time by Sharon in an op-ed essay published on the front page of the New York Times on 9 June 2002. The use of the biblical designations of Judea and Samaria to describe the territories, terms which were formerly employed only by the Likud but are now de rigueur for Labour Party stalwarts as well, is a reflection of a common Israeli view. That the former prime minister Ehud Barak (now Olmert’s defence minister) endlessly describes the territorial proposals he made at the Camp David summit as expressions of Israel’s ‘generosity’, and never as an acknowledgment of Palestinian rights, is another example of this mindset. Indeed, the term ‘Palestinian rights’ seems not to exist in Israel’s lexicon.
The problem is not, as Israelis often claim, that Palestinians do not know how to compromise. (Another former prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, famously complained that ‘Palestinians take and take while Israel gives and gives.’) That is an indecent charge, since the Palestinians made much the most far-reaching compromise of all when the PLO formally accepted the legitimacy of Israel within the 1949 armistice border. With that concession, Palestinians ceded their claim to more than half the territory that the UN’s partition resolution had assigned to its Arab inhabitants. They have never received any credit for this wrenching concession, made years before Israel agreed that Palestinians had a right to statehood in any part of Palestine. The notion that further border adjustments should be made at the expense of the 22 per cent of the territory that remains to the Palestinians is deeply offensive to them, and understandably so.
Nonetheless, the Palestinians agreed at the Camp David summit to adjustments to the pre-1967 border that would allow large numbers of West Bank settlers – about 70 per cent – to remain within the Jewish state, provided they received comparable territory on Israel’s side of the border. Barak rejected this. To be sure, in the past the Palestinian demand of a right of return was a serious obstacle to a peace agreement. But the Arab League’s peace initiative of 2002 leaves no doubt that Arab countries will accept a nominal and symbolic return of refugees into Israel in numbers approved by Israel, with the overwhelming majority repatriated in the new Palestinian state, their countries of residence, or in other countries prepared to receive them.
It is the failure of the international community to reject (other than in empty rhetoric) Israel’s notion that the occupation and the creation of ‘facts on the ground’ can go on indefinitely, so long as there is no agreement that is acceptable to Israel, that has defeated all previous peace initiatives and the efforts of all peace envoys. Future efforts will meet the same fate if this fundamental issue is not addressed.
What is required for a breakthrough is the adoption by the Security Council of a resolution affirming the following: 1. Changes to the pre-1967 situation can be made only by agreement between the parties. Unilateral measures will not receive international recognition. 2. The default setting of Resolution 242, reiterated by Resolution 338, the 1973 ceasefire resolution, is a return by Israel’s occupying forces to the pre-1967 border. 3. If the parties do not reach agreement within 12 months (the implementation of agreements will obviously take longer), the default setting will be invoked by the Security Council. The Security Council will then adopt its own terms for an end to the conflict, and will arrange for an international force to enter the occupied territories to help establish the rule of law, assist Palestinians in building their institutions, assure Israel’s security by preventing cross-border violence, and monitor and oversee the implementation of terms for an end to the conflict.
If the US and its allies were to take a stand forceful enough to persuade Israel that it will not be allowed to make changes to the pre-1967 situation except by agreement with the Palestinians in permanent status negotiations, there would be no need for complicated peace formulas or celebrity mediators to get a peace process underway. The only thing that an envoy such as Blair can do to put the peace process back on track is to speak the truth about the real impediment to peace. This would also be a historic contribution to the Jewish state, since Israel’s only hope of real long-term security is to have a successful Palestinian state as its neighbour.
Israeli officials were shocked at the scale of European support for the Palestinian resolution, with France switching sides and Germany abandoning a pledge to vote against. Among EU nations, only the Czech Republic supported Israel.'
Apart from Israel and the US, those voting against were Canada, the Czech Republic, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau and Panama.
The Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, all in the pocket of the U.S, but soon to all be under water. What a shame. So the votes against will be reduced to approx 4 the next time the U.N General Assembly casts it's annual vote on the 'Peaceful Settlement of the Question of Palestine', which includes these tenets for achieving a peaceful settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict: (1) “Affirming the principle of the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war”; (2) “Affirming also the illegality of the Israeli settlements in the territory occupied since 1967 and of Israeli actions aimed at changing the status of Jerusalem”; (3) “Stresses the need for: (a) The realization of the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people, primarily the right to self-determination; (b) The withdrawal of Israel from the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967”; (4) “Also stresses the need for resolving the problem of the Palestine refugees in conformity with its resolution 194 (III) of 11 December 1948.”
Here's a summary of how the vote has played out for the past decade and more:
1997 [155-2-3] Israel, United States
2000 [149-2-3] Israel, United States
2002 [160-4-3] Israel, United States , Marshall Islands, Micronesia
2005 [156-6-9] Israel, United States , Australia, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Palau
2007 [161-7-5] Israel, United States , Australia, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/no ... ?fb=native
'For months, Israeli diplomats worked to persuade EU governments to, at the least, abstain in the hope that the Jewish state would be able to deride a Palestinian victory as delivered by less than democratic regimes.
Israel's position was supported by [...] Tony Blair, envoy for the Quartet of the US, EU, Russia and the UN, which is attempting to kick-start peace talks.'
British foreign secretary, William Hague: "I am extremely concerned by reports that the Israeli cabinet plans to approve the building of 3,000 new housing units in illegal settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Israeli settlements are illegal under international law and undermine trust between the parties. If implemented, these plans would alter the situation on the ground on a scale that makes the two-state solution, with Jerusalem as a shared capital, increasingly difficult to achieve.
They would undermine Israel's international reputation and create doubts about its stated commitment to achieving peace with the Palestinians. The UK strongly advises the Israeli government to reverse this decision. The window for a two-state solution is closing, and we need urgent efforts by the parties and by the international community to achieve a return to negotiations, not actions which will make that harder."
Meanwhile, one of six Palestinians who were shot by Israeli troops on Friday, while protesting at the Gaza Strip boundary fence died this morning, according to hospital officials. The 21-year-old man had been demonstrating near the southern town of Rafah.
Seems to me Israel has now been revealed for the dangerous rogue state that it is. Too many people now know the truth about this country, despite it's massive PR campaign and it's blanket support from the U.S. The U.S government's pretence at being an honest broker in this conflict has also now been exposed for the huge sham that it is. I predict a change in U.S policy now in order to prevent any greater embarrassment and isolation on the World stage.
Israel's days as an international pariah are numbered.
the part I bolded in red.......is this believable? that Canada is interested in what's good for both sides?
Baird said Canada was voting against the initiative because "we are firmly convinced (it) will undermine the objective of reaching a comprehensive, lasting and just settlement for both sides."
no it is not believeable. its simply an excuse. heres how much the israeli govt wants peace:
I don't personally understand what my country stands to benefit from taking sides with the Israelis if they weren't sincere in their statements.
Gimli 1993
Fargo 2003
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St. Paul 2014
I have to say, the majority on this board seem VERY biased against Israel. How can you all say they would have built more settlements had the Palestinians looked for new status or not? Seems a bit presumptuous.
Gimli 1993
Fargo 2003
Winnipeg 2005
Winnipeg 2011
St. Paul 2014
I have to say, the majority on this board seem VERY biased against Israel. How can you all say they would have built more settlements had the Palestinians looked for new status or not? Seems a bit presumptuous.
precedent hugh. so no it is not any bit presumptuous of us. theyre trying to grab as much territory as they can.. and they will do so in violation of international law. its a big fuck you not only to the palestinians but also to the international community.
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I have to say, the majority on this board seem VERY biased against Israel. How can you all say they would have built more settlements had the Palestinians looked for new status or not? Seems a bit presumptuous.
Israel's illegal settlement expansion hasn't stopped at any point in the past 45 years. It didn't stop during the Oslo peace accords - in flagrant breach of those agreements (in fact it escalated) - and it hasn't stopped at any time since.
Hilary Clinton:"Americans honor Israel as a homeland dreamed of for generations and finally achieved by pioneering men and women in my lifetime. What threatens Israel threatens America. What strengthens Israel strengthens us."
"Just before midnight (Gaza time) Israel broke the ceasefire, firing at least one tank shell into an area of East Deir Al-Balah, Middle Gaza Strip. It injured 4, including 2 critically: one is brain dead; another lost a leg.
Since the 'ceasefire' was 'effectual', Israel has violated Palestinian airspace, waters, harassed, arrested, shot and killed Gazans. Israel systematically and consistently breaks these ceasefires.
Will the BBC report Israel's entirely unjustifiable ceasefire-breaking? Why does the world not understand who is the aggressor?"
Comments
The 193-member assembly voted 138 in favour of the plan, with only nine against and 41 abstentions. The scale of the defeat represented a strong and public repudiation for Israel and the US, who find themselves out of step with the rest of the world.
Thursday's vote marked a diplomatic breakthrough for Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas and could help his standing after weeks in which he has been sidelined by Palestinian rivals Hamas in the Gaza conflict.
Abbas, who flew from Ramallah, on the West Bank, to New York to address the general assembly, said: "The moment has arrived for the world to say clearly: enough of aggression, settlements and occupation."
...The general assembly resolution had finally given legitimacy to Palestine, he said. "The general assembly is called upon today to issue a birth certificate of the reality of the state of Palestine."
Israel and the US immediately condemned the resolution.
...the coalition against the vote was thin. Apart from Israel and the US, those voting against were Canada, the Czech Republic, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau and Panama.
...The prospect of the Palestinians applying to bodies such as the ICC is one of the main reasons for Israeli opposition, fearful that the Palestinians might try to launch a case over Jewish settlements on the West Bank or over military attacks on the West Bank and Gaza.
Palestinian officials say they have no immediate plans to do so but it remains a new and useful lever for the future.
...In Ramallah, hundreds watching on a television in the square cheered enthusiastically for Abbas as he denounced Israel's most recent assault on Gaza.
I wouldn't say it means nothing. If it did then Israel and the U.S wouldn't have been so desperate to stop it happening. If the ICC begin tabling a prosecuting against Israel for war crimes, and crimes against humanity, then the Israeli's won't have a leg to stand on. And the U.S could be charged with knowingly aiding and abetting Israel's crimes.
asshole GOVERNMENTS.
Fargo 2003
Winnipeg 2005
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St. Paul 2014
we voted them in a majority and we won't hold them accountable for this ... soo ... gov't = country at this point
Just stating fact because I am out of this argument - there's no winning either way, but....
The Palestinians did apparently break the peace agreement not to go to the UN. So, you are right about "rationalizing." I'm not sure about how you characterize it, but when one side breaks an agreement, is the other expected to uphold theirs?
So, who's big FU came first?
who is the rogue state thumbing it's nose at the international community?
the UN is going to have to take action if this goes ahead as planned.
Official: Israel to expand settlements after UN upgrades Palestinian status
JERUSALEM -- Israel plans to build thousands of new homes for its settlers in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, an Israeli official said Friday in a briefing, defying a U.N. vote that implicitly recognized Palestinian statehood there.
The official, speaking to Reuters on condition of anonymity, said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's conservative government had authorized the construction of 3,000 housing units and ordered "preliminary zoning and planning work for thousands" more.
The official would not elaborate. The New York Times and The Associated Press, citing anonymous Israeli officials, also said Israel was planning to expand East Jerusalem settlements.
But Israeli media, including Haaretz newspaper, said the government sought to emphasize its rejection of Thursday's upgrade by the U.N. General Assembly of the Palestinians to "non-member observer state" from "entity."
Israel and the United States had opposed the resolution, which shored up the Palestinians' claim on all of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza Strip, saying territorial sovereignty should be addressed in direct peace talks with the Jewish state.
Those negotiations have been stalled for two years, however, given Palestinian anger at continued Israeli settlement expansion. The Israelis insist they would keep West Bank settlement blocs under any final accord as well as all of Jerusalem as their capital.
That status for the holy city has never been accepted abroad, where most powers consider the settlements illegal for taking in land captured in the 1967 Middle East war.
The 193-nation General Assembly overwhelmingly approved the de facto recognition of the sovereign state of Palestine after Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas urged the world body to issue what he said was its long overdue "birth certificate."
Reuters contributed to this report.
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
what peace agreement? ... if there was a peace agreement - we wouldn't be having this conversation ...
you do realize that the UN Human Rights Council has adopted more resolutions against Israel than ALL OTHER NATIONS COMBINED??? ... Israel has been expanding and expanding whether the palestinians do anything or not ...
feel free to respond to any of the plethora of articles posted in this thread that highlights the atrocities of the state you are defending ...
I clearly did not indicate right or wrong. Just asked which was first and why one side is expected to uphold the agreement, and the other is not. But, you are right - it's not a peace agreement. It's a cease fire agreement. Potato/Pohtahtoh. My apologies.
Carry on.
can you provide a source that this was part of the cease fire agreement? ... that doesn't make any sense whatsoever ...
I am trying to find where I read it this morning. It was on MSN or something like that. But, quickly, I could find this on CNN.com which alludes to an old agreement (so it was probably not from the current round).
But Palestinian leaders have said they had the right to go to the U.N. because Israel failed to comply with agreements signed more than two decades ago.
"It's about a contract. Our contract is that in five years, we should have concluded the treaty of peace and all core issues. This did not happen, and we're talking about 20 years later. And going to the U.N. is not a unilateral step," Palestinian Authority chief negotiator Saeb Erakat said in September.
So, they are arguing that Israel broke the inherent agreement that allowed them to take this step (i.e. not doing it via direct negotiations with no preconditions).
I will look more, and get it more directly for you.
i've read the summary of the cease fire ... i'm pretty sure it's not part of the agreement ...
Perhaps I should have said "... would rather live under the system of government found in those 50 ..." My point being that I don't put much credence in matters voted upon by the UN General Assembly where most of them do not represent democratically elected governments that therefore least represent the will of the people.
http://www.nobelprize.org/educational/p ... cracy_map/
No, I find little humor in the allure of money and better living standards - but I do see a correlation between systems of government and living standards. I have never given much thought to your next question, but you're probably right.
some countries that voted yes:
sweden
norway
new zealand
denmark
iceland
france
russia
brazil
costa rica
belgium
greece
OTTAWA - Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird used the podium at the United Nations General Assembly to denounce the world body Thursday for its "utterly regrettable decision" to allow a historic vote on Palestinian statehood.
Baird also suggested Canada will take retaliatory measures against the Palestinians for forcing the statehood issue onto the world stage.
The minister didn't say what Canada was contemplating, but the obvious option would appear to be suspending aid spending to the Palestinians.
U.S. lawmakers on both sides of the political divide threatened Thursday to cut off aid if the Palestinians used their newfound status against Israel.
A senior Canadian official, who would speak only on condition of anonymity, said the government would take "thoughtful and deliberate" action in the coming days.
In a detailed speech, Baird recapped the UN's 65-year efforts to find a peaceful two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians.
The enduring theme, he argued, was that neither side would take unilateral action as the Palestinians have.
And he appeared to blame the UN for indulging them.
"As a result of this body's utterly regrettable decision to abandon policy and principle, we will be considering all available next steps," Baird told the assembly, after flying to New York to personally register Canada's No vote.
Baird said Canada was voting against the initiative because "we are firmly convinced (it) will undermine the objective of reaching a comprehensive, lasting and just settlement for both sides."
The Palestinians won UN recognition handily: the resolution, which upgrades their status to that of a non-member observer state, was approved by a vote of 138 to 9, with 41 abstentions.
That left Canada in small minority that included Israel and the United States, all of which lobbied hard to block the move as unhelpful to the building of peace in the Middle East.
Baird was among a handful of foreign ministers who addressed the general assembly Thursday, winning a prime speaking slot among a roster of orators that included Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israel UN ambassador, Ron Prosor.
Israel's Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman also jetted to New York for the meeting.
"The path to peace has historically rested in direct negotiations between the two parties to resolve all outstanding issues and it remains the same today. Solutions can only come through the two sides working together," Baird said.
"This resolution will not advance the cause of peace or spur a return to negotiations. Will the Palestinian people be better off as a result? No. On the contrary, this unilateral step will harden positions and raise unrealistic expectations while doing nothing to improve the lives of the Palestinian people."
Baird said Canada was calling on both sides to return to the negotiating table without preconditions.
Most of the General Assembly's 193 countries were expected to support the motion.
Several major countries, including France, have recently said they would support elevating Palestinians from the status of UN observer to non-member observer state.
The Palestinians are calling for UN recognition of a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem, the lands Israel captured in 1967.
They want to be able to resume negotiations with Israel, and say recognition of the 1967 borders of Palestine is meant to salvage a peace deal, not sabotage it, as Israel has charged.
The non-member observer state status could also open the way for possible war crimes charges against the Jewish state at the International Criminal Court.
However, a bipartisan group of U.S. senators warned Thursday they would amend legislation to cut off U.S. aid if the Palestinians used their new status to pursue legal action against Israel in the International Criminal Court.
Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador the UN, offered a sobering warning to Palestinian supporters to not get too carried away with their victory.
"Progress towards a just and lasting two-state solution cannot be made by pressing a green voting button here in this hall," Rice said in a speech to the assembly after the vote.
"Nor does passing any resolution create a state, where none indeed exits, or change the reality on the ground," she added. "This resolution does not establish that Palestine is a state."
Like Baird, Rice said peace can only be achieved if the two sides talk to each other.
"Long after the votes have been cast, long after the speeches have been forgotten, it is the Palestinians and the Israelis who must still talk to each other, and listen to each other, and find a way to live side in the land they share."
Fargo 2003
Winnipeg 2005
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St. Paul 2014
no it is not believeable. its simply an excuse. heres how much the israeli govt wants peace:
http://www.nation.co.ke/News/world/Isra ... index.html
Israel revealed on Friday plans to build 3,000 more settler homes in east Jerusalem and the West Bank after a historic UN vote to recognise Palestine as a non-member observer state, with Washington describing the move as "counter-productive".
In the Thursday vote in New York, the United Nations General Assembly overwhelmingly backed a resolution recognising Palestine within the 1967 borders as a non-member observer state.
Israel lashed out in response on Friday, with an official confirming to AFP plans to build the 3,000 settler homes, without specifying exactly where they were to be sited.
Washington said the plan would make resuming peace talks harder.
"We reiterate our longstanding opposition to settlements and east Jerusalem construction and announcements. We believe these actions are counterproductive and make it harder to resume direct negotiations or achieve a two-state solution," said National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor.
State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said that, despite past failures, Washington would keep trying to get Israelis and Palestinians to the negotiating table.
"That's the only way that we are going to get to two states for two peoples with a sovereign, viable and independent Palestine living side by side in peace and security with a Jewish and democratic Israel," she said.
Like Israel, the Obama administration had tried to stop the Palestinian push for UN recognition, saying it would put another obstacle in the path to peace and that statehood could only come through negotiations with Israel
Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas called for a return to peace talks, but criticised Israel's latest settlement plans.
"I've said a thousand times that we want to resume negotiations and we are ready to do it," Abbas told reporters in New York.
"We are not setting any condition but there are at least 15 UN resolutions which consider settlement activity as illegal and an obstacle to peace which must be removed," he said. "Why do (the Israelis) not stop settlement?"
Palestine Liberation Organisation official Hanan Ashrawi told AFP "it is an act of Israeli aggression against a state, and the world needs to take up its responsibilities."
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had warned that by going to the UN, the Palestinians had "violated" previous agreements with Israel, such as the 1993 Oslo Accords, and that his country would "act accordingly."
Such talks have been on hold since September 2010, with the Palestinians insisting on a settlement freeze before returning to the negotiating table and the Israelis insisting on no preconditions.
Israel has long feared that if the Palestinians won the rank of a UN non-member state, they could pursue the Jewish state for war crimes at the International Criminal Court -- particularly over settlement.
With their newly acquired status, the Palestinians now have access to a range of UN agencies as well as to the ICC, but Abbas said he had no plans to immediately petition the tribunal.
"We now have the right to appeal the ICC, but we are not going to do it now and will not do it except in the case of Israeli aggression," he said.
Israeli media reports said that some new settlement construction would be in a highly contentious area of the West Bank known as E1, a corridor that runs between the easternmost edge of annexed east Jerusalem and the Maaleh Adumim settlement.
With their newly acquired status, the Palestinians now have access to a range of UN agencies as well as to the ICC, but Abbas said he had no plans to immediately petition the tribunal.
"We now have the right to appeal the ICC, but we are not going to do it now and will not do it except in the case of Israeli aggression," he said.
Israeli media reports said that some new settlement construction would be in a highly contentious area of the West Bank known as E1, a corridor that runs between the easternmost edge of annexed east Jerusalem and the Maaleh Adumim settlement.
Palestinians bitterly oppose the E1 project, as it effectively cuts the occupied West Bank in two, north to south, and makes the creation of a viable Palestinian state highly problematic.
The Palestinians want east Jerusalem as capital of their state and vigorously oppose expansion plans for Maaleh Adumim, which lies five kilometres (three miles) from the city's eastern edge.
Linking the settlement and the city is an idea espoused by hardliners within Netanyahu's rightwing Likud party but strongly opposed by Washington.
Arab east Jerusalem was captured by Israel with the rest of the West Bank in the 1967 Six Day War and later annexed in a move not recognised by the international community.
Israel considers all of Jerusalem as its "eternal, indivisible" capital, and does not view construction in the eastern sector to be settlement activity.
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
Ah, the Oslo agreements - that I've heard so many people trumpeting these past few days (was this the latest proscribed talking point issued by IDF.com?).
Why don't we take a look at the Oslo accords and what they called for from both sides, and then ask who's been in breach of them these past 20 years? How many illegal Israeli settlements were built during and after those accords in breach of the agreements?
This is no surprise. The Israeli's have never shown any interest in a peaceful settlement in accordance with international law at any time in the past 60 years. And calling for more 'peace talks' was only ever a stalling tactic allowing them to steal more land. The Zionist leadership has stated it's true intentions on many occasions: they will not be satisfied until they've stolen all of the land between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean sea.
Read it and weep:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n16/henry-sieg ... ocess-scam
The Great Middle East Peace Process Scam
Henry Siegman
16 August 2007
'...In fact, all previous peace initiatives have got nowhere for a reason that neither Bush nor the EU has had the political courage to acknowledge. That reason is the consensus reached long ago by Israel’s decision-making elites that Israel will never allow the emergence of a Palestinian state which denies it effective military and economic control of the West Bank. To be sure, Israel would allow – indeed, it would insist on – the creation of a number of isolated enclaves that Palestinians could call a state, but only in order to prevent the creation of a binational state in which Palestinians would be the majority.
The Middle East peace process may well be the most spectacular deception in modern diplomatic history. Since the failed Camp David summit of 2000, and actually well before it, Israel’s interest in a peace process – other than for the purpose of obtaining Palestinian and international acceptance of the status quo – has been a fiction that has served primarily to provide cover for its systematic confiscation of Palestinian land and an occupation whose goal, according to the former IDF chief of staff Moshe Ya’alon, is ‘to sear deep into the consciousness of Palestinians that they are a defeated people’. In his reluctant embrace of the Oslo Accords, and his distaste for the settlers, Yitzhak Rabin may have been the exception to this, but even he did not entertain a return of Palestinian territory beyond the so-called Allon Plan, which allowed Israel to retain the Jordan Valley and other parts of the West Bank.
Anyone familiar with Israel’s relentless confiscations of Palestinian territory – based on a plan devised, overseen and implemented by Ariel Sharon – knows that the objective of its settlement enterprise in the West Bank has been largely achieved. Gaza, the evacuation of whose settlements was so naively hailed by the international community as the heroic achievement of a man newly committed to an honourable peace with the Palestinians, was intended to serve as the first in a series of Palestinian bantustans. Gaza’s situation shows us what these bantustans will look like if their residents do not behave as Israel wants.
Israel’s disingenuous commitment to a peace process and a two-state solution is precisely what has made possible its open-ended occupation and dismemberment of Palestinian territory. And the Quartet – with the EU, the UN secretary general and Russia obediently following Washington’s lead – has collaborated with and provided cover for this deception by accepting Israel’s claim that it has been unable to find a deserving Palestinian peace partner.
Just one year after the 1967 war, Moshe Dayan, a former IDF chief of staff who at the time was minister of defence, described his plan for the future as ‘the current reality in the territories’. ‘The plan,’ he said, ‘is being implemented in actual fact. What exists today must remain as a permanent arrangement in the West Bank.’ Ten years later, at a conference in Tel Aviv, Dayan said: ‘The question is not “What is the solution?” but “How do we live without a solution?”’ Geoffrey Aronson, who has monitored the settlement enterprise from its beginnings, summarises the situation as follows:
'Living without a solution, then as now, was understood by Israel as the key to maximising the benefits of conquest while minimising the burdens and dangers of retreat or formal annexation. This commitment to the status quo, however, disguised a programme of expansion that generations of Israeli leaders supported as enabling, through Israeli settlement, the dynamic transformation of the territories and the expansion of effective Israeli sovereignty to the Jordan River.'
In an interview in Ha’aretz in 2004, Dov Weissglas, chef de cabinet to the then prime minister, Ariel Sharon, described the strategic goal of Sharon’s diplomacy as being to secure the support of the White House and Congress for Israeli measures that would place the peace process and Palestinian statehood in ‘formaldehyde’. It is a fiendishly appropriate metaphor: formaldehyde uniquely prevents the deterioration of dead bodies, and sometimes creates the illusion that they are still alive. Weissglas explains that the purpose of Sharon’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, and the dismantling of several isolated settlements in the West Bank, was to gain US acceptance of Israel’s unilateralism, not to set a precedent for an eventual withdrawal from the West Bank. The limited withdrawals were intended to provide Israel with the political room to deepen and widen its presence in the West Bank, and that is what they achieved. In a letter to Sharon, Bush wrote: ‘In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli population centres, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949.’
In a recent interview in Ha’aretz, James Wolfensohn, who was the Quartet’s representative at the time of the Gaza disengagement, said that Israel and the US had systematically undermined the agreement he helped forge in 2005 between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, and had instead turned Gaza into a vast prison. The official behind this, he told Ha’aretz, was Elliott Abrams, the deputy national security adviser. ‘Every aspect’ of the agreement Wolfensohn had brokered ‘was abrogated’.
Another recent interview in Ha’aretz, with Haggai Alon, who was a senior adviser to Amir Peretz at the Ministry of Defence, is even more revealing. Alon accuses the IDF (whose most senior officers increasingly are themselves settlers) of working clandestinely to further the settlers’ interests. The IDF, Alon says, ignores the Supreme Court’s instructions about the path the so-called security fence should follow, instead ‘setting a route that will not enable the establishment of a Palestinian state’. Alon told Ha’aretz that when in 2005 politicians signed an agreement with the Palestinians to ease restrictions on Palestinians travelling in the territories (part of the deal that Wolfensohn had worked on), the IDF eased them for settlers instead. For Palestinians, the number of checkpoints doubled. According to Alon, the IDF is ‘carrying out an apartheid policy’ that is emptying Hebron of Arabs and Judaising (his term) the Jordan Valley, while it co-operates openly with the settlers in an attempt to make a two-state solution impossible.
A new UN map of the West Bank, produced by the Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs, gives a comprehensive picture of the situation. Israeli civilian and military infrastructure has rendered 40 per cent of the territory off limits to Palestinians. The rest of the territory, including major population centres such as Nablus and Jericho, is split into enclaves; movement between them is restricted by 450 roadblocks and 70 manned checkpoints. The UN found that what remains is an area very similar to that set aside for the Palestinian population in Israeli security proposals in the aftermath of the 1967 war. It also found that changes now underway to the infrastructure of the territories – including a network of highways that bypass and isolate Palestinian towns – would serve to formalise the de facto cantonisation of the West Bank.
These are the realities on the ground that the uninformed and/or cynical blather in Jerusalem, Washington and Brussels – about waiting for Palestinians to reform their institutions, democratise their culture, dismantle the ‘infrastructures of terror’ and halt all violence and incitement before peace negotiations can begin – seeks to drown out. Given the vast power imbalance between Israel and the Palestinians – not to mention the vast preponderance of diplomatic support enjoyed by Israel from precisely those countries that one would have expected to compensate diplomatically for the military imbalance – nothing will change for the better without the US, the EU and other international actors finally facing up to what have long been the fundamental impediments to peace.
These impediments include the assumption, implicit in Israel’s occupation policy, that if no peace agreement is reached, the ‘default setting’ of UN Security Council Resolution 242 is the indefinite continuation of Israel’s occupation. If this reading were true, the resolution would actually be inviting an occupying power that wishes to retain its adversary’s territory to do so simply by means of avoiding peace talks – which is exactly what Israel has been doing. In fact, the introductory statement to Resolution 242 declares that territory cannot be acquired by war, implying that if the parties cannot reach agreement, the occupier must withdraw to the status quo ante: that, logically, is 242’s default setting. Had there been a sincere intention on Israel’s part to withdraw from the territories, surely forty years should have been more than enough time in which to reach an agreement.
Israel’s contention has long been that since no Palestinian state existed before the 1967 war, there is no recognised border to which Israel can withdraw, because the pre-1967 border was merely an armistice line. Moreover, since Resolution 242 calls for a ‘just and lasting peace’ that will allow ‘every state in the area [to] live in security’, Israel holds that it must be allowed to change the armistice line, either bilaterally or unilaterally, to make it secure before it ends the occupation. This is a specious argument for many reasons, but principally because UN General Assembly Partition Resolution 181 of 1947, which established the Jewish state’s international legitimacy, also recognised the remaining Palestinian territory outside the new state’s borders as the equally legitimate patrimony of Palestine’s Arab population on which they were entitled to establish their own state, and it mapped the borders of that territory with great precision. Resolution 181’s affirmation of the right of Palestine’s Arab population to national self-determination was based on normative law and the democratic principles that grant statehood to the majority population. (At the time, Arabs constituted two-thirds of the population in Palestine.) This right does not evaporate because of delays in its implementation.
In the course of a war launched by Arab countries that sought to prevent the implementation of the UN partition resolution, Israel enlarged its territory by 50 per cent. If it is illegal to acquire territory as a result of war, then the question now cannot conceivably be how much additional Palestinian territory Israel may confiscate, but rather how much of the territory it acquired in the course of the war of 1948 it is allowed to retain. At the very least, if ‘adjustments’ are to be made to the 1949 armistice line, these should be made on Israel’s side of that line, not the Palestinians’.
Clearly, the obstacle to resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict has not been a dearth of peace initiatives or peace envoys. Nor has it been the violence to which Palestinians have resorted in their struggle to rid themselves of Israel’s occupation, even when that violence has despicably targeted Israel’s civilian population. It is not to sanction the murder of civilians to observe that such violence occurs, sooner or later, in most situations in which a people’s drive for national self-determination is frustrated by an occupying power. Indeed, Israel’s own struggle for national independence was no exception. According to the historian Benny Morris, in this conflict it was the Irgun that first targeted civilians. In Righteous Victims, Morris writes that the upsurge of Arab terrorism in 1937 ‘triggered a wave of Irgun bombings against Arab crowds and buses, introducing a new dimension to the conflict.’ While in the past Arabs had ‘sniped at cars and pedestrians and occasionally lobbed a grenade, often killing or injuring a few bystanders or passengers’, now ‘for the first time, massive bombs were placed in crowded Arab centres, and dozens of people were indiscriminately murdered and maimed.’ Morris notes that ‘this “innovation” soon found Arab imitators.’
Underlying Israel’s efforts to retain the occupied territories is the fact that it has never really considered the West Bank as occupied territory, despite its pro forma acceptance of that designation. Israelis see the Palestinian areas as ‘contested’ territory to which they have claims no less compelling than the Palestinians, international law and UN resolutions notwithstanding. This is a view that was made explicit for the first time by Sharon in an op-ed essay published on the front page of the New York Times on 9 June 2002. The use of the biblical designations of Judea and Samaria to describe the territories, terms which were formerly employed only by the Likud but are now de rigueur for Labour Party stalwarts as well, is a reflection of a common Israeli view. That the former prime minister Ehud Barak (now Olmert’s defence minister) endlessly describes the territorial proposals he made at the Camp David summit as expressions of Israel’s ‘generosity’, and never as an acknowledgment of Palestinian rights, is another example of this mindset. Indeed, the term ‘Palestinian rights’ seems not to exist in Israel’s lexicon.
The problem is not, as Israelis often claim, that Palestinians do not know how to compromise. (Another former prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, famously complained that ‘Palestinians take and take while Israel gives and gives.’) That is an indecent charge, since the Palestinians made much the most far-reaching compromise of all when the PLO formally accepted the legitimacy of Israel within the 1949 armistice border. With that concession, Palestinians ceded their claim to more than half the territory that the UN’s partition resolution had assigned to its Arab inhabitants. They have never received any credit for this wrenching concession, made years before Israel agreed that Palestinians had a right to statehood in any part of Palestine. The notion that further border adjustments should be made at the expense of the 22 per cent of the territory that remains to the Palestinians is deeply offensive to them, and understandably so.
Nonetheless, the Palestinians agreed at the Camp David summit to adjustments to the pre-1967 border that would allow large numbers of West Bank settlers – about 70 per cent – to remain within the Jewish state, provided they received comparable territory on Israel’s side of the border. Barak rejected this. To be sure, in the past the Palestinian demand of a right of return was a serious obstacle to a peace agreement. But the Arab League’s peace initiative of 2002 leaves no doubt that Arab countries will accept a nominal and symbolic return of refugees into Israel in numbers approved by Israel, with the overwhelming majority repatriated in the new Palestinian state, their countries of residence, or in other countries prepared to receive them.
It is the failure of the international community to reject (other than in empty rhetoric) Israel’s notion that the occupation and the creation of ‘facts on the ground’ can go on indefinitely, so long as there is no agreement that is acceptable to Israel, that has defeated all previous peace initiatives and the efforts of all peace envoys. Future efforts will meet the same fate if this fundamental issue is not addressed.
What is required for a breakthrough is the adoption by the Security Council of a resolution affirming the following: 1. Changes to the pre-1967 situation can be made only by agreement between the parties. Unilateral measures will not receive international recognition. 2. The default setting of Resolution 242, reiterated by Resolution 338, the 1973 ceasefire resolution, is a return by Israel’s occupying forces to the pre-1967 border. 3. If the parties do not reach agreement within 12 months (the implementation of agreements will obviously take longer), the default setting will be invoked by the Security Council. The Security Council will then adopt its own terms for an end to the conflict, and will arrange for an international force to enter the occupied territories to help establish the rule of law, assist Palestinians in building their institutions, assure Israel’s security by preventing cross-border violence, and monitor and oversee the implementation of terms for an end to the conflict.
If the US and its allies were to take a stand forceful enough to persuade Israel that it will not be allowed to make changes to the pre-1967 situation except by agreement with the Palestinians in permanent status negotiations, there would be no need for complicated peace formulas or celebrity mediators to get a peace process underway. The only thing that an envoy such as Blair can do to put the peace process back on track is to speak the truth about the real impediment to peace. This would also be a historic contribution to the Jewish state, since Israel’s only hope of real long-term security is to have a successful Palestinian state as its neighbour.
138-9: Yep, sure was a close call!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/no ... ?fb=native
'...the fact that Israel won the support of just nine countries, including the US, at the UN has caused a degree of alarm inside the Jewish state.
Israeli officials were shocked at the scale of European support for the Palestinian resolution, with France switching sides and Germany abandoning a pledge to vote against. Among EU nations, only the Czech Republic supported Israel.'
Apart from Israel and the US, those voting against were Canada, the Czech Republic, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau and Panama.
The Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, all in the pocket of the U.S, but soon to all be under water. What a shame. So the votes against will be reduced to approx 4 the next time the U.N General Assembly casts it's annual vote on the 'Peaceful Settlement of the Question of Palestine', which includes these tenets for achieving a peaceful settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict: (1) “Affirming the principle of the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war”; (2) “Affirming also the illegality of the Israeli settlements in the territory occupied since 1967 and of Israeli actions aimed at changing the status of Jerusalem”; (3) “Stresses the need for: (a) The realization of the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people, primarily the right to self-determination; (b) The withdrawal of Israel from the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967”; (4) “Also stresses the need for resolving the problem of the Palestine refugees in conformity with its resolution 194 (III) of 11 December 1948.”
Here's a summary of how the vote has played out for the past decade and more:
1997 [155-2-3] Israel, United States
2000 [149-2-3] Israel, United States
2002 [160-4-3] Israel, United States , Marshall Islands, Micronesia
2005 [156-6-9] Israel, United States , Australia, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Palau
2007 [161-7-5] Israel, United States , Australia, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau
2010 [165-7-4] Israel, United States, Australia, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/no ... ?fb=native
'For months, Israeli diplomats worked to persuade EU governments to, at the least, abstain in the hope that the Jewish state would be able to deride a Palestinian victory as delivered by less than democratic regimes.
Israel's position was supported by [...] Tony Blair, envoy for the Quartet of the US, EU, Russia and the UN, which is attempting to kick-start peace talks.'
They would undermine Israel's international reputation and create doubts about its stated commitment to achieving peace with the Palestinians. The UK strongly advises the Israeli government to reverse this decision. The window for a two-state solution is closing, and we need urgent efforts by the parties and by the international community to achieve a return to negotiations, not actions which will make that harder."
Meanwhile, one of six Palestinians who were shot by Israeli troops on Friday, while protesting at the Gaza Strip boundary fence died this morning, according to hospital officials. The 21-year-old man had been demonstrating near the southern town of Rafah.
Seems to me Israel has now been revealed for the dangerous rogue state that it is. Too many people now know the truth about this country, despite it's massive PR campaign and it's blanket support from the U.S. The U.S government's pretence at being an honest broker in this conflict has also now been exposed for the huge sham that it is. I predict a change in U.S policy now in order to prevent any greater embarrassment and isolation on the World stage.
Israel's days as an international pariah are numbered.
I don't personally understand what my country stands to benefit from taking sides with the Israelis if they weren't sincere in their statements.
Fargo 2003
Winnipeg 2005
Winnipeg 2011
St. Paul 2014
Fargo 2003
Winnipeg 2005
Winnipeg 2011
St. Paul 2014
precedent hugh. so no it is not any bit presumptuous of us. theyre trying to grab as much territory as they can.. and they will do so in violation of international law. its a big fuck you not only to the palestinians but also to the international community.
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
Israel's illegal settlement expansion hasn't stopped at any point in the past 45 years. It didn't stop during the Oslo peace accords - in flagrant breach of those agreements (in fact it escalated) - and it hasn't stopped at any time since.
Hilary Clinton: "Americans honor Israel as a homeland dreamed of for generations and finally achieved by pioneering men and women in my lifetime. What threatens Israel threatens America. What strengthens Israel strengthens us."
Since the 'ceasefire' was 'effectual', Israel has violated Palestinian airspace, waters, harassed, arrested, shot and killed Gazans. Israel systematically and consistently breaks these ceasefires.
Will the BBC report Israel's entirely unjustifiable ceasefire-breaking? Why does the world not understand who is the aggressor?"