Posted on 11/30/2009 5:35:17 AM PST by SJackson
Many shook their heads in disbelief when senior Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat recently declared that if Israel didn't agree to a total settlement construction freeze, the Palestinians would seek UN recognition of a Palestinian state within the borders of the 1948 armistice lines. Even the European Union chairman said the process doesn't work that way. A state has to exist before it is recognized, not the other way around. And Israel still controlled the disputed areas.
Similarly, while Palestinian insistence on a total freeze of settlement construction in advance of a resumption of negotiations may be viewed as a multi-layered tactical maneuver, ultimately it makes little sense.
So it might be useful to view the Palestinian efforts not as amateurish but rather as a window on their real thinking. They do not really want a negotiated settlement - they want to bypass negotiations.
The Palestinians have chafed under the rules of the game from the outset. The centerpiece of negotiations has always been UN Resolution 242, which was adopted in the aftermath of after the Six-Day War and calls for negotiations to determine the extent of Israeli withdrawals from lands seized during that conflict. So the Palestinian position that it is a concession to even negotiate with Israel doesn't hold water. Advertisement
Nor does the Palestinian claim of an "illegal occupation" withstand scrutiny. For while it is a principle of international law that land cannot be acquired through war, a clear distinction is drawn between a war of aggression and a defensive war. And there is the inconvenient fact that a good portion of the land claimed by the Palestinians was largely seized by the Arab states in the war of aggression against Israel after the partition plan was announced in 1948.
So in many respects the land at issue did not "belong" to any Arab state - certainly not to the Palestinians - when it was seized by Israel in 1967. Moreover, Resolution 242 spoke only in terms of the rights and obligations of "states" - like Israel and Jordan - and not to non-states like the Palestinian national movement.
The Palestinians will also have to stretch to make their point about "refugees." They act as if there is a legal right of a Palestinian "return" that must be a starting point for any consideration of the issue. Yet the only reference to it in Resolution 242 is of the necessity of "achieving a just settlement of the refugee problem." It simply does not provide for a vested right of return.
In light of this, it is not hard to see why the Palestinians would rather end-run a negotiating process where these issues will emerge rather than seek a solution based on politics and hard bargaining.
The lawyer in Barack Obama should enable him to see through all of this.
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The lawyer in Barack Obama should enable him to see through all of this.
I don't know, a pro-palestinian lawyer might consider it a good tactic.
Israel should just deport their Pali population to Gaza, then make the wall higher. Yes, the world would scream, but they scream anyway.
Or to Syria and Egypt where most of their families came from to begin with. That is where they WANTED to go after the 1948 war, but the Arab countries left them in refugee camps as a pawn to play against Israel.
I wish we could send all our radical muslims plus CAIR to Gaza City, T’would be nice to have them b*tching and moaning all in the same place.
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