JEDDAH, 6 April 2003 — Counterintuitive though it may seem while bombs and missiles rain down on Iraq and threats of “transfer” hover over Palestine, now may be the ideal time for the State of Palestine to apply for — and obtain — full United Nations membership.
The State of Palestine was proclaimed, within all the Palestinian territories occupied during the 1967 war, on November 15, 1988 at the historic Palestine National Council meeting in Algiers which formally endorsed the two-state solution and recognized Israel within the 78 percent of historic Palestine which Israel had controlled prior to the 1967 war.
Within two months, the State of Palestine was recognized diplomatically by over 100 other sovereign states. Today, it is recognized by roughly two-thirds of UN member states. Notwithstanding the subsequent Oslo accords, the state has never been renounced or legally ceased to exist.
Indeed, in July 1998, by a 124-4 vote in the General Assembly, the “permanent observer” status of “Palestine” at the UN was upgraded to a unique and unprecedented level, with rights and privileges of participation that had previously been exclusive to member states.
The Palestinian Authority, an anomalous creature of the Oslo accords, legally ceased to exist on May 4, 1999, the date on which the “interim period” pursuant to these accords ended. No one having an interest in insisting upon this legal point, no one did. However, since Ariel Sharon’s onslaught during the spring of 2002, the “Authority” has effectively ceased to exist as a practical force on the ground as well as in legal theory.
The State of Palestine, which does not require a second proclaiming, is available to fill the vacuum.
After his return to Palestine in 1994, Yasser Arafat listed three titles under his signature on his Arabic correspondence — President of the State of Palestine, Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization and President of the “Palestinian National Authority”. However, the state was de-emphasized and, publicly, spoken of more as an aspiration than as the legal and diplomatic fact which it actually was and still is.
There were two good strategic reasons for this.
First, the Palestinian leadership believed that discretion and peaceful negotiations were more likely to produce a warm and open peace based on the two-state solution than thrusting the Palestinian state aggressively in the face of an Israeli state which, after all, still occupied militarily all of Palestine.
Second, the Palestinian leadership believed that, at each point when bringing the state out of the closet was a serious prospect (indeed, on several occasions when President Arafat had solemnly promised to do so), a US veto of UN membership was highly likely and might make the Palestinian position worse than before.
Neither of these concerns is valid today. A warm and open peace is no longer conceivable. It is now almost universally accepted that separation based on the two-state solution and on the pre-June 1967 borders is essential for the peace and security of both peoples. When, in March 2002, the Arab League dramatically reaffirmed this fundamental formula in its Beirut Declaration, inspired by the Saudi Arabian initiative, almost all governments other than Israel and the US publicly embraced it.
Most importantly, with President Bush having repeatedly spoken of his “vision” of a Palestinian state, with the US having so recently expressed outrage over an allegedly “unreasonable” veto threat from France, Russia and China and with the entire Muslim world seething with unprecedented anti-American fury, is it conceivable that the US would veto a Palestinian UN membership application if one were submitted now?
If Palestine, within its internationally accepted pre-June 1967 borders, were a UN member state, not simply “the occupied territories” and no longer even arguably “disputed”, for how much longer could Israel maintain its occupation, which even Kofi Annan has publicly branded “illegal”? The writing would clearly be on the wall for all to see. The end of the occupation, even if not imminent, would instantly become only a question of “when”, no longer of “whether”. No change currently imaginable is more likely than a mutual realization of this inevitability to reverse the cycle of violence between Israelis and Palestinians.
The long-awaited but still unpublished “road map for Middle East peace” leads nowhere and has never been intended by the US to lead anywhere.
Particularly after President Bush’s recent public statement that he expects to receive comments on it from Israel (which has about 100 ready), it should be transparently clear that this “road map” is simply another opportunity for Israel to delay, feigning interest in peace while building more settlements and bypass roads and, generally, making a viable Palestinian state even less imaginable.
Dark though the skies may appear, now is not a time for despair, supine resignation and groveling for crumbs. Now is the time for the Palestinian leadership to seize the initiative, change the agenda and do something concrete and constructive to make the end of the occupation inevitable and to hasten the day of its end.
• John V. Whitbeck is an international lawyer who writes frequently on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
