Mondoweiss Online Newsletter

• ‘J Street’ urges Israel lobby group to sever ties with Elliott Abrams’s wife Rachel for ‘unhinged hate speech’ against Palestinians

• Off the coast of Gaza

• World condemns Israel’s Jerusalem landgrab, while US says it is ‘within the frame of our policy concern’

• ‘NYT’ features Amy Goodman and her antiwar record

• The Global War on Halloween (fake head not included)

• Israeli military and settlers interrupt olive harvest celebration in Hebron

• For neoconservatives, Israel is a foreign and domestic issue

• The conditional freedom of Palestinian prisoners deported to Gaza

• My wife forswears the groovy Ipad forever

• The unbearable absence of being: Palestinians and statehood

‘J Street’ urges Israel lobby group to sever ties with Elliott Abrams’s wife Rachel for ‘unhinged hate speech’ against Palestinians

Oct 24, 2011

Philip Weiss

That hateful Rachel Abrams rant against Palestinians continues to resonate, in large part because she’s the wife of Elliott Abrams. You know that the neocons are on the run because J Street, which usually avoids hot topics, has issued a sharp condemnation of the remarks, saying that they put Abrams and the Emergency Committee for Israel outside the “pro-Israel” community. Well I’ll take anything I can get to push the neocons out of the discourse. Jeremy Ben-Ami:

“J Street is appalled by the unhinged rant filled with incitement and hate speech posted this past week by the founder of the Emergency Committee for Israel, Rachel Abrams, on her personal blog….

It is bad enough that the Emergency Committee for Israel already has a proven track record of making Israel a wedge issue in American politics. If they hope to have any credible claim to a place in the pro-Israel community, they must cut ties with Ms. Abrams immediately.

If they don’t, we call on politicians and community leaders to refuse any further connection with ECI.”

I see that J Street doesn’t like that the Emergency Committee has politicized support for Israel. That’s the part I like: getting Israel into the political debate…

Off the coast of Gaza
Oct 24, 2011

Radhika Sainath

(All photos: Radhika Sainath)

I saw an Israeli naval warship for the first time yesterday, a concrete monster the color of ash, guzzling up the Mediterranean and spurting it out in its wake.

I rose early to go out with the Oliva, a small white boat used by Civil Peace Service (CPS) Gaza to monitor the Israeli navy’s conduct vis-à-vis Palestinian fisherman.

My colleague Joe and I walked across Gaza’s sandy shore, past a dozen wooden boats painted in bright shades of pink, blue, green and yellow and then jumped onto the Oliva. CPS’s white and blue flag billowed as Captain Salah started the boat’s engine and we pulled out of the harbor. Burgundy carpets with geometric designs lay across the boat’s floor. Three orange life jackets sat within an arm’s reach.

“Oliva to base, we are now leaving the port,” Joe radioed.

Because of weather conditions, we didn’t get started until about 8:20 a.m. Joe showed me how to work the radio and we were off. Dozens of small wooden boats – hasakas as they call them here – docked in Gaza’s peaceful harbor floated above the water, and if I didn’t know better, I may have felt like I was on a Middle Eastern pleasure cruise.

“So this may sound obvious, but if the Israelis water cannon you, don’t just stand there,” Joe informed me. “Duck,” he said in a matter of fact tone. “Oh, and go to the front of the boat, they generally target the engine.”

We sped towards the infamous 3 nautical mile line – another unilaterally-imposed “no go” zone imposed by Israel in June 2007 – cutting through the waves. Under the Oslo Accords, specifically under the Gaza-Jericho Agreement of 1994, Palestinians are permitted to fish 20 nautical miles off the coast of Gaza. Israel reduced this amount in 2002 to 12 nautical miles, and began enforcing a 6 nautical mile limit after Shalit’s capture in 2006.

“How are you feeling?” Joe asked me. At least one other international human rights observer had gotten sea sick on her first journey, and had asked if I would like to take something in advance of the journey for sea sickness.

“Oh I’m totally fine,” I responded. This was nothing. I mean the Mediterranean — it wasn’t even an ocean, how bad could it be? I declined the pills. And besides, I was tough. I sat back on the seats and chatted with Saleh for a bit in Arabic. He had 25 years of experience on the sea and told me the name of his village in what is now Israel from where his family was pushed out of in 1948.

At about 2 nautical miles I checked our position. We could see the Israeli naval ship moving towards five hasakas, headed our way. We continued forward, and then stopped our engine as one of them pulled up beside us.

“The Israelis shot live fire at us and we came back,” one of the men on the blue, yellow and white boat said. All of the hasakas came towards us, as fast as their small engines would be allow.

We all floated around for a while, until the navy moved away and the fisherman head back out. The Oliva straddled the 3 mile line, engines off, monitoring the situation. The fishermen explained what I had already read, that there were no fish to catch within 3 miles from the shore. The fish were 5, 6, 7 miles out. And so, the fishermen went out every day, sometimes fishing within 3 miles, sometimes going out further, in an attempt to ply their trade.

We watched as the Israeli navy played the game of cat and mouse with the working fisherman of Gaza, shooting at them when they came out, then moving south to shoot at another set of fisherman, then coming back towards us, and back again. Some of these fishermen had been detained by the Israeli navy in the past, taken to Ashod and then released, their boats damaged or confiscated.

“There are two more Israeli ships farther north,” Saleh explained.

I jotted down some notes, and, suddenly felt a wave a nausea. Taking notes was making me sick. I lay down. Joe periodically radioed the base to report our coordinates. At times, we could hear the crackle of the radio as the Israelis talked amongst themselves, sometimes in Hebrew, sometimes in English. I tried to recall the Hebrew I had learned years ago, but that too, made me sick.

“The navy is back,” Saleh reported. “Look they are very close to the fisherman.” I sat up and tried to take a few photos and some video footage, inhaling the engine’s fumes as the Oliva rocked in the sea. I lay back down. I was the world’s worst human rights observer at sea.

Saleh continued to explain the situation in Arabic, but my brain stopped working. I crawled up, leaned over the side of the boat and gagged a few times. And then, well, my breakfast came up. All of it. And dinner from the night before as well.

As my head dangled over the side of the boat, I wondered if the Israeli navy was watching us with their binoculars. Didn’t they have anything better to do then harass these poor fisherman? I mean really, the navy is supposed to be one of the most prestigious units for Israelis, and here they were spending all day, every day chasing after skinny fishermen riding in tiny pastel-colored wooden boats. Gilad Shalit was free, so really, why the 3 mile limit? Were they worried that Palestinians were going to fling sardines at them using 18h century technology?

After about ten minutes I came back up. Captain Saleh had started the boat and he let me drive it for a few minutes, since apparently that cures sea sickness. It did. Around 11 a.m. the fishermen head back and so did we.

Back on shore, we saw the group that had initially reported the gunfire and they showed us their meager catch of silvery fish – selling for about 20 shekels ($4) a kilo. They would be back out again tomorrow, Israeli gunfire and all.

Radhika Sainath is a civil rights attorney and a volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement

World condemns Israel’s Jerusalem landgrab, while US says it is ‘within the frame of our policy concern’
Oct 24, 2011

Philip Weiss

Israel is pressing ahead with its plans to colonize more of the land between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, a settlement that cordons off Jerusalem from the Palestinians. The Givat Hamatos project destroys the two-state solution–even in the eyes of ardent supporters.

Turkey has “strongly condemned” the plans for making the occupation permanent. Britain is“dismayed” by the plan. The EU says flatly that the new settlement is “unacceptable.” Francehas condemned the Israeli decision:

France condemns the unacceptable decision taken by Jerusalem city hall to create a new settlement at Givat-Hamatos in East Jerusalem. She points out again that colonisation, whether in the West Bank or in East Jerusalem is illegal under the terms of international law.

And the U.S.? The State Department has failed to address the settlement in the last week. But here is spokesperson Victoria Nuland at her press briefing of ten days ago. She will only talk about the matter hypothetically:

QUESTION: Yes. Victoria, could you comment on a report by the Israeli press that the Netanyahu government is gearing up to announce a massive, massive settlement construction on the eve of the Quartet meeting if it ever takes place?

MS. NULAND: We are aware of these reports, plans for the construction of additional housing in East Jerusalem. You’re talking about the housing in Givat Hamatos, right?

QUESTION: Right.

MS. NULAND: Our position on this would not change from what we have said in the past, which is that we believe such actions would be counterproductive to our efforts to resume direct talks between the parties.

QUESTION: Do you think such announcement of such plans is actually intended to sort of sabotage any likelihood for a Quartet meeting?

MS. NULAND: I’m not going to speak to that one way or the other. The Israelis have said that they are ready to come to such a meeting, and we take them at their word.

QUESTION: So forgive me. This has not yet happened —

MS. NULAND: Correct.

QUESTION: — this announcement, right?

MS. NULAND: Correct, right.

QUESTION: So it’s a hypothetical question at the moment?

MS. NULAND: Correct…. This construction, were it to happen, would be within the frame of our policy concern about construction of this type. So it’s not –

QUESTION: All right. Well, would –

MS. NULAND: Our policy isn’t hypothetical on this issue.

‘NYT’ features Amy Goodman and her antiwar record
Oct 24, 2011

Philip Weiss

Yet another sign of the seachange in the political culture. The New York Times runs a favorable profile of Amy Goodman‘s show Democracy Now!, by Brian Stelter:

“What drove us was telling stories we felt were being ignored, misreported or underreported by corporate media outlets,” Mr. [Jeremy] Scahill said.

The program slowly gained more stations and, amid a dispute with Pacifica, which was later resolved, it established itself as a nonprofit news organization in 2001. The week of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the program began to be simulcast on television. Since then, Ms. Goodman said, “the growth has just been phenomenal.”

While many media outlets were faulted for playing down antiwar protests after the attacks, “Democracy Now!” covered such events extensively.

Some fans as well as critics describe “Democracy Now!” as progressive, but Ms. Goodman rejects that label and prefers to call it a global newscast that has “people speaking for themselves.” She criticized networks in the United States that have brought on professional pundits, rather than actual protesters, to discuss the Occupy protests.

Last week, no United States television network covered the filing of a lawsuit in Canada by four men who said they had been tortured during the Bush administration and who are seeking Mr. Bush’s arrest and prosecution. But one of the men, Murat Kurnaz, a former prisoner at Guantánamo Bay, was interviewed at length by Ms. Goodman and her co-host, Juan Gonzalez.

The Global War on Halloween (fake head not included)
Oct 24, 2011

Adam Horowitz

From Buycostumes.com:

Ready to take down some terrorists?

You’ll look like a part of a proud moment in America’s history in the Navy Seal Adult Costume which includes: A camoflage bodysuit with attached knee pad details, black hood and a faux armor vest with American flag patch on the chest.

Available in Adult Standard Size: One Size Fits Most.
Includes: Bodysuit, Hood, Vest.
Does not include gun, fake head or shoes.

Thought experiment: Imagine that fake head being any other ethnicity (and no, “zombie” doesn’t count).

(h/t The Awl)

Israeli military and settlers interrupt olive harvest celebration in Hebron
Oct 24, 2011

Badia Dwaik

settlers and Israeli military interrupt the Olive Harvest. (Photo: Badia Dwaik)

Saturday was the gathering of many students from Al-Quds Open University, local families andYouth Against Settlements for the annual olive harvesting in Tel Al-Rumeda, Hebron.

The event was held in the land surrounding the Al- Sumood Centre on the beautiful hill overlooking the city. The coordinator of the youth movement and member of the council of students Murad Amro, invited the collection of students, who arrived in their droves, donning Palestinian state scarves and optimistic excitement.

Youth Against Settlements (YAS) are a grassroots organisation who’s main objective is to engage the community in non-violent resistance, actions and to support and protect the local community and families against the abuse and provocations they endure daily from the settlers and Israeli Occupation Force (IOF), who are illegally residing in the centre of the city. YAS involve the locals in many community events, from teaching international languages, training in media to life skills and protests, one of which involved changing the name of Shuhada to Apartheid Street.

Olive harvesting is an ancient tradition and one which not only benefits Palestinians through stimulating local economy and supporting families in their steadfastness, but furthermore since the occupation of the country, it has political value. Since 2000, 1.3 million olive trees have been burnt, cut down and destroyed, so therefore it is of upmost importance for locals and internationals to support the families and to protect their land from such attacks.

settlers

Today started in a celebratory tone, a peaceful and defiant gathering of students and activists from YAS with families from the local community. Upon congregating in front of the centre, they were quickly dispersed into groups, each focussing on the olive trees in the surrounding area, a social event which included many men, women and children. However this was stopped short when the settlers arrived on their land with the IOF.

The abuse the Palestinians endured today was tantamount to that which the locals put up with daily, but the most important factor is that they were not isolated. The abuses included but were not inclusive to the following:

– A group of settler children gathered to throw stones at a family collecting olives from the bottom of the hill. Upon confrontation by a member of YAS, the head of the settlements Baruch Marzel snatched the Palestinian flag from him, threw it to the ground and stamped on it.
– The activist who confronted him endured a torent of abuse. When others tried to film this, they were aggressively shoved away by the army and told to shut up and leave.
– The IOF in one instance confiscated an internationals passport, taking it from her sight and not explaining why.
– Baruch Marzel ordered an Israeli police officer to confiscate the youths ID’s and detain them outside for fifteen minutes without explanation. When confronted by international ISMers and activists they responded by stating that having a gathering on the land was illegal. One officer commented that according to them he was God and to shut up and go away as they are on his land.
– The IOF followed a student, provoked him and performed a body search, when internationals intervened, they pushed them away and wouldn’t allow the photographers to film them.
– Two young settlers entered the Palestinians land. A member of YAS asked the soldiers to take them away as it is forbidden to enter without permission. The children refused and fought the soldiers.
– They invited Baruch Marzel to provoke the youths in a non-direct way which ultimately would prevent them from olive harvesting.

In the midst of these violent and abusive acts by the IOF and settlers, the youths showed their steadfastness, optimism and sense of community in the face of their oppressors, by not pertaining to provocations but rather engaging in non-voilent resistance, from singing to upholding a sense of camaraderie and recording these abuses.

YAS will announce all upcoming actions and olive harvesting in the coming days. Please check the website www.youthagainstsettlements.org or facebook youth against settlements.

Badia Dwaik is Deputy Coordinator of Youth Against Settlements.

For neoconservatives, Israel is a foreign and domestic issue
Oct 24, 2011

Adam Horowitz

From Daniel Luban’s n+1 book review Kristol Palace:

As Balint shows [in Running Commentary: The Contentious Magazine That Transformed the Jewish Left into the Neoconservative Right], Commentary and the New York Intellectuals were rather ambivalent and lukewarm about Israel in the forties and fifties, and few of the original neoconservatives were committed Zionists; in this regard they were typical of American Jewry as a whole, which did not fully embrace Israel until after its victory in the 1967 Six-Day War. The neoconservative turn coincided with the critical decade following the 1967 war that saw the Yom Kippur attack on Israel in 1973 and the UN “Zionism is racism” resolution in 1975—a decade in which American Jews became deeply invested in the fate of Israel as they came to perceive it as under siege. Not all neoconservatives were Jewish, but the gentiles among them, like Jeane Kirkpatrick and Scoop Jackson, were as fervent in their backing of Israel as the movement’s Jewish majority.

Concern for Israel alone cannot explain why the neoconservatives turned against liberalism; after all, the Democratic Party in recent decades has been as indulgent a patron of Israel as the Republicans. But the neocons drew deeper lessons from the Arab-Israeli conflict about the indispensability of American power and the uselessness of international institutions. While liberals thought the conflict called for better diplomacy, the neocons blamed diplomacy itself, and a liberalism that was too impotent and equivocating to stand up for Israel. Their contempt for the UN and for European opinion in part can be traced to the view that the UN was actively hostile to Israeli interests and Europe insufficiently zealous in defense of them. American hegemony, in the neocon imagination, became the only reliable guarantor of Israel’s existence, and a US retreat into isolationism meant the abandonment of Israeli Jews to the same fate as their European predecessors.

As a matter of political strategy, if not ideological priority, supporting Israel meant supporting American involvement in the rest of the world. “Can anyone believe,” Irving Kristol warned in 1984, “that an American government which, in righteous moralistic hauteur, refuses to intervene to prevent a communist takeover of Central America will intervene to counterbalance Soviet participation in an assault on Israel?” If Jews truly hoped to protect Israel, he suggested, they must overcome their residual dovishness and accept the necessity of “a large and powerful [American] military establishment” willing to intervene all over the world.

For Kristol, the fate of Israel came to stand in implicit parallel with the fate of American Jewish liberalism, as the Arab rejection of Israel mirrored the rise of anti-Semitism in the African-American community. In Kristol’s writings from the seventies and eighties, collected in The Neoconservative Persuasion, Yasser Arafat figures in the same symbolic role abroad as Jesse Jackson at home; in fact, Kristol wrote, Jackson’s “mission has been to incorporate a Third World view of politics into the American political spectrum.” Both Arafat and Jackson served as demonstrations of the futility of Jewish good intentions: American Jews had fought for civil rights and for the welfare state just as Israelis had generously offered to live at peace with the Arabs, Kristol suggested, and in each case the rejection of their benevolence indicated the failure of liberalism. This allegedly implacable hostility towards Jews suggested to the neocons that they must start looking at politics through a different lens. Norman Podhoretz, whose own racial preoccupations were already apparent in his famous 1963 essay “My Negro Problem—And Ours,” indicated the new tack in a 1972 Commentary piece: “Is It Good for the Jews?”

Read the entire book review here.

The conditional freedom of Palestinian prisoners deported to Gaza
Oct 24, 2011

Adam Horowitz

Shahd Abusalama writes from Gaza as recently released prisoners arrive in Gaza:

The most emotional part of this swap deal is the deported prisoners. They have long-waited to be free again to return to the bosom of their families, but Israel has instead deported them to other places where they have to wait for even longer to wrap their beloved ones with their arms again. The freedom of these deported released prisoners is not freedom, it’s better to describe it as freedom to submit to Israeli rules.

Early in the evening, my parents went to a celebration held in the neighborhood for some released detainees. I was sitting alone when suddenly my phone rang. It was my mother.  I could hardly hear her because of celebrations that were going around her. “You should come and see how people are dancing with joy and singing for freedom,” she said. I got so excited that I could no longer stay home and I decided to join them immediately and see for myself the joyous atmosphere there.

I didn’t know the exact address of the festival but I didn’t worry about it as I was certain that the resonance of the songs of freedom would guide my steps. The lights along with the Palestinian flags of all sizes were everywhere decorating the dark-blue sky. The walls were dressed with the photos of our heroes who sacrificed their precious years for the sake of freedom for their people. The region was filled with people coming from different parts of the Gaza Strip to share with the released detainees the happiness of their freedom.  The festival included folk dancing performances, songs for free Palestine and poetry dedicated to those who were free and to those who are still suffering behind Israeli bars.

Rawda Odeh carries a photograph of her son Loai

Very close to the end of the festival which lasted for several hours, my father called me and mum to introduce us to his friends. A woman with a beautiful Palestinian traditional dress lined with threads of the colors of the Palestinian flag, white, red, black and green, was standing beside a blond man. “Rawda, Yacoub, here is my daughter, Shahd,” my father addressed them. Then the man, Yacoub,  stepped forward, kissed my fore head and hugged me and left me surprising of his reaction wondering still who he was. Then Dad continued with a big smile on his face “This is my friend from Jerusalem who was imprisoned with me in Nafha prison for 15 years, and we were freed together in Ahmad Jibreel’s exchange deal. And this is his brother’s wife, Rawda, who was imprisoned for 5 years as well in the 70s.”

I then realized that they were here a day ago to come and see Loai, Rawda’s son, who was freed in this swap deal but deported to Gaza. She was hoping that she would hug her son, Loai, as soon as he is released and she had been waiting for ten years daydreaming about that day. Her son was sentenced to 28 years of imprisonment but thanks to this exchange deal of prisoners, he only spent ten years jailed. However, it was very disappointing for her to find out that he would be deported to Gaza forever and that he will not return back home. She challenged everything to have the opportunity to hug her son again tightly and for that she traveled with her husband’s brother from Jerusalem to Jordan and then to Egypt and then to Gaza through Rafah Border. It’s so ironic to know that she had to suffer two days of travelling to enter Gaza while if Israel allowed her to enter though Eriz border, it would take her less than two hours to reach Gaza.

Read the entire post here.

My wife forswears the groovy Ipad forever
Oct 24, 2011

Philip Weiss

I came down to breakfast at my parents’ house yesterday and my wife said, “Have you seen my Ipad?” “Have you looked in the car?” “All through it.” “What about your bag?” She rolled her eyes.

I went out to the car and searched it top to bottom, under the seats, etc. I was a little frantic.Not again. Four months ago my wife fell asleep on the train and someone snatched her Ipad out of her bag. We bought her another one.

On Saturday there was a funeral in my wife’s family in Philadelphia and we’d driven around from one event to another with the Ipad in the front seat. I’d locked up, at the church, and at the club for the reception, then later at the mourning family’s house– but the windows were down a little because the dogs were in the back. Then my wife had opened the doors to get the dogs out…

My Toshiba laptop had been in the car the whole time, too, but of course no one had snagged that.

I found my wife in the living room. I said, “Find out where the Apple store is, let’s go out and buy you a new one right now.” She shook her head solemnly. “No. I’m not doing that. I’m not getting another one. I don’t want to have the groovy trendy object that everybody wants any more.” “But you love it and use it.” “I don’t want to have to worry about it all the time. It interferes with my human relationships. It’s like when I used to go to parties in New York and a woman would be running back to the bedroom every hour to make sure no one had run off with her Prada coat. That’s really stupid. You don’t live life the way you want to.”

I searched the car again and when I came back in my wife was in the kitchen with my mother, and my mother was pressing money on her. “Get back on the horse,” she said. “Here’s $60 to your new Ipad.” “No,” my wife said. “I mean I’ll take the money, but I’m not buying another one of those stupid things.”

I reheated some coffee. The Ipad was sitting by the microwave. I’d either brought it into the house the night before, boozily, and forgotten about it; or my dad, who’s dottier than I am, had borrowed it and then brought it back downstairs. I brought it into my wife. She pressed the money back on my mother, and she’s been using her Ipad ever since.

The unbearable absence of being: Palestinians and statehood
Oct 24, 2011

Idil Issa

The prospect of a vote on statehood for Palestine in the U.N. is reinvigorating multilateral Middle East diplomacy. However, there remain considerable complications — notably, Tony Blair. Barely pausing after sending Tornado F3’s to release Shadow missiles over Iraq, Blair blithely glided into the position of Mid-East Peace envoy for the Quartet in 2007, without betraying a hint of irony. His indefatigable stoicism and blinking affability have incongruously led to his recent label of persona non grata in the West Bank and Gaza. [Blair’s new offices for the Quartet in East Jerusalem, pictured at left]

Blair doesn’t seem to notice that he has been lobbying against a vote for Palestine in the U.N. these past few weeks. Just as he hasn’t seemed to notice that, rather than tour the Middle East with credible experts and peace brokers, he has been seated across from power as a peace envoy qua J.P. Morgan representative. The same J.P. Morgan that has been footing a bill of £2 million in consultancy fees to Mr. Blair. To call this a conflict of interest would be an understatement. Correspondingly, acommission has been struck in the British Parliament to investigate Blair’s use of Quartet letterhead to cut business deals for J.P. Morgan throughout his tenure.

But this behavior isn’t altogether novel. After all, Mr. Blair’s eternal sunshine of the spotless mind allows him to partner with an American President employing crusader rhetoric against the ‘Muslim world’ in the second Gulf War, only to subsequently found a faith foundation aimed at fostering religious tolerance and coexistence. Nevertheless, outright denials have recently been issued by Mr. Blair’s spokesperson, although the detailed investigations conducted by London’s pugnacious tabloid journals have yielded scant berth for an alternate narrative. In the meantime, Palestinians have not halted their attempts to broker support for their admission to the U.N. as a full member state. Recently, Mahmoud Abbas traveled to Colombia, temporary member of the U.N. Security Council, in order to lobby for a yes vote.

The role of Abbas and the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) has raised not a few eyebrowswith regard to the legality of the transition a successful yes vote in the U.N. would entail. Can the PNA become the state of Palestine? Is this a legitimate assumption of power? And what about Hamas, the last entity to win general elections in the West Bank and Gaza? Where will such a vote leave them?

The eliding of Hamas by the international community, initiated by Israel and the United States (and Canada, vestigially) is largely tactical and has little to do with the guilt or innocence of Hamas with respect to terrorism. It is not too long ago that Hamas was funded and promoted by Israel as a counterpoint to the ‘terrorist’ PLO and its ‘terrorist’ kingpin Yasser Arafat (later to become the dove and Israeli partner worthy of a Nobel prize). It is clear from the successive breaking and forming of alliances that pitting Hamas against Fatah is largely a divide and rule approach to prevent cohesion in the Palestinian territories, which have become an ersatz sorbet, Israel invading every few years to break up crystallization around the possibility of inter-factional unity.

Because the U.N. option is precisely the manner in which Israel was created, it carries symbolic resonance. Is this tactic unproductive as many, including Hillary Clinton recently, claim? In the most salient case of Israel, it yielded results. Israel was created through a vote at the U.N. and subsequently reasserted in a ground war. There was little chance that Palestinians, residing on a majority of the contested land in 1947, would have agreed to a partition through bilateral negotiations. A U.N. plan was feasible, in particular because a strong Jewish lobby in the United States would ensure that the contemporaneous hegemon would be the first to recognize the nascent state. Other countries would naturally follow suit. Conversely, in 2011 it seems that the countries of the world will be signing up to the principle of a Palestinian state, leaving the United States, once the metronome of changes in the region, politically atonal.

This sign of renewed activity is encouraging. However, many are willing to claim that this latest initiative on the part of Mahmoud Abbas and the PNA is the twitch of rigor mortis of the long-dead two-state solution and not the fresh stirrings of breath from the Arab spring in the West Bank and Gaza. Regional experts are rapidly constructing intellectual lattices of strenuous prose, suggesting a utopic one-state solution as the anti-xenophobic panacea for the travails of the region. Others say that Palestinians in favor of going ahead with the vote on the question of Palestine in the U.N. are foregoing key decision points.

While I do appreciate intellectualism, if a U.N. vote would be a capitulation, what would that make Oslo? The international political arena has had its fair share of complete surrenders rebranded as ‘peace’ pacts. The devastating treaty of Versailles is only the most famous. What Oslo represents is a crushing defeat of a negotiated settlement with Israel based on even a dimly recognizable principle of fairness. According to certain accounts, the Palestinian negotiators didn’t even have appropriate maps in order to negotiate land claims with the Israelis. The Palestinians seem to have netted a Nobel Peace prize, martial law, and internecine conflict from the agreement.

Furthermore, Oslo’s formula for the division of Palestinian territories into Areas A, B, and C dovetails too neatly with a disturbing quasi-polygenesis. Palestinians worthy of a measure of human rights ostensibly live in Area A. Palestinians under the supervision and control of Israelis in Area B must be vaguely humanoid to deserve such constraints on their freedoms. And the Palestinians in Area C must assuredly bear little resemblance to humankind. The residue of eugenics is present without necessitating reference to the express Israeli government policy of malnutrition in the occupied territories, arranged through the curtailment of payroll transfers and the rationing of shipments of basic goods at checkpoints. But if one deplores the comparison of Palestinians and their graded levels of autonomy with polygenesis, it is only because the differentiation between these areas is indefensible given the equality of humanity present in all three areas and the inalienable right of Palestinians to self-governance in the absence of just and equal treatment under Israeli rule.

The quixotism of considering a one-state solution as the way out of what has become a morass of disenchantment (in particular after the 2009 bombing campaign in Gaza which included over 1000 civilian deaths) is dyssynchronous at best. That the ‘negativization’ of Gaza and the West Bank into a grafted state is possible any time soon fails to account for the power-imbalance and the real desire, demonstrated through action, that Israel has shown to pwn Palestinian land, wholesale and without recourse.

Any settlement with Israel at the present time in its present stance would be a further capitulation by the Palestinians. By advocating a Big Bang theory for the creation of a new co-existent state at this historical moment, one is ignoring the ‘bang’ aspect – the inevitable conflict that will ensue from the destruction of the evidence of Palestinian land claims, and granted, the state of Israel.

If I can be permitted to stretch this analogy yet further, the Big Bang theory posits getting something from nothing, which is precisely what this solution would entail – Palestinian enfranchisement from a bi-national state. The next commentator who issues a hand-wringing missive on a one-state solution in the aftermath of Cast Lead, I would kindly ask to include a pledge to pick up arms to defend this ideal in the inevitable bloodletting that would result. Calls for a unionizing D-Day would be less forthcoming in favor of practicable steps towards peace.

A one-state solution at the present time would be Eretz Israel in all but name, and this implosion paired with the support of the U.S. military for the IDF (which are essentially cognates) would turn the West Bank and Gaza into glorified shooting galleries, without implying that they are not already approaching this dubious distinction. At the alternative, the negotiating table, Israel has placed peace on the horizon line, continually bypassing ever more Palestinian rights, vis-à-vis the status of refugees, the theft of land, the destruction of private property, the monopolization of resources, and the restriction of movement, inter alia, to attain a moving target.

That Oslo represents anything other than a second nakba has been imminently disproved by now. By taking a vote to the people, writ large, the Palestinians will be abrogating a dead-letter peace process. This open source abrogation is inspired by the Arab spring, by Libya, by Egypt, by Tunisia. Consensus-building at the U.N. will force the United States and Israel to defend their intransigent rejectionism under increasingly public scrutiny (interestingly, both countries are formally democratic, but exhibit despotic sympathies in their bilateral relations, although economic inequalities are upsetting their internal equilibrium and forcing their populations into the streets in protest). The vote in the U.N. for Palestine as an equal international partner, worthy of the self-determination afforded to other states is the right thing for right now. Otherwise, the negotiated numbers game, as has recently been demonstrated in the Shalit-Hamas deal, is weighted 1027 for 1.

This article first appeared in similar form on Idil Issa’s blog and at Kabobfest.