Today, USA Today published an editorial ‘Abbas bid for statehood will hurt Palestinians’ (9/23) and an opposing viewpoint by Rashid Khalidi ‘Palestinians need an honest broker’ (9/23). Khalidi explains what the ‘peace process’ has meant to Palestinians in terms of expanding settlements, the restriction of movement, and even the possibility that the two state solution is no longer possible. He maintains that a major obstacle to resolving the conflict has been the failure of the US play an honest broker and its disregard for international law – as clearly evident with President Obama’s recent UN speech. Khalidi sees the Palestinian UN bid as an effort to alter the dynamic of the conflict and the one-sided US role.
In contrast, the USA Today editorial opposed the Palestinian UN statehood bid claiming that it will revive hostility and polarization that the peace process contained. However, the editorial dramatically understated the number of settlers, promoted the Barak/Olmert generous offer myths, credited the US role in the conflict and failed to mention anything about the international legal consensus on core issues among other concerns. The USA Today editorial page is certainly entitled to its own opinion about the conflict but not its own facts — and misinformation of the US public by the mainstream media has played an important role in perpetuating the status quo.
Please WRITE! to USA Today letters@usatoday.com or use the feedback form http://feedbackforms.usatoday.com/marketing/feedback/feedback-online.aspx?type=18 in support of Rashid Khalidi’s op-ed and help to set the record straight regarding the facts of the conflict. Be sure to keep your letters under 150 words and include your name, address and phone number for verification purposes.
For further information:
Editorial: Abbas’ bid for statehood will hurt Palestinians
http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/story/2011-09-22/Abbas-bid-hurt-Palestinians/50519570/1?loc=interstitialskip
Take Action to Prevent U.S. Veto of Palestine UN Membership
http://www.endtheoccupation.org/article.php?id=3113
Abir Kopty: Mr. President, we don’t want a shortcut, we want our freedom
http://mondoweiss.net/2011/09/mr-president-we-dont-want-a-shortcut-we-want-our-freedom.html#more-53090
Ismail Khalidi: US Blocks Palestinian Freedom
http://www.timesunion.com/opinion/article/The-showdown-at-the-U-N-2182760.php#ixzz1YgnxrJ4J
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Opposing view: Palestinians need an honest broker
By Rashid Khalidi
http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/story/2011-09-22/Palestnian-statehood-bid-Palestine/50519368/1
Let us start from the beginning: Is there a Middle East “peace process,” and what has the process achieved for Palestinians?
This is a process that in 20 years of negotiations (since Madrid in October 1991) has produced a tripling of the number of Israeli settlers in the occupied territories, from 200,000 to nearly 600,000; has drastically reduced the mobility of 4 million Palestinians living under Israeli control; and may have made a two-state solution to the conflict impossible. The process has made peace more distant.
Four American presidents have presided over this debacle. All cared more about the dictates of domestic politics than Middle East peace. President Obama’s speech at the United Nations on Wednesday reinforced this reality.
The United States is Israel’s patron. The U.S. needs only to tie our massive support for Israel to a simple requirement — to abide by international law and previous agreements — for peace to be within reach. But the United States is highly partisan. And Palestinians suffer the consequences.
A much more important accomplishment than Palestinian U.N. membership would be to secure a genuinely honest broker. The U.S. has failed in this role. The Palestinians’ U.N. membership bid is an effort to enlist the international community to redress the imbalance in power and rights in this asymmetrical conflict.
President Obama unwittingly undercut his argument when he cited Northern Ireland and South Sudan as examples of peace won through negotiations between two sides. In both cases, the international community (led by the U.S.) evened the scales by supporting the (just) claims of the weaker party.
This could not be further from the reality of the past two decades of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. Indeed, former American negotiator Aaron David Miller once described the American role as that of “Israel’s lawyer.” Thus, the president’s speech made it seem as if the Palestinians, and not the Israelis, were the occupying power.
The statehood bid is an effort to alter this dynamic. It is an attempt to shake the U.S. out of its one-sided approach before the Arab Spring reaches the millions of Palestinians languishing under a 44-year occupation that the president never saw fit to mention in his U.N. speech.
President Obama’s speech was, sadly, par for the course, and it’s yet another illustration of why U.S. policy is and has been a major obstacle to a just and lasting Middle East peace.
Rashid Khalidi is a professor of Arab studies in the history department at Columbia University.
