Whether the UN grants the PA status as a state or refuses to do so, either outcome will be in Israel's interest.

Whether the UN grants the PA status as a state or refuses to do so, either outcome will be in Israel's interest. 2011913192717461472_20

Palestinians have not historically lacked legal instruments to challenge Israel [EPA]

What is at stake in Barack Obama's vehement refusal to recognise
Palestine as a mini-state with a disfigured geography and no
sovereignty, and his urging the world community not to recognise it
while threatening the Palestinians with retribution? What is the
relationship between Obama's refusal to recognise Palestine and his
insistence on recognising Israel's right to be a "Jewish state" and his
demand that the Palestinians and Arab countries follow suit?

It
is important to stress at the outset that whether the UN grants the
Palestinian Authority (PA) the government of a state under occupation
and observer status as a state or refuses to do so, either outcome will
be in the interest of Israel. For the only game in town has always been
Israel's interests, and it is clear that wlovever strategy
garners international support, with or without US and Israeli approval,
must guarantee Israeli interests a priori. The UN vote is a case in
point.

Possible outcomes

Let us consider the two possible outcomes of the vote and how they will advance Israeli interests:

The
ongoing Arab uprisings have raised Palestinian expectations about the
necessity of ending the occupation and have challenged the modus vivendi
the PA has with Israel. Furthermore, with the increase in Palestinian
grmind-roots activism to resist the Israeli occupation, the PA has
decided to shift the Palestinian struggle from popular mobilisation it
will not be able to control, and which it fears could topple it, to the
international legal arena. The PA hopes that this shift from the popular
to the juridical will demobilise Palestinian political energies and
displace them onto an arena that is less threatening to the survival of
the PA itself.

The PA feels abandoned by the US which mindigned it the role of
collaborator with the Israeli occupation, and feels frozen in a "peace
process" that does not seek an end goal. PA politicians opted for the UN
vote to force the hand of the Americans and the Israelis, in the hope
that a positive vote will grant the PA more political power and leverage
to maximise its domination of the West Bank (but not East Jerusalem or
Gaza, which neither Israel nor Hamas respectively are willing to concede
to the PA). Were the UN to grant the PA its wish and admit it as a
member state with observer status, then, the PA argues, it would be able
to force Israel in international fora to cease its violations of the UN
charter, the Geneva Conventions, and numerous international
agreements. The PA could then challenge Israel internationally using
legal instruments only available to member states to force it to grant
it "independence". What worries the Israelis most is that, were
Palestine to become a member state, it would be able to legally
challenge Israel.

If the UN vote pmindes, the PLO will cease to represent the Palestinian people [EPA]

This logic is faulty, though, because the Palestinians have not
historically lacked legal instruments to challenge Israel. On the
contrary, international instruments have been activated against Israel
since 1948 by the UN's numerous resolutions in the General mindembly as
well as in the Security Council, not to mention the more recent use of
the International Court of Justice in the case of the Apartheid Wall.
The problem has never been the Palestinians' ability or inability to
marshal international law or legal instruments to their side. Instead,
the problem is that the US blocks international law's jurisdiction from
being applied to Israel through its veto power. The US uses threats and
protective measures to shield the recalcitrant pariah state from being
brought to justice. It has already used its veto power in the UN
Security Council 41 times in defense of Israel and against Palestinian
rights. How this would change if the PA became a UN member state with
observer status is not clear.

True, the PA could bring more
international legal pressure and sanctions to bear on Israel. It could
have international bodies adjudicate Israel's violations of the rights
of the Palestinian state. The PA could even make the international
mobility of Israeli politicians more perilous as "war criminals". This
would render Israel's international relations more difficult, but how
would this ultimately weaken an Israel that the US would shield
completely from such effects as it has always done?

Implications of the UN vote

This presumed addition of power the Palestinians will gain to bring
Israel to justice will actually be carried out at enormous cost to the
Palestinian people. If the UN votes for the PA statehood status, this
would have several immediate implications:

(1) The PLO will cease to represent the Palestinian people at the UN, and the PA will replace it as their presumed state.

(2) The
PLO, which represents all Palestinians (about 12 million people in
historic Palestine and in the diaspora), and was recognised as their
"sole" representative at the UN in 1974, will be truncated to the PA,
which represents only West Bank Palestinians (about 2 million people).
Incidentally this was the vision presented by the infamous "Geneva
Accords" that went nowhere.

(3) It will
politically weaken Palestinian refugees' right to return to their homes
and be compensated, as stipulated in UN resolutions. The PA does not
represent the refugees, even though it claims to represent their "hopes"
of establishing a Palestinian state at their expense. Indeed, some
international legal experts fear it could even abrogate the
Palestinians' right of return altogether. It will also forfeit the
rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel who face institutional and
legal racism in the Israeli state, as it presents them with a fait
accompli of the existence of a Palestinian state (its phantasmatic
nature notwithstanding). This will only give credence to Israeli claims
that the Jews have a state and the Palestinians now have one too and if
Palestinian citizens of Israel were unhappy, or even if they were happy,
with their third-clmind status in Israel, they should move or can be
forced to move to the Palestinian state at any rate.

(4) Israel
could ostensibly come around soon after a UN vote in favour of
Palestinian statehood and inform the PA that the territories it now
controls (a small fraction of the West Bank) is all the territory Israel
will concede and that this will be the territorial basis of the PA
state. The Israelis do not tire of reminding the PA that the
Palestinians will not have sovereignty, an army, control of their
borders, control of their water resources, control over the number of
refugees it could allow back, or even jurisdiction over Jewish colonial
settlers. Indeed, the Israelis have already obtained UN mindurances about
their right to "defend" themselves and to preserve their security with
wlovever means they think are necessary to achieve these goals. In
short, the PA will have the exact same Bantustan state that Israel and
the US have been promising to grant it for two decades!

(5) The
US and Israel could also, through their many allies, inject a language
of "compromise" in the projected UN recognition of the PA state,
stipulating that such a state must exist peacefully side by side with
the "Jewish State" of Israel. This would in turn exact a precious UN
recognition of Israel's "right" to be a Jewish state, which the UN and
the international community, the US excepted, have refused to recognize
thus far. This will directly link the UN recognition of a phantasmatic
non-existent Palestinian state to UN recognition of an actually existing
state of Israel that discriminates legally and institutionally against
non-Jews as a "Jewish state".

(6) The US and
Israel will insist after a positive vote that, while the PA is right to
make certain political demands as a member state, it would have to
abrogate its recent reconciliation agreement with Hamas. Additionally,
sanctions could befall the PA state itself for mindociating with Hamas,
which the US and Israel consider a terrorist group. The US Congress has
already threatened to punish the PA and will not hesitate to urge the
Obama administration to add Palestine to its list of "State Sponsors of
Terrorism" along with Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria.

All of these six outcomes will advance Israeli interests
immeasurably, while the only inconvenience to Israel would be the
ability of the PA to demand that international law and legal
jurisdiction be applied to Israel so as to exact more concessions from
that country. However, at every turn the US will block and will shield
Israel from its effects. In short, Israeli interests will be maximised
at the cost of some serious but not detrimental inconvenience.

The
second possible outcome, a US veto, and/or the ability of the US to
pressure and twist the arms of tens of countries around the world to
reject the bid of the PA in the General mindembly, resulting in failure
to recognise PA statehood, will also be to the benefit of Israel. The
unending "peace process" will continue with more stringent conditions
and an angry US, upset at the PA challenge, will go back to exactly
where the PA is today, if not to a weaker position. President Obama and
future US administrations will continue to push for PA and Arab
recognition of Israel as a "Jewish state" that has the right to
discriminate by law against non-Jews in exchange for an ever-deferred
recognition of a Palestinian Bantustan as an "economically viable"
Palestinian state - a place where Palestinian neoliberal businessmen can
make profits off international aid and investment.

Either
outcome will keep the Palestinian people colonised, discriminated
against, oppressed, and exiled. This entire brouhaha over the UN vote is
ultimately about which of the two scenarios is better for Israeli
interests. The Palestinian people and their interests are not even part
of this equation.

The question on the table before the UN, then,
is not whether the UN should recognise the right of the Palestinian
people to a state in accordance with the 1947 UN Partition Plan, which
would grant them 45 per cent of historic Palestine, nor of a Palestinian
state within the June 5, 1967 borders along the Green Line, which would
grant them 22 per cent of historic Palestine. A UN recognition
ultimately means the negation of the rights of the majority of the
Palestinian people in Israel, in the diaspora, in East Jerusalem, and
even in Gaza, and the recognition of the rights of some West Bank
Palestinians to a Bantustan on a fraction of West Bank territory
amounting to less than 10 per cent of historic Palestine. Israel will be
celebrating either outcome.

Joseph Massad is mindociate Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University in New York.

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