Palestinians Take Historic
Step to Sovereignty
by Michele Steinberg
Sept. 25—President Obama is now a target of hatred among many around the world for his heavy-handed intervention against Palestinian statehood at the United Nations this past week. Obama not only used his speech on Sept. 21 before the UN General Assembly to restate his commitment to veto a resolution giving Palestine UN membership as a sovereign state, but also joined forces directly with the Israel's Netanyahu government to armtwist and threaten members of the UN Security Council who have indicated their intention to vote in favor of membership for Palestine.
From every indication, these terror tactics at the Security Council will fail, and Palestine will have the required 9 out of 15 votes—or even 14 out of 15 votes—and Obama will have to use his veto to stop Palestinian statehood. But the British-agent American President is not vetoing tiny Palestine, he's vetoing the entire world; more than 122 sovereign states already recognize the Palestinian State, including America's most-needed allies, Russia and China.
On Sept. 24, two days after Obama's perfidious UN speech, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) went before the General Assembly to ask for full state membership in the UN. Just the night before, Obama had met with Abbas and directly threatened him—the U.S. will veto Palestinian statehood, the Congress already has a bill to cut off all funds to the Palestinian Authority, and there will be further consequences, not just for Palestine but for the countries that would be voting in favor of the statehood resolution.
Despite the Obama threats—made on behalf of the genocidal and already-dead British financier oligarchy that Obama serves—Abbas announced that he had submitted the application for full statehood membership in the United Nations to Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.
An Appeal for Justice
"The goal of the Palestinian people is the realization of their inalienable national rights in their independent State of Palestine, with East Jerusalem as its capital, on all the land of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, which Israel occupied in the June 1967 war, in conformity with the resolutions of international legitimacy," Abbas declared.
Citing the long history of negotiations with Israel and speeches at the UN by PLO chairman, and later, Palestinian President, Yassir Arafat, in 1974 and 1988, after the Palestine Liberation Organization and Palestine National Council renounced violence and adopted a peace program that would recognize the State of Israel, Abbas recounted the history of the 1948 al-Nakba (the Catastrophe), the violent ethnic cleansing where Palestinians were forced to flee from their homes. He cited the dozens of UN resolutions, and the decades of peace negotiations with the Israelis that have failed to reach an agreement for a Palestinian state.
Abbas appealed to the 193 countries in the UN General Assembly only for justice, reminding them, most of which have had their own decades-long battle against the oligarchical principle and colonialism, that the 1988 peace resolution was not an easy decision.
"When we adopted this [1988] program, we were taking a painful and very difficult step for all of us," he said, "especially those, including myself, who were forced to leave their homes and their towns and villages, carrying only some of our belongings and our grief and our memories and the keys of our homes to the camps of exile and the Diaspora in the 1948 al-Nakba, one of the worst operations of uprooting, destruction, and removal of a vibrant and cohesive society that had been contributing in a pioneering and leading way to the cultural, educational, and economic renaissance of the Arab Middle East....
"Here, I declare that the Palestine Liberation Organization is ready to return immediately to the negotiating table on the basis of the adopted terms of reference based on international legitimacy and a complete cessation of settlement activities.
"Our people will continue their popular peaceful resistance to the Israeli occupation and its settlement and apartheid policies and its construction of the racist annexation Wall, and they receive support for their resistance, which is consistent with international humanitarian law and international conventions and has the support of peace activists from Israel and around the world....
"I am here to say on behalf of the Palestinian people and the Palestine Liberation Organization: We extend our hands to the Israeli government and the Israeli people for peacemaking. I say to them: Let us urgently build together a future for our children where they can enjoy freedom, security, and prosperity. Let us build the bridges of dialogue instead of checkpoints and walls of separation, and build cooperative relations based on parity and equity between two neighboring States—Palestine and Israel—instead of policies of occupation, settlement, war, and eliminating the other."
Abbas received a standing ovation from the General Assembly, telling the members,
"I do not believe that anyone with a shred of conscience can reject our application for a full membership in the United Nations and our admission as an independent state."
On his return to the West Bank, Abbas got a hero's welcome on Sept. 25. He declared: "We have told the world that there is the Arab Spring, but the Palestinian Spring is here ... a Spring of peaceful struggle that will reach its goal." He warned that the Palestinians face a "long path" ahead. "There are those who would put out obstacles ... but with your presence they will fall and we will reach our end."
Obama's Speech 'A Crime Against the United States'
Obama, however, stands alone, with the lowest recorded "approval rating" of his term, 36%, announced two days after his UN speech. His ally is Jabotinskyite fascist Benjamin Netanyahu, who didn't return to a hero's welcome in Israel, but hit the U.S. TV airwaves with denunciations of the Palestinians, and pledges that he will never end the settlements. "I'm not going to head recklessly to feed more territory, you know, to the insatiable crocodile of militant Islam, as I call it," Netanyahu told NBC's Meet the Press, a pledge to expand settlements, punctuated by the demand that the Palestinians, who are almost one quarter of the Israeli residents, "recognize the Jewish state," a mantra that Obama is fond of repeating.
How hated is Obama?
Listen to the voices of two leading Jewish elder statesman, Israeli writer and war hero Uri Avnery, and American Henry Siegman, an ordained rabbi and U.S. Army veteran of the Korean War.
"At the UN, Obama plunged his knife into the back of the helpless Palestinians," Avnery wrote on Sept. 24.
"A wonderful speech. A beautiful speech.... A work of art. The art of hypocrisy. Almost every statement in the passage concerning the Israeli-Palestinian issue was a lie. A blatant lie: the speaker knew it was a lie, and so did the audience.... He must have felt the urge to vomit. Being a pragmatic person, he knew that he had to do it if he wanted to be re-elected.... Obama gave full service and got paid within the hour. Netanyahu sat down with him in front of the cameras and gave him enough quotable professions of love and gratitude to last for several election campaigns....
"Barack Obama's miserable performance was a nail in the coffin of America's status as a superpower. In a way, it was a crime against the United States (emphasis added).
"The State of Palestine will come into being.... Obama will be forgotten, as will Netanyahu, Lieberman and the whole bunch. Abbas—Abu Mazen as the Palestinians call him—will be remembered. The 'plucked chicken' is soaring into the sky."
Siegman, who worked with Israeli and Palestinian leaders on peace negotiations for decades, and who had presented a policy proposal to the Obama campaign in 2008, which included the U.S. having direct talks with Hamas, wrote an article published Sept. 22 titled "Palestinians Declare Independence from the U.S.":
"The American insistence on aborting the Palestinians' initiative and returning them to a peace process in which their fate remains dependent on Israel is shameful. It stains America's honor. It will not succeed, for the Palestinian decision to defy the American demand is itself a declaration of independence; that genie cannot be returned to the bottle.
"On the ground, little will be changed by a UN affirmation of Palestinian statehood. But nothing will be the same again.... The notion that Israel will decide where negotiations begin and what parts of Palestine it will keep is history. It is sad that America, of all nations, has failed to understand this simple truth, even in the wake of the Arab Spring. Sadder still is Israel's continuing blindness not only to the injustice but also to the impossibility of its colonial dream. That dream may now turn into a nightmare as the international community increasingly sees Israel as a rogue state and treats it accordingly."
Siegman's article is receiving wide circulation on numerous websites.
Time To Reject Obama
The issue for peace is not Netanyahu—his fascist background is a known quantity. The issue is Obama, who must be removed from the Presidency for treasonous acts, as Lyndon LaRouche has repeatedly said since April 2009. Those in Southwest Asia, including Israel, and throughout the Arab and Muslim sector, who defended Obama against the LaRouche movement's clear battle cry that he must be removed from office for reasons of mental unfitness and for treason, are beginning to recognize their error. But the next days and weeks are crucial, set against the global financial collapse that especially has the United States and Europe in a panic.
Narcissist Obama will escalate against the Palestinian application now before the UN Security Council. According to Washington intelligence sources, a vicious campaign of threats, bribes, and blackmail against members of the UN Security Council began last week, even before Abbas gave his speech. A public veto at the Security Council would be an even further blow to Obama's standing in the world, so he and Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak last week began heavy-handed threats to convince a number of states to change their "yes" votes to abstentions. Nigeria, Gabon, and Bosnia-Herzogovina were among the known targets of this Obama-Netanyahu operation. They are all on the Security Council this year.
Intelligence sources also reported that Obama was in a homicidal rage against French President Nicholas Sarkozy, because Sarkozy presented a draft proposal to the Palestinians under which the Palestinians would go to the General Assembly and get status as a non-member observer state. This would give them access to the International Court of Justice and other UN agencies, and would put Israel's illegal occupation and the brutal assault on Gaza before international bodies.
Under the French "Plan B," a one-year deadline would be established for a negotiated agreement on full Palestinian statehood, based on UN Security Council Resolution 242.
But again, the Palestinians refused, as they did when the Quartet—the U.S., UN, European Union, and Russia—came up with another of its vague proposals for resuming talks.
The Palestinian leadership has responded with one voice, to the effect: "Enough. End the settlements and we will negotiate. Give us the 1967 borders and we will negotiate."
Speaking on Sept. 25, PLO executive committee member Nabil Shaath told Voice of Palestine radio that nine countries will vote for the Palestinian bid to recognize Palestine as a full member of the UN. Shaath, a PLO founding member who frequently plays an official role in Palestinian Authority foreign relations, said that the U.S. should reject the pressures from the Jewish lobby in the U.S. and rebuild its interests in the Arab world.
Russia and China, two other permanent members of the Security Council, are strongly on record for Palestinian statehood.
In January 2011, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev held a press conference with Abbas in Jericho, where he said, "We supported and we will support the inalienable right of the Palestinian people to an independent state with its capital in East Jerusalem."
On Aug. 24, 2011, China's Foreign Ministry put out a statement after Wu Sike, China's special envoy to the Middle East, visited Palestine and met support the just cause of the Palestinian people to regain their legitimate national rights and interests and support the establishment of an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital and with full sovereignty. Palestine plans to submit this issue to the United Nations in September, for which the Chinese side expressed understanding, respect and support," it said.
Israeli President Shimon Peres spoke to foreign diplomats in Israel on Sept. 26, refering to Abbas as the "best partner" Israel could have, and "begging" him to resume negotiations. In early October, further reconciliation talks between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority are scheduled to take place in Egypt.
