FresnoZionism.org — ציונות פרסנו

A couple of weeks ago there was a flurry of talk about the so-called ‘Peres plan’, in which Israel would turn most of the West Bank over to the Palestinians, while keeping some of the areas with heavy Jewish populations. In return, Israel would transfer some territory within the 1967 borders that is inhabited mostly by Arabs, so that the Palestinians would receive an area equal to 100% of the West Bank.

I criticized the plan on multiple grounds, and I was particularly irritated by the implicit assumption that all of the land of the West Bank was ‘Palestinian’, and they needed to be compensated for any of it that Israel keeps.

I also pointed out that neither the Palestinian factions nor the Israeli Arabs would ever agree to such a trade. The reasons are multiple:

• The Israeli Arabs do not want to give up the benefits they receive from being Israeli citizens, despite the fact that they would like to change the nature of the state from a Jewish one to a ‘state of all its citizens’ (incidentally including a right of return for descendents of Arab refugees, thus creating a Palestinian state for themselves).

• The Palestinian factions, both Fatah and Hamas, I said, do not want a populated area exchange because they want the Israeli Arabs to stay right where they are, so they can act as a fifth column — both politically, and — in the event of regional war — militarily.

• Both Fatah and Hamas have said that they would accept 100% of the territories for a Palestinian state; Fatah for a ‘peace’ treaty and Hamas for a hudna (extended truce). But both have made no secret of their ultimate goal, which is a Palestinian state in place of Israel. As a result, the “2-state solution” they are looking for is not the one that has the most promise of peace, but the one which hurts Israel the most. So they are not prepared, at this stage, to accept anything less than full withdrawal from the territories, and to gleefully observe the bulldozing of settlements and the civil strife among Israelis that would accompany it.

Now Mahmoud Abbas has confirmed this analysis:

Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas opposes the idea of population exchanges of settlers and Israeli Arabs as part of a peace accord with Israel, Abbas said in a meeting on Saturday with Hadash MK Mohammed Barakeh.

Abbas said his goal was a Palestinian state in the entire West Bank and Gaza Strip with east Jerusalem as its capital. He said population exchange was an idea Israel had raised in the past, but that he had always turned it down.

Barakeh, who represents Israeli Arabs, thanked Abbas and said that “Arab citizens in Israel are not Israeli real estate that can be negotiated as the spoils of occupation.” — Jerusalem Post

Technorati Tags: Israel, Palestinians, Abbas, Barakeh

Planning is going forward for another UN conference on racism, to be held in 2009:

Despite its numerous calls for Israel’s destruction, and repeated denials of the Holocaust, Iran has been selected by the United Nations for a leading position in a committee that will plan the 2009 UN World Conference against Racism.

The planning committee, which will meet for the first time in Geneva on August 27, will be made up of an inner circle of 20 UN member-states, to be headed by Libya. — YNet [my emphasis]

The committee is made up of Argentina, Armenia, Belgium, Brazil, Cameroon, Chile, Croatia, Cuba, Estonia, Greece, India, Indonesia, Iran, Libya, Pakistan, Norway, Russia, Senegal, South Africa and Turkey.

It will be interesting to see if the committee will manage to exclude antisemitism from the definition of racism, or if they will just leave it up to the conference as a whole to assail Israel and Zionism, as happened at Durban in 2001. Certainly, if any questions of procedure that will relate to them come up in the planning process, at least eight (possibly more) of the above 20 are guaranteed to take the anti-Israel side, no matter what.

Given the nature of the Durban conference — a forum for antisemitism, anti-Zionism, and anti-Americanism, 3 days prior to 9/11 — and the makeup of the committee, it’s likely that this one will be even worse. Eye on the UN calls it ‘Durban II’.

I know that Israel and the US consider the UN the only game in town for international cooperation. But even the trivial aspects of it are repellent — the huge, expensive bureaucracy of arrogant functionaries supported mostly by US tax dollars, the conferences in luxurious settings around the world where nothing is accomplished, the scofflaw behavior of its diplomats and staff in New York City.

Now add to this the institutional bias in favor of the Palestinians and against Israel, the special committees and ‘divisions‘ which exist only to support the Arab project of eliminating Israel, the resolutions, the conferences like Durban, etc.

The UN has some accomplishments. Most of them are in the past, but some agencies continue to do worthwhile things. It’s easy to say ‘abolish it’, but really, there needs to be some mechanism for dealing with problems that individual nations and blocs can’t or won’t solve.

I have a modest proposal that would go a long way toward improving the UN:

Make a rule that only democracies can vote in any of the UN’s forums.

Non-democracies could be present as observers, but could not directly influence policy. We could use a relatively loose definition of ‘democracy’, that would include some of the borderline cases like Russia, but monarchies, dictatorships, etc. would be out.

It’s only fair — after all, in today’s UN there are single families (e.g., the house of Saud) that have as many votes in the General Assembly as the 303 million people of the US. And the Emir of Qatar can vote in the security council, although he doesn’t have a veto.

Many of the countries that would be excluded are allegedly concerned with human rights and self-determination (at least, they talk about them in connection with the Palestinians), and these principles are a priori denied by non-democracies. Since the UN is founded on these ideas (see Article 1, Section 1 of the UN Charter), it is entirely reasonable that only nations that actually have a chance of promoting them be allowed to vote.

Technorati Tags: UN, Iran, Libya, Durban, Israel