[The
resolution is expected to win backing from a number of European countries,
among them France, Spain and Switzerland — a rebuff to intense American and
Israeli diplomacy. Others, like Germany, say they will abstain, and a tiny
handful of countries are expected to join Israel and the United States in
voting no. ]
 |
|
Chang W.
Lee/The New York Times
President
Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority spoke at the United Nations
before
the General Assembly voted on Palestine's status as a “nonmember
observer
state” on Thursday.
|
UNITED
NATIONS — An overwhelming majority of countries are expected on Thursday to
vote to recognize Palestine as a “nonmember
observer state” at the United Nations. Palestinian leaders say the step
advances a two-state solution with Israel, but Israeli and
American officials condemn it as detrimental to peaceful coexistence.
President
Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority,
speaking to the United Nations General Assembly before the vote, called the
moment a “last chance” to save the two-state solution and said that the window
of opportunity was narrowing.
“The
General Assembly is called upon today to issue a birth certificate of the
reality of the State of Palestine,” he said just before the vote was scheduled
to take place.
The
resolution is expected to win backing from a number of European countries,
among them France, Spain and Switzerland — a rebuff to intense American and
Israeli diplomacy. Others, like Germany, say they will abstain, and a tiny
handful of countries are expected to join Israel and the United States in
voting no.
The
resolution comes shortly after an eight-day Israeli military assault on Gaza that Israel
described as a response to stepped-up rocket fire into Israel. The operation
killed scores of Palestinians and was aimed at reducing the arsenal of Hamas,
the militant group that controls Gaza, a part of the territory that the United
Nations resolution expects to make up a future state of Palestine.
Mr.
Abbas directed harsh criticism toward Israel, saying that the “aggression
against our people in the Gaza Strip has confirmed once again the urgent and
pressing need to end the Israeli occupation and for our people to gain their
freedom and independence.”
“This
aggression also confirms the Israeli Government’s adherence to the policy of
occupation, brute force and war, which in turn obliges the international
community to shoulder its responsibilities toward the Palestinian people and
toward peace,” Mr. Abbas said early in his speech.
The
Palestinian Authority, based in the West Bank city of Ramallah, was politically
weakened by the Gaza fighting, with its rivals in Hamas seen by many
Palestinians as more willing to stand up to Israel and fight back. That shift
in sentiment is one reason that some Western countries give for backing the
United Nations resolution, to strengthen Mr. Abbas and his more moderate
colleagues in their contest with Hamas.
“We
have not heard one word from any Israeli official expressing any sincere
concern to save the peace process,” Mr. Abbas said.
“On
the contrary, our people have witnessed, and continue to witness, an
unprecedented intensification of military assaults, the blockade, settlement
activities and ethnic cleansing, particularly in Occupied East Jerusalem, and
mass arrests, attacks by settlers and other practices by which this Israeli
occupation is becoming synonymous with an apartheid system of colonial
occupation, which institutionalizes the plague of racism and entrenches hatred
and incitement.”
“The
moment has arrived for the world to say clearly: Enough of aggression,
settlements and occupation,” he said.
The
vote is taking place exactly 65 years after the General Assembly voted to
divide the former British Mandate of Palestine into two states, one Jewish and
the other Arab — a vote that Israel considers the international seal of
approval for its birth.
At
the time, Arabs rejected the division of the land and the creation of Israel.
But since the late 1980s, the Palestine Liberation Organization has officially
endorsed two states, with the state of Palestine defined as comprising the West
Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza — areas beyond Israel’s pre-1967 borders that it
captured in the 1967 Middle East war.
Mr.
Abbas said the Palestinians wanted to breathe new life into the negotiations.
He said the Palestinians would accept “no less than the independence of the
State of Palestine, with East Jerusalem as its capital, on all the Palestinian
territory occupied in 1967, to live in peace and security alongside the State
of Israel,” adding they were also seeking a solution to the refugee issue based
on the resolutions.
Israel
says that it, too, favors a two-state resolution to the Arab-Israeli conflict,
but reached through negotiations, with some parts of those areas remaining in
Israeli hands, with a strong focus on security concerns and with a formal
recognition by the Palestinians of Israel’s legitimacy as a Jewish state.
“The
Palestinians must recognize the Jewish state, and they must be prepared to end
the conflict with Israel once and for all,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
of Israel said in a statement on Thursday. “None of these vital interests,
these vital interests of peace, none of them appear in the resolution that will
be put forward before the General Assembly today, and that is why Israel cannot
accept it.”
The
Israelis also say that the fact that Mr. Abbas is not welcome in Hamas-run
Gaza, from which he was ejected five years ago, shows that there is no viable
Palestinian leadership living up to its obligations now.
Palestinian
officials said that it is Israel that has violated its agreements and
international law by building settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
They say that 20 years of failed negotiations with Israel pushed them to seek
this kind of international recognition in the hopes that it would press Israel
and its allies in Washington to step up peace talks.
“Israel,
the United States and a handful of countries are on the wrong side of morality,
the wrong side of justice and the wrong side of the law,” said Hanan Ashrawi, a
member of the executive committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization, at
a news conference in Ramallah on Wednesday. She said the United Nations vote
would “begin a process of historical redemption and healing in Palestine.”
Realizing
that they could not head off the vote on Thursday, Israel and the United States
have been working to contain the fallout from it.
On
Wednesday, two senior American diplomats — William J. Burns, the deputy
secretary of state, and David Hale, the special envoy to the Middle East — met
at a hotel in New York with Mr. Abbas to register American concerns.
“No
one should be under any illusion that this resolution is going to produce the
results that the Palestinians claim to seek, namely to have their own state
living in peace next to Israel,” Victoria Nuland, the State Department
spokeswoman, said on Wednesday. “We thought it was important to make our case
one more time.”
A
major concern for the Americans is that the Palestinians might use their new
status to try to join the International Criminal Court. That prospect
particularly worries the Israelis, who fear that the Palestinians might press
for an investigation of their practices in the occupied territories.
Another
worry is that the Palestinians might use the vote to seek membership in
specialized agencies of the United Nations, a move that could have consequences
for the financing of the international organizations as well as the Palestinian
Authority itself. Congress cut off financing to the United Nations Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organization, also known as Unesco, in 2011 after it
accepted Palestine as a member. The United States is a major contributor to
many of these agencies and plays an active role on their governing boards.
“To
my knowledge, there’s no legislative impact that is triggered in the same way
that there was with regard to Unesco,” Ms. Nuland said on Monday. “However, as
you know, we also have money pending in the Congress for the Palestinian
Authority, money that they need to support their regular endeavors and to
support administration of the territories. So, obviously, if they take this
step, it’s going to complicate the way the Congress looks at the Palestinians.”
Anticipating
approval of the resolution, which would upgrade Palestine’s observer status at
the United Nations from that of an “entity,” Western diplomats have pushed for
a Palestinian commitment not to seek membership in the International Criminal
Court and United Nations specialized agencies, a privilege that has been open
to other nonmember observer states.
Another
step would be an affirmation by the Palestinians that the road to statehood was
through the peace process. And a third could be a Palestinian commitment to
open negotiations with the Israelis.
Such
assurances do not appear to have been provided.
Israeli
officials, aware that a harsh reaction to the vote would only tend to isolate
their country further, have begun playing down the significance of the draft
resolution, and have toned down threats of countermeasures if it is approved.
Israel’s response will be “proportionate” to how the Palestinians act after the
vote, said an Israeli government spokesman, Mark Regev.
The
Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman, Yigal Palmor, said there would be no
automatic response from Israel. “We’re going to see where the Palestinians take
this,” he said. “If they use it to continue confronting Israel and other U.N.
bodies, there will be a firm response. If not, then there won’t.”
Some
Middle East experts said the Obama administration’s determination to vote
against the Palestinian Authority’s motion was self-defeating, since it would
accelerate the weakening of the authority as a voice for the Palestinian people
and as a partner in peace negotiations.
A
better strategy, said Robert Malley, the Middle East program director at the
International Crisis Group, would be for the United States and Israel simply to
“shrug their shoulders” and treat the resolution a desperate bid for political
legitimacy, not a threat to Israel or to the prospects for a peace agreement.
“He
really, politically, has no choice,” Mr. Malley said of Mr. Abbas during a
panel discussion at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “This is
less an act of confrontation than an act of survival.”
Reporting
was contributed by Michael R. Gordon and Mark Landler from Washington, Isabel
Kershner from Jerusalem, and Nicholas Kulish from Berlin.
