Unilateral recognition of Palestinian Arab statehood has broken out like the Covid virus. But ‘unilateral’ means what? Some 82% of UN members and four out of 5 permanent members of the Security Council today recognize "Palestine". What does that tell Israel?
It means what Josep Borrell, former EU Foreign Policy chief said it meant: “Israel cannot have the veto right to self-determination of the 'Palestinian people'.”
"Unilateral" therefore snubs international law and practice for settling conflicts through negotiation rather than by third-party imposition.
Second, it leaves Israel lawless - this means it had no right taking the "West Bank" from Jordan, and Gaza from Egypt in the 1967 blitzkrieg war.
Third, it tells us what just about all sources, from neutral to biased, tell us, that the territories are Palestinian-owned.
This in turn means that Palestinian Arabs have all along had the right to statehood but Israel prevented them from exercising the right.
Finally, the term "unilateral" trashes the 1993-1995 Oslo Accords as political theatre, pure and simple. Remember President Clinton hosting the signing ceremony at the White House? Parody?
I mean, if the Pals already had title deeds to the "West Bank" and Gaza, what for Oslo? What for the final clause binding Israeli and Palestinian leaders not to take, “any step that will change the status of the "West Bank" and the Gaza Strip pending the outcome of the permanent status negotiations.”
Most theatrical, when the mandate of the International Court of Justice is to “settle legal disputes between states in accordance with international law”; and when it is investigating the, “Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory,” we may take it that somebody’s hoodwinked everybody like nobody’s business.
That somebody was Yasser Arafat.
Arab League summits never cured problems. Blame games debilitated them, they seemed to be designated as outlets for disunity and grievance. The bogey was Israel of course. To them a cancer on the sub-continent, it tormented Arab leaders like bacon on the hotel breakfast menu.
The stand-out was the Arab League summit of November 1987 hosted by Jordan. Israel’s "occupation" was at the 20-year mark, and King Hussein spoke about a battle front that mattered more than all the humiliating lost wars. On the propaganda front things were going swell. The monarch must have smiled magnetically at the glum collection of men in the room. The big fraud was proving its weight in gold.
“The appearance of a distinct Palestinian national personality comes as an answer to Israel’s claim that Palestine is Jewish,” he said, in case the delegates needed reminding.
The King was harking back a couple of decades, to a turning point meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization in Cairo. On July 17 1968 a clique led by an Egyptian in keffiyeh and khaki drills, trademark stubble on his chops, contrived to filch the territories Israel captured in 1967 during the Six-Day War. The meeting set up Yasser Arafat to become a one-man product and project.
The weaponry he brought to the Palestinian National Council looked harmless. Yet a whiteout marker and a pen launched not only deadly intifadas but a firestorm of propaganda, unquenched to this day.
That’s correct - stationary was all it took for doctoring the National Covenant of the Arafat-led PLO which contained some problematic clauses. By whiting out words and inking others in, the editor-in-chief soon unpacked spanking new "Palestinian people", bits of straw clinging to beards.
All it lacked to bring the figurines to life was a holy mission. Arafat the editor duly gave them one. A new clause committed them to reclaim the "West Bank" and Gaza as the "Palestinians"’ birthright and heritage of ancient origin.
The editing was done in nimble consecutive steps:
- Erase a 1964 declaration that the "West Bank" and Gaza were not occupied (by Jordan and Egypt)
- Substitute a declaration that the territories were occupied (by Israel)
- Insert a declaration that the "Palestinian people" are sworn to liberate the Israeli occupied "West Bank" and Gaza.
Yet there remained a gut-wrenching Article 6. The original text in the Palestine National Covenant declared that “Jews who had normally resided in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion will be considered Palestinians.”
Jewish Palestinians? Impossible! Whiteout marker please. A definition with a grudge was substituted: Palestinians became, “Those who had resided in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion.” At strokes of a pen Palestinian Jews became invaders.
There and then the world adopted dispossessed Palestinians while it ostracized usurping colonial Jews.
From such rude beginnings grew the Omni-cause empowered by what became the Coca-cola of catchphrases, "Occupied Palestinian Territories."
The tempest was unstoppable. Arab Muslims were not the only or even the most influential spreaders of the narrative about Jews who’d swooped from Europe to put indigenous people under the boot. Arab Christians took up the ball and ran with it.
Thus it was that Jesus became a hybrid - a reborn "Palestinian". Yasser Arafat’s PR woman Hannan Ashrawi disclosed the astounding fact to the Washington Jewish Week on February 22, 2001, and it did not even make headlines.
The woman who lugged Jesus to the war front was not alone. “Every Christmas, Palestine celebrates the birth of one of its own, Jesus Christ,” proclaimed a PLO statement for Christmas 2013. To my knowledge no one has repurposed Jesus into a Muslim, but the PLO seems to leave the possibility wide open.
There were clerics who fidgeted. After all in the Gospels Jesus was King of the Jews. Mitri Raheb, pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem neatly solved the dilemma. Jews, he conceded, were not colonial occupiers - not in scripture they weren’t. But biblical Jews and modern Israelis are quite different people:
“I’m sure if we were to do a DNA test between David, Jesus and I Mitri, born just across the street from where Jesus was born, the DNA will show that there is a trace. While, if you put King David, Jesus and Netanyahu together you will get nothing, because Netanyahu comes from an East European tribe who converted to Judaism in the Middle Ages.”
More than religion and history had to be contorted to fit the narrative, international law had to.
“The partition of Palestine, in 1947, and the establishment of Israel are illegal and null and void, regardless of the passage of time. The claims of historic and spiritual ties between Jews and Palestine are incompatible with the facts of history or with true conception of what constitutes statehood.”
It’s not everyone who has the talent to spin bald-faced lies. Truth be told, the Palestinian Arab camp has done a better job framing Israel than the Israeli camp has done supporting it. Opinion polls confirm that Israel lies on the dung heap with Iran, Pakistan, and North Korea. The country’s name alone makes a majority of Europeans block their nostrils at the stink.
Ironic it may be, but the ascendancy of the Palestinian Arab cause rests on the Pals being losers. The road won’t lead to statehood unless they’re reckoned to be hapless victims of dispossession, at a disadvantage to Zionist cunning and guile and military might. To win the Pals must be underdogs.
Should they be caught outdoing Israel in cleverness and manipulation it could deal a fatal blow to the Palestinian Arab camp. It must play the underdog in this as on other battle fronts, or risk the whole war.
Case made for shining light on the very devious origin of the "victim people" bar none.
This article was adapted by the author from an article he wrote for the American Spectator.
Steve Apfel is an economist; founder and former Director of the School of Management Accounting; a veteran authority on anti-Zionism and a prolific author.