By Karl Vick in Strasbourg
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas holds a press conference at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, France, October 6, 2011.
On
top of the council's recommendation to its 47 members, including six nations
currently on the Security Council, there was also an encouraging nod from the
European Parliament, the elective arm of the European Union, which last week
termed the bid for statehood "legitimate." And on Wednesday the
executive board of UNESCO, the U.N.'s Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization, voted overwhelmingly to put the question of Palestinian
membership to its 193 members later this month, even if its parent organization
has not yet acted.
"The
timing is good," says Riyad al-Maliki, the Palestinian foreign minister,
of the flurry of multilateral encouragement. "This is really important in
terms of anybody who's trying to undermine our achievement."
"Anybody"
would include Israel, which correctly sees the Palestinian bid as an attempt to
gain leverage in moribund peace talks aimed at ending the 44-year occupation of
the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the ultimate precondition to realizing a state
called Palestine. The Israeli foreign ministry issued a statement saying the
UNESCO move "negates the efforts of the international community to advance
the political process."
There
was also a slapdown from the Obama administration, which has a longstanding
commitment with Israel to protect it at the United Nations, and any other
international forums that tend to pile up resolutions condemning the Jewish
State. UNESCO has been historically prominent on that list, having once equated
Zionism with racism. But the agency has since remade itself, and the specific
complaint of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was that it was
"inexplicably" putting the cart before the horse: Let the U.N. act first,
she told reporters.
"If
she means what she says I would agree with her," Abbas replies. "But
she doesn't mean what she says." The United States, he points out, is
doing all it can to thwart the Palestinian bid. Not only has President Obama
vowed to use the U.S. veto in the Security Council to prevent full membership,
his administration is working hard to prevent the measure from even emerging
from committee.
There's
intense lobbying of nations that currently hold rotating Security Council seats
— the swing voters include Portugal, Gabon, Colombia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina.
The U.S. hope is to leave Palestinians short of the nine votes required to move
the application to the level where the veto would become the only way to stop
it, and spare the U.S. playing at least the conspicuous heavy.
The
Palestinians are scrambling, too. From Strasbourg, Abbas headed across the
Atlantic to the Dominican Republic — where, by chance, Clinton was a day
earlier — then El Salvador, and finally Colombia, where he hopes to persuade
President Juan Manuel Santos to join nearly all of the rest of Central and
South America in backing the statehood bid. As luck would have it, Colombia,
which has been showered with defense aid from Washington in recent decades, has
a seat on the current Security Council seat. "We will get the nine, if not
even more," insists al-Maliki, who reckons he's visited 50 countries in
the last three months. "The fact that the president is going to the
Caribbean is evidence that we are not giving up."
The
Palestinians will also hit Africa this month — hello, Gabon — but the final
battleground will be Europe. If, as all expect, Washington prevails in the
Security Council and full membership is denied, the Palestinians could regroup
and take their case to the General Assembly. The assembly cannot bestow full
membership status, but it could elevate Palestine from "observer
entity" to "observer state," a crucial distinction because the
promotion would very likely give Palestinians standing in global legal
institutions such as the International Criminal Court, which appears to regard
Israel's 120-plus settlements on occupied Palestinian territory as a violation
of the laws of war.
The
question of jurisdiction is not automatic, however. The court will hear
complaints from Palestine only if it judges it qualifies as a state. That's a
subjective judgment easier to arrive at the longer the list of existing states
that say they recognize it as one — and, in the way of the world, the list
includes a lot of established, economically powerful states, which are
clustered in Europe.
Right
now, most of Europe is on the fence, extending something less than full
diplomatic recognition to Ramallah, the West Bank capital. That's why, from
Colombia, Abbas steers toward Paris. And why he started his journey in
Strasbourg, where emerging democracies come for merit badges. Begun after World
War II at the encouragement of Winston Churchill, the Council of Europe
welcomed much of the former East Bloc after the Cold War and now numbers 47
members. Its appeal? Its European Court of Human Rights surely matters. But the
key is prestige: "You're a member of the club," says Mireille Paulus,
secretary to the council's committee of ministers.
Palestine
was named a "Partner for Democracy," a designation shared only by one
other Arab state, Morocco. It's not membership, just encouragement; but
encouragement is what Palestinians need, Abbas tells the delegates seated, in
alphabetical order by last name, in the auditorium known as the
"hemicycle." "We have always underlined our commitment to
international legitimacy," he says. "Our people are waiting,
patiently."
This article was published in Time on 09/10/2011
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