Veto!

The United States will oppose Palestine’s bid to join the United Nations. Such a scenario was expected. However, Washington’s official announcement reiterating its intention to use its veto against Palestine’s entry introduces new dynamics and interpretations to international law and the charter of the United Nations. In effect, faced with the deliberate blockage imposed by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the threat of an American veto is not made more acceptable by the fact that the United States does not know if the impasse is long-term and continues to interfere in the peace talks in the contentious Middle East.

The United States, which recommends the creation of a Palestinian state on the basis of the 1967 borders, also admits that the move to insert colonists (that it did not succeed in stopping) into occupied Palestinian territory constitutes a serious impediment to the implementation of the vision of two states existing side-by-side — Israel and Palestine. The entrance of the Palestinian state into the U.N. based on the 1967 borders is the only answer that could resolve the situation. Also, the American veto to Palestinian entry into the U.N. will strengthen Israel, to which international law apparently does not apply. Israel, protected by Washington, squashes the world with its arrogance, hate and power, pursuing without remorse an objective that would nullify the Palestinian state. Washington is pleading that such a state would need to be the result of “negotiations” between Israel and the Palestinians. However, Israeli maneuvers clearly show that these negotiations do not interest Israel as they happened when it was not possible to envision a solution. The United States knows that perfectly.

Furthermore, the head of the Israeli extreme right party Yisrael Beiteinu, Avigdor Lieberman, the minister of foreign affairs, was not even hiding Israel’s intentions when he affirmed last year, after the interruption of negotiations after the Israeli moratorium on construction on the West Bank, that Israel should continue to negotiate with the Palestinians to assure that a Palestinian state is not conceivable for at least a century. Translation: these statements mean that there will in fact never be a Palestinian state that borders Israel because there is no Palestinian territory on which to build such a state.

The United States, the European Union, the U.N. and the Middle East Quartet know this, having directed the Israeli-Palestinian talks, whose repeated failures have led to rapid colonization in tandem with the Judaization of East Jerusalem. Thus, there is a complicity of all parties against Palestine and against world peace. This, to the knowledge of the international authorities, started in the U.N. and the lack of response played right into the United States’ hands. Because if a Palestinian state is not recognized and admitted into the U.N. this September, it will never be. And even if it is in a few decades, it will be too late to speak of Palestine or a Palestinian state.

Negotiate? It is an illusion that the Palestinians have been negotiating with the Israeli state since the 1993 Oslo accords, as the talks have gone without an iota of progress. The last hope of the Palestinians is to see their state admitted to the U.N., which the United States opposes. We cannot imagine how this is international equality and the right of all people to live free and equal when the Israelis, supported by the American veto, refuse to allow the Palestinians to live free in their own independent state.