Jerusalem Post editor David Horovitz has written an extensive analysis of the prospects of the Palestinian leadership opting for a unilateral declaration of statehood, probably sometime in 2011, as an alternative to working for a negotiated end to the conflict. It is crucial to understand the issue since it could add an entirely new dynamic into the situation, give new momentum to the Palestinian cause, and simultaneously put Israel in a perilous situation.

There are many reasons to be concerned about a move towards a unilateral declaration of statehood, not least because the Palestinians would undoubtedly want to go beyond the demilitarised state being offered by the Israeli government and also because they would then seek to argue that Israel is not merely an “occupying” power but also an “invading” power. This they could use as a justification for renewed “resistance”, for which read terrorism.

Horovitz has produced an excellent analysis and I recommend reading it in full. But since, at nearly 3,000 words, some readers may not have the time to go through it from beginning to end, I offer here a bullet point rendition of what I take to be the most important points, along with some comments of my own. Points taken from Horowitz’s piece (which are my words, not his) are in bold italics while my own comments follow in normal script:

** Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad has himself declared a summer 2011 deadline for Palestinian statehood. Stop the press right here: summer 2011 is effectively tomorrow. In other words, the threat should be treated as imminent.

** Last Tuesday, the UN’s Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process Robert Serry said to Fayyad: “We are in the home stretch of your agenda to reach [statehood] by August next year, and you have our full support.” The day before, PA President Mahmoud Abbas repeated what is an increasingly common theme from PA officials in threatening a “resort to the United Nations” in the context of a possible unilateral declaration of statehood. In other words, the potential move to a unilateral declaration of statehood with recognition at the UN should not only be treated as imminent, senior UN officials are sounding increasingly positive about such a possible move.

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Readers may be interested to see my piece in today’s Jewish Chronicle. From now on I will be writing a twice-monthly column for the paper in their foreign pages.

Click here to read it.

You couldn’t make it up. But since this is about the UN, you wouldn’t have to. The latest news from New York is that Iran, where women are stoned to death for adultery, is highly likely to gain a seat on the governing board of the UN’s newly revamped women’s rights agency, UN Women. Quoting diplomatic sources in the UN, the Associated Press (AP) said it now looked possible that Saudi Arabia, where women are forbidden from driving cars, could also take a leading position on the same gender equality body.

This is as big a farce as the dictatorship-ridden UN Human Rights Council. But, more than that, it provides yet another illustration of the impossibility of squaring notions of multilateralist, global governance with liberal-democratic principles. Whatever one’s views of the Bush administration, which pulled out of the Human Rights Council, this is one point they understood with complete clarity. Sadly, that is something one can’t necessarily say of their successors who seem almost as bemused as the hapless Europeans. AP quotes the spokesman for the US mission, Mark Kornblau, as saying that Iranian membership of the governing board “would send the wrong signal at the start of this exciting new initiative.” And, he went on:

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Desmond Tutu may have retired earlier this month as an Anglican Archbishop, but he has not given up on his obsession with demonising the Jewish state. Yesterday he was at it again with an appeal to the Cape Town Opera to cancel a planned trip next month to Israel and thus join the international boycott movement.

He said the decision to go would advance “Israel’s fallacious claim to being a ‘civilized democracy.’” He added that, like apartheid South Africa, Israel was “a society founded on discriminatory laws and racial exclusivity.”

Ok. Enough is enough from this man. He’s got away with extreme bigotry against the Jewish state for one reason and one reason alone: because he was a brave and principled opponent of South Africa’s inhuman system of apartheid. But this is ludicrous and it’s time he was called on it.

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Now, I know that it is no surprise that Richard Falk –United Nations Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights since 2008 — has come out with yet more hysterical bile against the State of Israel. This is a man, after all, who in a 2007 article entitled, Slouching toward a
Palestinian Holocaust, said the following: “Is it an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with [the] criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not”.

In fact he’s said many things like that. He also continues to flirt with 9/11 conspiracy theories along the lines that it was all a plot cooked up by “neo-cons” in the White House. In other words, he’s got all the qualifications you might expect for a senior role with the United Nations Human Rights Council, and to be treated as a credible source for the BBC about problems in the peace process.

So much for Richard Falk. Now bring on the BBC’s UN Correspondent, Barbara Plett — whose
laudatory story about Falk’s report yesterday to the UN General Assembly on Israeli settlements and the need for boycotts is today splashed all over the BBC website. (By the way, does the name Barbara Plett ring any bells? It was Plett, some may recall, who in 2004 admitted on air that she had burst into tears at the sight of the terminally ill Yaser Arafat being helicoptered out of his compound on the West Bank).

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