Abbas weighs intl action against Israel

[Jefferson23]

NEW YORK (Ma'an) -- President Mahmoud Abbas says the Palestinian leadership is close to deciding if it will file complaints against Israel at United Nations institutions and courts in November.

He said the leadership would act regardless of threats from either Israel or the United States.

Speaking to Ma'an during his flight to New York, Abbas said the PA was considering possible moves in response to settlement projects which the government of Benjamin Netanyahu is trying to carry out in the West Bank following the military offensive against the Gaza Strip.

Asked about rebuilding war-torn Gaza, the president was cautious in his remarks.

"Reconstruction of Gaza is possible through the national consensus government and through cooperation between Hamas and the Palestine Liberation Organization, and this cooperation must be agreed on quickly between the delegations of Hamas and Fatah to Cairo."

http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=729062

[BillZBubb]

1. The only way to stop the illegal Israeli settlements is through the Intl. community.

The US, of course, will do everything in its power to back whatever Israel demands. But, there might finally be support around to the world to finally tell the Israelis "enough"!

[Jefferson23]

2. Better to go down fighting that venue than caving and ending up without a viable state, yes. n/t

[King_David]

3. International community criticizing the Jewish state ?

If Algeria introduced a resolution declaring that the earth was flat and that Israel had flattened it, it would pass by a vote of 164 to 13 with 26 abstentions.

Abba Eban


Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/a/abbaeban167935.html#HyIevCp5DdkG632D.99

[BillZBubb]

8. Criticism isn't enough.

Action by the first world nations is what is required. Israel should be treated exactly as last stage apartheid South Africa--as a pariah nation unworthy of international support.

[King_David]

13. Hardly a new 2014 idea,

Been happening way before South Africa.

BDS been happening for centuries.

[oberliner]

4. Almost 20 percent of the UN member states don't recognize Israel as a country

For what that is worth.

[DanTex]

7. Question for you.

Do you recognize that the 1947 UN Partition plan was an injustice to the Palestinians? After all, it assigned more land to Israel than Palestine, despite the fact that there were more Palestinians than Jews. And also, the territory assigned to Israel was ethnically split, something like 60-40 Jewish or less, whereas the Palestinian territory was almost 100% populated by Palestinians. To me this is a clear indication that the partition was unfair -- not only did Israel get more land for less people, but obviously virtually all the land that could have gone either way, in the sense that it was populated by both peoples, was assigned to Israel. The result is that the partition would have required many Palestinians to live in a Jewish state or migrate, whereas almost no Jews would have been subjected to that.

It's interesting that this very clearly unjust (in my mind, though I'm interested to hear your opinion) UN decision is so frequently cited as legal legitimization of the whole Zionist colonial enterprise, and yet the same people now decry the UN as "biased against Israel".

[oberliner]

10. Response

The 300 years prior to the UN Partition Plan was an injustice to the Palestinians. Actually even longer than that. For centuries, Palestinians were under the rule of a variety of colonial powers.

The 1947 UN Partition Plan would have created an independent autonomous Palestinian state, something that had never been allowed to exist up to that point. Jerusalem would have been respected as an international city with free access to all faiths - and the Palestinian people would finally be free.

In addition, the Palestinians would forever be remembered as a people with such deep empathy and compassion for those who were exterminated by the millions across Europe, that they were willing to allow for a Jewish state to be established in their midst. They even could have seized on the potential benefit of working in conjunction with their new neighbors in order to create a better future for both peoples (and the international goodwill that could have been generated by such cooperation).

The 1940's was filled with many great injustices all over the world, thanks in large part to the horrors inflicted by WWII. The UN Partition Plan, while not ideal, was a step towards giving two oppressed peoples the opportunity to be masters of their own respective national destinies.

One of the reasons that the UN is currently biased against Israel is that the UN is composed of numerous countries today that did not exist then. If you restricted the UN to the countries that existed in 1947 - it would be a very different organization.

I would also point out that the UN Partition Plan was never actually implemented.

[DanTex]

14. Well, I kinda think you are avoiding the question.

I agree that prior to 1947 the Palestinians, along with many other indigenous peoples all over the world, were subjected to injustice. With the coming of modernity and the recognition that colonialism was an injustice, though, the non-Zionist outcome would have been a Palestinian state in what is now I/P. In an admittedly loose analogy, your argument is similar to saying that Jim Crow is OK because it was much better than slavery. What the Palestinians rightfully deserved, and could rightfully expect, was a state of their own and self-determination.

All this changed with the Zionist migration. Of course, evicting the Zionists or ethnically cleansing them (what some Palestinians i.e. Hamas still want to do) was obviously not the right thing to do either. In the same way that I don't think that kicking all the white people out of South Africa was the right thing to do either.

I'm also not sure that things were actually worse for the Palestinians before 1947. In the sense of technological advancement, sure, but in a broader political sense, were the Ottomans as brutal as the Israelis? With 1948 came the Nakba, and then in 1967 came the occupation. Did the Ottomans have checkpoints and security walls? I don't know the answer to these questions.

I wish you would actually address the question of the fairness of the 1947 partition -- I'm not trying to trap you, I actually would like to have a civilized discussion, because even though I probably disagree with you, in my short time here I've come to respect your opinion and also recognize that you probably know more about some of these issues than me. It just seems (clearly) indefensible to me to (a) give more land to the minority Jews and (b) partition the land such that Israel had a substantial Palestinian population and not vice versa. The fact that things were worse for the Palestinians before that (if indeed that's true) isn't a justification for further injustice. To me, this argument resembles conservative apologies for sweatshops, saying that without them the people would be even poorer.

Put yourself in a 1947 Palestinian's shoes. Finally, you have a chance for freedom and self-determination. Except suddenly more than half of your land is granted to a group of Europeans that just started moving here some 50 years ago. Even though there are less of them, they get more land. The land assigned to Palestine is awkwardly non-contiguous. And virtually all of the land that is populated with both peoples is assigned to the European state. Oh, and the people who decided upon this partition were Europeans and Westerners, all of the other nations in the area were opposed to the plan and were summarily ignored.

I don't agree that the current UN is biased against Israel. The US sits on the Security Council, and is also the most influential nation in the world, and Israel is one if its closest allies. The Palestinians have nobody with any power to go to bat for them. IN fact the whole notion of "anti-Israel bias" is grossly overblown IMO.

[DanTex]

15. Just to add.

If at any time before 1947, the Palestinians had taken to arms and rebelled against the Ottomans, nobody would have considered this anything by just another revolutionary war for independence. There would have been holidays and war heroes and songs and the whole works. But when the Palestinians took to arms against the unjust UN partition plan, against what the Palestinians (with very good reason) considered yet another group of foreigners colonizing their land, this war is taken as justification for the subsequent ethnic cleansing and capture of lands beyond the 1947 partition by Israel.

[oberliner]

16. It was actually Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon who attacked

The Palestinians mostly stayed out of it.

Colonial powers generally have a home country from which they are doing the colonizing. The Jewish immigrants to Palestine would not fit that description as they were, at this point, mostly refugees fleeing from oppressive environments (to put it mildly).

[DanTex]

17. From what I've read, civil war broke out between Palestinians and Jews first.

Started by Palestinians. Neighboring countries got involved later.

Colonial powers generally have a home country from which they are doing the colonizing. The Jewish immigrants to Palestinian would not fit that description as they were, at this point, mostly refugees fleeing from oppressive environments (to put it mildly).

This is true, Zionism wasn't traditional exploitation colonialism (i.e. for resources or labor or "glory&quot . But it wasn't just purely refugeeism either. There was a clear intent to establish a Jewish state in a land which already had an indigenous population. I believe the term is "settler colonialism".

This is not to deny that the refugees were fleeing oppressive environments -- the oppression of Jews is well documented, well before the Nazis. Generally, though refugees are seeking a place to live. They are not seeking to found a new nation in a location that is already populated. The US has accepted many refugees over the years. If Cuban refugees decided that they want to take a piece of Florida and create a new Cuban homeland, the US would have a serious problem with that.

Plus, from the point of view of the Palestinians, the Zionists were simply Europeans that came in, settled, and got other Europeans to grant them a state on the land that they had been living on and farming for centuries. And you can't really blame them for feeling that way. They weren't the ones conducting pogroms.

The central problem is that Palestinians were made to pay for the sins of Russians, Germans, and other Europeans. If someone's land should be taken to create a Jewish state, shouldn't it have been the people who had been oppressing the Jews?

[oberliner]

23. Feel free to PM me if you want to discuss this further

I don't want to clog up the board with rehashing this stuff. If you'd like to go into this in more depth, please do send me a message and I'd be happy to keep the conversation going.

[DanTex]

18. Another thought.

I also would prefer if history had proceeded as you hypothesize: the Palestinians welcoming the Zionists, acknowledging their oppression, and viewing them as friends and allies as opposed to enemies.

But the deck was seriously stacked against this.

First, as I mentioned, the Zionists, from the beginning were intent not on integrating with the indigenous population, but establishing their own Jewish-majority state. This was acknowledged by many Zionists from the beginning. Though the "bride is already married" quote may be apocryphal, there are plenty of examples of equivalent statements. The Zionists recognized that in order to create a Jewish state, somehow the native population would have to be relocated. Not necessarily through violence, but, for example, through discriminatory labor practices. If the Zionists, like virtually every other group of refugees I am aware of, had sought to live as peaceful neighbors in a nation governed by the local population, everything could have turned out differently. But this was not their intent.

On top of this we have the 1947 UN Partition which I can't see as anything but a gross injustice to the Palestinians.

One final point is that the Nakba is often dismissed by saying "well, there was a war", blaming it on the Palestinians and neighboring Arab states for initiating violence in 1947-48. Never mind that this is not a valid excuse for ethnic cleansing. Given that the Jewish majority in 1947 UN Israel was 60-40 at best, it is highly doubtful that Israel would have survived as a Jewish democratic state without ethnic cleansing in the first place. 60-40 is a very tenuous majority. Even with racist immigration policy, all it takes is a small differential in birth rates over the years to convert this to majority Arab. The common excuse for denying right of return is that it would destroy the Jewish majority. But this begs the question: what if there had been no Nakba? Is there reason to believe that the birth rate of Palestinians would have been lower had they not been displaced during the war?

All of this is to say, even if the Palestinians had had a Nelson Mandela or Ghandi, I don't really think that things could have turned out very well. I think the Zionist insistence on a Jewish majority state, motivated in large part by religious folklore (God promised the land to Abraham etc.) doomed the whole thing from the beginning.

[oberliner]

24. Zionists were not religious

They were secular. Many were atheists. Almost none believed "God promised the land to Abraham".

Just curious, have you read any of the first-hand accounts of the early Zionists? Some of them can be found for free on Google Books. I ask because I don't think you have a full picture of the intent, at least initially.

Granted, the Holocaust significantly impacted the Zionist movement due to the emergency situation that existed for world Jewry in the 1940s. Getting the hell out of Europe took precedence over anything else at that time.

[Israeli]

25. True oberliner....

" They were secular. Many were atheists. Almost none believed "God promised the land to Abraham". "

..... and many of them were communists ....like my grandparents .

Today its another story ....most are religious , most are Right wing ....most have been imported from your country .

[Israeli]

26. Kach oberliner...

Imported to here from America ... Baruch Goldstein and Co ...and most of Hevron ...and most of the religious Right wing extremists taking up space in the Wild West Bank .... they are American oberliner.

[whosinpower1]

40. Interesting

I did not know that.

Sigh......

[Israeli]

42. The majority of our Religious Right wing are American ...

......in Hevron , as an example , the Palestinians talk to us in a common language ...Hebrew ...their knowledge far outweighs our Arabic .....but the dominant language of Hevron is neither Hebrew or Arabic .... its English ... with an American accent .

[oberliner]

27. Agreed

But the poster was asking about the 1940s.

[Israeli]

37. and you brought up my roots ...

so excuse me for trying to have a say .

[DanTex]

28. I haven't read any first-hand accounts.

At least not in full -- just excerpts here and there. I take your word that that it was not a religious movement, at least not initially. And I don't know exactly when the intention to form a majority Jewish state arose, but I'm pretty sure it was well before the 1940s.

[oberliner]

29. It was not well before the 1940s - it was after the Holocaust

I'm not a fan of Wikipedia, but:

Before the Holocaust the movement's central aims were the creation of a Jewish National Home and cultural centre in Palestine by facilitating Jewish migration. After the Holocaust, the movement focused on creation of a "Jewish state" (usually defined as a secular state with a Jewish majority), attaining its goal in 1948 with the creation of Israel.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Zionism

[DanTex]

31. Well, Theodore Hertzl wrote "Der Judenstaat" in 1896, right?

After the first Zionist Congress, he said:

Were I to sum up the Basel Congress in a word - which I shall guard against pronouncing publicly - it would be this: At Basel I founded the Jewish State.[2] If I said this out loud today l would be greeted by universal laughter. In five years perhaps, and certainly in fifty years, everyone will perceive it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Zionist_Congress

So at the very least, the idea of a Jewish state was out there pretty early.

[oberliner]

32. Have you read the book?

I very much do not think the Wikipedia summary does it justice.

Also I think the quotes from the Basel Declaration cited in your Wikipedia link support my comments about the early Zionist movement.

As do the notes from the subsequent eleven Zionist Congresses throughout the early part of the 20th century.

I would note that Herzl didn't actually "say" what you've cited in your post, but rather he wrote it in his diary. Have you read the full diary? A few sentences later, he elaborates that he meant this as an abstract concept. The idea that Jews are a nation unto themselves - which was a fairly controversial position to hold at the time.

[DanTex]

33. I have not. I have also not read his diary.

However, when the founding (on edit, OK, maybe not exactly "founding" but certainly of central importance) document of Zionism is literally titled "The Jewish State," it's pretty hard to argue that establishing a Jewish state wasn't at least part of the program. This is not to say that all or even most of the actual Jews who migrated to I/P were doing so to establish a Jewish state. Or even that all of the leaders of the movement were trying to establish one. But the idea was clearly out there.

Yes, the idea of a Jewish state was controversial. This is why Hertzl didn't "say" that even though he was thinking that. Zionists needed political allies to achieve their goals. Boldly declaring that there were going to create a Jewish state in a place where there were still hardly any Jews would have been a political blunder. It also would have seemed far-fetched at the time.

Here's more from the Wikipedia entry on the Balfour Declaration. This is 1917, and the idea of a Jewish State is very much alive (and controversial).

Explication of the wording of the Balfour Declaration is found in the correspondence leading to the final version of the declaration. The phrase "national home" was intentionally used instead of "state" because of opposition to the Zionist program within the British Cabinet. Following discussion of the initial draft the Cabinet Secretary, Mark Sykes, met with the Zionist negotiators to clarify their aims. His official report back to the Cabinet categorically stated that the Zionists did not want "to set up a Jewish Republic or any other form of state in Palestine immediately"[21] but rather preferred some form of protectorate as provided in the Palestine Mandate. In approving the Balfour Declaration, Leopold Amery, one of the Secretaries to the British War Cabinet of 1917–18, testified under oath to the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry in January 1946 from his personal knowledge that:

"The phrase 'the establishment in Palestine of a National Home for the Jewish people' was intended and understood by all concerned to mean at the time of the Balfour Declaration that Palestine would ultimately become a 'Jewish Commonwealth' or a 'Jewish State', if only Jews came and settled there in sufficient numbers."[22]

Both the Zionist Organization and the British government devoted efforts over the following decades, including Winston Churchill's 1922 White Paper, to denying that a state was the intention.[a] However, in private, many British officials agreed with the interpretation of the Zionists that a state would be established when a Jewish majority was achieved.[23]

The initial draft of the declaration, contained in a letter sent by Rothschild to Balfour, referred to the principle "that Palestine should be reconstituted as the National Home of the Jewish people."[24] In the final text, the word that was replaced with in to avoid committing the entirety of Palestine to this purpose. Similarly, an early draft did not include the commitment that nothing should be done which might prejudice the rights of the non-Jewish communities. These changes came about partly as the result of the urgings of Edwin Samuel Montagu, an influential anti-Zionist Jew and Secretary of State for India, who was concerned that the declaration without those changes could result in increased anti-Semitic persecution. The draft was circulated and during October the government received replies from various representatives of the Jewish community. Lord Rothschild took exception to the new proviso on the basis that it presupposed the possibility of a danger to non-Zionists, which he denied.[25] At San Remo, as shown in the transcript of the San Remo meeting on the evening of 24 April, the French proposed adding to the savings clause so that it would save for non-Jewish communities their "political rights" as well as their civil and religious rights. The French proposal was rejected.

[oberliner]

34. This is why I don't like Wikipedia

Folk can go back and forth pasting Wikipedia paragraphs to support their arguments (even when those paragraphs contradict each other across different Wikipedia article on the same topic).

[DanTex]

35. That is a problem. Particularly on controversial topics.

It's also annoying when the links to the sources are broken, which happens all the time.

[oberliner]

36. My main point is that it did not have to turn out this way

The Zionist movement and the Palestinian nationalist movement could have existed in harmony with one another and to the betterment of both adherents.

[Israeli]

38. Correct DanTex....

...it was well before the 1940s.

The term used here is " Aliyah " ....means "ascent" ....see :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aliyah

“The First Aliyah” was between 1882-1903.

See also The First Aliyah Museum in Zikhron Ya'akov

http://www.israeltraveler.org/en/site/first-aliya-museum

The Second Aliyah was 1904-1914 ....(my roots)......see :

http://www.moia.gov.il/English/FeelingIsrael/AboutIsrael/Pages/aliya2.aspx

The Third Aliyah was 1919-1923.

The Fourth Aliyah was 1924-1928.

The Fifth Aliyah was 1929-1939 .

All before the 1940s.....

Ref : http://www.moia.gov.il/English/FeelingIsrael/AboutIsrael/Pages/aliya5.aspx

[Israeli]

39. The "aliyah" that has had the most profound affect on today's Israel ....

....is rarely mentioned DanTex ....it was the "aliyah" of the American religious Right wing ...post 1967 .

Naftali Bennett is a child of this "aliyah" ...

Naftali Bennett was born in Haifa, Israel on 25 March 1972. He is the youngest of three sons born to American Jewish immigrants Jim and Myrna Bennett, who had made aliyah from San Francisco in 1967

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naftali_Bennett

They came because the 1967 six day war to them was a miracle ....god had spoken .

They came in their thousands and made their claim .

Today they control the narritive ....backed up by a Russian ex bouncer that would make Putin proud . ...and Bibi of course ... whoes hands still drip with Rabin's blood ...

[whosinpower1]

41. thank you. nt.

[oberliner]

5. The Palestinian people don't support Abbas

It was something like 10 percent, right?

[BillZBubb]

9. Not now they don't. He is rightfully viewed as weak.

If he actually took bold action for once instead of temporizing, his popularity will rise.

[oberliner]

11. Does filing a complaint with the UN count as bold action?

Somehow, it doesn't seem like it would.

[BillZBubb]

12. The Israelis seem to be very concerned about it.

It goes beyond "filing a complaint". It is the beginning of using international organizations to bring Israel to justice by the Palestinians. Demanding recognition as a state is the bold move.

[oberliner]

21. They are always concerned

The phrase "filing a complaint" comes from the first paragraph of the article posted.

Demanding recognition as a state is not a bold move.

The majority of countries in the UN already recognize the state.

[Jefferson23]

20. The recent Gaza poll? Yes, that would be correct. Let's see what he does to build confidence. n/t

[oberliner]

22. Still hope for him?

He's never really been all that popular.

[Jefferson23]

30. That's entirely up to him, I think. n/t

[azurnoir]

6. Abbas needs to sign the Rome Statutes and Israel will have to do the same if it intends to bring

counter charges against the Palestinians

[Jefferson23]

19. Yes, and we'll see if he is prepared to go beyond positioning when the time comes. n/t