The Palestinians Are a Superpower at the UN But a Weak Mess in Reality - Caroline Glick -
The United Nations (UN) is often a theater of the absurd, where events take place that represent the exact opposite of reality. So it was with the Palestinians and the G-77 last week.
Palestinian Authority Chairman and Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) chief Mahmoud Abbas assumed the presidency Tuesday of the largest United Nationa bloc - the Group of 77 plus China - as the "President" of "the State of Palestine."
The G-77 has 134 member nations. On the face of things, electoral victory at the G-77 is a stunning victory for Abbas and a scathing defeat for Israel.
The most stunning aspect of the Palestinian presidency is that "the State of Palestine," which was elected to lead the group of developing nations, doesn't exist.
Whereas Israel - an actual state that "Palestine" seeks to destroy - is excited when it can pass a completely uncontroversial and effectively meaningless resolution in a minor UN agency encouraging business entrepreneurship, the Palestinians run a 24/7 campaign against the only democracy in the Middle East and have a lock on success in every UN agency and committee - large and small - except for the Security Council.
Due to this state of affairs, Israel is condemned more than all other UN member states put together. The UN has a special day set aside each year bemoaning Israel's very existence. Condemning Israel is a permanent agenda item at the UN Human Rights Council. The UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) devotes its energy to erasing Jewish history from the history books and condemning Israel for refusing to get with the program.
All this, as every tin pot dictatorship wins senior positions on the most illustrious - and progressive - committees. All this, as the Palestinians have done nothing but reject peace and work for Israel's destruction for the past hundred years.
And now, by elevating the non-existent State of Palestine to lead them for the next year, the G-77 has given the Palestinians their greatest victory yet. Palestine may not be a state in the real world. But at the UN, it is a superpower.
Yet at the end of the day, facts on the ground actually matter. And on the ground, Palestine isn't a state. Abbas isn't a president, and he isn't legitimate.
The roster of the members of the G-77 points clearly to the disparity between actual policies of governments and their support for the UN superpower "Palestine."
Over the past several years, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vastly improved and expanded Israel's relations with governments in Africa, Latin America, and Asia - all members of the G-77.
But even as newly-inaugurated Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has pledged to move the Brazilian embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, and made strengthening Brazilian ties with Israel a major goal of his administration, as a member of the G77, Brazil accepts non-existent "Palestine, "which seeks to destroy Israel, as the leader of the bloc. The same goes for India and Kenya and dozens of other G-77 member states with massively expanding bilateral ties with Israel.
In other words, their embrace of "Palestine" at the UN doesn't block them from embracing "Palestine's" real-world nemesis.
Then there is the issue of Abbas's legitimacy on the ground.
Currently, Netanyahu is standing for reelection. He will likely win a fifth term as prime minister and fourth consecutive term in office on April 9.
In contrast, Abbas - the "President" of "Palestine" - ended his legal term in office ten years ago. He lost control over the Gaza Strip to Hamas twelve years ago. His continued survival in office owes to his brutal repression of his critics and opponents on the one hand, and to the fact that Israel controls security in Judea and Samaria, and so prevents his opponents from unseating or assassinating him, on the other.
Making Abbas's illegitimate claim to leadership all the more difficult to uphold, the Jerusalem Post reported that on Tuesday - the day Abbas took over the G-77 - "80 civil society institutions in the Gaza Strip sent a letter to the Group 77 and China in which they said that Abbas was not authorized to represent or speak on behalf of the Palestinians because his four-year term in office had expired in 2009."
The groups blamed Abbas for the humanitarian crisis in claiming that his decision to impose sanctions on the Hamas terror state had raised unemployment to 46 percent and the poverty rate to 65 percent.
They also criticized Abbas's violation of human rights in Judea and Samaria, accusing him of "cracking down on university lecturers and students, lawyers, physicians, engineers, journalists and human rights activists."
The group finally asked the G-77 to withdraw its recognition of Abbas as "President of the State of Palestine."
The letter from the Palestinian organizations is in line with survey data among the Palestinians, which show that they overwhelmingly view Abbas as illegitimate. In a December 2017 survey carried out by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey research, 70 percent of Palestinians wanted Abbas to resign.
Word of the terror attack in Kenya came during the G-77 meeting. And during his speech, Abbas condemned terrorism. "Terrorism," Abbas said, "takes place worldwide on a daily basis. It is an epidemic and I therefore call on all countries of the world to cooperate, to put an end to terrorism, to uproot it."
He added, "The State of Palestine has adopted 83 protocols with 83 countries throughout the world to put an end to this scourge and to fight against terrorism and I call on all states to work with us to combat terrorism."
While Abbas was giving his speech, some 200 protesters were standing outside the UN building condemning the G-77 for electing Abbas and "Palestine" in light of his direct sponsorship of terrorism.
As he condemned terrorism, Abbas failed to mention that he devotes 7 percent of the Palestinian Authority's budget, and nearly half of the foreign aid the PA receives, to incentivizing terrorism.
In 2018, Abbas spent $340 million of the PA's $5 billion overall budget on paying salaries to terrorists sitting in Israeli prisons, and on transfer payments to the families of terrorists wounded and killed in the course of carrying out terror attacks against Israel.
The protest outside the UN was organized by New York City Councilman Bruce Blakeman and Stuart Force, whose son Taylor Force, a U.S. army veteran, was murdered in Tel Aviv by a Palestinian terrorist in 2016. Last year, Congress passed the Taylor Force Act, which bars the U.S. from funding the Palestinian Authority so long as it maintains it maintains its payments to terrorists and their families.
The disconnect between the events in the hall and the outside world - in terms of the member states' bilateral relations with Israel; the Palestinian public's rejection of Abbas; and Abbas's role as terror sponsor and financier - points to a basic truth about the Palestinians and the nature of international relations.
International support for the Palestinians grows with the level of abstraction. The more concrete one's relations are with the Palestinian Authority - whether as Palestinians who live under its jackboot, or Israelis who are the target of its aggression - the less legitimate Abbas is, and the smaller the octogenarian with no legitimate claim to power appears.
The more symbolic one's relations with the Palestinians, the more fervent support for "Palestine" becomes. The G-77 isn't elevating the "State of Palestine" because it cares about the Palestinians. The G-77 is elevating the "State of Palestine" because it doesn't care about the Palestinians.
Although India, for example, rarely votes against the "State of Palestine" at the UN, its bilateral ties with Israel have expanded exponentially in recent years.
Netanyahu has worked assiduously to leverage the ties he has developed with states like Kenya, Rwanda, Brazil, and India into diminished support for the Palestinians at the UN. His efforts have brought about only a marginal change in behavior.
By and large, the Palestinians can continue to expect support from the vast majority of UN member states for any initiative they launch against Israel. Indeed, long after Abbas, his successors and their PLO are ousted from power, they will remain in senior leadership positions at the UN.
But as the recent massive growth of Israel's bilateral ties to the nations of the world makes clear, there is often little connection between support for "Palestine" at the UN and animosity for Israel.
Time to Tell the Truth about the Palestinian Issue - by Alan M. Dershowitz - https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13615/palestinian-issue-truth
The front page of the New York Times Sunday Review featured one of the most biased, one-sided, historically inaccurate, ignorant and bigoted articles ever published by that venerable newspaper. Written by Michele Alexander, it is entitled: "Time to Break the Silence on Palestine," as if the Palestinian issue has not been the most over-hyped cause on campuses, in the United Nations and in the media. There is no silence to break. What must be broken is the bigotry of those who elevate the Palestinian claims over those of the Kurds, the Syrians, the Iranians, the Chechnyans, the Tibetans, the Ukrainians, and many other more deserving groups who truly suffer from the silence of the academy, the media and the international community. The United Nations devotes more resources -- time, money and votes -- to the Palestinian issue than to the claims of all the other oppressed groups combined. Some of these other groups cannot even get a hearing at the United Nations.
The suffering of the Palestinians, which does not compare to the suffering of other groups, has been largely self-inflicted. They could have had a state, with no occupation, if they had accepted the Peel Commission Report of 1937, the United Nations Partition Plan of 1947, the Clinton-Barak offer of 2000-2001, the Ehud Olmert offer of 2008. They rejected all these offers -- responding with violence and terrorism -- because they would have required them to accept Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people -- something they are unwilling to do even today. I know, because I have asked President Mahmoud Abbas that question directly, and he has said no. The Palestinian leadership has always wanted there not to be a Jewish state more than they wanted there to be a Palestinian state.
The Palestinian issue is not "one of the great moral challenges of our time," as the article insists. It is a complex, nuanced, pragmatic problem, with fault on all sides. It could be solved, if Palestinian leaders were prepared to accept the "painful compromises" that Israeli leaders have already agreed to accept. Had the early Palestinian leadership -- which collaborated with Hitler -- not, with all the surrounding Arab states, attacked Israel the moment it declared statehood, it would have a viable state. Had Hamas used the resources it received when Israel ended its occupation of the Gaza Strip in 2005 to build schools, hospitals and industry, instead of using these resources to construct rocket launchers and terror tunnels, it could have become a "Singapore on the Sea" instead of the poverty-stricken enclave its leaders have turned it into. The Palestinian leadership -- Hamas as well as the Palestinian Authority -- bears at least as much responsibility for the plight of the Palestinians as do the Israelis.
Israel is not without some fault, but the one-sided blame-it-all-on-Israel approach taken by Alexander is ahistorical and bigoted. One illustration of the author's bias is her absurd claim that "many students are fearful of expressing support for Palestinian rights" because of "McCarthyite tactics" employed by pro-Israel groups. Has Alexander ever actually been on a campus? Well, I have taught and lectured at hundreds of campuses, and I can attest that there is no international cause that is given more attention -- far more than it deserves in comparison with other more compelling causes -- than the Palestinians. It is pro-Israel students who are silenced out of fear of being graded down, denied recommendations and been shunned by peers. Efforts have been made to prevent me from speaking on several campuses, despite the fact that I advocate a two-state solution to the conflict.
Alexander claims that there is legal discrimination against Israeli Arabs. The reality is that Israeli Arabs have more rights than Arabs anywhere in the Muslim world. They vote freely, have their own political parties, speak openly against the Israeli government and are beneficiaries of affirmative action in Israeli universities. The only right they lack is to turn Israel into another Muslim state governed by Sharia law, instead of the nation state of Jewish people governed by secular democratic law. That is what the new nation state law does when it denies Arabs "the right of self-determination in Israel."
Alexander condemns "Palestinian homes being bulldozed" without mentioning that these are the homes of terrorists who murder Jewish babies, women and men. She bemoans casualties in Gaza -- which she calls "occupied," even though every Israeli soldier and settler left in 2005 -- without mentioning that many of these casualties were human shields from behind whom Hamas terrorists fire rockets at Israeli civilians. She says there are "streets for Jews only," which is a categorical lie. There are roads in the disputed territories that are limited to cars with Israeli license plates -- for security reasons. But these roads are open to all Israelis, including Muslims, Druze, Christians, Zoroastrians, and people of no faith. But as Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK) reminded us, when you repeat a lie often enough people believe it.
The most outrageous aspect of Alexander's screed is her claim that MLK inspired her to write it. MLK was a staunch Zionist, who famously said: "When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You're talking anti-Semitism." MLK would have been appalled at Alexander's one-sided attack on the nation state of the Jewish people and especially on her misuse of his good name to support anti-Israel bigotry.
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