The UN’s deputy chief for political affairs, B. Lynn Pascoe, has been urging Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, to restart negotiations with Israel.
Let us forget for a moment that Israel wants to negotiate what under international law as sanctioned by the UN itself should not be negotiated, only withdrawn from.
Forget, too, for a moment that the UN is incapable of enforcing this international law on Israel, a country that has been in transgression of international law, not to mention common norms of moral and decent behaviour, since its founding in 1948 and the resulting displacement and dispossession of more than 50 per cent of Palestinians at that time.
Forget finally, that without the UN and the legitimacy it bestows upon the causes of the poor, the weak and the dispossessed the world over, Palestinians, along with all those other poor, weak and dispossessed people from all corners of the world, are finally sold down the river in a Hobbesian world devoid of mercy or justice.
That the UN should put the onus on the Palestinians to restart negotiations simply beggars belief.
How is it that the UN can sanction such a position? Surely, the onus has to be on Israel to withdraw from all areas it occupied illegally and belligerently in war, with or without negotiations.
That is not to say that talking isn’t a good thing. But there is no point in talking for the sake of talking. That is what Israel has succeeded in doing since 1991. Talking for no other reason than to drag out time in order to expand its control on the ground and over more land.
Israel’s settlement expansion is also illegal under international law as expounded by the UN, but apparently that doesn’t matter when trying to curry favour with a country whose government, uniquely in this day and age, wants to define it as being only of one ethno-religious grouping in a throwback to some of the more unfortunate political philosophy of a long-ago era in Europe.
The most important issue to bear in mind right now is this: failed negotiations will backfire, again, and this time likely irreparably. The UN’s deputy chief of political affairs should understand this simple truth.
Much more useful would be for the UN to insist that its member states finally and unequivocally take a stand against Israel’s criminal settlement building in occupied territories and present the country with a clear ultimatum: cease and desist or face sanctions.
Why should Israel be allowed to get away with breaking the law for so long?
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