The Quartet Plan was presented to stop the P.L.O. from pursuing their “UN bid”, or pressing it for a vote, because Israel was terribly upset, and the U.S. threatened to use their veto power to block it in the UN Security Council.

At the first 3-month mark, the two parties were to have met, and they were to have exchanged ideas on what the borders for a two-state solution should look like, and on security arrangements.

So, what has happened?

In December, the Palestinians let it be known that if Israel doesn’t present its idea of borders for a two-state solution by this date, the “hudna” or “truce would be over, and the Palestinians would again unleash all efforts for international recognition and admission to the international organization.

In a calm and rather leisurely reaction, the U.S. State Department said a few days later that the three-month marker was not a rigid or fixed “deadline” … and urged efforts to continue to bring the parties back to the table for direct negotiations.

[Only the Palestinians were refusing, saying it would be useless, mainly because Israeli settlement-building activities continued, while Israeli officials said to anyone who would listen that they were ready for direct talks, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu even repeated his offer to go anywhere, almost anytime -- even to Ramallah...]

Then, King Abdullah II of Jordan flew by helicopter over the Israeli-controlled West Bank and landed in the refurbished helicopter pad at Ramallah Presidential Muqata’a for a meeting with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas — a day before Abbas himself was due to travel through Jordan, on his way to another session of Palestinian reconciliation talks with Hamas officials in Cairo… Little was revealed publicly about that meeting, and some diplomatic sources suggested that the real purpose was that Abdullah needed help and had panicked, and was really asking Mahmoud Abbas for help .

What is more significant is that U.S. State Department envoy David Hale, who had met Abbas the evening before, was back in Jerusalem to meet Israeli PM Netanyahu just before Abdullah II landed in Ramallah. Then, Hale drove overland to Amman, and met Abdallah II back in Amman that evening.

Not long afterwards, Jordan announced that it would be hosting talks between Israeli and Palestinian negotiators in Amman — which would include direct meetings for the first time since September 2010. Jordanian Foreign Minister Nasser Judeh announced that further contacts would be held — but not announced.

The U.S. Secretary of State then announced the date of the second meeting, in early January…

There was criticism from different Palestinian political groupings, from Hamas to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine [PFLP], and Palestinian “youth groups” organized a couple of demonstrations outside the Muqata’a to protest.

A total of five meetings were held in Amman, prior to today’s deadline.

The Palestinians presented their maps and border proposals in an early meeting.

It was not until the last meeting of negotiators [the P.L.O.'s Saeb Erekat, and Israel's Yitzhak Molcho] that the Israeli delegation screeched up to the meeting, just hours before the deadline, with a kind of power-point presentation about its general ideas — but reportedly without any very specific indications of what Israel thought the borders for a two-state solution should be… and not much indication about security, either.

UPDATE: AP reported on Friday 27 January, here, that:

“Israel is proposing to essentially turn its West Bank separation barrier into the border with a future state of Palestine, two Palestinian officials said Friday, based on their interpretation of principles Israel presented in talks this week. The officials said Israeli envoy Yitzak Molcho told his Palestinian counterpart that Israel wants to keep east Jerusalem and consolidate Jewish settlements behind the separation barrier, which slices close to 10 percent off the West Bank. They spoke on condition of anonymity, citing strict no-leaks rules by Jordanian mediators … Israel has confirmed that it presented principles this week for drawing a border with a Palestinian state. But the politically charged nature of the talks — even though they were held at a relatively low level, below that of Cabinet ministers — was reflected in the guarded refusal by any top official to discuss details. An Israeli government official said that as far as he knew, the information was incorrect, but declined to elaborate or go on the record, citing Jordan’s demand for discretion. Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor, one of the closest Cabinet ministers to Netanyahu, said he has been supporting such an offer for months, and that Israel should concentrate on preserving the large West Bank settlement blocs, close to the pre-1967 border. But he could not confirm whether the offer was in fact made. ‘I do not know if (Molcho) said these words exactly, but it would be great’, Meridor told The Associated Press … Israel started building the barrier in 2002, in the midst of a Palestinian uprising that included scores of deadly attacks by Palestinian militants who crossed from the West Bank into Israel and blew themselves up among civilians … However, it was routed in a way that raised questions about Israel’s claim that it was a temporary security measure — weaving through the West Bank, looping wide around some settlements to leave room for expansion, and looking very much like a border a future Israeli government might argue for. The Palestinians condemned it from the start as a land grab. The Palestinian officials also said that Molcho portrayed the Jordan Valley, which makes up about one-fourth of the West Bank and borders Jordan, as a strategic Israeli security asset. However, that wording suggests less than a demand for firm territorial control. Netanyahu has said he wants a continued Israeli presence on the eastern border of a future Palestinian state as part of any peace deal. Netanyahu has long argued Israel needs the area as a security buffer — protection against possible attack from the east. The 1994 peace treaty with Jordan eased this concern — but the Arab Spring has given it new life: although it is almost never discussed by officials, mindful of riling Jordan, many in Israel ponder a nightmare scenario in which the Jordanian monarchy falls to Israel’s enemies, who then pour weapons and militants into the West Bank, reaching within miles (kilometers) from its major cities. A senior Israeli military official said last week the Israeli army had to consider in its planning the possibility of heightened threats from east of the West Bank. Israeli officials have said any presence in the Jordan Valley could be reviewed over time … The Palestinians argue that the period set aside for the contacts ended Thursday, or three months after the Quartet issued its marching orders. Israel says the intention was to have three months of talks, and so wants meetings to continue”.

FURTHER UPDATE: Ethan Bronner’s report in the NYTimes later on Friday here, contains essentially the same description of the two different views on the Quartet’s 26 January “deadline”:

“The Palestinian view is that the terms of the talks — laid out last fall by the European Union, Russia, the United Nations and the United States — required both sides to present their approach to borders and security by this week. The Israelis say the clock began ticking only when the two sides actually sat down this month and the deadline is therefore in April … ”

The NYTimes account added:

“A Palestinian official said the offer ‘effectively abandons international law and the framework we have been focused on for the past 20 years’. Speaking on the condition of anonymity on the subject of the talks, as did Israeli officials, the Palestinian said, ‘If you put it in perspective, it is as if the West Bank were not occupied, just disputed, with both sides having legitimate claims, while the rest of Israel remains outside the dispute’ … The Palestinian official who spoke anonymously added that the Israeli negotiator, Yitzhak Molho, did not provide any written documents or maps in his discussion with the Palestinian negotiator, Saeb Erekat, and did not include Jerusalem or the Jordan Valley in what he discussed. ‘Our starting point is the 1967 borders with minor swaps and theirs is the wall and settlements’, he said, referring to the separation barrier Israel has been building for the past decade along and inside the West Bank.’“In some ways, this is their way of reframing the occupation’ … A Palestinian official said the offer “effectively abandons international law and the framework we have been focused on for the past 20 years.” Speaking on the condition of anonymity on the subject of the talks, as did Israeli officials, the Palestinian said, “If you put it in perspective, it is as if the West Bank were not occupied, just disputed, with both sides having legitimate claims, while the rest of Israel remains outside the dispute … [Meanwhile] An Israeli official defended the offer. ‘The principle we laid out on Wednesday is that the majority of Palestinians should be on the Palestinian side and the majority of Jews on our side’, that official said. ‘These are preliminary discussions. The Palestinians have asked for clarification. We have asked for clarifications from them on some things as well. And we hope that in the coming weeks these talks will continue’.”

Mahmoud Abbas met the Quartet High Representative, Catherine Ashton, in Amman tonight.

It was later announced that the Fatah + the PLO would be meeting to discuss the situation on Sunday + Monday, and that Mahmoud Abbas would ask the Arab League for guidance at a meeting in Cairo on 4 February.

LATER UPDATE: The Los Angeles Times reported here in a story filed from Ramallah on Saturday 28 January [after Abbas met with the Irish Foreign Minister and the Deputy of the Foreign Affairs
Committee of the Japanese Parliament] that:

“Palestinian and Jordanian officials said the talks will be on hold for a week for evaluation and to give Abbas time to consult with Palestinian and Arab officials on whether to continue with them or not. But at two meetings with foreign officials visiting Ramallah to help salvage the talks, Abbas said the negotiations are at a dead end. Abbas told one of his guests that ‘Israeli intransigence and refusal to submit clear proposals on the issues of borders and security as requested by the Quartet [of Middle East peace mediators] have blocked the way to continue with the exploratory talks,” according to the official WAFA news agency’. In the second meeting, Abbas briefed his guest on the latest developments in the peace process, ‘particularly the impasse in the exploratory meetings being held in Amman as a result of Israeli government rejection of the two-state solution and a stop to settlements’, WAFA reported”.

Shaath said that this "hudna" would last until January 26, the end of the three-month period that the Quartet gave the two parties [Israel + the PLO] to meet and agree on intitial steps to resume negotiations.

After that, Shaath indicated — and unless Israel stops settlement building by then — the PLO will resume its international efforts, including the suspended “UN bid”.

The admission of the State of Palestine to full membership in UNESCO in Paris on 31 October was something of an unplanned surprise, Shaath suggested: “It’s been on the agenda every year since 1989″, he suggested, but this year, it just happened: “we won”, he said. After that, Shaath told journalists, Abu Mazen [Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas] declared a moratorium on any further moves [well, a lot of donor funding, including USAID money, as well as the immediately-important Israeli transfer of the PA VAT + Customs duties it collects, which goes to pay PA salaries, was at stake].

Shaath also said that separate efforts to join distinct UN agencies and international bodies was just a lot of wasted effort, because if accomplished through the “UN bid” — or, otherwise, by taking the easier and more immediately productive route of going to the UN General Assembly to ask for an upgrade in status from observer organization to observer but non-member state.

Meanwhile, Palestinian-American professor Rashid Khalidi has talked to Victor Kattan — the transcript is published here — analyzing the PLO strategy for its “UN bid” filed on 23 September for full UN membership for the Palestinian state:

Rashid Khalidi [RK]: “…If your objective is a narrow diplomatic one to obtain maximum benefits at minimum costs, which is a perfectly rational approach, it might have been advisable to have avoided the Security Council and to have gone directly to the General Assembly. If, however, this was part of what I would call a declaration of independence from the United States, and the idea was to illustrate the fact that the United States is an obstacle to a just resolution of the conflict, then I don’t see why a defeat in the Security Council, by a U.S. veto or a lack of necessary votes, doesn’t serve that purpose and then that could be followed by going to the General Assembly and achieving the same objective. Obviously you don’t want to suffer a defeat if you don’t have to and another argument would be why should the Palestinians accentuate their differences with the U.S..

VK: What did you think of Abu Mazen’s speech before the UN General Assembly?

RK: I thought that it was an unexpectedly good speech. I think that a not fully appreciated result of the whole initiative was the re-opening of questions that have been ignored – especially in the U.S. It generated an enormous amount of interest in the Palestine question, and I don’t think the PA/PLO capitalized on it at all, as much as they should have, and might have, and ought to have. But, nonetheless the media frenzy around the UN effort opened up issues having to do with the role of the U.S., having to do with the moribund so-called peace process, having to do with going back to the UN and international resolutions as a basis of a resolution, having to do with the anomaly between Israel getting sanctioned as a state in 1947 by UN General Assembly resolution [GA 181, the November 29, UN partition plan] and the Palestinian state being disallowed. All these things have been opened up and I think the whole discussion has moved on a little bit. Now obviously it requires capitalizing on that. One of my constant regrets is that there has never been a serious Palestinian official effort to effectively make the case…

VK: What did you think about the position adopted by some Palestinians and Palestinian organizations, including many in the U.S., who opposed the Palestinian strategy to go to the UN because of the question of refugee rights among other issues?

RK: I think those were unwarranted fears. I cannot see how the continuation of a strategy at the UN, in which the PLO has been engaged for a very long time, would necessarily jeopardize the status of the refugees. I think you can argue that the two-state solution is problematic among other things because it does not fully take into account the refugee issue. But that is a problem some people have been talking about since 1974 when it was first floated by the PLO. That is a fundamental problem of the two-state solution. How is that made compatible with a just resolution of the Palestine refugee issue along the lines of GA resolution 194? I don’t think that is something raised by going to the UN in September 2011, that’s raised by a strategy that has been adopted since 1974. And that’s a legitimate concern…

VK: What did you make of President Barack Obama’s address to the UN?

RK: In my memory it is one of the worst, if not the worst, speech an American President has ever given to the UN on the Palestine issue … It was a repudiation of long-held American positions and an adoption of the Israeli position that the U.S. has in the past been unwilling to adopt. In the past there have been campaign speeches and statements by Presidents running for re-election or candidates for the Presidency, or pandering to AIPAC or to other similar lobbying organizations by Presidential candidates, or speeches by Presidents that I can remember that have been pretty awful, including some by this President. But I cannot recall a speech to the UN General Assembly by an American President that quite plumbed these depths … [A]nyone who understands the making of American foreign policy and its interaction with the domestic scene will understand that really you had two Obama Presidencies. You had the one before November 2010 when the Democrats lost control of the House and the one after November 2010—and we are still in that period. Actually in the first couple of years the Administration had the illusion that it had all the time in the world to do whatever it pleased and it launched a number of initiatives: the Istanbul speech, the Cairo speech, the demand for a settlement freeze and so on and so forth, essentially wasting an enormous amount of time in a situation where it thought it was politically invulnerable. What happened in November 2010 is that the Administration discovered that they were extremely politically vulnerable—and the Republicans wasted no time in beating them about the head with the Palestine-Israel issue. The Administration has never recovered. They are still cowering in the corner on this issue. Frankly, Netanyahu has more support in Washington than the President does. He knows it, and they know it”…
…

This report is posted here.

Has Abbas forgotten that the PLO accepted the late Yasser Arafat’s decision to issue a Palestinian Declaration of Independence at a meeting of the Palestine National Council in Algiers on 15 November 1988 –a Declaration which was based in part on the UN’s 1947 partition plan contained in UNGA resolution 181 of 29 November 1947…

Professor John Quigley, an American expert on international law, recently discussed aspects of UN Resolution 181, during a visit to Ramallah, as we reported on our sister blog, www.UN-Truth.com, here. In response to a question about the legality of UNGA Resolution 181, which many Palestinians believe was a serious infringement on their right to self-determination, Quigley replied that what gave UNGA Resolution 181 legality, or legitimacy [he avoided specifying the term] was the PLO’s own acceptance of it, over 40 years later, as the basis for the Palestinian Declaration of Independence in 1988…

According to the AP report, in tonight’s interview on Israeli TV Channel 10 Abbas also “confirmed Olmert’s account that the Israeli leader was prepared to withdraw from 93.5 percent of the West Bank. The Palestinians, Abbas added, responded by offering to let Israel retain 1.9 percent of the West Bank. Peace talks stalled three years ago and last month, Abbas bypassed bilateral negotiations to ask the UN to recognize an independent state of Palestine. In his TV interview, Abbas acknowledged the Palestinians might not be able to muster the necessary nine votes in the 15-member Security Council to approve the statehood bid”…

The documents were posted a short while ago by Colum Lynch, correspondent at UNHQ/NY, on the Foreign Policy website, here.

It is notable that Mahmoud Abbas signed the letter as President of the State of Palestine, Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

According to this account, written by the NYTimes’ Isabelle Kershner, “Mr. Abbas said that after they arrived at the United Nations on Sept. 19, the Palestinians would hand their application to Secretary General Ban Ki-moon for submission to the Security Council, and that a copy would go to the General Assembly chief. Then, he said, the Palestinians will see what occurs. Earlier Thursday, Palestinian officials and supporters kicked off a popular campaign to accompany the United Nations bid, with several dozen people marching to the United Nations headquarters in Ramallah”.

There was some initial confusion elsewhere about this “popular campaign” delivering a letter to the UN office in Ramallah — with some, particularly in Israel, thinking that this was the presentation of the official request.

This was a matter taken up at the UN regular noon briefing for journalists at UNHQ/NY on Thursday, according to the transcript, here:

Question: Speaking of which, reports, there are reports out from Gaza, from, sorry, from Ramallah that some sort of Palestinian letter, either by the Palestinian Authority or by activists, was sent to the Secretary-General. Has such a letter been received by the Secretary-General? What is your understanding of this, the nature of this?

Deputy Spokesperson: Mr. Serry has received the letter and he is in the process of transmitting it to the Secretary-General.

Question: Received a letter from?

Deputy Spokesperson: From I believe it was an activist; a member of an NGO.

Question: An activist? Meaning you don’t perceive this to be an official Palestinian request for membership of the UN?

Deputy Spokesperson: Well, we’ll have to wait till the letter is received in the Secretary-General’s office and its contents are read.

Question: But you said Serry has already received it, so I assume that you know the content of it?

Deputy Spokesperson: No, I don’t know the content of it, no.

According to the NYTimes: “Mr. Abbas said that if the Quartet produced a package to pave the way back to negotiations that included an Israeli freeze on settlement construction and the use of the pre-1967 lines with agreed land swaps as the basis for talks on borders — both longstanding Palestinian demands — the Palestinians ‘will go to the United Nations and we will return back to talks’.”

Abbas also said: ” ‘To be frank with you, they came too late’, Mr. Abbas told a group of foreign reporters on Thursday evening at the Mukata, his headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah. The international powers had ‘wasted all the time’ since the beginning of the year, he said, and even now, less than two weeks before the prospective bid at the United Nations, they still had not produced any concrete proposal. Mr. Abbas was speaking after meeting in recent days with two senior American diplomats, David Hale and Dennis Ross, and Tony Blair, the envoy of the so-called quartet of Middle East peacemakers that includes the United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations. He said he had also spoken by telephone with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton this week”.

An editorial published in Haaretz on Friday said that “As the UN vote on Palestinian statehood within the June 4, 1967 borders approaches, Israel’s government is showing increasing symptoms of hysteria … [Recently] Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman threatened that Israel would revoke the Oslo Accords. This week Lieberman proposed severing all ties with the Palestinian Authority to preempt the wave of violence he says will erupt the day after the UN declaration”.

The Haaretz editorial, which can be read in full here, also notes that “It’s hard to think of a more dangerous and foolish move than destroying the PA and cutting off the livelihood of tens of thousands of security personnel and officials who depend on it for their wages. As Defense Minister Ehud Barak said at the debate, this move would lead to anarchy in the West Bank, making Israel responsible for the welfare of 2.5 million people”.

Henry Siegman, currently research professor at the University of London, analyzed what’s behind this “hysteria” this week in an article saying that “The alleged legal objection to the Palestinian initiative is that it violates the terms of the Oslo accords, which preclude measures by either party to resolve unilaterally any of the permanent status issues. If it were true, as Israel’s government maintains, that an impermissible unilateral measure frees the other party from the Oslo accords’ obligations, then Palestinians were freed of Oslo’s obligations long ago, for both the UN and the International Court of Justice have declared that Israel’s settlements in the West Bank are not only impermissible unilateral acts but in clear violation of established international law. More fundamentally, however, it is simply not true that the proposed Palestinian initiative violates the Oslo agreement. Palestinians do not intend to ask the UN to address any of the permanent status issues they are required to negotiate with Israel. If the UN were to declare that Palestinians have achieved the requirements of statehood—as they have in fact been found to have done by the IMF and the World Bank—and a Palestinian state were accepted into full UN membership, Palestinians would still have to reach agreement on each of the permanent status issues with Israel. The United States and Israel have warned Palestinians to abandon their UN initiative on prudential grounds as well, for even if they were to succeed in obtaining UN recognition of their right to statehood in the Occupied Territories, nothing would change on the ground, for Israel’s government would be as indifferent to such a UN declaration as it has been to countless other UN directives. Indeed, Israel’s foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, has threatened that in those circumstances Israel would feel free to annex far more West Bank territory than it already has. But if were true that UN action would have no effect whatever in advancing the Palestinian cause, except perhaps to spur an even greater Israeli land grab, why is Israel engaged in such frantic efforts to prevent a UN showdown? Indeed, why does it not welcome the Palestinian initiative? The answer is that what the Netanyahu/Lieberman government fears most is an international confirmation that the 1967 border is the point of reference for Israeli Palestinian territorial negotiations”…

Henry Siegman, a former president of the American Jewish Congress, argues firmly that, contrary to the hysterical arguments being advanced, the UN is the right venue for this matter, and the U.S. preference to return to stagnating peace negotiations is not. He states that “The assumption that in the absence of an agreement, the occupying power can retain its permanent hold on the occupied territories is absurd”.

And, he writes, “What is so shameful is that not only have we failed to support a legitimate Palestinian demand but we threaten to punish them severely for it”.

Siegman’s analysis is posted here.

An earlier article by Daniel Levy, now in the U.S. but formerly the chief staff drafter on the Israeli team of the Geneva Initiative, said some of the same things — and also accused the Quartet of “sophistry” when it comes to the 1967 borders.

Levy’s step-by-step explanation centers around a jousting match between the U.S, and the European Union around a surprising Obama Administration effort to fudge the expressed EU resistance to a 2004 letter from then U.S. President George W. Bush to then Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon (that letter was part of an American effort to help the Israelis accept the Road Map). In that letter, Bush wrote that existing realities on the ground (meaning, Israeli settlements in the West Bank) should be taken into account.

The EU never accepted that 2004 Bush letter — and the EU said they vigorously opposed it in a Quartet meeting attended by then U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell. But, how was that expressed? The Quartet adopted a statement drafted in extremely diplomatic language saying that it could only accept changes that both parties agreed.

The U.S. never mentioned the Bush letter again — and journalists asked about its status a couple of dozen times, without any clear recommitment — until Obama’s recent speech to AIPAC.

Daniel Levy goes through this in detail:

“The U.S. presented to its Quartet ‘partners’ a suggested one page text that looked rather like an exercise in cherry picking Obama’s recent speeches by the Israeli Prime Minister’s office (given the recent traffic between Jerusalem and Washington and the end product it is reasonable to speculate that that is precisely what happened). The American pitch went something like the following: the proposed text is a reflection of the President’s speech, the Quartet had encouraged the President to give such a speech, the President had taken some political heat for the speech, the Quartet had even endorsed the speech (which it did in a May 20 statement), therefore the Quartet should now stand united behind the American draft, demonstrate to the Palestinians that they have no alternative but to accept the Quartet position, resume negotiations, and drop the UN idea. The text was quite clearly pre-cooked with the Israeli leadership, so no problem of acceptance from Israel.

It reads like an attempt to ensure that September could be navigated safely by not even starting the negotiations before then — instead focusing on this new ‘preparatory work’. Under the conditions embodied in the U.S. text, the only preparatory work that one can imagine might lead to success would be a Hogwart’s crash course in Wizardry (although American officials no doubt have different ideas and are proposing the kind of minimalist Israeli confidence-building measures that have made such a massive contribution to peace in the last decade!)”.

Daniel Levy’s article, detailing the Quartet’s “sophistry”, was published here on Foreign Policy magazine’s Middle East Channel.

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This was a follow-up to Ahmad Dari’s earlier observations on the mission of former U.S. Special Envoy, George Mitchell, posted on Youtube here:

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(Britain then abstained in the UNGA vote on Resolution 181, as did Turkey, the successor to the Ottoman empire).

A recent policy brief published by Dore Gold’s Jewish Center for Policy Affairs [JCPA] in Jerusalem, recently stated openly that Israel’s claim to the West Bank, and the legitimacy of its settlements there, is based on the 1922 Palestine Mandate.

[This is interesting, as the Palestine Mandate was only formally adopted by the Council of the League of Nations in 1923 -- after the formal surrender of the Ottoman Empire in Lausanne, and, significantly, after Britain informed the League of Nations that Transjordan was being administered separately, thereby effectively limiting Jewish immigration, which the Mandate was designed to encourage, to the areas west of the Jordan River.]

Al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network based in Berkeley, California, has a stated mission of educating and fostering “public debate on Palestinian human rights and self-determination within the framework of international law”. In May 2010, it published a policy brief written by Ali Abunimah, entitled “Reclaiming Self-Determination”, and posted here, which says that “any commitment to self-determination in principle or in practice” has been lost or given up (including by the Palestinian leadership) during the “peace process” of the
past two decades.

Abunimah wrote that “The peace process that began with the 1991 Madrid Conference has gradually excluded the majority of Palestinians from having any role in determining the future of their country. In the eyes of peace process sponsors, the ‘Palestinian people’ constitutes at most residents of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, though even Gaza now finds itself as marginalized as the Diaspora. It is this exclusion that has allowed a cause of decolonization and self-determination to be reduced to little more than a ‘border dispute’.”

In his analysis, Abunimah then wrote that self-determination is a right “legitimate residents” of the territories — not of national groups (as the League of Nations recognized the Jewish people, for the first time, by incorporating the language of the Balfour Declaration and its advocacy of a Jewish homeland directly into the Palestine Mandate). However, he then argued, Jewish settlers could be considered, if …

He explained: “[T]he notion that Israeli Jews are legitimate residents, provided they shed their colonial character and privileges, derives directly from the traditional conception of Palestinian self-determination. As Arafat put it in his 1974 UN speech, ‘when we speak of our common hopes for the Palestine of tomorrow we include in our perspective all Jews now living in Palestine who choose to live with us there in peace and without discrimination’.”

His article was a critique of the failure of the Palestinian leadership to involve its own people in the diaspora, it’s own people in the occupied Palestinian territory, and civil society around the world — particularly in the reported plan to go to the United Nations in September to seek UN membership for a Palestinian State.

From 1974, the PLO waged a battle seeking UN recognition as the “sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people”.

In November 1988, the late PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization] leader Yasser Arafat issued a Declaration of Independence for a Palestinian State, at a meeting of the PLO’s legislative assembly, the Palestine National Council [PNC], in Algeriers. This Declaration was repeated before a session of the UN General Assembly, which moved to Geneva for the occasion, in December 1988. Over 100 UN member states recognized that declaration of independent statehood.

After that, the UN “upgraded” the status of the PLO observer delegation, which was henceforth called the Observer Delegation of Palestine.

Now, the effort will be to seek full UN membership for the State of Palestine. If that fails, a fall-back position might be to seek full observer status for the Palestinian State (similar to the Vatican — or, to Switzerland, before it opted to become a full UN member a little less than a decade ago.

Halper wrote: “Inside the UN, Abbas would present Palestine’s compelling case for independence and UN membership, as he did in his New York Times piece of May 16th. He would also re-frame the conflict. It is not security issues that lay at the roots of the conflict, but Israel ’s refusal to respect Palestinian national rights and to end the Occupation. As he also did in the New York Times article, Abbas must also make it clear that recognition of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders in no way compromises the right of refugees to return to their homes, a key point of future negotiations with Israel. He should also state up-front that the establishment of a Palestinian state does not end the Palestinian quest, through peaceful means, of an inclusive single-state solution. If international mobilization is pursued vigorously and Abbas exudes a genuine determination to see a Palestinian state established and recognized, more than 130 countries, including many of the leading European ones, will vote to accept Palestine into the UN. Even if this does not overrule the US veto in the Security Council, it is far more than a merely symbolic achievement and certainly cannot be considered a failure. Such a massive expression of support would demonstrate the inevitability of Palestinian statehood. It would signal the beginning rather than the end of an international campaign for Palestinian rights, one now joined by governments as well as civil society”.

Among Halper’s pointed criticisms of the Palestinian leadership’s lack of leadership are these:
(1). “Israel, helped by time and geography, has succeeded in fragmenting the Palestinians. The refugees in the camps are almost completely excluded from political processes, but it is the exclusion of the Diaspora that is especially problematic. Highly educated for the most part, fluent in all the European languages, they could play a major role in promoting the Palestinian cause abroad. Indeed, a few individuals have carved out influential positions despite being excluded, even resisted, by the West Bank leadership. Instead, the Palestinian Authority has fielded, with a couple notable exceptions, a most inept and inarticulate corps of diplomats. Rather than using their greatest asset, their own people abroad as well as the legions of articulate spokespeople at home, including younger people, the Palestinian Authority has tied its own hands diplomatically just when Israel is mounting a major international offensive against it. Just recall one astounding fact: during the entire year that saw the Obama Administration taking office and the invasion of Gaza, there was no official Palestinian representative in Washington!”

…

(2) A key flaw in the strategic thinking of the Palestinian leadership, Halper wrote, was the expressed fear that “not receiving the required votes for admission to the UN would constitute a ‘failure’. “If Abbas approaches the UN in a docile and half-hearted way, appearing more to be pushed by an Israeli refusal to negotiate than by his people’s own just cause and urgent need for independence, the Palestinian struggle will certainly suffer. Many other countries that would otherwise support the Palestinian initiative will indeed waiver, giving in to US and Israeli pressure because it seems the Palestinian themselves are not serious about it. But if he goes into the UN as the head of a national unity government with the support of the world’s peoples, Mandela-like, he could decisively change the course of events forever. To pull off his September initiative, Abbas must reject the go-it-alone approach that the Palestinian leadership has followed fruitlessly for so long … The issue is not whether the initiative ‘succeeds’; it is clear that the US will cast a veto. The true struggle is to pull out all the stops to show the world just how strong the Palestinian movement is. If mobilized, the collective power of the grassroots who have for years labored on the Palestinian issue will generate a momentum that will be hard to stop. Time is of the essence. Mobilization must begin immediately. The elected representatives of the Palestinian people in the Occupied Territory, joined for the first time by Palestinians of the refugee camps, inside Israel and the Diaspora, should issue a joint ‘Call for Support’. Immediately following the Palestinian Call, grassroots activists would issue a Civil Society Call to support the Palestinian initiative, which would be signed by tens of thousands of people from all over the world and delivered to the UN in September. If a campaign for public support begins now, if the political leadership works intensively and closely with its own civil society to garner wide-spread support, more than 100,000 people can be gathered at the UN in New York in September in a mass rally for Palestinian independence. (And believe me, Israel will mobilize its own supporters!)”

…

(3) And, Halper wrote, “We, the people who have pursued Palestinian rights over the decades, Palestinians and non-Palestinian alike, are an integral part of the struggle. We have earned the right, all of us, to have our voices heard in September. Indeed, I would argue that if September comes and goes without any breakthrough due to the acquiescence and weakness of the Authority leadership, civil society support might well dissipate. The people can bring the struggle to a certain point; we cannot negotiate or pursue initiatives at the UN. If the leadership fails us then we truly have nowhere to go. All those Palestinians who have suffered, resisted and died over the past decades cannot be let down at this historic moment by a vacillating political leadership. We call on you to mobilize us”.

This piece is published here.

The article, published here also says that “Together with the diplomatic ‘tsunami’ that Defense Minister Ehud Barak has forecast, Israel can expect a legal tsunami, which for the first time will claim a price for violating human rights in the occupied territories. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the prolonged occupation of the Palestinian territories that Israel conquered in 1967, are not an internal Israeli issue. This is an international conflict in which the international community has a legitimate interest. However, during the years of the occupation the state of Israel has repelled the professional legal mechanisms of the United Nations, that deal with protecting human rights, from discussing its actions there…”.

Sfard’s argument continued: “In the territories Israel refused to apply the various human rights treaties that deal, inter alia, with discrimination against women; rights of the child; racial and other discrimination; and torture. Some of Israel’s most talented advocates were sent to Geneva to claim that these treaties were not binding on Israel beyond the Green Line. Israel considers itself the representative of the victims and survivors of the Holocaust, and as such was one of the initiators of the establishment of an international criminal court for war crimes. The height of jurisdictional isolation came when Israel decided not to ratify the court’s statute so as not to grant it authority to investigate and discuss crimes that, allegedly, were/are being carried out by Israeli officers and soldiers. Over the course of 44 years, Israel has succeeded in putting the job of judging its actions in the occupied territories in the hands of [Israel's own Supreme Court, the] High Court of Justice, which approved almost every policy and practice of the army in the territories, deepening the occupation and making possible massive violations of human rights under its patronage. Israel succeeded in leaving the investigations of its crimes to [Israel's] military advocates/attorneys who made sure that the policy of investigation would be such that enforcing the rigor of the law on soldiers and officers who had violated it would be a sort of miracle. All of this is about to come to an end”.

He wrote that “The significance of a Palestinian state joining the UN is that, for the first time, it will be the Palestinians who will decide what the international legal framework is that is binding in their territory. After more than 40 years in the wilderness of the occupation, the Palestinians will have the possibility of influencing their fate through legal means”.

This is because, he noted, “the significance of accepting Palestine as a member of the UN is that the new member will be sovereign to sign international treaties, to join international agreements and to receive the jurisdictional authority of international tribunals over what happens in its territory”.

While Michael Sfard’s article focussed on big and weighty matters like torture and ethnic discrimination, and acquiescence in oppression and denial of another people’s self-determination, there is also something like, reported in another article in Haaretz, here, that will be affected: “An investigation by Haaretz has found that the phenomenon of uprooting [ancient Palestinian] olive trees [mainly from the occupied West Bank but also from the Galilee] and turning them into pet plants for the [Israeli] rich has been going on for several years now without causing much of a ripple, and feeds a market worth tens of millions of shekels … One can be yours, starting at NIS 30,000 [almost $9,000], with prices reaching close to NIS 100,000 [almost $30,000]“. A photo accompanying this article shows a long line of ancient trees waiting to be “adopted” at “Al-Bustan nursery, near Baka Al-Garbiyeh”…

It is worth taking a close look at this reportage in Haaretz:

A., identified only as a landscape designer because he apparently wants to conceal his identity, tells Haaretz:
” ‘Everything is done in an orderly fashion, with permits’, he insists. ‘These are trees that grew for generations upon generations, mainly belonging to Galilee Arabs. In principle, Arabs do not remove trees from the ground, but sometimes they have to enlarge their house, sometimes a road is paved through their land, and then they are forced to uproot the trees and are given permission by the JNF. Trees from the territories? No way. It is forbidden to bring trees from there because the State of Israel does not have permission to uproot there’.

At Al Bustan, the nursery owned by Philippe Nicolas near Baka al-Gharbiyeh, they know A. He passed by there on his quest, strolled up and down the long avenues of ancient olive trees, and also purchased a few.

‘We have 21 dunams [1 dunam = 1/4 acre] of olive and other trees and another 100 dunams in Afula’, says one nursery worker. ‘There are 100-year-old trees and even 1,000-year-old trees. Of the especially ancient kind we have two left, after one was sold. The first one cost NIS 75,000, the second one goes for NIS 60,000′.

When asked who the clientele for these trees is, the employee has a ready answer: ‘There are a lot of crazy people in this country. In Caesarea, in Savyon’, he replies. But when asked what the source of the trees is – who the seller is – his initial response is silence, and a small smile.

‘Do you see these? I got them yesterday. We brought them at 11 pm, with a 50-ton crane and 20 workmen. This is a 2,500-year-old tree. It’s not from here, it’s from abroad. From Palestine. It’s all from the territories’, he explains. ‘I go to the owner of a grove in the territories, pick out trees and say: “I’ll pay you for a tree like this, say, $10,000″, and then he goes into shock. If he keeps the tree, the olives won’t bring in that kind of money even over 10 years. For them this is serious money. If the potential seller agrees – and not everyone agrees; there are some who won’t hear of it – I arrange for a person who goes in and buys. And then he goes through the checkpoints with a permit. We get clearance from [the Ministry of Environmental Affairs and register the tree and receive a license. Just like an Arabian horse gets a permit that it's a thoroughbred Arabian, it's the same for the tree".

The Civil Administration [despite the name, this is a body created and staffed by the IDF and the Israeli Ministry of Defense], which is the only body authorized to permit olive trees to be brought into Israel, has a different version. Samir Mouadi, the Agriculture Ministry’s officer at Civil Administration headquarters, maintains that no permits whatsoever were granted last year for the transfer of olive trees from the West Bank. Administration officials add that they are not aware of any trees being smuggled into Israel – an intriguing claim considering that the phenomenon has been going on for years and that one of its aspects received considerable publicity in the past: In January 2003 the daily Yedioth Ahronoth ran an extensive article on a massive uprooting of olive trees in the territories, in particular along the route of the separation barrier being built at the time. According to that article, construction of the barrier necessitated the uprooting of thousands of trees, some of which were never returned to their owners as required but were allegedly sold by several of the contractors working on the barrier – with the Civil Administration’s knowledge”…

The article also says that “Tree dealers [whose garden shops and lands straddle the de facto border carved out by the Israeli military-constructed Wall in the West Bank] complain that the PA has been making life difficult for them lately. ‘I’m allowed to bring goods onto my property, but with olives it’s harder’, complains one nursery owner. ‘The PA asks that olive trees not be uprooted because from an economic standpoint they are one of the most important resources in the West Bank, and we’re just barely keeping the inventory restocked’. In the next breath, he offers to sell six ancient olive trees that came into his possession just a month ago. Trees can also be ordered in advance according to specification. ‘I don’t have such a large tree right now, but within a week I can get you a 500-year-old tree’, he adds”.

The dealer is in Israel, the land where the olive trees are located is in the West Bank…and this is further explained by another paragraph further down in the article: “The Civil Administration had this to say in response:’”In 2010 no permits were issued to Palestinians to transfer olive trees from Judea and Samaria into Israel. At the gate located in the village of Hableh permission is mainly granted for transferring work tools and goods that serve the landowners, in view of the fact that there are no permanent residents in this part of the village’.”

And, the Haaretz article says that the Jewish National Fund [JNF] is the only body capable of acting when such theft or questionable transactions do occur: “If the Civil Administration hasn’t heard anything about tree smuggling, and the flora and fauna supervision unit doesn’t have any teeth, then the deterrent power that all the parties involved rely on is the JNF’s supervision unit, consisting of fewer than 10 people who are supposed to cover all of Israel and the PA combined. ‘We are working to catch every olive tree that was transplanted without authorization and without a license, to put the person responsible for it on criminal trial, and have the tree itself confiscated by the state’, says Amikam Riklin, who heads the JNF’s supervision unit. ‘Whoever violates the olive tree violates the landscape of the country, and we cannot let trees be taken without authorization to the home or the neighborhood of whoever it is’.”

And, if the tree itself is confiscated by the state, then what happens to it?