The decision to take Palestine to the United Nations Security Council may be the start of a new Palestinian strategy, writes Graham Usher at the UN This Friday -- barring something extraordinary -- Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas will submit an application to the United Nations Security Council for Palestine to become the 194th member state of the world body. "We have only one choice," he said en route to New York: "Going to the Security Council". The choice will fail. The Obama administration has vowed to veto the bid in the name of an imaginary "peace process", or bribe, bully and cajole enough council members to vote against or abstain and so make an American veto redundant. But either move would still be catastrophic for America's already tarnished stature in the region: not only would the US president be vetoing his own policy (last year he waxed lyrically about "a new member of the UN -- an independent sovereign state of Palestine"); he would be defending Israel's occupation and denying Palestinians their most basic national rights at the very moment when the Middle East has seen its peoples cast aside dictators in the name of freedom. Every Western capital knows the price Washington will pay for again shielding Israel from the consequences of its actions: embassies in Cairo and Tunisia have been stormed for less. Saudi Arabia's former ambassador to the US Turki Al-Faisal last week warned that if Washington vetoes a Palestinian state, it would lose Saudi Arabia, its oldest and closest Arab ally. The choice is even more remarkable because Abbas is the Palestinian leader most associated with Oslo: a US controlled model of negotiations that granted him and the elite around him the trappings of statehood while allowing Israel, shielded by the US from any legal sanction, to triple the number of its settlers in the occupied territories to a cool 600,000. The UN bid makes a diplomatic break with that model. Addressing his people last week Abbas said going to the UN would not end the occupation. But membership would allow the Palestinians to join UN bodies like the International Criminal Court (ICC) and prosecute Israelis for grave breaches of the Geneva Convention, including the illegal transfer of settlers into occupied territory. It offers a political alternative to US-led negotiations skewed in Israel's favour or the self-destructive violence of an armed Intifada. It strengthens the Palestinian hand diplomatically and politically. And it's because it represents a break with Oslo that Abbas's choice so alarms Western states: for them Washington remains the indispensable agent that will someday deliver Israel and so frees them of having to act against Israel themselves. Once it was clear Abbas's choice was no bluff, Washington dispatched its heavy hitters. According to PA sources US envoys Dennis Ross and David Hale made dark threats in Ramallah, warning that the UN bid could trigger Congressional sanctions and Israeli reprisals against the PA. This apparently only made Abbas more resolved. When sticks failed, carrots were fed. Tony Blair, former British prime minister and the Middle East Quartet's representative, offered a deal: a new Quartet statement or "framework" for negotiations in exchange for the Palestinians not going to the Security Council. PLO executive member Hanan Ashrawi was contemptuous. Even "if the Quartet put out a statement that respected all previous [Israeli-Palestinian] agreements and is more than just words it doesn't contradict our efforts to head to the UN. We will go to the Security Council. We are here," she told the BBC. In the end Blair said his mediation was not to prevent the Palestinians going to the UN -- which is their "right": it was rather to chart a new "pathway" to negotiations. The PA has said any return to negotiations must be based on Israel accepting the 1967 lines as the basis of a future border between the two states as well as a total settlement freeze, especially in East Jerusalem. Israeli premier Binyamin Netanyahu calls the 1967 lines "indefensible" and has never observed a settlement freeze, especially in East Jerusalem. Should the US veto or gerrymander a majority against membership at the Security Council, "we have other options", says Ashrawi. The Palestinians could go to the 193 member General Assembly and ask it to upgrade Palestine's status to a non-member observer state. This is less than a full member but more than the PLO's status as observer and -- say legal experts -- could help the Palestinians join the ICC. There are things wrong with the UN bid. Rather than being declared on TV it should have been decided through democratic discussion with Palestinian groups, especially Hamas. And so far it seems an exclusively diplomatic strategy. No effort has been put into building a movement of non-violence to make sovereignty a form of mass action in the occupied territories. Nor is there any sign of a regional solidarity in which Arab peoples would protest and Arab states punish Israel and the US for any penalties imposed on the PA. Yet it is clear Abbas's choice would not have happened without the wave of revolutions coursing through the Arab world. The two struggles are not the same. The Palestinians' main enemy is not autocracy: it is occupation. And their main goal is not democracy: it is national independence. But where the Palestinian struggle does chime with those of their kin in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen and Bahrain is in the fact that no change will come via leaderships and alliances wedded to the ancient regime. In the Arab states the ancient regime was, mostly, dictatorships backed by the West. In the occupied territories it was a negotiating paradigm that granted a US-guaranteed impunity for Israel to colonise another people's country. By returning Palestine to the UN and international law there may be the beginnings of a new Palestinian strategy. (see pp.8-9 and Editorial p.14)
