An article in an American newspaper has brought me back to New York. I did not need a vote at the United Nations to realize that the whole world supports Palestine and opposes Israel. In 2011, I was at the UN General Assembly when Mahmoud Abbas gave his speech, and received standing ovations both inside and outside the hall, interrupting his speech eight times with applause. Some shouted out their support and others even broke into tears, like I did along with the Lebanese Ambassador Nawaf Salam. I thought that emotions would fizzle out this year, but the Palestinian president was greeted with the same enthusiasm. While the UN police protected Abu Mazen with an arm-to-arm wall of policemen, with people scrambling to shake his hand, Benjamin Netanyahu rushed to the escalator like a criminal who killed a child and served his sentence, leaving the prison and rushing to escape from people's eyes. The United Nations voted this year with a majority of 139 countries to recognize Palestine as an observer state, including Russia, China, France and Italy. Nine countries voted no to the resolution, including the United States (of course) and Canada, currently ruled by a government of neoconservative-like politicians, and island states such as Micronesia. In 2010, President Barack Obama promised a seat for Palestine and then he backtracked in 2011, and then opposed the membership of Palestine in 2012, although the U.S. election is over and with it the restrictions that held him back. I say to him congratulations for winning over Israel and the Pacific Islands because, under his administration, this is the kind of countries that the reputation of the United States has descended to, and congratulations for having a Republican majority in the House of Representatives, because this is his punishment for reneging on his promises. I am writing today against the backdrop of an article in the American Conservative, a magazine for U.S. conservatives. The article was titled “Moynihan, Zionism, and Racism: What Went Wrong?" The article's author, Scott McConnel compared 1975, when the UN General Assembly passed a resolution with a majority of 70 votes equating Zionism with racism, with the recent vote on Palestine's membership of the UN. McConnel said that in 1975, the entire Western world voted in favor of Israel, in a campaign led by then-U.S. Ambassador Daniel Moynihan (who became senator on the following year). McConnel went on to say that Israel, 37 years later, has become different. He said that one reads about bus lines in the West Bank, for Palestinians, because the Israeli settlers whom Israel has illegally settled on Palestinian land (in the words of the author himself) can't bear to see Palestinians riding on the same buses they do. McConnel also wrote that there were rabbinic admonitions to Jews proscribing renting apartments to Arabs who stayed in their country after 1948, and that Jewish youths are engaged in violence against the Palestinians in Jerusalem, which is evocative of the climate in Mississippi against African Americans in the 1960s. McConnel also wrote that Israel is like a compulsive eater, as it has been unable to keep itself from gobbling up and settling Palestinian territory, all the way to East Jerusalem. Now, he said, there are U.S. legislators who want to exclude the United States from the United Nations in order to preserve Israel's control over “Judea" and “Samaria," as they called them, meaning the West Bank. The article was followed by 23 comments on the day I read it this week, mostly opposing Israel and the U.S. support for it, of which I chose the following: - Missed opportunity, all right — for you to admit that you were wrong, and those nations who voted for the 1975 UN resolution were presciently correct. - I think Israel would benefit from an even stronger indication of disapproval from the European countries. Israel needs to be told, bluntly: you cannot keep the West Bank. Full stop. - Many Israeli militarists detest the UN. Isn't this fact alone a strong argument in favor of the UN and continued US support? - Over the long term Israel is doomed. Israel has exactly zero friends in the Middle East, including their former friends Turkey and Iran and increasingly few throughout the world. Zionism as “the liberation movement of the Jewish people" -what a joke. There will be no hope for Israelis except to emigrate to the Promised Land of America. - All Arab countries have agreed to accept Israel within its pre-1967 borders. Israeli foolishness, in trying to keep most of the West Bank permanently, is [the] primary reason Israel is undermining its own security. I say Israel has made itself a pariah state around the world, and can no longer fool anyone. [email protected]
