Jeffrey Goldberg, the Netanyahu apologist, thinks that the Palestinian Authority should abandon its plan to seek non-member observer status in the United Nations and should instead petition for the right of all occupied Palestinians to vote in Israel. Of course, his goal is to stop tomorrow’s vote which he can’t do. Tomorrow the Palestinian Authority will finally do something right: defy Israel and the United States and begin the process of achieving statehood. Bravo.
Here is Goldberg’s explanation of why seeking the vote inside Israel would be more effective.
Reaction would be seismic and instantaneous. The demand for voting rights would resonate with people around the world, in particular with American Jews, who pride themselves on support for both Israel and for civil rights at home. Such a demand would also force Israel into an untenable position; if it accedes to such a demand, it would very quickly cease to be the world’s only Jewish-majority state, and instead become the world’s 23rd Arab-majority state. If it were to refuse this demand, Israel would very quickly be painted by former friends as an apartheid state.
In other words, Israel would have to accede to the demand for Palestinian rights or be “painted by former friends as an apartheid state.”
Except that would never happen. Israel will never voluntarily give Palestinians democratic rights and it does not have to because U.S. policy, dictated by AIPAC, will never hold Israel to the rules it applies every where else. If Israel absorbs all the territories and denies the people who live there voting rights, 90% of Congress will support that position. So would President Obama. So would Al Franken, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Elizabeth Warren. Of course the Republicans would too. In fact, I have written the statement liberal Democrats would use in defending Israel’s position of not permitting Palestinians to exercise their rights.
We firmly reject the United Nations call on Israel to extend the vote to Israel’s five million Palestinian citizens. We would remind the United Nations that for Israel to grant voting rights to this group would end Israel’s standing as the world’s only Jewish democracy. Democracy is an elastic concept. What applies to Brazil or Germany or even the United States does not necessarily apply to Israel, located as it is in a very dangerous neighborhood. If nothing else, the Holocaust taught us that. We also reject calls to link aid to Israel to its compliance with the United Nations resolution calling on Israel to grant voting rights. We oppose that idea just as we applaud our government’s use of the veto to block its passage. No, we will stand with the people of democratic Israel as it continues its struggle for peace and democracy for all.
Bottom line: so long as the White House and Congress depend on AIPAC and its associated donors for campaign funding, Israel will neither grant Palestinians voting rights nor be ostracized by the United States. Palestinians need to do what they need to do. Counting on the United States to help is ridiculous.
I think the best way to humiliate Hamas would be to grant Palestine its indepence, recognize them as the legitimate government……..and let the become another third world slum akin to Egypt or Syria.
The game changed today
This is the most important historic event in the Middle East in the last 60 years – the beginning of the end of the Israelification of Palestine – the beginning of the end of Apartheid
Does everybody really connect this up that this is precisely the moment Netanyahu was so desperate to avoid – the whole Israeli hoax on the US over Iran – that the hoaxing of the US into a conflagration with Iran was precisely to prevent precisely this?
Yes – it’s as cynical as that with Netanyahu’s Israel – it is precisely that cynical.
Preventing this triumph of the Palestinians to finally have effective international recourse to reversing Apartheid – unblocked by Israel’s Israeli Lobby in the US – was the whole ballgame for Israel and yes – the Israelis themselves say so
Netanyahu was like a flailing swimmer and what he was desperate to prevent is precisely THIS MOMENT. If he had succeeded this moment would have never come for perhaps decades.
This is what would NOT have happened had Netanyahu succeeded in pushing the US into a war with Iran a couple of months ago while up on the stage at the UN as Wylie Coyote
This was the whole ballgame for them – to prevent Palestine from ever having a day in court .
Does everybody really see this? – these are the realities of Israel, her/our Neocons, and her Israeli Lobby crystallized in a moment of history.
Yes, I also saw that the game had most likely changed.
However, it makes me wonder now; what (new) game are the Zionists up to?
I can only hope Palestine is given observer-status, minimally, but I do not trust the world (esp my own country– USA) to do the right thing. I think we’ve seen this game before, at least in part. We all get our hopes up, for Palestine, and those hopes are quickly dashed.
At some point, the USA has to cut all ties with the Zionist-state, If they will not sign on with the NNPT, and they continue to build nuclear-weapons and use WMDs on the civilian population of Palestine, the USA has to stop the financial support, at least of, “Israel”.
I like the idea of Palestine (as a nation, not as a government or political party such as PLO or PA of Hamas) getting recognition so it stands on the same juridical feet — as far as possible — with Israel.
If the vote goes through, then the very next day, Abbas & Hamas (or either) can request the vote from Israel for the duration of the occupation (counting Gaza as occupied territory as long as Israel controls what goes in or out of it — other perhaps than heavy weapons). Why would Jeffrey Goldberg think — rationally anyhow — that this order of doing things would be worse for the Palestinians than doing it “has way”? Won’t Israel still be an apartheid pariah if it fails to grant a pretty-please request for the vote (or an end to occupation)?
And while we talk about voting, please reflect that “transfer” and gerrymandering are perfectly good (or perfectly bad) ways for Israel to dilute the vote, and the permanent exile of the exiles from 1948 is an example of Israel’s diluting the Palestinian vote.
If I were a Palestinian I might be afraid to request the vote for fear of what Israel would do next.
Hmmmm, interesting but in the short term something needs to be done in the recognition of Palestine as a nation state with the same rights and privileges as that of Israel and its surrounding nations. It also creates a lot of problems for Israel, the Palestinians could call for United Nations troops to protect that of their territory which would place Israel again in a position of no power.
However, i think a lot of this could change the dynamic of the entire situation does their exist any land that is untouched or not being used in which we could carve a piece out of to give the Palestinians? We did it for the Israelis, when we offered them different locations throughout the world before they agreed on the current location.
Well, there’s Antarctica, probably parts of the Sahara or Siberia that are available for the Palestinians. I remind you that “we” did not carve out a piece of untouched land for the Israelis. They stole land that was already occupied, just as European colonists did in the Americas. Then they used terrorist attacks and assassinations to exploit European and American postwar guilt in order to get a UN resolution passed, which I believe is the last UN resolution the Israelis have paid any attention to. Palestine needs to get international recognition in the UN. It’s the only path that will work.
Unfortunately the common misconception that Palestine at one time was a nation or defined as a nation when in fact it had never been a nation or defined with a border before 1945. If anything at one time it was apart of what is known as Jordan and at the time before what was created of what is Israel today, was under the Ottoman Empire, which is Turkey and that area included and was recognized as Trans-Jordan and at the time or before the creation of Israel, the population is unclear but est sits between 15,000-100,000 but these are est as nothing is for sure on who was considered to be Palestinian vs. being an Arab. This idea and that keeps being thrown around that the Israelis stole land is just none-sense and the comparison to American exploitation of the North America isn’t the same.
There were people living on that land. They were forcibly removed from it by the Jews who moved onto it. Laws were passed preventing their owning the land, working it, or enjoying rights on it. It doesn’t matter whether there was a country called Palestine or not, whether it belonged to the Ottoman Empire or not, or what the people were called. The parallel between Jews forcing their way onto that land and European colonists forcing their way into the Americas is exact. You do not say what the actual alternative explanation might be b/c in fact there is no other explanation. The Jews wanted that land; they took it by force and terrorism and continue to hold it by those means today.
Martha, i respect that opinion but it wasn’t a nation nor was it a nation defined and no matter how it was obtained the fact remains that is the case and yes the Ottoman’s controlled and encompassed that entire area, go back to maps as early as 1919, perhaps earlier and it will show you no defined country, but that area had always been from as far back as i have studied being that of Palestine but that doesn’t mean that it belongs to those that are labeled or claim to be Palestinian. The same can be said about the Israel’s, just as it can be said for that of Palestinians. We do know going back as far as what the Roman Empire that something existed that could be defined as a nation, that was dominate by that of Jews. Please don’t take my opinion being for or against either party, as i want to see both sides find a common solution.
You ask about a solution or alternative, why not take the Sinai it is mostly uninhabited and it is basically a no mans land, yes it is controlled by Egypt but to what extent really? Also, lets place the United Nations headquarters there, so no one on either side is going to do anything with an international body sitting in the heart of on the new founded nation. It would be essentially a means to ensure piece.
It doesn’t matter whether Palestine was a nation then or not, nor whether the Ottomans controlled it or not (I am fully aware that the territory was part of the Ottoman Empire), nor who had been there in Roman times. What matters is that there were people living on that land, that beginning in 1882 Jews came in, threw the people out, often violently, passed Jim Crow laws that prevented their possessing or using or making a living from that land, and used terrorism and assassination to force the rest of the world to acknowledge that possession in 1948, and the situation has continued so since that day. Whether one has a 6,000-year-old book or a sense of manifest destiny is not germane. Forcing people off their land and taking it for yourself is a land grab. Bombings, assassinations, occupation, and apartheid are crimes against humanity