The U.S., U.N. & Palestinian statehood

The following remarks on the Pales­tinian struggle are excerpted from a talk given by Joyce Chediac at a Detroit Workers World Party forum on Oct. 1. Chediac, editor of “Gaza: Symbol of Resistance,” also spoke at a WWP meeting in Cleveland on Sept. 30.

The uprooted Palestinians are at the heart of the conflict in the Middle East. The Palestinian Authority just made a bid for the U.N. Security Council to recognize a Palestinian state. This bid was not substantive, not based on the strength of the Authority on the ground, but rather symbolic. However, it was watched carefully by the Palestinian people, with many demonstrating for [this] international show of support for their rights.

While President Barack Obama has repeatedly given lip service to a Palestinian state, when push came to shove, the U.S. government showed its real views on Palestinian self-determination when it vehemently opposed even this symbolic move and threatened to veto the PA resolution. Now the U.S. is working overtime behind the scenes, arm-twisting Security Council members to vote against the resolution — so the U.S. won’t have to use its veto and stand fully exposed.

In his speech before the U.N., Obama called the U.N. the “wrong platform” for recognition of a Palestinian state. Obama referred the PA back to talks with the Israeli government, saying there was “no shortcut” to statehood.

Shortcut? After 63 years, the Palestinian people still have no state and their grievances remain unaddressed. Obama won’t even allow them 22 percent of historic Palestine — the total land mass of the West Bank and Gaza — symbolically.

Obama wants the PA to go back to talks with Israel without conditions. Twenty years of talks, under direct U.S. tutelage since the 1991 Madrid conference, have been a cover for continued Israeli and imperialist aggression.

In 20 years the number of settlers on stolen Palestinian land has tripled — to 600,000 — and Israel just announced over 1,000 more settlement housing units on land stolen in 1967.

That the U.N. is not the “right platform” for a Palestinian state reeks of hypocrisy. The U.N. was the right platform for sanctions against Libya and attempts to do the same against Syria. It was the right platform to recognize the new Libyan government, even though that is so divided it has been unable to form a cabinet.

The U.N. was the right platform to partition Palestine in 1947 and to recognize Israeli statehood in 1949.

Scores of resolutions to ease the burden on the Palestinian people have been passed in the U.N. — and never enforced. But the U.S. government will not let the U.N. criticize Israel for repeated attacks on the Palestinian and neighboring Arab people. Between 1972 and 1997 Washington used its veto 32 times to defend Israeli aggression.

The U.N. does not stand above governments and above class forces. Far from it. V.I. Lenin called the League of Nations, the U.N.’s predecessor, a “den of thieves.” The U.N., like its predecessor, is still bourgeois, and imperialist nations use the world body whenever they can to divert and sabotage the liberation struggles of the oppressed pe oples and class struggles of the workers.