The U.N. Must Recognize Palestine

As this is being written, the United Nations may accomplish what it should have accomplished 60 years ago; international recognition of Palestine.

The Obama administration is opposed, arguing the only way to bring lasting peace to the region is through direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. Yeah, like that's worked out really swell since Oslo. Let's give it another 18 years.

Palestinian sovereignty is not some recent Israeli goodwill gesture. The 1947 Partition Plan, U.N. Resolution 181 that sliced Israel out of historical Palestine, also envisioned a new Arab state would be founded in the remaining territory. It didn't happen. What did happen was sixty-three years of predictable hostility, Arab aggression and brutal reprisals from the people whose land the West so casually snatched. Now who could have seen that coming?

Israel, citing security requirements, suppresses Palestinian autonomy through control of its roads, water supply, power grid and fledgling economy; alters international borders at whim; refuses the internationally recognized right of repatriation to 4.7 million displaced Palestinians; occupies the U.N.-mandated neutral city of Jerusalem; and strategically plops settlements throughout territory designated to Palestine for its future state.

While security may have been a concern in mid-century, the Israeli military is now the fourth largest in the world and clearly the most awesome in the Middle East. Today, it certainly smells a lot more like Israeli arrogance, or even apartheid, than a security issue. As for Palestinian atrocities, Israel has out "atrocitized" them 10 to 1.

Much is made of the refusal by Hamas radicals, which controls the Gaza Strip, to recognize Israel, but the half million strong and growing, mostly right-wing, religious zealots illegally occupying settlements in in the West Bank and East Jerusalem also reject the notion of a Palestinian state. And the Israeli government, which could end this impasse tomorrow, not only panders to these extremists but encourages new settlement construction to sabotage the viability of any future Palestinian state.

Nothing's going to change given current protocols. Everyone in the world seems to grasp this except America. So, other than U.S. politicians' benefiting mightily from pro-Israeli swag in the form of contributions from Israel's virulently toxic propaganda machine - along, of course, with America's Security Council veto which it uses to protect Israeli intransigence - there is simply no reason not to do this.

By recognizing Palestinian statehood, the U.N. could take the two most contentious issues off the table - issues that will never be resolved in direct negotiations - freezing illegal settlements and establishing East Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine and assign the third, the repatriation of Palestinian refugees, to the status of an obscure, historical grievance.

If the world could carve out and recognize a Jewish state six decades ago, it surely has sufficient cause to recognize a Palestinian one now.