|
http://www.maannews.net What can we expect of the international community? It is no longer possible, in a time of the major changes in the 21st century, to leave the Middle East a hostage to the crisis management approach or of U.S. election agendas. It is, rather, in urgent need of radical solutions, especially for the Palestinian issue, on the basis of international legitimacy which has already coalesced around the two-state solution to end the Arab-Israeli conflict. The two-state solution on the land of Palestine was the first international initiative to end the Arab-Zionist conflict, by voting in the General Assembly of the United Nations on the partition resolution No. 181, on 29 November 1947, without consulting or even notifying the Palestinians or the Arab world. This led the international community to announce, a few months later, the establishment of Israel in May 1948. This gave Israel the right of statehood through full membership of international organizations, especially the United Nations, leaving the Palestinian people looking for their own state ever since. Since 1988, the Palestine Liberation Organization has been struggling, on the basis of the international institutions and their resolutions, to reach a just solution to the Palestinian issue through establishing the independent Palestinian state on the borders of June 1967, to live side by side with Israel, which was based on an area of 78 percent of historical Palestine. This percentage is even more than what was apportioned in the 1947 resolution, but Israel relied on its global alliances to legalize or protect what it had occupied by military force. However, Israel could not initiate, in any international institution, a resolution that can confiscate the minimum rights of the Palestinian people through occupying the whole West Bank, including Jerusalem, and Gaza. This is because the world, through the international community, has set the minimum borders of the 1967, the basis for a Palestinian state, which can never be given up. The Palestinian leadership, which is keen to reach a just peace that would preserve for future generations their right to live in peace and security, did not find in Israel any decisive will to live in peace, to start a historic moment for the stability and integrity of the region and the world. Rather, the Palestinian people find themselves, twenty years after the Madrid Peace Conference in 1991, with no state or hope to establish it. This is because the successive Israeli governments took the political and negotiating process to a dead end, with no international party able to compel Israel to seize the opportunity of making peace that can preserve its existence and security, and give it globally-recognized legitimacy. So, we have the decision to go to the United Nations next September to request full membership for the State of Palestine, as promised by President Barack Obama in his speech in 2010 before the United Nations, and supported by the trend of the international community for a two-state solution, and its commitments to the right of peoples to self-determination. These words have been spoken on many occasions, but will come under scrutiny in September when the Palestinian leadership goes to the United Nations to use international norms to establish the independent Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital. The legacy of the twentieth-century, represented by the Israeli occupation which is the last complex and continuing occupation in the world, is not an easy one. It brings the international community, particularly the United States and the European Union, face to face with their responsibilities. We hope that they can, this time, make their decision as they claim to have done in Libya, in favor of the people's rights. This means enabling the Palestinian people to establish their independent state. This will not be an easy decision, especially in the light of the stalled negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians, and Israel's insistence on selecting their own terms for peace process, while denying the right of the Palestinian people to establish their independent state.
|
