Saving The US From New UN Veto – OpEd

By Seyyed Mohyeddin Sajedi

The Portuguese chairman of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) says the UN admission committee has forwarded its report on Palestine’s full UN membership bid to the UNSC members.

The report reads that the committee cannot offer a proposal which attracts the consensus of the members. This means that Palestine’s bid for full UN membership is dismissed before being put forward in the UNSC and is not going to win the votes.

To be presented in the council, the bid needed the support of nine members of the Security Council out of 15. In this case, the US would wield its veto power to block Palestinian membership.

However, since only 8 members of the Security Council voted for the proposal, there is no need for the US to veto the resolution, because no resolution would be put forward at all.

Last Thursday, France, the UK and Colombia announced that they would abstain. Brazil, China, India, Russia, Lebanon, and South Africa have said that they vote for the bid. Chances are that Nigeria and Gabon would shift to a yes vote. Bosnia and Portugal will also abstain. It is crystal clear that Germany would vote in favor of Israel and would oppose Palestine’s bid, but we have to wait and see if it is blackball or blank.

According to some media reports, Saudi Arabia made an effort to persuade Bosnia to vote for the Palestinian bid, but to no avail. Bosnia’s justification for the blank vote is that the Serbian member of the country’s three-member presidency council is opposed to voting for the proposal. Bosnia used the same pretext to abstain from voting for the membership of Palestine in the UNESCO, whereas Serbia voted in favor of it.

Apparently, changing the vote of the UN Security Council member states is so important for the US that, according to some reliable Palestinian sources, the US president sent a letter to the Bosnian government and asked it to vote against the Palestinian membership.

The US had threatened that it would veto the proposed resolution even if the majority of the UN Security Council members voted for Palestine’s bid. Obama made an all-out effort to avoid confrontation with the public opinion of the Arab world in the current atmosphere that would result from vetoing the bid, especially since Washington is striving to show that it takes sides with the Arab nations in respect to Syria, Libya and even Yemen.

White House advisors are now exulting that their struggles to prevent Palestine from achieving full membership in the UN Security Council paid off and they succeeded in taking another step in legitimizing and backing the Israeli regime.

But their exultation will not last. This victory cannot restore the lost credibility of the US president, who promised the UN General Assembly last year that Palestine would definitely become a member of this global organization in 2011, but staked all his credit to not deliver this promise.

Recently, a conversation between the French and the US presidents has been publicized; in the conversation, the Israeli prime minister is called a liar. But Obama’s explicitly going back on his promise is no less than Netanyahu’s lying.

In an attempt to justify his opposition to Palestine’s membership, the German envoy to the UN Security Council, whose government provides Israel with nuclear submarines free of charge, has said that the bid would get vetoed by the US anyway.

How long can the veto work? Will the US mobilize its entire diplomacy apparatus every year? Mahmoud Abbas will present the bid for Palestine’s membership to the UN General Assembly where, as in the UNESCO, the US has no veto power.

The US threat of cutting its financial contribution to the UNSESCO did not create any hesitation among the majority of the members of this scientific and cultural organization in accepting Palestine’s membership. Will the US stop its financial contribution to the UN if the General Assembly votes for the membership of Palestine? Apparently, the fascistic ideas of John Bolton in the US mission to the UN continue to linger.

Considering the votes of the European countries in the Security Council, it is clear that all of them, excluding Germany which will probably votes against the bid, do not want to get more involved in Palestine’s issue. France voted for the membership of Palestine in the UNESCO, but the United Kingdom and Italy preferred to vote against it. They knew that UNESCO would welcome Palestine.

Palestine intends to become a member in 13 other UN-related organizations such as the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court. American diplomats feel duty-bound to thwart the attempt. But, wherever the US succeeded in preventing Palestine’s membership, it actually took another step in further isolating itself and the Israeli regime.

The resignation of Dennis Ross, Barack Obama’s advisor on Iran and the Middle East, who was one of the ardent proponents of Israel, is another blow to the credit of the Obama administration. Considering the resignation of George Mitchell, US’s special envoy to the Middle East, the departure of Ross shows that the current US administration has given up all kind of plans and efforts in this regard until further notice. This condition may serve the interest of the Israeli regime in the short term, since it spares the regime from any kind of pressure to enter negotiations and make concessions, but Palestine or other Arab nations involved in the recent uprisings never had any hope in the UN to resolve their problems.

What has led to the regime changes in the Middle East has been the determination of Arab nations, not the intents of the US or the UN. Even in Libya, the US seized the opportunity only after the Libyan people had embarked on their uprising.