All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
And our first guest on the show today is Joe Lauria.
He is a New York-based independent foreign affairs correspondent.
You can read him in the Sunday Times, in the Wall Street Journal, at the Huffington Post, and of course, in the past, has written for every major newspaper in the world.
Welcome back to the show, Joe.
How are you?
I'm fine, Scott.
Thanks for having me back on your show.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here, and especially knowing you just sat and watched this speech by Abu Mazen, a.k.a.
Abu Abbas, live in person there.
I guess, first of all, just give us your, you know, impression of what you just witnessed there.
Is this a world historical event, or what?
Well, it's a bit anticlimactic, because we knew pretty much what he was going to say.
But this entire effort by the Palestinians to come here and get U.N. membership or observe a state status at the General Assembly is a very historic moment in the whole long history of this conflict, absolutely.
But the speech put the punctuation mark on it, and it was a bit harsh at times.
It referred to the racist annexation wall, the fence that the Israeli's have built to surround the settlements on the occupied territories.
And he called for Israel to come and negotiate with the Palestinians, but he wants the complete cessation of settlements first, something the government of Benjamin Netanyahu has refused to do, probably because if he does that, his coalition with Lieberman, even more Abu Dar Lieberman, the foreign minister, would probably collapse.
He said he was not looking for the delegitimization of Israel, but the legitimization of Palestine.
And he extends his hand to Israel, to the government people of Israel, who wants to build bridges of this dialogue instead of checkpoints and walls of separation.
And he says that Israel wants...
Well, he made a very good argument at the IMF, the World Bank has already said that their institutions are that of a state.
And this gives me an opportunity to make an important point, because there's been a lot of misreporting, shoddy and bad reporting on this entire story, essentially what the Palestinians are trying to do here.
They're not coming for statehood here.
The UN does not recognize states, individual governments do.
And the Palestinians declared independence on November 15th, 1988, and immediately 100 countries around the world, soon right after that, recognized them.
It's now 130 countries of the world recognize that.
Many of those countries have Palestinian embassies and ambassadors in their capitals.
So Palestine is, for those 130 countries, a state already.
Just the way the United States, when it declared independence in 1776, was recognized by countries, even though it was then occupied by British troops.
And in the same way someone went out of Alaska mosque in Jerusalem and read the Declaration of Independence, the way it was read in the courtyard of the State House in Philadelphia.
That, in fact, is missing from U.S. media reports.
I'm not sure why, but it has to be said that they are recognized by 130 states.
Now, to become a member of the UN, you already have to be a state.
So you can't become a state on membership.
So what they're saying is we're a state recognized by 130 countries around the world.
We want to be a full member of the United States.
Nine of the 15 Security Council members are amongst those 130 states.
And the process to become a member is to go first to the Security Council to get a resolution passed as a recommendation, which then goes to the General Assembly, which needs a two-third vote.
The problem is on the Security Council, of course, five countries have a veto.
China and Russia have recognized Palestine, but the United States does not, and they vow to veto it.
So while 130 countries say that Palestine is a state already, the United States does not believe that.
Therefore, they will veto.
They don't think that they're worthy of being a member because they don't see them as a state, whereas so many other countries do.
So if they do veto that resolution, but if, in fact, it comes to a vote, the U.S. will delay this, and they're lobbying very hard to get some of those nine countries that have already recognized Palestine as a state to abstain.
And you need nine votes in the Security Council with no vetoes to pass a resolution, a recommendation resolution on membership.
The U.S. can get some of those countries to be peeled off, and they only get eight votes.
Then the measure will be defeated, and the U.S. can avoid, which would be a very troubling veto for them in terms of the reaction in Arab countries amongst people demonstrating against the U.S. It would be seen as a great betrayal by the United States by President Obama, who has gone on record saying he wants the Palestinian state, although he backtracked a lot from that this week.
So if they don't get the nine votes, the U.S. can avoid that, and it's a bit of an embarrassment to the Palestinians.
But they have two more options after that, one not very likely, one very likely.
The first one is they could go to the General Assembly, and there they could use a uniting for peace resolution.
I've heard this from Francis Boyle, who has been their top legal advisor since 1988 when he advised them on that Declaration of Independence.
He feels that the uniting for peace resolution, which was introduced by the United States in 1950 to get around vetoes by the Soviet Union on the Korean conflict, that the Palestinians could use this now as a way to bypass this veto of the U.S. or a failure of the Security Council to pass with nine votes to go for membership in the General Assembly.
But it would be very difficult.
They would have to convince two-thirds of the 194 members that membership would be a defense against Israeli aggression.
And it's a bit of creative legal thinking, because there was an advisory opinion by the International Court of Justice back in 1950 before this uniting for peace came into effect, saying that only the Security Council could first recommend that council action was necessary.
But if they do choose to go that route, they may get the two-thirds vote.
More likely is to ask for observer state status, become an observer state.
The Palestinians are now an observer mission.
They have no rights to vote.
They can't make speeches, basically, nothing else.
If they became an observer state with only 51 percent, a simple majority is necessary, and they certainly have 97 votes to get that with 130 countries that are recognized, that they become an observer state.
And that does change quite a lot, because then they will be able to accede to treaties and join U.N. agencies.
Amongst those treaties would be, say, the Law of the Sea Treaty, which would give them automatic sovereign rights over their territorial waters off Gaza, that they could then go to the International Court of Justice and sue Israel for the blockade.
Now this would be seen internationally as Israel on the territorial waters of the Palestinian state.
Well, now, why do they do that in the first place, Joe?
Why go to the U.N. Security Council, where they're virtually guaranteed to either be voted down or vetoed out of there, when they could just go to the General Assembly and actually get it done?
That's a very good question, and I think the answer is, and Palestinian officials have pretty much said this, that it was for domestic reasons the Palestinian people wanted the U.S., sorry, wanted their leadership to challenge the U.S. and the security, to challenge them to the veto, to go forward, to be aggressive against the United States.
Probably not the smartest move, but I think he's done that to show what defiance in the region that has seeped into the West Bank and Gaza, that he would go to the Security Council and defy or challenge the U.S. to allow them to become a member.
And they won't.
And then they'll go ahead and go to the General Assembly anyway.
They will go to the General Assembly, probably for that second option, and they will join a law of the sea.
They could join the International Civil Aviation Organization, which means they have sovereignty over their airspace, and most critically, they can join the International Criminal Court.
And I've interviewed all the U.N. officials on this.
This is absolutely true.
And they could then, starting from July 2002, retroactively, could ask the ICC to investigate Israeli military for any activities on the Palestinian territories of Gaza or the West Bank.
And they would have to investigate that, and they could bring war crime charges or crimes against humanity charges against Israeli military officials.
Just so I understand this right, Joe, you're saying that in the General Assembly there's really nothing that Israel or the United States can do about it.
They obviously have a solid majority.
And if the General Assembly votes to give them, I guess, this observer status, or under the technicality of that old law that you mentioned there, then that's it.
Then they would be a state in the eyes of the United Nations or under the law of the United Nations, where even the Security Council states would have to respect that fact, or what?
Well, no.
No, because 130—that's a good question, actually.
I'd just say 130 countries believe it is a state already, and they will vote in the General Assembly, so they're going to be able to confer observer state status on the Palestinians.
But, you know, the British had said, actually, that they were maybe willing to vote for this as long as they weren't required by the resolution that will be written to bilaterally recognize them.
So you could perhaps vote for this if they got that—vote for it, observe a state status, but not bilaterally recognize it.
If you vote for it, it doesn't mean you automatically bilaterally recognize it.
Hold it right there, Joe.
We've got to go out to this break.
Everybody, it's Joe Laurier.
You can find him at The Huntington Post and The Wall Street Journal and all over the place.
He's a great independent journalist reporting live today from the United Nations.
We'll be right back.
All right, Joe, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm on the line with Joe Laurier, New York-based freelance journalist.
Writes oftentimes for The Wall Street Journal, and I know you're saying, The Wall Street Journal, that is a bastion of pure evil.
No, no, no, that's the editorial page.
They've got really good journalists that write for them about important things.
Joe's one of them.
All right, so now, well, there's confusion in the chat room, too.
Do we really hear you right, Joe, that what you're saying is after Barack Obama vetoes this thing in the UN Security Council, that it's going to go through the General Assembly and they will have some semblance of statehood under United Nations rules to the degree where you're saying even the British were saying, well, maybe we'll have to go along with that even if we don't recognize them directly.
Maybe we'll go ahead and support them having observer status, whatever that is.
Yes, I said the U.S. wants to avoid the veto by lobbying fiercely for less than nine votes.
If they have to, they will veto.
But, you know, something else could happen.
It should be pointed out clearly that a lot of media outlets reported there would be a vote this week, and it was completely false.
It was never going to be a vote this week.
It was only going to be a boss said last Friday that today, this Friday, he would simply declare and submit an application for membership, which he's done now at 1130 a.m. here in New York.
Now the process of the Security Council could take to the membership committee that the council has where there has to be agreement.
No vetoes, however, on that committee.
So the U.S. can veto there.
If that passes, then it goes to the large Security Council, and then they will have a vote.
And if they get more than nine, the U.S. will veto.
So that's a couple of weeks maybe down the line.
And if that happens, the Palestinians will then go to the General Assembly after maybe a month or so.
They don't say exactly how long, but they're not going to wait too long for that process to be dragged out because they'll lose momentum.
But in that time, the European Union is driving very hard.
And Sarkozy, President Sarkozy, yesterday from the General Assembly podium here at the U.N., laid out some of the ideas that he had.
He basically told the U.S. you failed in 20 years of negotiations, so move over.
We're taking over.
We're going to leave this peace process.
And he came up with his own one-year plan.
Now the other European countries were a little miffed with Sarkozy because it's a European Union plan, not a French plan, even though President Sarkozy is trying to take credit for it.
And what this is, is essentially they're trying to restart the negotiations and to delay even that General Assembly vote by offering what to the Palestinians.
Not very much.
They want to offer them, I'm sorry, the General Assembly vote where they get observer's state, but they want the Palestinians to sign off on not taking any action based on the new rights that they would get, such as going to the International Criminal Court or to the International Court of Justice on the territorial waters.
And then they will support a General Assembly resolution giving them observer's state.
You know, they're going to get that anyway.
So I don't know what the Palestinians would gain from that.
And the Israelis would have to freeze settlements in order for the Palestinians to come back.
But right now there's a huge lobbying effort going on by the Europeans on the Palestinians to delay taking any actions once they become an observer's state, what I had described to you before.
And if they do that, then the Europeans will lean on the Israelis to come back to the table and maybe freeze settlements.
Although that is really not to be seen.
So just to sum that up, while this long U.N. process plays out over the next weeks or so before there's a Security Council and then a General Assembly vote, the Europeans are going to be trying to get talk started again.
If they feel the Americans have not failed to do that, they're not seen as an honest broker.
Mr. Obama's speech yesterday was seen widely as being extremely pro-Israel, one of the most pro-Israel speeches he ever made because of the governor you have there in Texas, if that's where you're at right now, Scott.
His remarks about Israel, you know, it's a domestic season here.
Some people point out it was bad timing for the Palestinians to come here when there's a presidential election coming and Obama couldn't least afford to oppose his Israeli and Jewish supporters in the United States, as we saw Perry's making hay out of that.
So the issue is...
Well, look, all things being equal, the Europeans being able to work anything out is not going to happen any more than any of the rest of the so-called peace process has happened.
So I'm kind of wondering if we fast forward a few months from now or something and they have this observer status by way of the General Assembly, probably, what difference will that make for the Palestinians' ability, or say the Palestinian Authority and the West Bank's ability, to do anything about the settlements or the occupation there in terms of, you know, submitting their complaints to the world law, etc.
What they can do is, first of all, they would feel they had more leverage in negotiations.
They've never said that this U.N. move here would preclude negotiations.
They realize they have to still negotiate with the Israelis, but they have more leverage as either a member state or as an observer state to negotiate in a more equal footing with the Israelis, who are certainly a state and a member of the U.N.
And they could then use the practical rights that are given to them to challenge in the International Criminal Court the occupation, the pest-led war against Gaza, and other actions that the military has taken, the naval blockade, in these international fora.
And that would put pressure on Israel.
Israel could ignore the International Court of Justice ruling.
They ignored the ruling on the separation wall.
They ruled against that, as the United States ignored an oral court ruling on the mining of the Nicaragua harbor in the 80s.
But it's still a political pressure on them to have to deal with a court ruling an opinion against them.
And the International Criminal Court is even more serious, because arrest warrants can be issued.
And then we're seeing Israeli military officials not being able to perhaps leave the country, go to a country that's a member of the court, or be obliged to arrest them.
So this would give much more leverage to the Palestinians to enter into these negotiations.
But as far as getting rid of the settlements and all that, that obviously can only be done if Israelis decide to dismantle them.
That's not going to be done in any other way.
Even if the court ruled that they were illegal, they were now illegally occupying a sovereign country's land.
Well, why didn't they do this back in 1996, Joe, when Netanyahu was destroying the Oslo peace agreement back then?
Well, the Palestinians did try at some point to do what they're doing now, when George Bush's father was in office back in, I guess, sometime in the early 90s.
And Thomas Pickering, I'm told, who was the ambassador here, stood up and threatened to take down, you know, to destroy the UN if they went ahead with this, and Arafat back down.
So they've had the ability to go to the...
They didn't have the ability to challenge, let's say, the blockade.
They did bring...
I don't know who brought the suit against Israel on the separation wall, but the ICJ did rule on that.
I mean, why didn't they do what in 1996?
You mean, go for a membership?
Or for...
Yeah.
But they did try and they backed down in the early 90s, but not in 1996.
I don't know the answer to the reason why they didn't do it then.
I think they were believing that this process could work at some point.
And they've fed up now.
They, you know, they really...
The Palestinians are really unhappy with American statements about Obama saying that there are no shortcuts, no shortcut on Wednesday, no shortcuts to statehood, to recognition, when in fact, you know, they've 20 years of waiting, and they feel it's not a shortcut anymore.
All right.
Thanks so much for your time on the show today, Joe.
I really appreciate it.
No problem.
Okay, Scott.
All the best.
The great Joe Loria, everybody.
You can find his blogs at The Huffington Post and his freelance journalism in the Wall Street Journal, among other places.
