With the Palestinian bid for statehood about to come up at the United Nations, lest we forget that Israel did the same. The state of Israel was unilaterally proclaimed by Zionist Jews in Palestine on 14 May 1948. A year later, a request for statehood by would-be Israel was presented to the UN General Assembly. On 11 May 1949, that request received the necessary 2/3 majority for approval. However, that General Assembly vote never received UN Security Council ratification.
Palestine is about to be born in the exact same fashion. Of course, the nascent nation of Palestine won't be allowed the same privilege of simple existential pronouncement. This new Palestine won't be allowed lapses in legal procedure due to semantic legerdemain. And, Palestine won't enjoy the immediate lavishing upon it of billions of dollars in aid from the United States. Nor the unending supply of the finest military weapons and weapons of occupation provided by that same angel, the US. Nor will any resolution harmful to even Palestine's mere image be tolerated quickly being quashed by US Security Council veto. Nor will Palestine be able to conduct daily terror operations-- replete with wholesale mayhem to and murder of civilians --without any consequences arising because America won't allow it. Nor will Palestine be able to refuse to define its borders—accepting the 1967 lines of demarcation for the nonce — even as it daily devours more and more of Greater Palestine, again without consequence or reprisal. Nor will Palestine be able to provoke Israelis until they respond with violence and hatred and then let loose punishing air attacks and ground assaults that decimate entire towns, cities, villages and claims 100s of times more deaths to innocent victims than were lost to the provoked response. This new nation of Palestine won't be allowed to speak of peace while conducting war; constantly given the "benefit of the doubt" that it means what it mouths even as its actions demonstrate a violently different reality.
No, this brand new nation of Palestine won't ever enjoy what Israel has. But what a Palestinian state will enjoy is access to the international legal institutions, like the World Court, in order to air its legal grievances against Israeli occupation and usurpation of Palestinians' homeland. And, once justice is rendered, Palestine will enjoy freedom from a brutal occupation, the end to daily humiliation, to apartheid. Palestine will generate a new hope and good will among its people. They will join together in national recognition, of a dream come true. Pride will flow through the veins of every Palestinian drawing breath on this planet.
Blessings to Mahmoud Abbas and nearly ten million Palestinians, for their audacity to hope after 60 years of a brutal occupation, for still believing that by speaking truth to power it will listen and respond in spiritually elevated human fashion, with justice for all.
