Can US Support UN Resolution on Israeli Settlements? Yes We Can!

A key resolution on the Israel-Palestine conflict is now before the
UN Security Council. Largely echoing stated US policy, the resolution
embraces negotiations, endorses the creation of a Palestinian state, and
demands an immediate halt to Israeli settlement construction in the
West Bank and East Jerusalem. But even though the resolution echoes US
policy, President Obama is under pressure to veto the UN resolution from
forces in Washington who want to protect the Israeli occupation of the
West Bank.

Can President Obama say no to this pressure? Yes, he can! Urge him to do so.

Prominent former US government officials, including Ambassador Thomas Pickering and Ambassador James Dobbins, have written to President Obama, urging him to instruct our Ambassador to the United Nations to vote yes on this initiative, noting that it echoes US policy.

It's not an immutable law of the universe that the U.S. has to veto
U.N. resolutions critical of Israeli settlement expansion in the West
Bank and East Jerusalem. Indeed, last year, the U.S. promised
the Palestinians to "consider allowing UN Security Council condemnation
of any significant new Israeli settlement activity," the Guardian reported.

Some DC conventional wisdom suggests that there is no way politically
that President Obama can fail to comply with any demand from the
"Israel lobby" to veto the UN resolution.

But there are reasons in this case to doubt whether this conventional wisdom must necessarily be right.

The "Israel lobby" isn't as internally unified on the question of
Israeli settlement expansion in the West Bank as it is on say, U.S. aid
to Israel. A lot of folks who "support Israel" do not support the
expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, because it is obvious
that there is a fundamental contradiction between Israeli settlement
expansion in the West Bank and a peaceful resolution of the conflict.
There is a choice to be made: settlement expansion or peace. We cannot
have both.

There would be a real cost to a U.S. veto that would be higher today
than in the past. There isn't any credible excuse for a U.S. veto in the
Security Council of the U.S.' own position that can be sold
internationally, and particularly in the Middle East, at a time when the
U.S. is facing unprecedented challenges on a number of fronts. The
arguments that have been used so far in Washington to try to justify a
U.S. veto won't wash internationally. The UN Security Council isn't an
"anti-Israel" venue - a venue where the U.S. has a veto won't ever be
"anti-Israel" in any meaningful sense of the term. Indeed, the key
players in the Security Council look a lot like the key players in the
"Quartet" that is supposedly overseeing the "peace process" - the U.S.,
the EU, Russia, and the U.N. And the purpose of the resolution isn't to
dodge negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians; it explicitly
embraces them. The purpose is to try to make those negotiations
meaningful by effectively imposing a parameter on them that all sides
have already agreed to, but that the U.S. has failed to effectively
enforce: a freeze on Israeli settlement expansion.

As Time Magazinenoted last week,
after Tunisia, Arab governments feel under greater pressure from "the
Arab street." This is not a time when the U.S. can rely on Arab
governments to protect the U.S. government from contradictions in the
U.S. position.

The leak of documents yesterday by Al Jazeera and the Guardian
on the U.S.-led "peace process" expose that "process" as currently
being a charade which is not leading towards a resolution of the
conflict (in case there was anyone who still had any doubts about that.)

Here's Tzipi Livni, then Israel's foreign minister, in 2007:

At a west Jerusalem meeting in November 2007, [Livni] told
[Ahmed Qureia, then senior Palestinian negotiator] that she believed
Palestinians saw settlement building as meaning "Israel takes more land
[so] that the Palestinian state will be impossible"; that "the Israel
policy is to take more and more land day after day and that at the end
of the day we'll say that is impossible, we already have the land and we
cannot create the state". She conceded that it had been "the policy of
the government for a really long time".

At the end of 2007, though, "it is still the policy of some of the parties but not the government".

Of course, the parties to which Livni then referred now are
the Israeli government. And for the forseeable future, in the absence of
effective outside pressure, "take more and more land day after day and
that at the end of the day we'll say that is impossible, we already have
the land and we cannot create the state" will continue to be the policy
of the Israeli government.

All this is going to put more pressure on the pro-U.S. wing of the
Palestinian leadership and the pro-U.S. Arab governments to demonstrate
that they have something else going on besides the failed U.S.-led
"peace process." If the door to the UN Security Council is closed to
them, that energy is going to go somewhere. It's likely that alternative
venues and channels for that energy are going to be much more disliked
by the U.S. than the UN Security Council, where the U.S. holds a veto.

If the U.S. wants to keep governments in the region onside against
Iran's nuclear program, a U.S. veto in the Security Council of the U.S.'
own position on Israeli settlements is not going to help with that. On
the contrary: a U.S. veto of its own position on Israeli settlement
expansion is going to force U.S. allies in the region to put more
distance between themselves and the U.S.

This is not a time when the U.S. can easily afford to take more hits
politically in the region. The current U.S. gambit in Lebanon does not seem to be going well at the moment.
It may well turn out that, as in the recent past, current efforts by
the U.S. to reduce the influence of Hizbullah over the government in
Lebanon will backfire by producing a government in Lebanon in which
Hizbullah has even more influence than before. If this happens, it will
make governments in the region even warier of being perceived as close
to the U.S.

If the U.S. vetoes the U.N. resolution, it will signal to the region
that the U.S. is incapable of meaningfully supporting international
efforts for a just resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict. A U.S.
veto will embolden the most reactionary forces in Israel, which have
been escalating their efforts to silence Israeli dissent against the
occupation.

But if the U.S. supports the resolution, it will signal to the region
that the U.S. is no longer determined to stand in the way of
international efforts to promote a just resolution.

We have been in a situation like this before. In 2008, the right wing
of the "Israel lobby" pushed the U.S. House to pass a resolution that
essentially called for a U.S. naval blockade of Iran, which of course
would be an act of war, although the resolution did not use those exact
words. The DC conventional wisdom said that resolution would go through
the House "like a hot knife through butter." But it did not turn out to
be so. When peace groups got activated, and it became an issue outside
of the usual circles, many House Democrats took a second look, and
decided that a resolution pushing the U.S. towards war with Iran was not
just another resolution written by the "Israel lobby" for Congress to
sign.

This could be like that. Because the draft UN Security Council
resolution echoes stated U.S. policy, because the U.S.-led "peace
process" is in a state of total collapse, because U.S. leadership in the
region is facing unprecedented challenge, it's not a no-brainer
politically for the U.S. to veto. The international political price of a
veto will be high, and the domestic political price for failing to veto
is likely to be minimal - if this becomes an issue on which a broader
public gets engaged.

This is a historic opportunity for President Obama to show leadership and back up the words of his speech in Cairo with deeds. Urge President Obama to support the UN resolution condemning Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.