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Palestinian Statehood and the Lessons of Oslo

(Wall Street Journal) Fouad Ajami - "UN 194" is the slogan of the campaign to grant the Palestinians a seat at the UN, to recognize their authority as the 194th nation in that world body. This is the Palestinians' second chance, for there was the session of the General Assembly in 1947 that addressed the question of Palestine and the struggle between Arabs and Jews. A vote took place on the partition resolution that November and provided for two states to live side by side. Israel would become the 58th member state. The Palestinians refused the 59th seat. Were the Palestinians to look at their history, they would come to recognize that the one break that came their way happened in 1993, through direct negotiations with Israel. The peace of Oslo that secured them their national authority, that brought Yasser Arafat from his Tunisian exile to Gaza, was a gift of direct diplomacy. A generation later, the lesson of that accord remains unaltered. There can be no avoiding direct negotiations. The deliberations at the UN are only theater, just another illusion. The writer is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
2011-09-23 00:00:00
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