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Should the UN Admit Palestine as a Full Member State?

(Intelligence Squared U.S.) On Jan. 10, 2012, Intelligence Squared U.S. held a debate at NYU on the question: "Should the UN Admit Palestine as a Full Member State?" During the debate, former U.S. Middle East negotiator Aaron David Miller said: "Just because negotiations are stuck...doesn't mean that in an effort to maintain hope, to diffuse desperation and to accommodate some measure of urgency, we need to pursue an idea [UN admission] that...you've, in my judgment, failed to demonstrate where the real upsides are. The downsides of this are very, very real. In July 2000, we decided to recommend to Bill Clinton to go to Camp David to try to create a conflict-ending solution between Israelis and Palestinians. Do you realize that a dozen years after that summit, we are still paying for the lack of wisdom and the recklessness of that decision? Israelis and Palestinians have not yet recovered from the trauma of those ten years, because we believed in an effort to do something in the face of a desperate situation that we could make it better." Former Israeli UN ambassador Dore Gold, president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, addressed Mustafa Barghouthi, asking: "Were you at the Dec. 22 meeting in Cairo of the Palestinian leadership?" Barghouthi: "I was." Gold: "The meeting included Khaled Meshaal, the head of Hamas; it included the heads of Islamic jihad, and these are organizations that call for the obliteration of the State of Israel, the destruction of the State of Israel. So how do you square the circle of invoking to an American audience names like Martin Luther King and then going to an event in Cairo with the leaders of the Islamic Jihad which is a wing of the Pasdaran of Iran, of sitting with the Hamas leadership while they - after your meeting with them - are quoted in Al-Hayat, in the Arabic press, still calling for armed struggle against the State of Israel?"
2012-01-13 00:00:00
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