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UN Security Council Resolution 2334: A Disservice to the Cause of Peace

(Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies-Bar-Ilan University) Col. (res.) Dr. Eran Lerman - The Palestinian leadership may yet rue the day they managed to secure an American abstention leading to the adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 2334. This poorly designed and atrociously timed diplomatic tool seems set to harm, if not entirely destroy, the very purposes it was designed to serve. It is bound to do damage to Israeli interests (and those of Palestinian employees in Jewish-owned businesses) by giving momentum to the BDS movement. Moreover, when Israeli leaders are confronted with a UN and U.S. endorsement of the Arab narrative, they are unlikely to feel comfortable enough to work for an equitable compromise, and certainly not when there is no partner for compromise on the other side. The so-called "Occupied Palestinian Territories" were never Palestinian at any point: first, the Palestinian leadership rejected UN General Assembly Resolution 181 of November 1947 and launched a war of annihilation against Israel; and second, the territories were held between 1949 and 1967 by an occupying power that gained the recognition of only two states (Britain and Pakistan) to their annexation to Jordan. Thus, Israel is the only existing inheritor of the League of Nations mandate, which called for the "close settlement of Jews on the land." A second unfortunate aspect is that the Obama administration, secure in the presumption that it was "saving Israel from itself," drew no lessons from its own past errors of judgment. Obama's efforts to create "daylight" between U.S. and Israeli positions led to the one of the longest barren periods in the history of the peace process. Now the mistake has been repeated and worsened. A "solution" that encourages the Palestinians to believe in the forced removal of hundreds of thousands of Jews living beyond the 1949 armistice lines, including in east Jerusalem, is a pipe dream. The writer is former deputy for foreign policy and international affairs at Israel's National Security Council.
2016-12-28 00:00:00
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