If Not Now, When?

International lawyer, John V. Whitbeck, has written a very good article in The Nation in which he questions the US and EU's decision to allow Kosovo to declare independence from Serbia, "a course of action which should strike anyone with an attachment to either international law or common sense as breathtakingly reckless."

And he does well to highlight the hypocrisy of western insistence that Kosovo should be allowed to separate from Serbia whilst the wishes of the Palestinian people to have a state free from Israeli interference are simply ignored. Patience, it appears, is something the Palestinians are expected to hold in abundance, whilst it would be unthinkable to ask the same of the Kosovars.

The American and EU impatience to amputate a portion of a UN member state (universally recognized, even by them, to constitute a portion of that state's sovereign territory), ostensibly because 90% of those living in that portion of the state's territory support separation, contrasts starkly with the unlimited patience of the U.S. and the EU when it comes to ending the 40-year-long belligerent occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (no portion of which any country recognizes as Israel's sovereign territory and as to which Israel has only even asserted sovereignty over a tiny portion, occupied East Jerusalem). Virtually every legal resident of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip seeks freedom -- and has for over 40 years. For doing so, they are punished, sanctioned, besieged, humiliated and, day after endless day, killed by those who claim to stand on the moral high ground.

He also highlights the difference in the US and EU's attitude towards the Serbs and the Israelis. The Serbs are having this forced down their throats whether they want it or not, whilst the US and EU are insistent that the forty year dispute between the Israelis and the Palestinians must be sorted by negotiation, on a wildly unequal bilateral basis, between the occupying power and the occupied people.

The Isrealis have a virtual veto on any state of Palestine, whilst the Serbs have no say whatsoever on the formation of a new country of Kosovo on land that has been traditionally their own.

The west's concern that the Kosovars couldn't reasonably be expected to hold off any longer from declaring their state sits in sharp contrast to our attitude towards a people occupied for over forty years. And, once again, and this is a theme that is coming up more and more frequently, he asks that a one state solution be called for by the Palestinians if the west continues to drag it's heels regarding the two state solution.

The consequence would be the end of the "two-state" illusion. The Palestinian leadership would make clear that if the U.S. and the EU, having just recognized a second Albanian state on the sovereign territory of a UN member state, will not now recognize one Palestinian state on a tiny portion of the occupied Palestinian homeland, it will dissolve the "Palestinian Authority" (which, legally, should have ceased to exist in 1999, at the end of the five-year "interim period" under the Oslo Accords) and the Palestinian people will thereafter seek justice and freedom through democracy -- through the persistent, non-violent pursuit of full rights of citizenship in a single state in all of Israel/Palestine, free of any discrimination based on race and religion and with equal rights for all who live there, as in any true democracy.

As an article I linked to the other day makes clear, there are only a finite number of ways to resolve this, and if the west can act with such determination to set up a state of Kosovo - against the wishes of the government of Serbia - then it really does beg the question of why it is so very hard to produce a state of Palestine.

Whitbeck points out that the Palestinians have been playing the game the western way for far too long and that perhaps the only way for them to get western attention is to "constructively kick over the table."

Click title for Whitbeck's entire article.

Tags: Israel, Palestine, Kosovo, Serbia, US, EU, hypocrisy