Why the U.N. Vote Doesn’t Matter

The Palestinian Authority’s (P.A.’s) decision to seek United Nations recognition this fall set off a paroxysm of Israeli and American worry about how to respond. The Israeli Foreign Ministry began a global diplomatic initiative alternately wooing and intimidating small states. Congress threatened to cut off Palestinian aid. Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman threatened to revoke the Oslo Accords. Likud biggie Danny Danon wanted to annex the West Bank. Bar Ilan University professor Mordechai Kedar urged that Israel give the P.A. five or six cities to govern under Israeli supervision and call it autonomy (opponents would call it Bantustans).

Of course, it was mostly shadowboxing. Palestinians have proclaimed a state at least four times already. States can be admitted into the U.N. only by Security Council vote, where the United States has veto power. Other possible measures, such as a General Assembly resolution affirming Palestinian statehood or a grant of beefed up “observer rights,” (such as those Switzerland had before it joined the U.N.) may give the Palestinians a psychological boost, but in real-world terms for Israel they are no big deal. No U.N. resolution will give the Palestinians an effective state. Only direct negotiations between the parties will do so.

The Palestinians know this. The real aim of seeking recognition in the U.N. is to increase their leverage in any such negotiations. In this they have succeeded: The mere prospect of a U.N. vote has increased Palestinian leverage. Americans have worked 24/7 to develop a last-minute negotiating structure that could cause the Palestinians to pull back. Between threats, the Israeli government has intimated various possible concessions—for instance, that they would accept raising the 1967 borders in a negotiation, although they would reject using them as a baseline for any settlement.

Israel could have been creative and used the U.N. debate as an opportunity. It still could. It could offer its own resolution (with U.S. and likely European support) affirming the goal of a two-state solution to include both a homeland for the Palestinian people and a homeland for the Jewish people—that is, a Jewish state. It could enter serious negotiations on borders under U.S. or Quartet (the United Nations, the United States, the European Union, and Russia) auspices. It could jump-start Palestinian economic development by implementing the long list of promises Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made but never fulfilled.

But Israel has done nothing of the sort. It went all out against the September vote for the same reason Netanyahu went ballistic after President Obama’s May AIPAC speech: because the present Israeli government fears any reference to the 1967 lines as a baseline for “tradeoffs.” This is not because the 1967 lines are, in Abba Eban’s words, “Auschwitz borders.” No one expects Israel to return to the borders it had before June 1967. It’s because the government knows that if you start from those borders as the basis for tradeoffs, you are going to have to swap a great deal of current Israeli land to keep all of the settlements and the Jordan Valley.

Starting with 1967 borders as a baseline would mean keeping only 5 to 20 percent of the West Bank, with corresponding swaps of present Israeli land for the Palestinians. But there is not enough easily disposable Israeli land that the Likud is prepared to trade. Even “liberals” in the nationalist camp hope to keep 30 to 60 percent of the West Bank. The result would be a nonviable Palestinian entity that is ineluctably irredentist, one that the Palestinians (and the rest of the world) would never accept.

Netanyahu’s recent decision to build 900 homes in Har Homa (in East Jerusalem) and 277 housing units in Ariel (18 kilometers inside the 1967 border or “Green Line”) shows that this is what the fight is really about. Decisions like these, coupled with the insistence on Israeli control of the Jordan Valley, underscore that the Likud may be grudgingly prepared to accept a vassal statelet between Israel and the Jordan river—but not much more. And their lack of urgency suggests they would be just as happy with the alternative—“managing” the “disputed territories” until world attention turns elsewhere. All this assumes that the Palestinian problem will eventually go away—either the Palestinians will emigrate (or be “emigrated”) or accommodate to the status of resident aliens without a vote or civil rights. Or perhaps the Arab birthrate will decline or the Jewish birthrate dramatically rise. Or (please G-d) the Messiah will arrive and all these issues will become moot.

For such believers, the views of the rest of the world do not matter—we are, as the Bible tells us, a “people who dwell alone.” But most Jews realize that international isolation weakens Israel and marginalizes Jews worldwide and that the demographic problems, if unattended, will doom Israel’s democratic character. Israel’s leaders would rather posture and delay. Make no mistake about it—what will place the Jewish state in long-term peril is not the U.N. vote but how Israel responds to it. By then it may be too late. too late.

Marshall Breger is a professor of law at Catholic University.