Waking up to good news

I was woken up in the night last night when my email pinged with a new message.  This normally annoys me; last night it was Ken de Bevoise’s “Continuing Education” email with breaking news;  Palestine had been granted non-member observer status at the UN.  This may not seem to be a major step but it is part of the process of membership – one day – and we no longer have to use “Palestine” (with the quote marks) as a title.  It will grant Palestine membership  of UN institutions and it will have the same diplomatic position as the Vatican. It exists.  Somewhat predictably Britain abstained; couldn’t quite bring ourselves to upset America enough to do the right thing.  It had been expected given comments made over the past few days by William Hague but it’s still disappointing to know that, when it came to the crunch, we didn’t have enough spine to do what was right.  I suppose the best we can say is that we didn’t, at least, vote against it as America did.  I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised with America either.  It has been fairly obvious that they weren’t going to elevate the status of Palestine.  One can only hope that this doesn’t lead to a slashing of the contributions that the USA makes to UN based aid agencies as has happened in the past.  One US Senator (Republican – predictably) even went so far as to suggest that the US cut off all funding to the General Assembly if that vote went against them. It did – overwhelmingly.

Does it surprise me that today Israel has announced that it going to build 3000 more settler homes in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem? On top of this 1000 more planning permissions are to be fast-tracked.   This will add to the 500,000 Israelis who already live in the West Bank.  This may sound like a more-or-less harmless case of sour grapes given yesterday’s vote.  However, the more that Israel carves up the West Bank by spreading settler communities the harder it will be to create a coherent contiguous Palestine that will exist as a viable state.  The Israelis seem to be hoping that the spread of settlements will prevent a fully independent Palestinian state from becoming a reality.  This also contravenes UN Resolution 446 which called upon Israel to cease expansion of settlement communities, in fact, there is rather a long list of UN Resolutions that Israel has ignored. If there is going to peace in the region it will come as a “two state solution”, however, allowing Israel to consistently ignore international law is not the way to achieve a way forward.

It may be that one of the new agencies/organisations that Palestine has access to is the ICC…if that is the case then Israel’s ongoing refusal to listen to the UN might be about to be tested in court.