On Sept. 20th, the Palestinian Authority plans to bring its case for formal statehood recognition to a vote at the United Nations.
Yet, what seems to be an attempt to diplomacy is actually creating a diplomatic war, driving a deeper wedge between the Palestinians and Israelis.
Beginning with the 1993 Oslo Accords, an agreement made between Palestine and Israel to resolve the ongoing violent conflict, and continuing all the way into September 2010, there has been a peace process.
After the Camp David Summit failed in 2000 and the second major Palestine uprising took place, Israel broke off negotiations with the then Palestinian
President Yassir Arafat. Later, Israel reestablished negotiations with Mahmoud Abbas, Arafat's successor.
However, negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority have been stalled in recent years. The peace process has been grueling, extensive, and exhausting, but Israel has not given up hope that peace can be achieved through the resumption of negotiations.
Yet the Palestinian push for recognition threatens to disrupt the peace process drastically and potentially damage this relationship permanently.
The Palestinian Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) has assumed that the peace process has failed. In other words, the Palestinian Authority is walking away from the negotiating table.
President Obama has urged the Palestinian Authority to continue negotiating with Israel, but the Palestinian Authority has refused to resume negotiations with Israel since last September.
President Abbas has actively abandoned negotiations altogether by choosing to go directly to the U.N.
Abbas is formally requesting full admission as a state into the U.N. based on the pre-1967 armistice lines. However, the Palestinian Authority does not control all the pre-1967 land they wish to declare as their own.
In other words, the declaration directly violates past PLO-Israel agreements, specifically the Oslo Agreement, which included Palestinian recognition of the State of Israel within the 1967 borders alongside the Palestinian self-government arrangement.
However, imposed border solutions do not create lasting peace; permanent peace can only be achieved through direct negotiations with both parties.
Namely, a peace agreement was achieved between Israel and Egypt in 1978, and between Israel and Jordan in 1994, as a result of direct negotiations. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is no different.
Past agreements like the 1993 Oslo Agreement and the 1995 Interim Agreement show that the Israelis and Palestinians are capable of success when directly negotiating with one another. But the negotiation process is highly dependent on responsible partners.
The Palestinian Authority has a number of internal issues that put into question its legality and ability to declare itself the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.
The Fatah-governed West Bank and the Hamas-controlled Palestinian entity in Gaza are two rival governments.
The two political factions cannot seem to find common ground to form a functioning government.
A state, as defined by the Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, must possess the following qualifications: a permanent population; a defined territory; government; and capacity to enter into relations with the other states. The rival governments of Fatah and Hamas clearly do not meet these standards
Lastly, UDI can establish dangerous international precedents. UDI will undermine the principles of international diplomacy and conflict resolution.
Diplomatic processes lose their value when one party can simply walk out and achieve its own ends without considering the cause of the other side —and gain international recognition anyway.
If one separatist group can go to the U.N. for recognition, then others could follow suit. In Europe alone, multiple groups could take this path, such as the Basques and Catalonians in Spain, the Flemish in Belgium, the Roma in Romania, the Corsicans in France, and the Albanians in Macedonia.
President Obama and the U.S House and Senate have publicly denounced the unilateral declaration of independence.
Congress overwhelmingly passed resolutions – H. Res. 268 and S. Res. 185 – that call on the administration to lead opposition to a unilateral Palestinian statehood effort. If the unilateral declaration is passed, the United States will most likely cut off foreign aid to Palestine.
With this, there has to be an immediate resumption of direct negotiations between both parties. This is the only way peace can be achieved.
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