110 Days to Go
Is the UN Vote Really Important?

By Sherwin Pomerantz

With 110 days remaining to the opening day of the United Nations General Assembly’s 2011 session in New York and the proposed vote to grant the Palestinians recognition for statehood, some people are responding questioning why I think this is a potentially disastrous watershed?

The opposing argument goes something like this: The General Assembly cannot grant membership to any country not so approved by the Security Council, the Security Council will probably not pass it based on the stated intention of the U.S. to veto any such resolution, and the decision of the General Assembly is not binding in any case. I will not, again, go into the aspects of that argument that may have offsets/overrides in prior U.N. resolutions or in the overall legality of the request itself. Rather, let me list the concerns about the process, in and of itself.

• The discussion at the General Assembly on this resolution will, itself, be an exercise in Israel bashing, certainly by the Arab bloc, as well as other countries who have been convinced that peace would come to the entire world if only Israel were not around. We certainly do not need more of this in New York in September.
• Should the resolution pass, even if every legal eagle in the world opines that is has no enforcement capability, the Palestinians, through their seemingly very capable p.r. apparatus, will hawk the fact that now that the resolution has been passed, those Israelis living in areas which the Palestinians claim is now part of their new state, are now living there illegally and must return to pre-1967 armistice lines Israel. Remember we are speaking about hundreds of thousands of people if you include people in the Jerusalem suburbs of Ramot, French Hill, Gilo, and Har Homa as well as the large communities of Ariel, Ma’ale Adumim and Gush Etzion.
• The world, whose nations voted in favor of the resolution, will then be asked to back up their support for the resolution by penalizing Israel, who refuses to recognize the sovereignty of the newly designated Palestine, by imposing trade and diplomatic sanctions on Israel. This could include not permitting Israeli products to be imported into their countries, not accepting the passports of Israelis who live in the newly designated Palestine, etc. In Thursday’s papers the Israel Defense Ministry has already raised the concern that defense exports may drop as a result.

Do I need to go further? Many of the people who receive this blog every day can each probably add another concern of their own and add significantly to this list. Israel is already experiencing a march towards isolation that, however illogical it may be, is already making itself felt in local society. We have politicians and retired military personnel who don’t travel to certain countries for fear of being arrested as war criminals when they get off the plane; representatives of the government are regularly heckled and their speeches disrupted at appearances worldwide; certain exports of the country are boycotted in specific locations in the west in support of the Palestinian cause; and even my partner and myself during presentations a year ago on doing business in the middle east, have been picketed in nice places like Portland, Oregon and New Orleans, Louisiana.

I believe, therefore, that a case can be made for doing everything we can to let the delegates to the U.N. from every nation know that voting in favor of the resolution to recognize a Palestinian state would be a mistake of major import. If we fail to at least try, we ourselves are abdicating our responsibility as informed, caring and knowledgeable citizens of the world.

Pirke Avot (Ethics of the Fathers) teaches us that “It is not yours to complete the task, but neither are you free to desist from it.” Those are the words that should govern our conduct in the current situation. Do something please and do it now!