Jane Adas. Washinton Report on Middle East Affairs. July 2007. "The U.S. bears special responsibility. Despite its mainly unilateral efforts following the 1967 war—Henry Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy, President Jimmy Carter at Camp David, and Secretary of State James Baker’s Madrid peace conference—the U.S. has never supported self-determination for the Palestinians. President George Bush’s 2005 comment in support of Palestinian statehood was rendered irrelevant, Khalidi asserted, by his April 2004 letter to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon supporting the annexation of Jewish settlement blocs ["In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli populations centers"] and denying Palestinian refugees the right to return to Israel ["The United States is strongly committed to Israel's security and well-being as a Jewish state. It seems clear that an agreed, just, fair and realistic framework for a solution to the Palestinian refugee issue as part of any final status agreement will need to be found through the establishment of a Palestinian state, and the settling of Palestinian refugees there, rather than in Israel".] —both in contradiction to many U.N. resolutions Washington formerly had supported. Khalidi accused the U.S., like Great Britain earlier, of being driven by domestic concerns and great power strategies rather than abiding by the principles of international laws".
Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies and director of the Middle East Institute at Columbia University, discussed “International Law, Legitimacy and the Palestinian Question” in Princeton on April 21. The event was sponsored by the New Jersey Division of the United Nations Association of the United States, an organization Khalidi regards as important because it counters the trends toward unilateralism and increasing contempt for the U.N. and international law.
Khalidi has long considered the question of why the Palestinian people, despite having a well-developed national identity, have been unsuccessful in achieving independence and statehood. While his most recent book, The Iron Cage, focuses on internal Palestinian causes, there also have been externally imposed constraints, he said, the most important emanating from the two pillars of modern international law and legitimacy: the League of Nations and the United Nations. The issue of Palestine, he argued, shows the limits of those institutions and the long-term perils of great powers following short-sighted policies not based on their professed principles.
Because of Britain’s difficulties during WWI, Khalidi noted, Palestine became the “thrice-promised land.” In the Hussein-McMahon correspondence of 1915-16, Britain made vague promises to the Arabs about independence in order to persuade them to revolt against the Ottomans on the eastern front. At about the same time, Britain and France signed the Sykes-Picot agreement, secretly dividing between themselves Arab lands under the Ottomans as a sort of colonial compensation for their huge losses on the western front. In November 1917, Britain agreed to the Balfour Declaration, promising European Zionists a “Jewish national home” in Palestine.
For the same reasons, Khalidi continued, Britain for the first time was dependent on the U.S. and was therefore obliged to accept Washington’s war aims as put forward by President Woodrow Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” of December 1917—including the principle of self-determination and the creation of a world body to regulate international affairs. This led to the League of Nations and the Mandate system, behind which Britain and France were obliged to mask their territorial ambitions. Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations designated Arab areas of the former Ottoman Empire as Class A Mandates, meaning they had reached a state of development whereby their existence as independent nations could be provisionally recognized, subject to the “rendering of administrative assistance and advice” through the mandatory power.
The terms of Britain’s Mandate for Palestine, which Khalidi described as the governing document from 1922 until WWII, adopted the language of the Balfour declaration, according to which Palestinians were the “non-Jewish communities.” Jews, by contrast, who constituted 10 percent of Palestine’s population at the time, were a “people” with “national rights” for whom the mandatory power was enjoined to support the creation of Jewish national institutions and facilitate Jewish immigration. In this way, Khalidi asserted, Britain and the League of Nations helped to produce an intractable conflict.
Palestine was one of the first issues brought before the newly established United Nations, Khalidi pointed out. General Assembly Resolution 181 of Nov. 29, 1947 went farther than the League of Nations Mandate by acknowledging that there was an Arab people in Palestine deserving of statehood. Nevertheless it assigned 55 percent of the land to the Jews, at that time only one-third of the population. Khalidi attributed this to the fact that World War II had seen a new level of inhumanity, and it was the unlucky fate of Palestinians to be in conflict with the primary victims of the worst crimes. He charged the international community with acquiescing in the extinction of the Arab state, noting that the U.N. sent no peacekeeping forces and provided no mechanism to regulate the conflict it had created.
The U.S. bears special responsibility, Khalidi said. Despite its mainly unilateral efforts following the 1967 war—Henry Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy, President Jimmy Carter at Camp David, and Secretary of State James Baker’s Madrid peace conference—the U.S. has never supported self-determination for the Palestinians. President George Bush’s 2005 comment in support of Palestinian statehood was rendered irrelevant, Khalidi asserted, by his April 2004 letter to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon supporting the annexation of Jewish settlement blocs and denying Palestinian refugees the right to return to Israel—both in contradiction to many U.N. resolutions Washington formerly had supported. Khalidi accused the U.S., like Great Britain earlier, of being driven by domestic concerns and great power strategies rather than abiding by the principles of international laws.
http://www.wrmea.com/archives/July_2007/0707038.html
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