Wait, Who's Opposed to UN Palestinian State Resolution?

Seems like someone should have checked to see if the Arab states’ resolution, presented by Jordan and Mahmoud Abbas, actually has Palestinian support.

The resolution demands that Israel shrink to the 1949 armistice lines, referred to as “withdrawing to the pre-67 borders and from east Jerusalem.”  This would be followed by the creation of a Palestinian state.

The Palestinian government of Gaza (Hamas) and a number of Palestinian factions including the DFLP (Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine) are fully against it. This is because the resolution allows for Israel’s existence, something that these organizations oppose.

And recent polls indicate that Gazans themselves support Hamas over Abbas’ Fatah.

But it’s not clear that that the Palestinian Authority wants two states either.  Even when a Hamas-Fatah partnership looked like it was about to happen – as it did several months ago – Hamas was in no way asked to change its foundational agenda of removing Jewish Israel.

Naturally, the Israeli government opposes a resolution imposed on it by the UN – not only, or even primarily, because of the UN’s constant outpouring of resolutions against Israel far out of proportion to that of any other country, but because all the issues involved in creating a state of Palestine – something that the Israeli government supports – impact the entire existing state of Israel and the lives millions of people.

The US is expected to veto the resolution, in any case.

Meanwhile, a majority of the member states of the UN have already symbolically recognized a state of Palestine.

And Europe is rapidly following suit, reiterating after every vote that the support of their parliaments are merely “symbolic gestures.”

Even with a real UN resolution, demands are only symbolic without the work of negotiation between the two countries and the work of building the political structure for the state of Palestine. These resolutions have a way of ignoring the people actually involved, both Jews and Arabs.

Repeated polls have found that in predominately Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem, more residents want to be part of Israel than of Palestine.  In a recent survey, 40% of Arabs said they would move into Israel if their neighborhood became Palestinian and 27% said they wanted to be part of a Palestinian state.

Mahmoud Abbas has said that when the state of Palestine is formed, not one Jew should be allowed to live there.