Palestine's Rocky Path to the United Nations

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What to Read on the Middle East Peace Process

Steven A. Cook

An annotated Foreign Affairs syllabus on the Middle East peace process.

As Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas reaffirmed last week, the Palestine Liberation Organization will present an application for UN membership on Friday to be considered by the Security Council. This move appears to close the door on the possibility that Palestinian officials would withdraw their application in favor of a General Assembly resolution if such a vote were to enjoy a critical mass of support from EU member states.

In the eyes of the Palestinian leadership, Europe is the big prize. Abbas hopes to leverage the UN bid to recruit other global heavyweights as a counterbalance to the United States. But not at any cost: when European offers last week proved underwhelming and loaded with conditions that Ramallah could not accept, Abbas confirmed his current course, with all the negative consequences that entails. But all hope might not yet be lost.

It has become catechism among the Palestinian leadership that there will be no return to bilateral negotiations with Israel in the absence of acceptable terms of reference and a settlement freeze. Even before negotiations broke down in September 2010 after two failed rounds of talks (one direct between Israelis and Palestinians, the other indirect, via U.S. mediators), Palestinian leaders had trumpeted the United Nations as a fallback option.

They claimed that full UN membership was indeed a practical option: either the United States could be pressured not to veto the Palestinian application in the Security Council or the U.S. veto could be circumvented in the General Assembly. But these declarations, premised on inadequate knowledge of the UN system, turned out to be plain wrong. Without any other options and with his already weakened credibility on the line, Abbas plowed ahead with the original idea, even as his surrogates explored alternative paths, such as requesting non-member observer state status.

"You have to understand what the Palestinian mentality is right now," an Egyptian official told me several months ago. "The leadership feels that it's out of options, and the UN is the proverbial last bullet in the gun. They are going to use it." At this point, having backed themselves into a corner, Abbas and his allies have little choice. Were they to step back now, with no suitable compensation, they would only confirm their fecklessness in the eyes of their people.

The view of the UN gambit within even the innermost circle of the Palestinian leadership is not monolithic, however. Loosely speaking, there are two camps. The first, led by Abbas, has looked to the UN to preserve the reigning paradigm of Palestinian diplomacy: good relations with Washington and bilateral negotiations with Israel. The UN offered a means of doing something by demonstrating activism to a jaded Palestinian public, a symbolic protest proving that Ramallah would no longer engage, as a Palestinian negotiator put it to me, in "business as usual." At the same time, the UN could pave a way back to the negotiating table. With Israel unwilling to agree to terms Abbas deemed acceptable and the United States unable to extract them from Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's government, Abbas hoped that the UN would deliver what others could not.

The second camp, associated with a wider but less influential segment of the Palestinian leadership, is more willing to jettison the current paradigm. It recognizes the ultimate necessity of negotiations but prefers, in the meantime, to concentrate on acquiring the institutional and legal tools needed to shift the balance of power. It sees the UN initiative as a means to gain membership in international organizations and justice mechanisms, particularly the International Criminal Court. As this camp sees it, the move would normalize the idea of Palestinian statehood and make full UN membership seem inevitable; it would also afford the Palestinians certain legal tools, although the leadership claims that it would use them more as a deterrent against future Israeli aggression than as a platform for adjudicating the occupation.

But such reassurances are not convincing to officials in Israel, the United States, and some European states, such as the United Kingdom, who fear a wave of ICC cases with negative consequences for both Israel and the court itself. Certain European states have reportedly conditioned their support for a General Assembly resolution upgrading Palestine's status at the UN on a commitment not to bring any cases to the ICC, a demand that has been rejected thus far. (Similarly, Abbas has rejected Europe's related demands for the Palestinians to return to negotiations without preconditions and to forego any move to the Security Council, either before or after a General Assembly vote.) 

Europe's unwillingness to support any option acceptable to the Palestinians is serving only to unite these two Palestinian camps as the UN debate looms. Internal divisions matter little if there is no real choice to be made. At this writing, the Palestinian leadership is determined not to give up the leverage it believes it holds at the Security Council until it has a solid alternative in hand --  but, as often tends to happen with brinksmanship, tactics can become strategy.