What Americans Will Lose if the US Vetoes Palestinian Admission to the UN

Americans could lose a lot if the US exercises its planned veto in the Security Council vote on the Palestinian application for admission to the United Nations. The question that is not being discussed is whether the loss is worth it.

The first thing to know is that the issue is not about Palestinian statehood. The media essentially has it wrong when it describes the UN vote as one creating a Palestinian state. The UN does not have the power to create a state. The issue is whether the Palestinian Authority will be admitted as a member to the UN. There are non-states who are members of the UN, such as the Vatican, and there are states that are not members of the UN, such as Taiwan and Kosovo. Being a member of the UN is not the same as being a state. Thus, the US is really opposing a membershp application, not a referendum on statehood.

Second, to gain admittance to the UN, the Palestinian Authority would have to accept the tenets of the UN Charter. Among other things, this would require a recognition of Israel's right to exist and a rejection of violence. Since Hamas rejects Israel's right to exist, the Palestinian Authority will be placed in a difficult dilemma. It can join the UN and accept Israel's right to exist, or it can reject membership and continue to oppose Israel's right to exist. The unintended consequences of the Palestinian Authority admission to the UN might actually work to the benefit of the US and Israel.The media doesn't talk much about this important issue either.

Third, a US veto against a symbolic membership application that does not have the force of law and may actually advance US and Israeli interests will be very, very costly. A veto will dispel any notion of the US's impartiality as a mediator in the Middle East peace process. A veto will be seen as an implicit endorsement of continued settlement construction in the West Bank. A veto will be seen as implicit endorsement of the non-peace regime of Benjamin Netanyahu. A veto will be viewed as inconsistent with the professed American values of freedom, self-dtermination, and democracy. Thus, a veto may cause important moderate elements the Arab world to turn away from the US as a model of peace, democracy, and protector of human rights. A veto will be used by radical political Islamists to incite further violence against the US, particularly the US military. A veto will harm US efforts to find peaceful solutions in Iraq and Afghanistan. A veto, in short, will make foreign policy initiatives in the Islamic world much more difficult. The cost to ordinary Americans will be reflected in continued unpopular military expenditures and a possible decline in national security, at least overseas.

The pro-Israel lobby and American Jews supporting Israel would say that all of this does not matter. What is important is the survival of Israel. However, they do not explain how the Palestinian membership in the UN threatens Israel's survival. This is a classic example of reactive devaluation: If it's good for the Palestinians, it must be bad for Israel. Israel's supporters are automatically and emotionally rejecting anything that could concievably benefit the Palestinians. Since they see the conflict in purely distributive terms--one side's gain must mean the other side's loss--any Palestinian gain must cause harm to Israel. However, a reasoned examination of the effects and implications of admission to the UN fails to uncover a cost to Israel. How, exactly, is Israel injured by the Palestinian admission to the UN? The media isn't asking this question either.

Finally, President Obama has precious little negotiation leverage over Netanyahu. To remedy the lack of leverage, he should withdraw the US threat of a veto. The more strategic approach might be to say, "The US has not decided on its position on the application of the Palestinian Authority for UN membership. Whether the US votes in favor, opposes, or abstains will depend largely on the willingness demonsrated by the Israelis and the Palestinians to progress towards a durable peace. The US is committed to peace in the region and will support those who aspire for it through their concrete actions. It will not support those who merely talk peace, but are unwilling to compromise." From this position, the US may leverage the parties to the peace table. Netanyahu has to know that the US may not oppose the Palestinian bid for membership in the UN. If he backs off of his hawkish, aggressive positions and compromises with the Palestinian Authority, great. If he remains opposed to compromise, including cessation of settlement construction, he bears the consequences in the Security Council vote. The same is true for the Palestinians.

That kind of sophisticated negotiation strategy seems unlikely because the domestic political costs at the beginning of a presidential electiion cycle will be too high. However, the cost of not alienating the pro-Israel special interests will extract a higher cost for world peace. Ultimately, American taxpayers will have to foot the bill for that price.

Douglas Noll, Lawyer Turned Peacemaker, is the author of Elusive Peace: How Modern Diplomatic Strategies Could Better Resolve World Conflicts (Prometheus Books 2011).

Understanding the Legal Niceties of the Palestinian UN Bid for Statehood

The media will be paying close attention to the Palestinian bid for statehood because that bid sets up a classic human conflict of little guy against Big Guy, of justice vs. injustice, of self-determination and self-rule against opression and autocracy. Moreover, the US, which will oppose the Palestinian bid in the Security Council will be made to look as a power-mongering hypocrite. The media loves this because it sells newspapers and magazines.
However, the legal technicalities will probably escape media attention, and those technicalities are important.They are not that difficult to understand so here's a primer on the process.
First, there is a difference between statehood and membership in the UN. They are not the same thing. For instance, Taiwan is not a member of the UN, but it is a state. The Vatican is considered a state but it is not a member of the UN. Kosovo is considered a state by major powers, including the US and the EU, but it is not a member of the UN. Switzerland only joined the UN in 2002, but it was a state long before then. During the Cold War, many states had their application for membership at the UN vetoed (such as Ireland, Jordan, and some Soviet republics) but this did not mean that they were not states. So the Palestinians may be granted membership in the UN, but that does not confer statehood upon them.
This is complicated by the fact that international legal scholars do not agree on what "statehood" means. Neither the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) or the Montevideo Convention (1936) define the process of the creation of a nation-state. There are two terms used to described the formation of a nation-state: constitutitve and declarative. Constitutive means that a nation-state is recognized as such by other nation-states. Looks like a duck, walks, like a duck, quacks like a duck, must therefore be a duck. Declarative means that in addition to recognition, the nation-state must demonstrate independence from other authority, have defined geographical borders, a defined population, and control over the internal affairs within the borders and with the population. The declarative standard would be difficult for the Palestinians to establish.
All of this makes for good law review writing, but is politically meaningless. The reality is that an international consensus has to form around recognition of a nation-state. When the consensus has formed, there are legal procedures in place to codify the consensus into a legal reality. Without consensus, forming a new nation-state, e.g., Palestine, is impossible.
I should probably mention that consensus, in this context, means that all of the major military/economic powers agree generally on statehood. This is not a majority-rule situation, which is key to understanding the legal and political dynamics of the Palestinian situation. If one major power says no, there is no consensus, and nothing that is legally effective is likely to happen. And having said that, in the 21st century, wielding that kind of veto power may be politically very, very costly if the veto is against the sentiment of the rest of the world.
The process of seeking admission to the UN as a member starts with a formal letter from the leaders of the region seeking recognition as a nation-state to the UN secretary-general asking for acceptance as a full member to the United Nations. (See Rules 134-138) The letter has to include a declaration that the nation-state accepts the principles of the UN Charter. I've search the Internet to see if I could find a copy of any letter. So far, I have been unsuccessful. I don't think the letter has been delivered yet, which is interesting in its own right. Is this whole thing a negotiation ploy by the Palestinians? As a side note, one wonders how President Abbas can speak for Hamas in accepting the UN Charter on behalf of all Palestinians. Since Hamas is dedicated to the destruction of Israel, which would seem to be a violation of the UN Charter, its hard for me to see how the letter can legally be received as a good faith declaration of intent of all Palestinians. But that is a side issue.
When the UN secretary-general receives the letter, he is required to forward it to the current president of the Security Council, which in this case, is Germany. The president must convene a committee to study the request and submit a report to the UN Security Council.
The UN Security Council, upon receipt of the request and the report, debates the issue and votes to approve it or not. In this case, the US, bowing to Israeli political pressure, will veto the request.
If, by some miracle, the Security Council approved the request, the matter would be referred to the General Assembly where the request must be approved by a two-thirds vote. As of early September 2011, that vote would seem assured as 135 out of 196 members have indicated approval of membership for the Palestinians.
If the Security Council does not approve the request, the UN Assembly may pass a resolution approving the request, but the resolution has no force of law.
In essence, the Palestinian application for membership into the UN is a legally futile act. Politically, however, it may require the US to exercise veto power against the will of the vast majority of the members of the General Assembly in favor of Israel. One must wonder about the wisdom of that strategy from both the Israeli and the Palestinian perspective. The US, which is the largest, most significant financial supporter of both regimes, will be the biggest loser.
In summary, if the Palestinians apply for membership in the UN, they will fail. The process will polarize the US Congress in an election year. It will alienate Israel. It will leave the Obama Administration with yet another foreign policy mess. And, it will do nothing to change the status in the region. This looks like another dollar auction situation being played out by President Abbas against the advice of his senior advisors. (See my September 5, 2011 post Libya Needs a New Diplomacy for a description of The Dollar Auction.)
One last interesting point that has escaped the media's attention: If the Palestinians were admitted to membership in the UN, they would have access to the International Criminal Court. Cables released by Wikileaks seem to indicate that Israel considers this possibility, indictment of senior Israeli officials for crimes against humanity, a significant security threat such that Palestinian pursuit of an indictment would "constitute an act of war" against Israel. The existential and primal fear implied by this statement suggests that peace is a distant prospect in the region.

Libya Needs a New Diplomacy

Libya needs a new diplomacy; not the tired, ineffective efforts of the modern diplomatic establishment. Here's why.

First, Gaddaffi is exhibiting the classic signs of the third phase of The Dollar Auction Game, a phenomenon well-known to conflict resolution theorists and practitioners, but absent from the lexicon of diplomats.

Speaking from his hiding place, believed to be in southern Libya, he said on Thursday Libya's "armed tribes" were still loyal to him and would fight on and expel the "colonisers".

"We will not surrender," he said. "We are not women and we are going to keep on fighting.

"If they want a long battle, let it be long. If Libya burns, who can govern it? So let it burn." (The Telegraph, September 1, 2011)

The Dollar Auction Game was invented by some theorists at the RAND Corporation back in the 1950s. Essentially, the game goes like this: The auctioneer offers up a $5 bill for sale. The rule is simple. The highest bidder wins the $5 for the highest bid and the second highest bidder, the loser, has to pay whatever his or her bid was to the auctioneer. I have conducted this game dozens of times with predictable results. The most memorable example was at a bankers' convention. The two hundred or so people in the room were all lenders responsible for loans ranging from $10 million to $50 million.

The auction began at 50 cents, and various bankers began bidding. At first, the attitude was "Hey, this is cheap. Maybe I can make a quick profit." Of course, everyone else in the room is thinking the same thing, and the price drives upwards. At around $3, the attitude changes from "This is a good deal" to "I want to win." The auction is now a game to be won or lost.

Eventually, as is almost always the case, the auction came down to two bidders. One was at $4.95, the other was at $4.99. The lower bidder went to $5. The game just changed again. Now, it was no longer a competition, it was "I know I am going down, and I am taking you with me." In that auction, I stopped the bidding at $20. I have of other auctions going into the thousands of dollars.

The Dollar Auction Game points out how emotions drive conflicts. Diplomacy is based on the assumption of rationality. However, rationality is the first thing to go out the window when people get into conflicts. Diplomats generally have no clue how to deal with the deep, intractable emotions in difficult conflicts, and therefore ascribe emotional conflict behaviors to "irrationalism." At that point, they wring their hands and call in the military. In this case, the world diplomats are talking about a UN military presence in Libya to deal with Gaddaffi's dollar auction situation. What they are not doing is thinking about Gaddaffi's psychology and developing processes for engaging him at a level that will de-escalate rather than inflame violence.

Second, while fighting has died down in Tripoli, life there remains very difficult. The Tripoli Post reported on Wednesday that much of the capital is without electricity and water. The pumps used to pump water from the man-made river to the reservoirs were not working because of the lack of electricity and the reservoirs were empty.

Though a cleaning campaign has started, some streets in Tripoli are strewn with torched cars and stinking garbage because trash had not been collected for months. Stores are closed, bombed planes sit on the Tripoli's airport's tarmac, and corpses crowd abandoned hospitals, though mass burials have been started.

To make matters worse, fuel prices have skyrocketed with the cost for a gallon fetching 28 times the normal price before fighting broke out. (The Tripoli Post, Friday, August 28, 2011)

As I have pointed in earlier blogs, the first priority of the National Transitional Council must be to get basic services back into the cities, including clean water, electricity, sewage, and sanitation. It recognizes this need and is asking for patience from the Libyan people. This is good.

At the same time, representatives of some 60 nations gathered in Paris Thursday at a Friends of Libya conference, aimed at helping the new Libyan authorities restore stability and a functioning economy to a country ravaged by rebellion and 42 years of dictatorship. Libya was represented by the two leaders of the rebels’ Transitional National Council — its chairman, Mustafa Abdel-Jalil, and its prime minister, Mahmoud Jibril — who laid out the new government’s need for reconstruction aid and technical assistance. This was the classic, how-to-do-it diplomatic gathering. Speeches were given and sort of listened to. There was very little in the way of decision-making, and the likelihood of a rapid diplomatic response to the Libyan situation seems slim, next to zero. Even Secretary of State Clinton, who was present, offered nothing more than broad platitudes of support by the US.(New York Times, September 1, 2011)

What is happening is classic diplomatic failure. The international community supported an external military intervention in support of the rebels. For the 7 months of the campaign, no one apparently gave much strategic thought to what will be needed once Gaddaffi is tossed out. No one began the serious, difficult tactical planning for food, fuel, expertise, and logistical support necessary to get Libyans back to a semblance of normality while the National Transitional Council focuses on creating a new Libyan constitution and representative form of governance. Instead, at the end of the major offensive effort, they gather in Paris, not Tripoli, to debate, not act. They wish to avoid the debacle of Iraq, but lack the initiative of bold action to support the Libyan people.

What would a new diplomacy look like? First, the assumptions of rationality around human decision making would be given proper weight. Which is to say, not much.

Second, before anyone fired a cruise missile in February, a planning task force would have been convened to plan for the logistics of a post-Gaddaffi regime. Right now, there should be tankers and freighters off the coast of Tripoli filled with fuel, supplies, and support personnel to help the Libyans reconstruct their country. Because of the attitudes of the old diplomacy, it may be weeks or months before this happens. In the meantime, Libya will hang on the cusp of transformation or anarchy. Is this any way to run a modern world? The lesson here is that the old ways are not working. While the international community wants to avoid another Iraq, its behaviors, attitudes, and inaction virtually guarantee further turmoil and humanitarian disaster for the long-suffering Libyans.

Douglas E. Noll, Lawyer Turned Peacemaker, is author of Elusive Peace: How Modern Diplomatic Strategies Could Better Resolve World Conflicts (Prometheus Books, 2011).