Legitimacy in the United Nations

It hardly mattered that when Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas addressed the General Assembly in his bid for recognition of "Palestine" as a non-member observer state, that he used incendiary, derogatory terms lavishly in describing the activities and intentions as he had it of Palestinian Arabs' nemesis, the State of Israel.  Israel, the 'aggressor', the 'apartheid' state, with its genocidal program of extinction of the Palestinians in its zeal to destroy the peace process and enlarge its territory.

All of that was happily lapped up by the majority of the international states' representatives and the outcome of the vote was well known beforehand.  Israel had done its diplomatic utmost to try to persuade those of whom it felt it could rely upon to balance their impressions, to listen to the reason of the Oslo Accords signed by the Palestinian Authority and to which this appeal to the United Nations represented a gross deviance from the Accords.

The statehood proffered sixty years earlier which was contemptuously and unanimously rejected by the Arab and Muslim states in the Middle East now represents a signal that the Palestinians - with the backing of the very brother states that once persuaded them to leave the territory, to return after the destruction of Israel by a combined Arab army of state-deterrence - are prepared for peace and a resolution of the long stand-off, but Israel is not.  Israel alone is mired in a state of conflict.

It is the oppressor state, the threat to stability in the Middle East.  Attention finally deflected from the violent turmoil in Syria where a tyranny is slaughtering its own; attention turned from Egypt where an Islamist saviour has suddenly demonstrated his urge to become a dictatorial ruler above the rule of law; attention defrayed from Persian intransigence on the nuclear file when the IAEA has clearly identified its relentless march to nuclear weaponry.

Theocratic Iran is compelled by its martyrdom-and-Armageddon complex to hasten the blessed event, so there are no constraints of 'mutual deterrence' to which the 'peace'-loving left always defers, in recalling the MAD days of nuclear-armed America and the USSR.  The Sunni-majority Arab states know and recognize very well the warped mindset of fanaticism; it is a viral disease they suffer from as well, though perhaps not quite as morbidly.

But Mr. Abbas's speech was not without those gestures to which he and his supporters can later point with pride of having made verbal concessions leading to the potential for something exclusive of actually sitting down with those he accuses of meaning to destroy the dream of the Palestinians. 

"We extend our hands to the Israeli government and the Israeli people for peace-making.  I say to them: Let us urgently build together a future for our children where they can enjoy freedom, security and prosperity.  Let us build the bridges of dialogue instead of checkpoints and walls of separation, and build cooperative relations based on parity and equity between two neighbouring states - Palestine and Israel - instead of policies of occupation, settlement, war and eliminating the other."

The implication being that Israel has always planned 'occupation, settlement, war and eliminating the other', and not that this was all imposed upon them, requiring the urgency of self-defence to eliminate the real possibility of elimination through the kindly auspices of a combined Arab army bent on a course of destruction.  Nor, once a series of such violent offensives failed, the Palestinian Intifadas, suicide assaults and rocket launchings.

The statement that the Palestinians were extending their hands for peace-making belies the truth that their school curricula teem with loathsome descriptions of the hated Jews, and invective against their continued monopolizing of the land that has been consecrated to Islam, and now defiled by Judaism, a condition that children are trained to believe that they have an obligation when they mature, to battle as a new generation of martyrs for Islam.

"The state we want will be a state characterized by the rule of law, democratic exercise and protection of the freedom and equality of all citizens without any discrimination, and the transfer of power through the ballot box", he enthused, waxing philosophical.  There it is, and it cannot be denied, for all its lack of democratic commitment, the idea of democracy is beloved in the Middle East, as a demonstration to the West that it too can aspire to a noble political condition empowering people.  A democratic vote empowered Hamas and left Fatah fearing another election.

"The PLO and the Palestinian people adhere to the renouncement of violence and rejection and condemning of terrorism in all its forms, especially state terrorism, and adhere to all agreements signed between the Palestine Liberation Organization and Israel."  Overtly denying the very truth of his personal and the PA's collective encouragement and incitement to violence coded "resistance" to the "occupation"; a resistance that is honoured through the naming of public squares in memory of successful mass murderers.

And glossing over the reality of the PLO charter, still demanding, like that of Hamas, the destruction of Israel, the reunification of the land and the total occupation by Palestinian Arabs of the entire geography, absent the State of Israel, which the PLO and Fatah have never amended.  Not to be overlooked is the refusal of the PA and Mahmoud Abbas to recognize the legitimacy of the existence of the State of Israel, a Jewish state.
 
As for the pledge of equality of all citizens without any discrimination, any area that Palestinian Arabs will occupy will be scrupulously scraped clean of any Jewish presence, while the symbols of Judaism and its heritage will be altered to be claimed as an Islamic heritage site, with the added disclaimer that there ever existed any legitimate site dedicated to Judaic tradition. 

Just as Mahmoud Abbas wrote his dissertation on the denial of the extent of the Holocaust, so too does he and the Muslim Authority deny that the most sacred remnant of Jewish heritage ever existed on the Temple Mount.  Truth and reality are a moving target which may not be pinned down to prove any historical or heritage rights as far as the Palestinians are concerned.  For even the name they have chosen to identify themselves with has been purloined from the Jews, the original Palestinians.

Whom, of course, the Arab Palestinians have undertaken to discredit in every conceivable way.  To obtain recognition on the international stage for their legitimacy, in the process of which the Jews and their heritage and their current status must - on the proof brought to the fore by the victims of Jewish aggression, and the refugees produced at the birth of the Jewish state - be proven to be illegitimate.