| This September 2011, the Palestinian State issue is scheduled to come before the UN.
The last time this was set and thwarted was Sept 11, 2000. A year later on that very day was the 9-11. This is the underlying reason for that day as we have said previously.
The following is a significant article form the NY Times about this: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/world/middleeast/03mideast.html
“We are facing a diplomatic-political tsunami that the majority of the public is unaware of and that will peak in September,” said Ehud Barak, Israel’s defense minister”
To further deepen on this issue quickly is “Israel’s Story in Maps”. Looking at the history through these maps with brief explanations will orient anyone quickly to easily understand the key points of this issue since Baha’u’llah’s arrival in the Holy Land to the present day.
Four pdf documents at this link: http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Facts+About+Israel/Israel+in+Maps/
Lastly, it should be pointed out that when we calculated the dates of 9-11 2000-2001, we were looking to see what was to occur at that time.
It was September, 13, 2000 that Palestine was to face their crucial deadline. http://www.jcpa.org/art/becker2.htm
However, the UN meeting Millennium Summit Sept. 8, 2000 crushed these hopes forcing the Palestinian National Council (PNC) to cancel declaring its independent statehood on September 11, 2000 two days before the deadline.
This was thus all thwarted at that pivotal date (9-11-2000) and then gas thrown on the fire when Arial Sharon went up on the temple mount, in September 2000 setting off the second Intifada also called the al-Aqsa Intifada. One year later to the day was the 9-11, 2001.
Simultaneous with the failure of the Palestine State on September 11, 2000 was this official announcement from Al-Sabah, the official publication of the Palestinian Authority, dated September 11, 2000 which declared: “We will advance and declare a general intifada for Jerusalem. The time for the intifada has arrived, the time for intifada has arrived, the time for Jihad has arrived.” http://www.jcpa.org/jl/vp470.htm
In Israel, Time for Peace Offer May Run Out
By ETHAN BRONNER
Published: April 2, 2011
JERUSALEM: With revolutionary fervor sweeping the Middle East, Israel is under mounting pressure to make a far-reaching offer to the Palestinians or face a United Nations vote welcoming the State of Palestine as a member whose territory includes all of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.
The Palestinian Authority has been steadily building support for such a resolution in September, a move that could place Israel into a diplomatic vise. Israel would be occupying land belonging to a fellow United Nations member, land it has controlled and settled for more than four decades and some of which it expects to keep in any two-state solution.
“We are facing a diplomatic-political tsunami that the majority of the public is unaware of and that will peak in September”, said Ehud Barak, Israel’s defense minister, at a conference in Tel Aviv last month. “It is a very dangerous situation, one that requires action”. He added, “Paralysis, rhetoric, inaction will deepen the isolation of Israel.”
With aides to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thrashing out proposals to the Palestinians, President Shimon Peres is due at the White House on Tuesday to meet with President Obama and explore ways out of the bind. The United States is still uncertain how to move the process forward, according to diplomats here.
Israel’s offer is expected to include transfer of some West Bank territory outside its settlements to Palestinian control and may suggest a regional component, an international conference to serve as a response to the Arab League peace initiatives.
But Palestinian leaders, emboldened by support for their statehood bid, dismiss the expected offer as insufficient and continue to demand an end to settlement building before talks can begin.
“We want to generate pressure on Israel to make it feel isolated and help it understand that there can be no talks without a stop to settlements.” said Nabil Shaath, who leads the foreign affairs department of Fatah, the main party of the Palestinian Authority. “Without that, our goal is membership in the United Nations General Assembly in September.”
Israeli, Palestinian and Western officials interviewed on the current impasse, most of them requesting anonymity, expressed an unusual degree of pessimism about a peaceful resolution. All agreed that the turmoil across the Middle East had prompted opposing responses from Israel and much of the world.
Israel, seeing the prospect of even more hostile governments as its neighbors, is insisting on caution and time before taking any significant steps. It also wants to build in extensive long-term security guarantees in any two-state solution, but those inevitably infringe the sovereignty of a Palestinian state.
The international community tends to draw the opposite conclusion. Foreign Secretary William Hague of Britain, for example, said last week that one of the most important lessons to be learned from the Arab Spring was that “legitimate aspirations cannot be ignored and must be addressed.” He added, referring to Israeli-Palestinian talks, “It cannot be in anyone’s interests if the new order of the region is determined at a time of minimum hope in the peace process.”
The Palestinian focus on September stems not only from the fact that the General Assembly holds its annual meeting then. It is also because Prime Minister Salam Fayyad announced in September 2009 that his government would be ready for independent statehood in two years and that Mr. Obama said last September that he expected the framework for an independent Palestinian state to be declared in a year.
Mr. Obama did not indicate what the borders of that state would be, assuming they would be determined through direct negotiations. But with Israeli-Palestinian talks broken off months ago and the Middle East in the process of profound change, many argue that outside pressure is needed.
Germany, France and Britain say negotiations should be based on the 1967 lines with equivalent land swaps, exactly what the Netanyahu government rejects because it says it predetermines the outcome.
“Does the world think it is going to force Israel to declare the 1967 lines and giving up Jerusalem as a basis for negotiation?” asked a top Israeli official who spoke on condition of anonymity. ”That will never happen.”
While the Obama administration has referred in the past to the 1967 lines as a basis for talks, it has not decided whether to back the European Union, the United Nations and Russia “the other members of the so-called quartet” in declaring them the starting point, diplomats said. The quartet meets on April 15 in Berlin.
Israel, which has settled hundreds of thousands of Jews inside the West Bank and East Jerusalem, acknowledges that it will have to withdraw from much of the land it now occupies there. But it hopes to hold onto the largest settlement blocs and much of East Jerusalem as well as the border to the east with Jordan and does not want to enter into talks with the other side’s position as the starting point.
That was true even before its closest ally in the Arab world, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, was driven from power, helping fuel protest movements that now roil other countries, including Jordan, which has its own peace agreement with Israel.
“Whatever we put forward has to be grounded in security arrangements because of what is going on regionally,” said Zalman Shoval, one of a handful of Netanyahu aides drawing up the Israeli proposal that may be delivered as a speech to the United States Congress in May. “We are facing the rebirth of the eastern front as Iran grows strong. We have to secure the Jordan Valley. And no Israeli government is going to move tens of thousands of Israelis from their homes quickly.”
Those Israelis live in West Bank settlements, the source of much of the disagreement not only with the Palestinians but with the world. Not a single government supports Israel’s settlements. The Palestinians say the settlements are proof that the Israelis do not really want a Palestinian state to arise since they are built on land that should go to that state.
“All these years, the main obstacle to peace has been the settlements”, Nimer Hammad, a political adviser to President Abbas, said. “They always say, ”but you never made it a condition of negotiations before.” And we say, “that was a mistake.” ”
The Israelis counter that the real problem is Palestinian refusal to accept openly a Jewish state here and ongoing anti-Israeli incitement and praise of violence on Palestinian airwaves.
Another central obstacle to the establishment of a State of Palestine has been the division between the West Bank and Gaza, the first run by the Palestinian Authority and the second by Hamas. Lately, President Abbas has sought to bridge the gap, asking to go to Gaza to seek reconciliation through an agreed interim government that would set up parliamentary and presidential elections.
But Hamas, worried it would lose such elections and hopeful that the regional turmoil could work in its favor “that Egypt, for example, might be taken over by its ally, the Muslim Brotherhood “ has reacted coolly.
Efforts are still under way to restart peace talks but if, as expected, negotiations do not resume, come September the Palestinian Authority seems set to go ahead with plans to ask the General Assembly to accept it as a member. Diplomats involved in the issue say most countries “more than 100” are expected to vote yes, meaning it will pass.
What happens then?
Some Palestinian leaders say relations with Israel would change.
“We will re-examine our commitments toward Israel, especially our security commitments”, suggested Hanna Amireh, who is on the 18-member ruling board of the Palestine Liberation Organization, referring to cooperation between Palestinian and Israeli troops. “The main sense about Israel is that we are fed up.”
Mr. Shaath said Israel would then be in daily violation of the rights of a fellow member state and diplomatic and legal consequences could follow, all of which would be painful for Israel.
In the Haaretz newspaper on Thursday, Ari Shavit, who is a political centrist, drew a comparison between 2011 and the biggest military setback Israel ever faced, the 1973 war.
He wrote that “2011 is going to be a diplomatic 1973” because a Palestinian state will be recognized internationally. “Every military base in the West Bank will be contravening the sovereignty of an independent U.N. member state.” He added, “A diplomatic siege from without and a civil uprising from within will grip Israel in a stranglehold.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: April 10, 2011
A Diplomatic Memo article last Sunday, about the growing possibility that, even without an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement, the United Nations General Assembly might approve a resolution in September granting statehood to Palestinians on Israeli-controlled land referred incompletely to the options available to the United States for blocking such a resolution. It has no veto power in the General Assembly, as the article stated, but such a resolution would first require a recommendation from the Security Council, where the United States could exercise a veto.
Arabs resigned to delay of Palestinian state
September 11, 2000
Web posted at: 8:10 AM EDT (1210 GMT)
CAIRO, Egypt (Reuters) — Arabs grimly acknowledged on Monday that Palestinians had little choice but to defer their statehood dream, but some saw peace talks with Israel as futile.
Few Arab governments commented on Sunday’s widely expected decision by the PLO Central Council to postpone declaring an independent state that Palestinian President Yasser Arafat had vowed to proclaim as early as September 13.
The official Arab silence seemed to signal quiet relief at a move that allows more time for a negotiated final peace with Israel and defuses prospects for violent confrontation.
“We are determined to do what needs to be done to save the peace process and, therefore, regain our land and rights,” Palestinian Planning Minister Nabil Shaath told Egyptian radio, adding that the council would review the issue on November 15.
November 15 is the anniversary of a declaration of statehood which Arafat made from exile in Algiers in 1988.
Senior Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said the delay was a vote for the peace process. “We hope that we can conclude an agreement this year and with that we can have our own state by agreement. The decision last night was to recommit ourselves to peace as a strategic option,” he told Israel’s Army Radio.
Sign of weakness
Yet many Arabs viewed the PLO decision as an expression of Arab and Palestinian feebleness in the face of an expansionist Israel unwilling to concede basic Palestinian rights, particularly sovereignty over Arab East Jerusalem.
In Damascus, two radical groups — the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine — criticized the delay.
“Israel wants the establishment of an unarmed Palestinian state which is deprived of the right to sign any defensive deals with any of its Arab neighboring countries in addition to the cancellation of Palestinian refugees’ rights to return to their homes,” DFLP leader Nayef Hawatmeh told Reuters.
“If Arafat had announced the Palestinian state…it would not have been like (northern) Cyprus that nobody recognizes except Turkey,” grumbled Egypt’s state-owned al-Akhbar daily, arguing that 180 countries would endorse a Palestinian state.
“But, as usual, Israel prevented this with threats (of retaliation) in the event of unilateral Palestinian action and the United States is supporting Israel on that,” it said.
Egyptian analyst Tahseen Bashir, once adviser to the late President Anwar Sadat, said the PLO decision was weak.
“What has been implemented of the (1993) Oslo accords does not give the Palestinians sovereignty over their land and Israel controls the Palestinian economy,” the former diplomat said.
“These defects made it difficult for the Palestinians to declare their independence without Israeli agreement.”
In Jordan, which hosts some 1.4 million registered Palestinian refugees, residents of the sprawling Baqa’a refugee camp accused their leaders of caving in to U.S. pressure and some called for violence to seize Palestinian rights.
“The Palestinian leadership fixed a date for the declaration of the Palestinian state, but did not go ahead with it. This is a sign of cowardice,” complained Fayez Ahmed, 55.
No gain for refugees
In Ain al-Hilweh, Lebanon’s largest Palestinian refugee camp, many said delaying statehood by months, or even years, would make little difference to their 52-year-old plight.
They said that without Israeli recognition, proclaiming a sovereign country would be meaningless, though some spoke wistfully of their need for state protection, however symbolic.
“We want peace,” said 70-year-old Ibrahim Moghrabi, sitting on the pavement outside his tiny tin-roofed grocery shop.
“This delay does not harm us in any way and if it means that we are giving peace another chance, then we support it.”
Abu Nasser Hussein, an elderly tailor who hails from Safad, in Galilee, scoffed at the idea of declaring a state that would not lead to the return of land occupied by Israel since 1948.
“I don’t support this state business if it doesn’t mean that every inch of our land will come back to us,” he said. “The Israelis and the Arabs are conspiring against us. We know that if Abu Ammar (Arafat) had declared a state it would not have had any meaning.”
Aytaf Hamed, clutching her baby daughter, said she craved to belong to a state. “Palestinians live a very hard life in Lebanon, we’re lucky if we get work as garbage collectors.
“My husband is unemployed although he’s an expert builder and I have to work to support our kids. We need a state to protect us and to end the humiliation and misery we live in.”
An estimated 365,000 Palestinian refugees live in Lebanon, where they are denied many civil rights, barred from 70 professions and regarded as a potential source of violence.
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