Drama at the UN Security Council: Israel’s Illegal Settlements
The resolution further reiterated that no recognition would be afforded to “any changes to the 4 June 1967 lines, including with regard to Jerusalem, other than those agreed by the parties through negotiations” [...]
“The United States has been sending a message that the settlements must stop privately and publicly for nearly five decades.”
Samantha Power, US Ambassador to the UN
Christians following the Gregorian calendar are getting busy to celebrate Christmas, but the business of diplomacy continued in the United Nations. In the Security Council, anticipation about a particular resolution was greater than usual.
On Friday, interest was piqued by what the Obama administration’s representative, Samantha Power, would do about a particular resolution that had riled Israeli politicians, US president-elect Donald Trump, and various members of the US Congress.
Resolution 2334, as worded, demanded that Israel “immediately and completely cease all settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem” claiming that the establishment of Israeli settlements had “no legal validity and constitutes a flagrant violation under international law and a major obstacle to the achievement of the two-State solution and a just, lasting and comprehensive peace.”
The resolution further reiterated that no recognition would be afforded to “any changes to the 4 June 1967 lines, including with regard to Jerusalem, other than those agreed by the parties through negotiations.” States were also “to distinguish, in their relevant dealings, between the territory of the State of Israel and the territories occupied since 1967”.
The resolution had already danced a jig into hasty retreat after Egypt expressed second thoughts on whether it should go head. On Thursday, Danny Danon, Israel’s ambassador to the UN, breathed a sigh of relief at Cairo’s change of heart – momentarily. “The delaying of the vote is an important step. However, we realize that this issue is not yet resolved.”[1]
On that score, Israeli pressure had proven to be effective, mounted aggressively by Netanyahu, the Foreign Ministry and the National Security Council. Donald Trump’s huffing had also convinced the Egypt to desist, though the exact form of that persuasion is unclear. It was left to New Zealand, Malaysia, Venezuela and Senegal to take the wheels of the resolution and drive it to a vote.
Would traditional US form prevail? The traditionalists, initially taken off guard, thought so. (In 2011, the Obama administration used its veto against a similar resolution.) Trump certainly hoped so. “As the United States has long maintained,” claimed the president-elect in a statement on Thursday, “peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians will only come through direct negotiations between the parties, and not through the imposition of terms by the United Nations.”[2]
For Trump, mounting the soapbox in favour of such a position was prejudicial – to Israel. “This puts Israel in a very poor negotiating position and is extremely unfair to all Israelis.” Trump had already signalled his position on Israeli affairs with his nomination for the post of US ambassador to Israel, David Friedman.
Friedman’s record behind encouraging the settlement program is known. He rejects any notion that a two-state solution is viable and has suggested that Israel fob off all international criticism and annex part of the West Bank.[3] He has excoriated morally troubled Jews supporting a two-state solution as “kapos,” the dark term used to describe Jews dragooned into assisting the extermination of their own people by the Nazis. In some instances, his views make those of Netanyahu moderate.
An answer finally came: an abstention by the US was registered, meaning that it passed with 14 votes. Power’s statement suggested that the goals of continuing settlement programs being pursued by Israel, and the negotiations on a two-state solution, were mutually exclusive.
“One cannot simultaneously champion expanding Israeli settlements and champion a viable two-state solution that would end the conflict.” The choice had to be made “between settlements and separation.”
This stark view was not one shared by such pro-Israeli stalwarts as Republican Senator John McCain. In these circles, Israel remains the perennial, noble victim, permanently at the mercy of forces it needs to control, and even repel.
Noble victims, armed to the teeth with the most modern of weaponry and nuclear weapons, indifferent to thieves masquerading as squatters, tend to spout gibberish before the canons of international law. “By voting yes in favour of this resolution,” claimed Danon, “you have in fact voted no. You voted no to negotiation, you voted no to progress and a chance for better lives for Israelis and Palestinians, and you voted no to the possibility of peace.”[4] Bully knows best.
In abstaining, the United States marked “a troubling departure from our nation’s long, bipartisan history of defending our ally Israel in the United States.”[5] A defence was always to be mounted for that beleaguered state, right or wrong.
The office of the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised in rejecting “this shameful anti-Israel resolution at the UN” that it would “not abide by its terms”. Asserting a sacred proprietary lease, if not right, on US political good will, Netanyahu’s office also looked “forward to working with president-elect Trump and with all our friends in Congress, Republicans and Democrats alike, to negate the harmful effects of this absurd resolution.”
That stance has been a long standing one: legal writ, ill-fitting for Israel’s foreign and domestic policy, will be disregarded. Washington’s buffering support can be counted upon. With a Trump presidency, support for such a stance will be forthcoming – in bucket loads.
About the author: Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com
Source: Global Research
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.
Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!
Donate to Support Us
We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics, and international relations.
“Rooted in a story of generosity and partnership, Thanksgiving offers an opportunity for us to express our gratitude for the gifts we have and to show our appreciation for all we hold dear….”So begins the official Presidential Proclamation of Thanksgiving Day, 2015, signed and issued by Barack Obama.While it hearkens back to earlier Thanksgivings in St. Augustine in 1565 and Plymouth in 1621, this is an essentially imperial document that gives only vague lip service to giving “thanks for the many blessings bestowed upon us.” When his proclamation gets specific, in the third sentence, the President gives the highest place of ...
Video documentary movie on the first ISIS in Europe in the Islamic Caliphate of Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1992-1995.This movie is made by the British SKY NEWS after the civil war in Bosnia-Herzegovina.Similar documentary movies on the ISIS Bosnia-Herzegovina made by the Bosnian Serbs were never shown to the Western audience.The duration of the movie is 8 min. and 17 sec.In the movie are presented and future Al-Qaeda Mujahedeen holy fighters.From the movie is clear what was the real nature of the civil war in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the 1990s.All copyrights reserved by the SKY NEWS.Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, ...
Backdrop To The BalkansThe tiny South-Central Balkan country of the Republic of Macedonia is in dire straits right now, but most of Europe – let alone the rest of the world – has no idea that this is the case because the Mainstream Media narrative is that the state’s two-year-long political crisis was “resolved” when the patriotic VMRO-DPMNE government of Nikola Gruevski was replaced in a “constitutional/electoral coup” that followed Color Revolution and even Hybrid War provocations. The author wrote about this in a Sputnik piece at the time from May 2017 titled “The Macedonian Crisis Isn’t Over, and a ...
Kosovo is to set up a regular standing army, officially defying everyone, including NATO, although the bloc’s objections are only half-hearted. The alliance would prefer that the illegal entity of Kosovo change its constitution in order to create an army. Just amend it, and then you’re free to have one. This stance looks more like connivance than any real opposition to the move.Washington’s position is more or less the same. It supports "the gradual, transparent transformation of the Kosovo Security Force into a multiethnic force in line with NATO standards" as long as it complies with the provisions of Kosovo’s constitution, reflecting that “entity’s multiethnic ...
Big Brother in the Aisles of HyVeeRepeat a lie often enough, the conventional Nazi propaganda wisdom ran, and it will become an accepted truth.This last Veterans Day weekend, I couldn’t watch a sporting event, listen to a car radio, or even go shopping at the local grocery store without hearing a Great American Lie repeated over and over.Sports announcers, radio talk-show hosts, commercials, and even a recorded voice blasted into the aisles of the HyVeee supermarket told me again and again that I owed my great American “freedom” to veterans and current enlistees of the U.S. military – in other ...
Because this article states so many things that might be likely to contradict what most people in Western countries have been led to believe, readers here are especially strongly encouraged to click onto any allegation which seems at all questionable, in order to get to the sources behind any given questionable allegation. And wherever a clicked-onto source turns out to be another article, one is encouraged similarly to do the same there, so that the reader will be able, in this way, to probe down to the ultimate sources, which are the sources upon which this article is finally based.After ...
PrefaceA peaceful dissolution of the USSR according to the agreement between Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan in 1988 in Reykjavik brought a new dimension of global geopolitics in which up to 2008 Russia, as a legal successor state of the USSR, was playing an inferior role in global politics when an American Neocon concept of Pax Americana became the fundamental framework in international relations. Therefore, for instance, Boris Yeltsin’s Russia capitulated in 1995 to the American design regarding a final outcome of the USA/EU policy of the destruction of ex-Yugoslavia in November 1995 (the Dayton Agreement) followed by even worse ...
The book of evidence about ethnic cleansing and policy of genocide committed by the neo-Nazi Ustashi government in Croatia against its own citizens of the Serb nationality in August 1995. That was a third genocide against the Serbs committed by the Croats in the 20th century: 1. during the WWI; 2. during the WWII; 3. in the 1990s. Today, Croatia is almost totally ethnically cleanced from all non-Croats like Kosovo and Albania from all non-Albanians. During the WWII, around 700.000 Serbs were brutally killed by the Croats and Bosnian Muslims on the territory of the Independent State of Croatia.Read our ...
A newly-released Hilary Clinton email confirmed that the Obama administration has deliberately provoked the civil war in Syria as the “best way to help Israel.”In an indication of her murderous and psychopathic nature, Clinton also wrote that it was the “right thing” to personally threaten Bashar Assad’s family with death.In the email, released by Wikileaks, then Secretary of State Clinton says that the “best way to help Israel” is to “use force” in Syria to overthrow the government.The document was one of many unclassified by the US Department of State under case number F-2014-20439, Doc No. C05794498, following the uproar ...
At the beginning of March 2017, it will be exactly six years since the beginning of the conflict in Syria. Some journalists even make unfavorable forecasts wondering about the very possibility of reconciliation. Complicated by the foreign intervention on the part of Israel war in Lebanon, for example, had been for about 15 years. But even a six-year term it is too long.That is why we may hope that the meeting in Astana scheduled on January 23 will eventually lead to a positive result. And then there will be an occasion to consolidate the success of the negotiations in Geneva ...
In front of socialist era high-rise blocks, Bill Clinton waves to the Kosovars. Kosovo Albanians built the statue in the capital, Pristina, in gratitude for the bombing of then Yugoslavia by NATO in 1999, which a few years later led to independence.U.S. and Albanian flags flutter alongside each other on the rooftops. In no other Muslim country in the world is the United States as popular as here in Kosovo. On the square in front of the statue, young women stand around in their skirts and head scarves.This is one facet of the young state. The other is only a ...
The US media has done it again. In a breaking news story on Fox News on Friday, September 28, 2007, Fox reporter Catherine Herridge used the term “former Yugoslavia” twice in the Fox story “Terrorist 007”. The term Yugoslavia was used deliberately to conceal the fact that the Al Qaeda terrorist known as Terrorist 007, or Irhabi 007 in Arabic, Younes Tsouli, had ties to Bosnia and to Bosnian Muslims who planned terrorist attacks.Fox News sought to conceal this Al Qaeda connection to Bosnia by using the term “former Yugoslavia” in place of “Bosnia”. This was deliberate and planned. Someone ...
Recommended alternative reading list on the Yugoslav studies not used by mainstream corporative Western mass-media and top Western universities dealing with global security, world politics and international relations. Reading proposed readers below you can complete picture on the Yugoslav studies out of the official Western approach.March Pogrom 2004 Book and Photo EvidenceKOSOVSKA GOLGOTA Intervju 198820 Principal Misconceptions on Kosovo IssueThe Srebrenica Massacre Evidence Context Politics Edward S Herman Phillip CorwinLista Diane Budisavljevic 1941 Do 1945 by Владислав Б. Сотировић/Vladislav B. SotirovićJosip Broz Tito Bez Maske! by Владислав Б. Сотировић/Vladislav B. SotirovićHayden Mass Killings and Images of Genocide in Bosnia by ...
Antonio Zambrano-Montes, a 35-year-old Mexican national, was shot to death by police in Pasco, Washington last Tuesday as he was backing away from officers with his hands up. A video of the shooting clearly corroborates claims by Zambrano-Montes’s family that he was killed “execution-style.”Police claimed that Zambrano-Montes, who had lived in the city for ten years and worked as an orchard picker, may have been “armed with a rock” before he was shot multiple times. Protests erupted over the weekend, with more than a thousand demonstrating in Washington state on Saturday against the killing.The United States has invaded, bombed, and ...
Edward S. Herman died on November 11, 2017, at the age of 92. Fortunately, it was a peaceful death for a supremely peaceful man. In all he did, Ed Herman was a tireless champion of peace.Ed Herman could be considered the godfather of antiwar media critique, both because of his own contributions and because of the many writers he encouraged to pursue that work. Thanks to his logical mind and sense of justice, he sharply grasped the crucial role and diverse techniques of media propaganda in promoting war. He immediately saw through lies, including those so insidious that few dare ...
"Please don’t write about Ya’ir Golan!" a friend begged me, “Anything a leftist like you writes will only harm him!"So I abstained for some weeks. But I can’t keep quiet any longer.General Ya’ir Golan, the deputy Chief of Staff of the Israeli army, made a speech on Holocaust Memorial Day. Wearing his uniform, he read a prepared, well-considered text that triggered an uproar which has not yet died down.Dozens of articles have been published in its wake, some condemning him, some lauding him. Seems that nobody could stay indifferent.The main sentence was: "If there is something that frightens me about ...
“Fool me once, shame on you; but fool me twice, shame on me.”Ancient proverb, (sometimes attributed to an Italian, Russian or Chinese proverb) “Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius, and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.” Ernst F. Schumacher (1911-1977) (in ‘Small is Beautiful’, an essay, in The Radical Humanist, Aug. 1973, p. 22). “The powers-that-be understand that to create the appropriate atmosphere for war, it’s necessary to create within the general populace a hatred, fear or mistrust of others regardless of whether those others belong ...
For almost 2 decades, the US pursued a list of ‘enemy countries’ to confront, attack, weaken and overthrow. This imperial quest to overthrow ‘enemy countries’ operated at various levels of intensity, depending on two considerations: the level of priority and the degree of vulnerability for a ‘regime change’ operation.The criteria for determining an ‘enemy country’ and its place on the list of priority targets in the US quest for greater global dominance, as well as its vulnerability to a ‘successfully’ regime change will be the focus of this essay. We will conclude by discussing the realistic perspectives of future imperial ...
Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, is a host of The 20th Annual Conference of Central European Political Science Association: “Security Architecture in CEE: Present Threats and Prospects for Cooperation”. The conference place is at the Institute of International Relations and Political Science, Vilnius University, from September 25 to 26, 2015. It is organized by the Institute of International Relations and Political Science, Vilnius University, and the Lithuanian Political Science Association. The conference sponsors are the Lithuanian Research Council, the Ministry of National Defence of the Republic of Lithuania, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Lithuania, and the ...
Stalinist “Land of Eagles” As in neighboring Yugoslavia, the communist revolutionary guerrilla forces, established by the aid and crucially supported by the Yugoslav communists led by local Albanian communist leader Enver Hoxha, took over the power in Albania in 1944.[1] From 1945 to 1948 Albania was under the strong influence of Titoist Yugoslavia and both counties being under the hand of J. V. Stalin. Yugoslavia lavishly supplied Albania with deficient material, mainly nutritious ones, like wheat, etc. As testified by the Montenegrin zealot communist and revolutionist Milovan Đilas, one of the leading Yugoslav politicians at the time, and a member ...
The magazine is covering the research gaps uncovered by global Western hoax mainstream media platforms and academic teaching & research institutions.
This is an alternative information & academic research digest platform with the purpose to offer an alternative “another side of the truth”.
The magazine is independent, private, and free of any influence by any institution, organization, government, or pressure group. URL: www.global-politics.eu
On Friday, interest was piqued by what the Obama administration’s representative, Samantha Power, would do about a particular resolution that had riled Israeli politicians, US president-elect Donald Trump, and various members of the US Congress.
In abstaining, the United States marked “a troubling departure from our nation’s long, bipartisan history of defending our ally Israel in the United States.”[5] A defence was always to be mounted for that beleaguered state, right or wrong.
