Diplomatic fog shrouding Palestinian hopes
The unloved slab of the UN building looms like a bone coloured gravestone over the East River in Manhattan. This morning it was enveloped in soupy fog, just in time for the diplomatic fog to thicken inside its corridors.
As predicted by a senior western diplomat over tea and biscuits at the beginning of the week, the historic issue of Palestinian statehood would be dissipated and delayed by diplomatic procedure. The procedure is called arm twisting.
America has been busy applying “procedure” behind the scenes on the members of the UN Security Council who on Monday still dared to think of voting for Palestine’s application for statehood. Colombia has apparently fallen in line behind its big neighbour to the north.
Portugal has caved, it appears, over fears that its stricken economy cannot afford America’s wrath. Bosnia has been told that if it sides with the Palestinians then the Americans will push a vote on Kosovo’s statehood, which they oppose and which has been languishing at the UN Security Council under the threat of a Russian veto since 2008. Nigeria is wobbly.
If you do the math, as they say here, you will find that the Palestinians may no longer have the nine votes they need out of 15 in the security council. In other words the Americans no longer even need to apply their veto to block the application. In fact it is unlikely to come to a vote at all in the foreseeable future. Palestine’s application will languish in the security council’s in tray for weeks, months and probably years.
I am told the Palestinian delegation is bitterly divided about how to proceed and what to say to the thousands of people demonstrating between joy and despair on the streets of Ramallah and Nablus.
Mahmoud Abbas will return to Ramallah as a President without a state. But at least he can say that he has filed for application and he can blame American and Israeli intransigence over the issue. It is slim pickings.
The result of this week of diplomacy is to have left the Americans almost as isolated as they were when George Bush was preaching regime change in Iraq.
France’s President Sarkozy stepped into the breach on Wednesday with a speech in which he slammed America’s lack of leadership, and Britain is breathing a sigh of relief that procedure has avoided a showdown, which would have left the government exposed.
As the Italian diplomat Daniele Vare put it in the 1920s. “Diplomacy is letting someone else have YOUR way.”