Palestinians Face Own Diplomatic Tsunami

It seems like it’s been more than just 12 months since the pro-Israel community was in uproar about an imminent “diplomatic tsunami” that we were told would swamp the Jewish state. The “tsunami” was the Palestinian Authority’s plan to get the United Nations to grant it independence without first having to make peace with Israel. The assumption among foreign policy “realists” and the Jewish left was that the Palestinians would carry the international community with them and force Israel’s government to make even more concessions to avoid total isolation. But the “tsunami” that Ehud Barak feared never came to pass. If anything, what followed that fall was a diplomatic disaster for the Palestinians that illustrated that they were the ones who were isolated.

Though the PA vowed last year they would be back at the UN for another round of this fight, yesterday they signaled they would not bother. Though PA leader Mahmoud Abbas will address the UN again in September and mention the issue, the Palestinians won’t try to get it passed in either the Security Council or even the General Assembly, where everyone assumes they have an automatic majority. This concession shows just how thoroughly Israel’s supposedly incompetent government defeated them in 2011. But it may also signify a belief on their part that they would do better to keep quiet until President Obama is safely re-elected rather than cause trouble that would only worsen their situation during the fall campaign.

The “tsunami” failed not just because President Obama kept his word about threatening to veto a Palestinian attempt to get the Security Council to give them full member status. The U.S. wound up not even having to exercise that veto because the Palestinians couldn’t even get other, erstwhile sympathetic nations, to vote for them. Even the automatic Palestinian majority in the General Assembly was wary of wasting time and effort on this lost cause. The world knew the PA was a corrupt and bankrupt organization incapable of exercising sovereignty even if it was handed to them on a silver platter. For all of the anti-Zionist propaganda that is routinely aired at the UN, most member states, even those most hostile to Israel, understand that the Palestinians are only interested in perpetuating the conflict, not genuinely seeking a two state solution. Nor were they interested in picking a fight with the U.S. Congress, which was sure to vote to cut off funds to the world body if the Palestinians got their way.

It should also be noted that Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who is generally regarded in the United States as a bull in a china shop, actually maneuvered quite adeptly in the diplomatic battles that preceded the fizzling out of the “tsunami.” Countries that might have been expected to back the Palestinians flipped and Lieberman deserves some of the credit for this, along with the Americans.

Abbas knows that a repeat of the exercise this year would bring a similar result, hence their quiet waving of the white flag. But the Palestinians are still holding onto the hope that a re-elected Barack Obama will give them an advantage and the abandonment of the UN gambit is also a sign that they are not eager to do anything that might hinder his chances at the polls. If there is to be any trouble from them, it will almost certainly come after November when they may think the president’s attitude toward their requests will be more flexible than it was during his election year Jewish charm offensive.

Israelis are similarly uncertain about the consequences of Obama’s re-election, as they fear a second term will embolden him to return to efforts to force them to make concessions in a quixotic attempt to revive the peace process. But the problem for the Palestinians is that even a president as sympathetic to their cause as Obama isn’t likely to stick his neck out for them in the absence of a firm determination on their part to actually negotiate with Israel and to accept a reasonable peace offer. Even a re-elected Obama, who would also be tangling with Israel over the Iranian nuclear threat, may understand that hammering the Jewish state is a futile endeavor as long as the Palestinians are unwilling to make peace. The real diplomatic tsunami is the tide of indifference that Palestinian rejectionism has bred even among those most likely to back their cause.