Does UN bid advance Palestinian struggle? Ali Abunimah and Mouin Rabbani on Democracy Now!

From Democracy Now:

Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas is expected to officially submit a membership request to the United Nations in defiance of US and Israeli threats. A new joint Israeli-Palestinian poll shows the Obama administration’s stance on Palestinian recognition at the United Nations is more extreme than that of a strong majority of Israeli citizens, with 69 percent of Israelis saying their government should accept UN recognition of an independent Palestinian state. The survey also found 83 percent of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories support the bid. While supporters have hailed the bid as a step forward in the struggle to end the Israeli occupation and bring peace to the Middle East, critics call it a ploy by the Palestinian Authority to cling to power while undermining the rights of Palestinian refugees.

We host a debate with two leading Palestinian analysts: Ali Abunimah, co-founder of the website The Electronic Intifada, and author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse; and Mouin Rabbani of the Institute for Palestine Studies and the webzine Jadaliyya.

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"Viable" means "alive" and the reason there is "no viable partner for peace" among the Palestinians is because the Israelis have jailed or killed them all.

What Israeli really wants for a "viable partner" is a Quisling, and it seems that Mahmoud Abbas is no longer entirely willing to fulfill that role.

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I am a believer in the old US street maxim: "No justice - No peace." What could possibly be more useless than negotiations between two men in the desert one of whom has his boot on the neck of the other? Negotiations under duress could only further cement in place the "situation on the ground" that Israel transforms daily so that ethicnically European Jews will be able to be positioned to outvote Palestinians. With Israel refusing to desist from its ongoing policy of ethnic cleansing by ordering Palestinian families out of their homes at gunpoint, so that their homes can be replaced by segregated apartment buildings reserved for "Jewish only" (a continuation of the same crime against humanity carried out by the European Zionist soldiers with US guns who invaded the homes and lands of Palestinian families in 1947-48), there is no ground on which to negotiate. Israel continues to increase the population of racist Russians who feel entitled by God to lean over their balconies and shoot Palestinian men walking to their olive groves and throw stones at Palestinian children on their way to school, while the "Israel Defense Force" soldiers stands ready to protect only Israelis. Even with the minimal UN status that the General Assembly can confer after the USA vetoes the Security Council vote on statehood, Palestinians will be able to petition the International Criminal Court and the Court of Justice for legally authoritative judgments against Israel. Even though the USA has refused to be counted as part of international system of justice, Uncle Sam will become increasingly isolated in our coddling of our uncontrollable nephew by virtue of international pressure to recognize these legal judgments. We can earnestly hope that a future US administration and a future US congress will be able to read the handwriting on the wall, as we finally did in the case of Israel's close ally, Apartheid South Africa.