Henry Siegman at Foreign Policy:
Bottom line, Obama is wrong in his assertion that the U.N. can never bring about a Palestinian state and that only a resumed Israeli-Palestinian peace process can. The precise opposite is true. Direct negotiations, even if begun at the 1967 lines and based on land swaps, will never produce a Palestinian state. A long and unbroken history of failed direct Israeli-Palestinian negotiations and failed American mediation attest to that truth. Only the U.N. can produce a Palestinian state — provided, of course, that Obama does not veto the effort.
There is a controlled anger under this that is extremely impressive. Siegman favors U.N. approval of a Palestinian declaration of statehood. He cites the case of Israel itself as precedent and argues that the land grabs by Netanyahu are in flagrant violation of UN resolutions 242 and 338. He thinks such a declaration the only conceivable way to a two-state solution, now that Obama and Netanyahu between them have scuttled further negotiations. (Siegman hopes otherwise but I don’t think there’s a chance Obama will fail to use the U.S. veto. He would see such defiance of Israel as one of the few acts that could bring about his defeat in 2012.)
