The lemonade gambit

Regular readers of www.peacefare.net will know that I don’t usually refer to Tom Friedman, who often strikes me as more facile and glib than profound.  But his What To Do With Lemons in yesterday’s New York Times seems to me right on:  there is going to have to be a UN General Assembly resolution on Palestine this fall, so why not make it one that says something useful and gets the peace process restarted?

His proposed resolution would read:

This body reaffirms that the area of historic Palestine should be divided into two homes for two peoples — a Palestinian Arab state and a Jewish state. The dividing line should be based on the 1967 borders — with mutually agreed border adjustments and security arrangements for both sides. This body recognizes the Palestinian state as a member of the General Assembly and urges both sides to enter into negotiations to resolve all the other outstanding issues.

Friedman suggests this be passed not in the General Assembly, where resolutions are like pre-season football games (sometimes well played but they don’t count in the standings), but instead in the Security Council.

What are the tradeoffs here? The Palestinians get General Assembly membership (Friedman’s wording on this point needs some work though) and reference to the 1967 borders as the basis for any adjustments as well as reference to security arrangements. Security is generally regarded as an “Israel” issue, but there are many ways in which it applies also to Palestine. Israel gets recognition as a Jewish state, something Friedman notes was mentioned explicitly in the original 1947 UN partition resolution.

I’d have some concern that the specific wording Friedman suggests could be abused by Jewish extremists, some of whom would like Arabs to leave Israel and go to the newly independent Palestine, but that could be fixed. New population displacement would be an unwelcome development.

More important: Friedman’s suggestion does nothing to guide resolution of two other critical questions: return of refugees and Jerusalem. I imagine he would say these issues should be resolved in the subsequent negotiations. But the temptation of the parties to want any new resolution to tilt in their favor will make it difficult to leave these issues out.

The important thing here is not the specific wording: it is the idea of getting a resolution, whether through the General Assembly or the Security Council, that makes a positive contribution. That would be far better than a one-sided resolution that isolates Israel and the United States in the General Assembly, or is vetoed by the United States in the Security Council.

Something similar was achieved last fall, when a Serbian demand for General Assembly resolution on Kosovo was turned into a generally acceptable appeal for Belgrade/Pristina talks on practical issues that are reportedly now close to reaching some modest conclusions. The Middle East diplomatic challenge is orders of magnitude greater, but the Friedman gambit–to turn lemons into lemonade–might still work.