Days numbered for Palestine Authority’s subordinate leadership

An analyst says that Zionist and imperial agencies fear a UN approval for Palestine to have an independent voice at international institutions like the ICC.

In the background of this, more than half of EU members including France and Spain are expected to vote in favor of the Palestinians in their UN bid for greater recognition and the ability to access international agencies such as the International Criminal Court. Zionist imperial states like Israel, the UK and the United States are expected to vote against the bid; the US though has no power to veto the decision at the UN General Assembly. Australia has announced that it will abstain from the vote and is presently receiving a backlash of pressure from pro-Israeli groups in that country.

Press TV has interviewed Mr. Ralph Schoenman, political commentator from Berkeley about this issue. The following is an approximate transcription of the interview.

Press TV: How do you assess this coming showdown if I may call it that between the United States and the rest of the world?

Schoenman: The showdown that you describe has to do with the token representation of the Palestine Authority and agencies of the United Nations.

The content of that is not significant. It is symbolic, but nothing more because the issue before us is the politics of Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestine Authority and its relationship to both the Zionist state and to imperialism and its stranglehold over the Palestinian population.

We have to keep in mind that the Palestine Authority is literally funded not only by the Israelis, but it is actually answerable to the CIA Central Intelligence Agency, which is deeply involved in its administration in the West Bank and it is constant that the Palestine Authority arrests and even kills and disappears Palestinian activists who oppose the policies of the Israeli State and attempt to mobilize the population in that regard.

This widely understood. It’s even understood by the mainstream press in the United States. For example, the Atlantic Monthly, the Atlantic publication, which is a mainstream monthly publication wrote an article by Robert White called, When will economic blockade of Gaza end?.

He says here’s another thing the United States would not tolerate – If Canada imposed a crippling economic blockade denying the United States the import of essential goods, usually restricting American exports. This would be understood as an act of war. And the United States if necessary would respond with force, yes, lobbing missiles into Canada.

This is the situation Gaza has faced for years, a crippling economic blockade imposed by Israel that starves out its population.

These are the categories that would not in the past have appeared in mainstream American publications.

Even so much as basic things as cement and gravel and steel are prevented from entering Gaza. It is a blockade by air and by sea; extensive constraints on what can be imported. They cannot sell things to fellow Palestinians in the West Bank. The number of truckloads of goods that leaves Gaza each month is two percent of what would be required.

No wonder Gaza’s unemployment officially is 28 percent. No wonder 70 percent of the Gazans are dependent upon aid that does not meet their needs. No wonder there’s a shortage of elementary supplies; that there are schools that cannot be built because there are no construction materials. This article in the Atlantic publication spells out that this will not change, this is the constant policy…

Press TV: I also wanted to ask about the UK and its stance, which essentially the UK seems scared in a sense of what Palestine could do at the ICC (International Criminal court) vis-à-vis Israel. How do you assess the UK’s fears regarding that?

Schoenman: Both the UK and the United States and all the imperial powers are anxious not to allow any forum for Palestinian representation in international agencies because they know that the days are numbered for the Palestine Authority and for this leadership that is subordinate to it, to Israel and to the United States.

The presence of the Palestinians in any international agency will not always be spoken for by country-selling forces such as Mahmoud Abbas. And that’s the concern, to retain the absolute isolation of the Palestinian people even formally in such institutions.

It is nothing to do with their concern that Mahmoud Abbas will challenge the role of the Zionist State or the subjugation of the Palestinian people. Everybody understands that that will not occur.

But it is even the acknowledgement of the Palestinian people as an oppressed population that they have national rights of self determination and that these agencies have to reflect that even in nominal degrees that is intolerable to the architects of the imperial strangulation of the Palestinian population – inside Gaza, inside the West Bank, inside the Green Line, wherever.