Lowey said that she still hoped that the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas would sheer off before she and her colleagues had to deploy their doomsday device. "I am an optimist," she kept repeating, pointing to the U.S. team, led by White House official Dennis Ross, that has been dispatched to the Middle East to gain Israeli and Palestinian agreement on a new framework of negotiations to be held under the aegis of the so-called Quartet, thus derailing the bid for statehood. But these discussions are in fact a shadow play; it is widely understood that Abbas cannot afford to abort the effort unless Israel makes the kind of concessions that it plainly is not prepared to make. Indeed, Abbas just delivered a speech rejecting the diplomatic bid and vowing to seek statehood at the U.N. Security Council.
Lowey and her colleagues are threatening the Palestinians with doom for refusing to engage with a peace process that is self-evidently dead. Palestinian leaders have been quite open about the fact that they chose the U.N. path only after they concluded that Washington could not or would not push Israel into making meaningful concessions. "We know there is no escape from negotiations," a Palestinian official is quoted as saying in a recent report by the International Crisis Group. "We have no options because the process' sponsor has checked out." The U.N. statehood bid, then, is more a gesture of despair than an act of calculated diplomacy.
Kay Granger, chairman of Lowey's subcommittee and author of the legislative language terminating aid, recently described the upcoming vote as a "train wreck" -- which it may well be. Granger was of course blaming the Palestinians, who are driving the train. But this looming calamity has less to do with Palestinian stubbornness than with Israeli intransigence and American paralysis, both conditioned in part by the pro-Israel (right or wrong) crowd in Congress. In their despair, the Palestinians really may do something genuinely self-destructive. Abbas is fully aware that the United States would veto an attempt to gain statehood in the Security Council. That would be a train wreck, bringing terrible harm both to U.S. standing in the Arab world and to the Palestinians' standing in the United States. It's the one thing that might make Senate action on an aid cutoff unavoidable, thus turning Granger's metaphor into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
President Barack Obama's administration is now trying to line up enough votes at the Security Council to make a veto unnecessary and then persuade the Palestinians to go instead to the General Assembly, which could not grant statehood but could upgrade their status to that of "nonmember observer state," like the Vatican. Of course, the United States would oppose this too; and the Obama administration is hoping to reduce the Palestinians' expected margin of victory in the General Assembly by peeling off key European allies. That, according to a senior congressional aide, a U.S. diplomat, and an expert in the region, is the real purpose of the administration's eleventh-hour dash to the Middle East: to devise language sufficiently acceptable to EU countries that they would agree to vote against the Palestinians in the Security Council or the General Assembly.
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