Palestinian Leader Urges U.N. to Press for Deadline to End Israeli Occupation

The New York Times, Sept. 26, 2014 by Somini Sengupta

UNITED NATIONS – The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, accused Israel on Friday of failing to negotiate in good faith, saying any return to negotiations would be “naïve at best,” and called on the United Nations Security Council to press for a specific deadline to end Israeli occupation.

“It is impossible and I repeat – it is impossible – to return to the cycle of negotiations that failed to deal with the substance of the matter and the fundamental question,” Mr. Abbas said at the annual session of the General Assembly, reading from a prepared text but visibly enraged.

“The time has come to end this settlement occupation,” he said.

His speech, however, was short on details. He did not offer his own deadline for an Israeli withdrawal, as some had expected, nor did he say anything about joining the International Criminal Court, which his aides have repeatedly said he is prepared to do. He only hinted that he would seek accountability for alleged war crimes against Palestinians during the latest war with Israel.

“In the name of Palestine and its people, I affirm here today: We will not forget and we will not forgive, and we will not allow war criminals to escape punishment,” Mr. Abbas said in his 30-minute address.

Mr. Abbas has been threatening to join the international court ever since Palestine won upgraded status as a nonmember observer state of the United Nations in November 2012, which permits membership in many related world bodies. Israel is worried in particular about Palestinian membership in the international court because it could open the way for the prosecution of Israeli political and military leaders for building settlements and other policies related to its decades-old occupation.

Israel and the United States have expressed strong opposition to Palestinian membership in the court and have asserted that talks between the two sides remain the best way to achieve a two-state solution to the protracted conflict.

The conspicuous absence of a direct reference to the international court in Mr. Abbas’s speech suggested that he was still reluctant to take that step.

The Palestinian president has been seeking to bolster his authority in the aftermath of the 50-day Gaza war this summer between Israel and Hamas, the militant group that, unlike Mr. Abbas, refuses to recognize Israel’s right to exist.

Despite the devastation in Gaza from that war, Hamas’s popularity as a force that will stand up to Israel has increased among Palestinians.

The fighting this summer damaged more than 100 United Nations schools and hospitals, which the Israeli authorities said were near Hamas holdouts. The United Nations said 2,150 Palestinians, including 500 children, were killed. On the Israeli side, 67 soldiers and six civilians, including one child, were killed.

A fragile cease-fire agreement, negotiated in Cairo, has held for a month, and the two sides last week agreed to let reconstruction materials move into Gaza, monitored by the United Nations to ensure that they are destined for civilian projects. Israel has repeatedly said that cement and steel are diverted by Hamas to build tunnels to attack Israel.

Israel’s demand that Gaza be demilitarized is among the topics left for future cease-fire negotiations.

Palestinian diplomats have been pushing their Arab peers at the United Nations to propose a Security Council resolution that would establish a time frame for ending the Israeli occupation and call for talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority to demarcate the borders of two independent states. No resolution has yet been proposed, and the United States has said nothing about whether it would support such a measure. American diplomats have said they want both sides to return to negotiations.

Mr. Abbas described the Israeli occupation as “an abhorrent form of state terrorism and a breeding ground for incitement, tension and hatred.”

6. Russian Diplomat’s Speech Depicts the West as Hypocritical

The New York Times, Sept. 27, 2014 by Rick Gladstone

Russia’s foreign minister delivered a strident denunciation of the United States and its allies on Saturday, using his speech at the annual United Nations General Assembly session to depict the West as an arrogant and hypocritical arbiter of “what is good or evil.”

The speech by Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov, a skilled diplomat who spent a decade as Russia’s United Nations ambassador, described the world’s acute conflict zones – Ukraine, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan – in near polar opposite terms from the way the United States and Western European leaders have framed them.

He bluntly rejected their depiction of Russia as a scheming violator of the world order, equating such a view to what he called an inherent inability of the West to outgrow the stereotypes of Soviet times. On the contrary, Mr. Lavrov said, the deterioration of Russia’s relationship with the NATO alliance, particularly regarding the Ukraine crisis, had “made obvious the inability of the alliance to change the genetic code it embedded during the Cold War era.”

Russia did not illegally seize Ukraine’s Crimea Peninsula six months ago, as President Obama and many other leaders have said, but rather only wanted to see the people of Crimea decide for themselves whether they would remain part of Ukraine after the political violence that ousted the pro-Russia president, Viktor F. Yanukovych. “The attempts to distort the truth and to hide the facts behind blanket accusations have been undertaken at all stages of the Ukrainian crisis,” Mr. Lavrov said.

He reiterated the Kremlin’s view that the current Ukraine government, led by Western-friendly politicians, was the result of a coup d’état.

“Shouldn’t the General Assembly adopt a declaration on the inadmissibility of interference into domestic affairs of sovereign states and nonrecognition of coup d’états as a method of the change of power?” he asked. “The time has come to totally exclude from the international interaction the attempts of illegitimate pressure of some states on others.”

Countering the American-led position that Russia has resorted to force to get what it wants in Ukraine and arbitrarily redraw geographic boundaries, Mr. Lavrov said the reverse was true.

“Washington has openly declared its right to unilateral use of force anywhere to uphold its own interests,” he said. “Military interference has become a norm – even despite the dismal outcome of all power operations that the U.S. has carried out over the recent years.”

The Western alliance, Mr. Lavrov said, which “portrays itself as a champion of democracy, rule of law and human rights within individual countries, acts from directly opposite positions in the international arena, rejecting the democratic principle of sovereign equality of states enshrined in the U.N. Charter and trying to decide for everyone what is good or evil.”

Mr. Lavrov’s speech had been eagerly awaited, in part to see whether Russia would react to the newly formed American-led alliance of European and Arab states now conducting airstrikes on the Islamic State, the extremist group ensconced in eastern Syria that has seized parts of Iraq and has been universally condemned as a terrorist organization. The United States did not seek permission for those attacks from the government of Syria, a Russia ally, nor did it seek an authorization from the United Nations Security Council, where Russia, as a permanent member, has veto power.

While Russia may be quietly happy that the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, is now the target of American airstrikes, Mr. Lavrov took the opportunity to challenge the Obama administration’s decision as arrogant, arbitrary and contrary to the United Nations Charter.

“The struggle against terrorists in the territory of Syria should be structured in cooperation with the Syrian government, which clearly stated its readiness to join it,” Mr. Lavrov said