There's been some talk from the State Department about working with Congress to carve out exceptions or waivers or new interpretations or whatever. But my impression is that nobody wants to touch the issue with an election coming up next year. I've been saying for some time now that Palestine would have gotten a much better reception to this move from the USA if they'd waited until after the 2012 elections. But then, I suppose that Abbas has his own political timetable to worry about, and it seems that the main purpose of this push is to cause headaches for the USA anyway...
Why should they? They've been waiting for a long time and I think they should carry out every move BEFORE the elections, so its evident exactly how strong a stranglehold the Israeli lobby has on the US. My favourite was when Clinton had to call on Netanyahu to convince US congressmen to release American aid funds for Palestinians. Nah, its still the US voting no on UNESCO. That one will go in the history books You still seem to be under the illusion that the US can do anything for the Palestinians. They can't. They are completely impotent in the process. Even the Israelis recognise their impotence, which is why you can't get them to even take perfunctory note of what the US President says. Did you hear Obama's speech at the UN? He sounded like a complete idiot. Which is why only the handful of Americans were clapping at his soundbites. Imagine telling an audience of post colonial nations that the Palestinians need the permission of their colonists to ask for statehood. I can just imagine what the response would be if he spoke like that about the American Revolution: it was premature, we should have asked the British, lol. Can't wait to hear what gems come from the American lobby next: Rosa Parks was a terrorist? Martin Luther King should've known better? Yeah lets see the Amerikkkans defending the Israeli racial segregation with their Jewish only transport on Jewish only roads to the Jewish only apartments in the Jewish only settlements in the West Bank, which is such a dangerous place that Israelis need a wall to protect themselves from the evil Palestinians there, except of course, when they send Israeli Jews by the busloads to live there. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Except that stranglehold is only in your mind. Only 2 states have more than 5% Jewish population and 32 states don't even have 1%, so no, there is not nearly the influence you think there is. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Jews Indeed, the Jewish vote was solidly behind recent losers Gore and Kerry and just like they were behind the winners Clinton and Obama, and that's because they almost always for the Democratic candidate (The ONE exception is they only gave Carter 45% support for his failed bid for a second term). But they also live predominately in states that also lean very Democratic (New York, New Jersey for instance are the only two states with over 5% Jewish population, but they tend to be in the 15 to 20% excess Democrats) The next most would be in California, again always Democrat, and so they have zip veto power. You want your lobby to have strength, you have to be able to swing a state in a close election to the other side. As shown with Bush taking Florida, twice, they really can't even do that. Arthur
Why don't you go and read the sentence immediately after the one you quoted there, where I address exactly that? And not, y'know, pull this cheap stunt of cherry-picking one sentence and using it to basically misrepresent me? The word for that, is "trolling." What does that get Palestine? I get why you would favor such, since you are more concerned with validating your perspective on Israeli-US relations than on anything else. But how would that actually advance the Palestinian interest? Does that actually figure into your perspective, or are they just a convenient soap box for you to harangue Americans and Jews from? Given that nobody seems to pay the slightest attention to UNESCO except in the rare case that it happens to become tangentially relevant to their pet cause, that does not strike me as particularly dire. Nobody seems to even notice that the USA left UNESCO for nearly 20 years, much less care. I doubt that anyone will even remember this current episode a few months from now. UNESCO is not exactly the Security Council. That's a very dangerous mistake to make. The USA is not omnipotent, and cannot simply impose a convenient solution. But that's a far cry from impotence. Meanwhile, if you truly hold that the USA is completely impotent wrt Israel/Palestine, then you should have no complaints about military aid to Israel, the US veto in the UNSC, etc. Those don't matter, at all. No? There are people that make that exact argument, actually, saying that independence would have happened anyway with less bloodshed. People say the same thing about slavery/civil war, the world wars/holocaust, etc. Generally these people are insufferable hand-wringing pacifists, or apologists for racism/imperialism/antisemitism/whatever. But the difference here, of course, is that's it's Palestine deciding to go out and ask for a state. They already tried the method where you wage wars to get a state, and failed. Die in a fire, troll.
