Palestine, the United Nations and the Refugees
Internationalist Observer | 21.03.2014 18:44 | Analysis | Anti-Nuclear | Palestine | World
If there is one definitive test for an association of states then it is its own exception. In the case of the current such entity that is to be found in the issue of refugees. For most situations, the UN defines the descendants of refugees as original inhabitants of their birthplaces. But when it comes to Palestinians and Israelis it makes an exception and declares these as heirs of their ancestors´ status. As the price of a right of return to be passed on from one generation to another, they are being denied the privileges of other inhabitants of their birthplaces. Often this is rendered as a privilege itself, such as if the Israelis would have been privileged with a 1875-year long march before returning to their place. The most cynical argument that can be heard about that is, with the denial of equality in their places of living these people were more likely, or at least more motivated, to return. But as a matter of fact remains that each further generation is being alienated from its current natural environment and betrayed with an unfulfilled promise in exchange for that loss. And yet it does not matter whether without these sugar-coated restraints they might be less likely to return, but that with full equality they are more prepared to do so in ways that actually end the misery rather than just passing it on to others.
When recently a representative of the European parliament drew international attention with remarks on Israeli-Palestinian mutual water rights, it was not so much that he declared himself a friend of the Palestinians, which anyway is pretty meaningless when it comes to people who cannot afford to choose their friends, but how superficial the water issue was addressed, what should have rung an alarm bell with anyone focused on natural water conservation. Of course investments into seawater desalination factories are no such solution since they only provide a target which turns the water supply itself into a part of a weapon of mass destruction. The bigger a dependency on desalination, the bigger the vulnerability at the bottleneck. In this example the difference between a natural and an artificial water source is most obvious - while the former is entirely independent of the electrical grid, the latter existentially depends on it and after it drowned all alternatives may get knocked out by any sunspot or similar occurrence.
Not only did the parliamentary representative when it argued with per capita quantities ignore the risk of that parameter suddenly dropping to zero, but also fall back behind the state of the art of water conservation in Europe, where it is already common knowledge that water consumption cannot be sustainably satisfied if it is all expected to be of the same quality. There are different qualities of water for human and agricultural uses, and the equation that overall consumption quantities were a linear expression of wealth and progress does not add up – mostly, they are signs of inefficiency and mismanagement. It is this mismanagement which brings about the scarcity that is most pressing to others, which then becomes the first visible sign of organised discrimination. Yet the interest of the EU is not to solve the problem of desertification, but a merely tactical triangulation favouring selective advocacy of the causes of others to further its own agenda.
In this sense, the EU is the little sister of the UN – a smaller and later imitation of the same deceptive tactic glued together with a fictional currency likely to fall apart without the latter. And the refugees from the wars which brought about the EU are not an exception in the UN, unless the Israelis were counted as such, but that issue was conveniently outsourced from the EU. Yet as in geopolitics there is no zero sum game, or more precisely neither does it add up to zero nor is it a game, the current land conflict is the result of the state efforts to fix the last one, and that failure propagates itself into a chain of events which leaves neither side in a desirable position. With every military provocation or threatening display of superior force the death toll multiplies, on one hand because it has no meaning other than as an undeclared death threat, and on the other because of what must be done with the military in order to stop it forever, signalling suicidal tendencies at the top of its hierarchies that oppressed populations might be echoing for pedagogical reasons.
At the same time, in the EU there is no such exception as in the UN, and the most likely candidate for it, the Germans who have been expelled from the Northern crusader states of Eastern Europe in the aftermath of WWII, cannot inherit a right of return. As a result, even with the Baltic states in frenzy gravitating towards Berlin, Kaliningrad remains a Russian enclave in EU territory, and if it were to be ceded to Europe Russia might ask for some other territory in exchange, which would be Crimea. With the EU´s aggressive attempts, together with the North Americans, to take over Ukraine even at the price of a drastic worsening of its political culture, the Russian takeover of Crimea can be interpreted as a sign of the divergence between the two models. Although it would have to be expected from the aspect of return of refugees, the EU shows no visible interest in the enclave, not even as the Crimea issue ever more rose to the forefront.
With the refugees having gone to Germany, and the next generations ceasing to understand themselves as such, there is no significant effort that could be compared to the UN role in Palestine. It seems that for any progress on Palestinian emancipation an antagonist of the UN would have to implement a similar territorial exchange, and convince some territory to break away from it and join the other side in order to get the respective association of states refocused on the refugees. This does not necessarily mean that ever more people are expelled, as this has not happened in Crimea either. But like Crimea´s change of sides pushed the EU head on into its false and fraudulent interpretation of international law, such a step might have to change the perception of the UN to a similar extent.
At a homoeopathic degree this has already happened with the Chinese intervention in the Korean-Japanese airspace conflict discussed in an earlier article. At a bigger extent it could come from places which are more distant to the UN treaty framework, like these who, like Israel, are outside of the Nonproliferation Treaty. It might be that both India and Pakistan were to decide to obtain a much larger political distance to the problematic of North America, or that Japan’s neighbours unite to remove it from the IAEA leadership to get rid of the unhealthy bias that has deprecated it since the Fukushima incident, to sketch only the most obvious scenarios.
While the Persian rattling of that framework takes a direct focus on the EU, and is probably the main reason why the hostile takeover of Ukraine was not even more aggressive, by itself it is not enough to put sufficient pressure on the grouping to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate. That is largely because the expectation of a Persian atomic weapons program is indeed fictional and merely a speculation in the scaremongering of Israel, for if it were real it would have the same effects on that atomic bombs stockpile as any significant political shift on the side of one or more of the above-mentioned non-NPT arsenals. Yet for this to occur it does require a fully developed anti-American and anti-European consensus recognising the fact that the double standard on refugees between the EU and the UN could be levelled in either direction.
But whether the EU begins to make exceptions or the UN ceases to, or whether status heredity or local equality or both are to become that single standard, the most touching point of the constellation is the relationship between Europeans and Americans, who after all are little more than the refugees of Europe´s religious war that were outsourced by colonialism. For them to return, not only there is no room in Europe other than next to Russia, but also quite few are waiting to reclaim their places once they have left there. North America is an example that in some instances a return scenario is not desirable for any of the involved sides. This is different with Africa, where a minority might find place, but with regard to Europe it matters that a North America in the place of Europe would in no way be desirable to anyone else, least of all to Africa, as it is already the case with the American military occupation there.
The key for the understanding of this is the grasp of the vast implications of a double standard on the status of refugees. Not only does that refer to many individual lives, but it also does so towards the common scenario that is most likely to bring about many refugees as well as the most profound challenges to their status, and that is atomic contamination. Once the refugee issue is being dealt with in a dishonest manner, which definitely is the case in the permanent betrayal of the Palestinian refugees by the UN, the absolute precondition for a reliable handling of the atomic contamination issue is lost. And since the political frictions between the atomic weapons states run much deeper than these between others even when they are far from being used, like in the development of Crimea any significant change of tide in the UN system – especially in regard to its most ill-regulated issues – must come through rearrangements achieved between them. But while the Russian blowback was a largely local phenomenon responding to misguided EU expansion tendencies, any such occurrence from further out directed at this issue would be a global thing in the sense that it had to pursue an implied exchange arrangement in order to deliver a lesson on specific institutional distortions of international law which cannot be accepted any longer.
* * *
See also:
- Why is the Nonproliferation Treaty Failing? (9.1.) -
https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/01/514650.html
- The Death of the Inclusion Policy in the East Asian Shelf Waters (16.1.) - https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/01/514789.html
- Triple Treason in the Caucasus (23.1.) - https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/01/514946.html
- NATO. Obituary to a Nukepool (27.1.) - https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/01/515002.html
- Obey or Die - The Pathology of Organised Treason in Europe (21.2.) - https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/02/515538.html
- The Suicide Attack Against indymedia and its Cause (28.2.) - https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/02/515677.html
- What does the Invasion of Yalta Mean for the European Peninsula? (8.3.) - https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/03/515828.html
- Why is Poland a Nazi Client State? (15.3.) - https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/03/515949.html
Not only did the parliamentary representative when it argued with per capita quantities ignore the risk of that parameter suddenly dropping to zero, but also fall back behind the state of the art of water conservation in Europe, where it is already common knowledge that water consumption cannot be sustainably satisfied if it is all expected to be of the same quality. There are different qualities of water for human and agricultural uses, and the equation that overall consumption quantities were a linear expression of wealth and progress does not add up – mostly, they are signs of inefficiency and mismanagement. It is this mismanagement which brings about the scarcity that is most pressing to others, which then becomes the first visible sign of organised discrimination. Yet the interest of the EU is not to solve the problem of desertification, but a merely tactical triangulation favouring selective advocacy of the causes of others to further its own agenda.
In this sense, the EU is the little sister of the UN – a smaller and later imitation of the same deceptive tactic glued together with a fictional currency likely to fall apart without the latter. And the refugees from the wars which brought about the EU are not an exception in the UN, unless the Israelis were counted as such, but that issue was conveniently outsourced from the EU. Yet as in geopolitics there is no zero sum game, or more precisely neither does it add up to zero nor is it a game, the current land conflict is the result of the state efforts to fix the last one, and that failure propagates itself into a chain of events which leaves neither side in a desirable position. With every military provocation or threatening display of superior force the death toll multiplies, on one hand because it has no meaning other than as an undeclared death threat, and on the other because of what must be done with the military in order to stop it forever, signalling suicidal tendencies at the top of its hierarchies that oppressed populations might be echoing for pedagogical reasons.
At the same time, in the EU there is no such exception as in the UN, and the most likely candidate for it, the Germans who have been expelled from the Northern crusader states of Eastern Europe in the aftermath of WWII, cannot inherit a right of return. As a result, even with the Baltic states in frenzy gravitating towards Berlin, Kaliningrad remains a Russian enclave in EU territory, and if it were to be ceded to Europe Russia might ask for some other territory in exchange, which would be Crimea. With the EU´s aggressive attempts, together with the North Americans, to take over Ukraine even at the price of a drastic worsening of its political culture, the Russian takeover of Crimea can be interpreted as a sign of the divergence between the two models. Although it would have to be expected from the aspect of return of refugees, the EU shows no visible interest in the enclave, not even as the Crimea issue ever more rose to the forefront.
With the refugees having gone to Germany, and the next generations ceasing to understand themselves as such, there is no significant effort that could be compared to the UN role in Palestine. It seems that for any progress on Palestinian emancipation an antagonist of the UN would have to implement a similar territorial exchange, and convince some territory to break away from it and join the other side in order to get the respective association of states refocused on the refugees. This does not necessarily mean that ever more people are expelled, as this has not happened in Crimea either. But like Crimea´s change of sides pushed the EU head on into its false and fraudulent interpretation of international law, such a step might have to change the perception of the UN to a similar extent.
At a homoeopathic degree this has already happened with the Chinese intervention in the Korean-Japanese airspace conflict discussed in an earlier article. At a bigger extent it could come from places which are more distant to the UN treaty framework, like these who, like Israel, are outside of the Nonproliferation Treaty. It might be that both India and Pakistan were to decide to obtain a much larger political distance to the problematic of North America, or that Japan’s neighbours unite to remove it from the IAEA leadership to get rid of the unhealthy bias that has deprecated it since the Fukushima incident, to sketch only the most obvious scenarios.
While the Persian rattling of that framework takes a direct focus on the EU, and is probably the main reason why the hostile takeover of Ukraine was not even more aggressive, by itself it is not enough to put sufficient pressure on the grouping to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate. That is largely because the expectation of a Persian atomic weapons program is indeed fictional and merely a speculation in the scaremongering of Israel, for if it were real it would have the same effects on that atomic bombs stockpile as any significant political shift on the side of one or more of the above-mentioned non-NPT arsenals. Yet for this to occur it does require a fully developed anti-American and anti-European consensus recognising the fact that the double standard on refugees between the EU and the UN could be levelled in either direction.
But whether the EU begins to make exceptions or the UN ceases to, or whether status heredity or local equality or both are to become that single standard, the most touching point of the constellation is the relationship between Europeans and Americans, who after all are little more than the refugees of Europe´s religious war that were outsourced by colonialism. For them to return, not only there is no room in Europe other than next to Russia, but also quite few are waiting to reclaim their places once they have left there. North America is an example that in some instances a return scenario is not desirable for any of the involved sides. This is different with Africa, where a minority might find place, but with regard to Europe it matters that a North America in the place of Europe would in no way be desirable to anyone else, least of all to Africa, as it is already the case with the American military occupation there.
The key for the understanding of this is the grasp of the vast implications of a double standard on the status of refugees. Not only does that refer to many individual lives, but it also does so towards the common scenario that is most likely to bring about many refugees as well as the most profound challenges to their status, and that is atomic contamination. Once the refugee issue is being dealt with in a dishonest manner, which definitely is the case in the permanent betrayal of the Palestinian refugees by the UN, the absolute precondition for a reliable handling of the atomic contamination issue is lost. And since the political frictions between the atomic weapons states run much deeper than these between others even when they are far from being used, like in the development of Crimea any significant change of tide in the UN system – especially in regard to its most ill-regulated issues – must come through rearrangements achieved between them. But while the Russian blowback was a largely local phenomenon responding to misguided EU expansion tendencies, any such occurrence from further out directed at this issue would be a global thing in the sense that it had to pursue an implied exchange arrangement in order to deliver a lesson on specific institutional distortions of international law which cannot be accepted any longer.
* * *
See also:
- Why is the Nonproliferation Treaty Failing? (9.1.) -
https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/01/514650.html - The Death of the Inclusion Policy in the East Asian Shelf Waters (16.1.) -
https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/01/514789.html - Triple Treason in the Caucasus (23.1.) -
https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/01/514946.html - NATO. Obituary to a Nukepool (27.1.) -
https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/01/515002.html - Obey or Die - The Pathology of Organised Treason in Europe (21.2.) -
https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/02/515538.html - The Suicide Attack Against indymedia and its Cause (28.2.) -
https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/02/515677.html - What does the Invasion of Yalta Mean for the European Peninsula? (8.3.) -
https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/03/515828.html - Why is Poland a Nazi Client State? (15.3.) -
https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/03/515949.html
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