Khalil Jahshan, Middle East analyst and director of the Seaver College Washington, D.C., Internship Program, spoke at an event hosted by the Middle East Peace and Awareness (MEPA) club Wednesday evening, sharing his views on the United Nations vote on recognition of Palestinian statehood and the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Countering Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who called the U.N. vote “meaningless,” and other analysts who have criticized the diplomatic move, arguing that it hurts the peace process, Jahshan said, “There is no peace process to damage at this time. The process exhausted its usefulness long ago and needs to be rebuilt from scratch.”
The peace process has been stalled since September 2010, when direct talks between Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, Netanyahu and President Obama failed. The Palestinian leaders have asked that the construction of Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank be halted in exchange for a renewal of peace talks, but Netanyahu’s government has continued to approve the expansion of such settlements.
Jahshan criticized Obama’s treatment of the statehood bid, calling his Sept. 21 speech at the U.N. General Assembly “shameful” and characterizing it as a “defenseless retreat from earlier pronouncements on the conflict.”
In that speech, Obama praised the pro-democracy movements that have occurred in the past 10 months in the Middle East, but strongly criticized the Palestinian U.N. bid. This contrasts strongly with a speech the president made one year ago at the U.N., in which he himself expressed hope of Palestinian statehood. In this year’s speech, he said, “One year ago, I stood at this podium and I called for an independent Palestine. I believed then, and I believe now, that the Palestinian people deserve a state of their own. But what I also said is that a genuine peace can only be realized between the Israelis and the Palestinians themselves.”
In an interview with the Graphic, Jahshan expounded upon the comments made at the MEPA event. “It’s amazing to me that you go to the U.N. General Assembly 12 months ago and say, ‘I want to join you next year with a Palestinian state sitting among you as a new member,’ then you go back in 2011 and say, ‘The Palestinians need to sit in the back of the bus, there’s no room for them in the inn.’”
Continuing, Jahshan explained that he believes Obama is “a very intelligent person who doesn’t believe that.”
In his MEPA presentation, Jahshan referred to the U.N. bid as “shock treatment” for the stalled peace talks, saying, “Palestinian-Israeli talks have been off of their trajectory for a long time and badly needed this course correction.”
In closing, Jahshan asserted his belief that the United States must “step up to the plate and lead the international community into a new, fair and pragmatic peace effort or continue to play politics with the lives of Palestinians and Israelis by mimicking self-destructive Israeli ideological positions.”
