Instead of ranting about Obama, today I'd like to comment briefly on something serious: Kosovo. It's something I've been avoiding, because it's a touchy subject here in Spain: Spaniards are outraged at the United States violating Serbia's sovereignty as it might set a bad example for the separatist movements in Catalonia and the Spanish Basque country.

Personally, I don't think the Spaniards really have that much to worry about, as I cannot imagine the Catalans resigning themselves to never seeing Barça and Real Madrid play against each other again, except maybe, by chance, once or twice a decade, in the Champion's League.

Athletic Club Bilbao, never gets to Champions and so they would never ever play Real Madrid again. I just can't imagine that happening. However, as it makes my Spanish friends very nervous, I have avoided the subject.

The people who are really nervous, and with reason are the Israelis. The Kosovo precedent is directly applicable to the "Occupied Territories"... even more so as Israel's sovereignty over the West Bank has never been officially recognized by anyone.

Right wing Israeli commentator Caroline Glick who is solidly aligned with the American neocons had this to say in the Jerusalem Post:

The emergence of a potentially destabilizing state in Kosovo is clearly an instance of political interests trumping law. Under international law, Kosovo has no right to be considered a sovereign state. Even UN Security Council Resolution 1244 from 1999, which the KLA claims provides the legal basis for Kosovar sovereignty, explicitly recognizes Serbian sovereignty over Kosovo. For Israel, Kosovo's US-backed declaration of independence should be a source of alarm great enough to require a rethinking of foreign policy. Unfortunately, rather than understand and implement the lessons of Kosovo, the Olmert-Livni-Barak government is working actively to ensure that they are reenacted in the international community's treatment of Israel and the Palestinians. Today, Israel is enabling the Palestinians to set the political and legal conditions for the establishment of an internationally recognized state of Palestine that will be at war with Israel.

And in the English edition of the semi-official Egyptian news paper Al-Ahram John Whitbeck wrote:

American and EU impatience to sever a portion of a UN member state (universally recognised, even by them, to constitute a portion of that state's sovereign territory), ostensibly because 90 per cent of those living in that portion support separation, contrasts starkly with the unlimited patience of the US and the EU when it comes to ending the 40-year-long belligerent Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (no portion of which any country recognises as Israel's sovereign territory and as to which Israel has only asserted sovereignty over a tiny portion, occupied East Jerusalem). Virtually every legal resident of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip seeks freedom, and has for over 40 years. For doing so, they are punished, sanctioned, besieged, humiliated and, day after endless day, killed by those who claim to stand on the moral high ground.(...) Of course, to prevent the US and the EU from treating such an initiative as a joke, there would have to be a significant and explicit consequence if they were to do so. The consequence would be the end of the "two-state" illusion. The Palestinian leadership would make clear that if the US and the EU, having just recognised a second Albanian state on the sovereign territory of a UN member state, will not now recognise a Palestinian state on a tiny portion of the occupied Palestinian homeland, it will dissolve the Palestinian Authority (which, legally, should have ceased to exist in 1999, at the end of the five-year "interim period" under the Oslo Accords) and the Palestinian people will thereafter seek justice and freedom through democracy, through the persistent, non-violent pursuit of full rights of citizenship in a single state in all of Israel/Palestine, free of any discrimination based on race and religion and with equal rights for all who reside there.

And not only the Israeli ultra-ultras are in a panic. Here is Bradley Burston in Haaretz:

The Palestinians have kept their ultimate doomsday weapon under tight wraps for 40 years. Israel knew about it. Israelis senior commanders could only pray that the Palestinians would never take it out and put it to actual use. Every Israeli soldier who served in Gaza knew about it, and also knew the hollowness in the declarations of IDF brass that "The army will now how to deal with it, should it happen." In all of Israel's vast arsenal of defense hardware and technology, there is nothing that can effectively counter it. That is what makes it a weapon so powerful we dare not speak its name: non-violence.(...) At the back of the minds of Israeli statesmen, diplomats, police officials, and defense planners, was an awareness that the true power of the Palestinians had nothing to do with stone-throwing, Molotov cocktails, grenade attacks, knifings, suicide bombings, assault rifle drive-by's, or Qassam rocket barrages. They knew that the true power of the Palestinians to damage Israel also had nothing to do with incitement, institutional anti-Semitism in schools, or declarations of revolution until victory and the ultimate replacement of the Jewish state by an independent Palestine. The true power of the Palestinians, the bottom-line dread of the Israelis, was embodied in only four words: Get up and walk. The theory - expounded by Palestinian moderates for year after year, supported by Israeli leftists - was that a determinedly peaceful demonstration in which thousands and thousands and still more thousands of Gazans headed for the Israeli border, would do more for the cause of Palestinian independence and freedom that all the gratuitous violence of the last 40 years of armed struggle combined.

Why the United States would choose to do something with such potentially perilous effects on Israel at this precise moment is an interesting question. I cannot answer it. Is anyone else asking it?
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