In Arab world, support for UN gambit close to unanimous

          Israel and the US may be scrambling to scuttle the Palestinian statehood bid, but in the West Bank, Gaza and across the Arab world a nearly unanimous consensus has formed in favor of this week's UN declaration. A poll released Monday by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found 83 percent of Palestinians support the unilateral declaration, and half of respondents said they would join any demonstrations that might break out in its wake.Elsewhere in the Arab world, the prevailing sentiment is similar. The website NOW Lebanon carried an unsigned editorial Monday asking, "Is this the Palestinian role in the so-called Arab awakening? Perhaps. The mood in the region has changed, and the Arab street appears to have teeth for once." A statehood declaration, even a symbolic one, it said, "might even blunt the angry sword of Hamas and strike a blow for mainstream diplomacy ... Quite how Hamas and, to a lesser extent, Hezbollah will react is anyone’s guess. The point is that this is not the time to be shamelessly and blatantly pandering to the whims of Israel and the Israeli lobby in the US." "From Tripoli to Cairo, the West has positioned itself as the champion of democracy and freedom. And yet on any matter to do with Israel, when push comes to shove, the big players back off," it said. Also Monday, Beirut's Daily Star newspaper editorialized, "Any world leader that claims to support aborted Israeli-Palestinian negotiations while opposing the latter’s bid for statehood is either a liar or a coward. Those seeking a way out of Palestine’s application are rapidly losing the benefit of the doubt." Emad Gad, heads of Israel studies program at the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo, wrote, "It is very clear that the incumbent Israeli government refuses to re-launch talks to reach a political settlement. Accordingly, this government wants to waste time and manipulate inter-Palestinian divisions, but will not begin any serious discussions that would lead to political settlement." "A resolution by the General Assembly recognizing an independent Palestinian state is an immense achievement for the Palestinian cause, and would change the nature of negotiations with Israel from talks between an authority representing a people under occupation and the occupying state, to talks between two countries, where one country is occupying the other," he wrote Monday in the state-run Al-Ahram daily. Hussein Ibish, a Lebanese-American writer and senior fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine (ATFP), is one of a handful of pro-Palestinian activists who has questioned the wisdom of a unilateral statehood declaration. In an op-ed Monday in the Abu Dhabi-based daily The National he warned, "the potential damage to the Palestinian national interest and project can hardly be overstated." "As Mr. Abbas himself has repeatedly acknowledged, a negotiated agreement is the only choice for the creation of a Palestinian state. And there is no alternative broker other than the United States," Ibish wrote. "A crisis in relations with the Americans by provoking a veto in the Security Council is unlikely to enhance the prospects for genuine, rather than virtual, Palestinian statehood." (21,29)