Commenting: Middle East peace needs UN resolution

1. Every time Palestinians have made or offered a 'hard compromise' (hard for them, not for Israel), US and Israeli governments have seen it as a weakness and upped their demands.

In 2009 PA was ready to give up 50 % of E. Jerusalem. Both US and Israeli governments refused this offer and demanded that PA gives up the ENTIRE E. Jerusalem.

US' negotiator Mitchell got angry on PA for even trying to hold to part of E. Jerusalem, demanded that Palestinians give it up and then prepare "for more hard compromises" aka to give up more land.

Enter Kerry, whose Likudnik team demanded that Palestinians give up 90 % of E. Jerusalem. Immediately Israel's government demanded that E. Jerusalem or Jerusalem overall can't be even MENTIONED in a peace agreement...

There are over 300 000 Palestinians in E. Jerusalem. Israel has kept running water cut off from E. Jerusalem's Shuafat refugee camp now for 13 months, destroyed homes and businesses in most days of the week, announces new illegal settlement building in E. Jerusalem each week and has made it clear that it won't accept Palestinian presence in E. Jerusalem if it gets to keep it. But those 300 000 Palestinians are "facts on the ground" that PA can't ignore.

Kerry's plan would have left up to 700 000 Palestinians in areas that would have been annexed by Israel. All evidence is that those areas would have been ethnically cleansed and the bantustans on what would have remained of West Bank would have become more crowded.

But US attitude is immortalized in Dennis Ross' own words in his memoirs that "Palestinians don't need land, Israel does." It's totally in contradiction with reality on the ground.

Lastly, the refugees: US and Israel take it for granted that refugees can't return (when they at the same time think it's right that everyone with 1 Jewish grand-parent can move into Palestinians' ancestral lands) and that refugees must forever be left rotting in refugee camps, outcasts from the society around them. The fact that Syrian and Iraqi conflicts have already turned that applecart of theirs has not - as is the case with them always when it comes to Palestinians - registered. There is likely no place for Palestinian refugees in any "new Syria", whoever wins. Lebanon can be engulfed too.

Does USA and Israeli govs really expect that Europe will take in hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees without demanding that Israel shares the burden? Apparently they do, like they still think that they can force Abbas or some successor to sign of the rights of refugees, sign of E. Jerusalem, Jordan Valley etc.

US and Israeli govs are utterly blind to the "red lines" that Palestinian leaders can't cross, whose breaking the people will not accept. Same goes with Europe. USA is far from Palestine, Europe is near and will be affected by ways that it must take into account and which the US politicians gorging themselves on Israeli Lobby money in Washington D.C. utterly fail to take into account.

2. UN didn't actually partition Palestine, and of course the actual dismemberment has been a horrific mess.

UN tried to partition Palestine, claiming Balfour declaration as an excuse, even when British government already in early 1920s said it was not binding. Palestinians would have gotten only 44 %, divided into four different, separate areas. The Anglo-American proposal in 1945 would have given Palestinians almost 60 %.