JERUSALEM – Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Tuesday there are “signs” the United Nations Security Council may attempt another resolution on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the coming few weeks – meaning before President Obama leaves office this month.
Speaking at an annual meeting of Israeli ambassadors and chiefs of mission in Europe at the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem on Tuesday, Netanyahu warned that while he believes the contents of a summit on the Middle East slated to take place in Paris on January 15 will be “empty,” there “are signs that they will try to turn the decisions made there into another resolution in the Security Council, and that is already [something that is] not empty.”
“[The major effort] we are engaged in now is to prevent another UN resolution, and also to prevent a Quartet decision. We are investing a great deal of diplomatic efforts in this, and this also has to be your main efforts in the coming days,” Netanyahu said. “This will not take much time, but it will occupy us in the next two weeks, and we need to succeed.”
Netanyahu’s remarks seem to confirm a Breitbart Jerusalem exclusive report from last week quoting a senior PA official as saying that the conclusions reached at the Paris Mideast summit could form the basis of UN action prior to Obama’s departure from office.
The official said the UN action could come in the form of declarations by UN bodies, including the General Assembly; UN sessions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; or even another United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolution. He said any further UNSC resolution would depend on the support of the U.S. and European countries after the Paris Mideast summit.
He said the UN action would seek to set the parameters of a future Palestinian state with a clear timeline for negotiations. If the action comes in the form of a resolution at a UN body, it could call for an infrastructure to establish mechanisms to enforce the UNSC resolution two weeks ago, which demanded a complete halt to Israeli construction in the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem and declared those territories occupied Palestinian lands, the Palestinian official said.
The PA official speaking to Breitbart Jerusalem said that any upcoming UN action would be geared toward bypassing the Mideast policies of the incoming Donald Trump administration by establishing binding guidelines for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations and a halt to settlement activity.
“The new motion will seek to set up a clear timeline for negotiations resulting in the establishment of a Palestinian state and stipulate a procedure for overseeing the implementation of Resolution 2334, including posting inspectors to the Palestinian territories,” said the PA official, who requested anonymity.
He said the “inspectors” are expected to be civilians with a background in security, and would function like the Temporary International Presence mission in Hebron. That mission consists of civilian observers who monitor the so-called Hebron Agreement, which saw the partial redeployment of Israeli forces to sections of Hebron while about 80% of the territory remained under Palestinian control.
The PA official added that the Paris conference is expected to call on all sides to establish a Palestinian state within the so-called 1967 borders in a relatively short period of time, perhaps by the beginning of 2019.
“The goal is for these moves to be binding for the incoming American administration, which would have to adopt them as its platform, and also for the European Union, which is expected to step up should there be clashes with Trump,” he said.
“In the next few days we’ll know whether we’re headed to the UNSC,” the official said. “Right now, the chances of that are very high. From our viewpoint, the goal is partially achieved. The settlements have been designated as the main obstacle to the peace process and now it’s up for the world to make clear that, in the event of failure, the side that would refuse to comply with the will of the international community, as codified in the UN resolution, is the guilty side.”
The official said that it remains unclear whether any UNSC session would produce a new resolution or merely validate last week’s resolution.
“Following in the EU’s steps, now the US recognizes that it’s Israel that sabotages the peace talks, and does so through its settlement enterprise,” the official claimed. “The motion is of immense significance – it validates all the decisions by the international community, chiefly the EU, to slap sanctions on Israel in the form of halting cooperation, halting the financing of mutual projects and expansion in scope of marking settlement products to all the products from every single settlement.”
Last week, Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes said that the U.S. would veto any other UNSC resolution brought before Obama leaves office if the text of the resolution is anti-Israel. The “anti-Israel” qualifier is left open for interpretation.
Aaron Klein is Breitbart’s Jerusalem bureau chief and senior investigative reporter. He is a New York Times bestselling author and hosts the popular weekend talk radio program, “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio.” Follow him on Twitter @AaronKleinShow. Follow him on Facebook.