Palestine - UN Security Council flirts with racist fantasyland

The negotiations will be based on previous agreements between us, UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, the road map and the April 14, 2004 letter of President Bush to the Prime Minister of Israel.

All the international players sitting in the Security Council - including outgoing US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice - were surely aware that Mr Qurei's statement sounded the death knell for the Annapolis negotiations and signalled the end of any hope for a successful outcome of those negotiations.

Yet instead of condemning Mr Qurei's statement - or demanding its retraction - Ms. Rice had the effrontery to tell the Security Council that Israeli and Palestinian negotiators, "had made the choice to defeat an ideology of hatred with one of hope".

The only conclusion that one can draw from the Security Council's extraordinary conduct in totally ignoring Mr Qurei's statement is its unwillingness to face up to the fact that Annapolis is finished, President Bush's dream has turned into a nightmare and the Quartet's strategy in backing President Bush's Roadmap has exposed it as totally impotent in having any influence to determine the allocation of sovereignty in the West Bank between Jews and Arabs.

The Security Council, by its silence, has offered encouragement to those like Mr Qurei who for the last 130 years have opposed Jews having any right to live in their biblical homeland - the West Bank - or indeed within any part of the 23 per cent of Palestine designated by the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine and article 80 of the United Nations Charter as the site for the reconstitution of the Jewish National Home.

In doing nothing to disavow the Arabs from pursuing their long standing enmity and racial hatred of the Jews, the Security Council has ignored a whole body of international law on the issue and given comfort to the long held Arab view that everything done since the creation of the Mandate in 1920 is deemed null and void.

"Jews out" is indeed a call that is still alive and kicking in the Middle East.

This racist fantasyland has been given a considerable boost by the Security Council's flirtation with, and failure to unequivocally repudiate, Mr Qurei's remarks when endorsing Resolution 1850. United Nations efforts to eliminate all forms of racism worldwide have been seriously compromised.

RIP President Bush's Performance-Based Roadmap. RIP Annapolis. RIP the United Nations.