Groupthink and the Palestinian Bid for Statehood

On September 12 2011, there was a vote on the issue of Palestinian Statehood in the UN. If this had succeeded a brand new state of Palestine would have been created. Yet there were many obstacles blocking the path towards statehood. The most obvious were Israel and the United States. While these objections were already predicted yet there was a surprising pair of nations who agreed to vote for the Palestine state, Russia and China.

The idea for a Palestinian state has been an issue since the creation of the Israeli state in 1948, and the following Israeli-Arab Wars which caused a refugee crisis in some of the following states and leaving the Palestinians without a state. In the following decades a large Palestinian community remained in the Gaza Strip and parts of Israel. Yet at the same time there were large groups of them in the neighboring states, such as Lebanon, Jordan and the southern parts of Syria.

In the Gaza Strip the conditions were horrible, with health issues, sanitation and just plain safety becoming a problem. The Refuges were living in retched situations; they had barely any money no property and unemployment had sky rocketed due to the economic situations and a rapidly increasing population. This wasn’t made any better by the terrorist groups creating chaos and causing retribution by Israel for its attacks on them, which has resulted in the current blockade which is prevented a lot of humanitarian supplies from reaching the city.

The Palestinians situations in the neighboring countries aren’t any better. Within the country of Lebanon the government doesn’t want to accept them as citizen for various reasons, both socially and economically. The same has been going on in Israel too, with new buildings taking over the original Palestinian homes with compensation being rare for them. These along with other events have further increased their desire for an independent state.

In the recent month or two the Palestinian Authority has recently decided to press for a U.N vote to ask for a creation of their state. Mahmoud Abbas announced this to the U.N on Sept. 16 event though he knew that this would provoke a strong reaction from the United States and Israel . As the idea progressed forward my states gave support the new Palestinian State. The Palestinians believed that the idea would definitely get pass the general assembly. But the greatest problem would be the Security Council.

The U.N works in that the General Assembly is where people can voice issues, bring up events and propose certain ideas. While at this level most events can be brought up to accord, a lot of major actions cannot be brought into play. This is where the Palestinians gained tried to gain an international basis of support and bring it up to higher levels. After this is the Security-Council where a large amount of actions can be brought into play, which includes: Deploy economic sanctions against a country or group to stop aggressive tendencies, take military action, and most important to this case accept new members for the U.N.

The U.N Security Council, is made up of 15 members, (10 non-permanent and 5 permanent). The 5 permanent members are China, France, Russian Federation, Great Britain and The United States, and the non-permanent members vary. These powers within the U.N will vote on the most major of issues, and must come to an agreement about because each of the countries has a powerful veto. The Veto is special in this case in that if one and just one veto’s the new idea it will not pass at all, so that means they must all come to an agreement.

In the case of the Palestinian bid for Statehood, they didn’t have much problems with most of the powers, with most of them giving their support for the idea of a new state. One of the most surprising of these was India, who has had a lot of mutual agreement with Israel. Yet at the same time it seemed impossible due to the United States and its unwavering support with Israel, and the rivalries present in the world, since sometimes in history rival nations will vote on something another way because their rival voted in one direction.

As the debates progressed, an interesting thing happened two states: not on the best of relations happened to agree with each other and supported a new Palestinian State. The states are Russia and China who both are powerful permanent United Nations. These powers are usually not on the best of terms and as a result usually do not agree with each other. Yet in this they did, why did they do it? One of the reasons I think is because they both had a reason to gain because of this. Since they know that the U.S is staunch supporter of Israel and will probably veto the bill. They realize if they support the Palestinians they can place a lot of political pressure on the U.S, because it is the only one really placing a lot of pressure upon the negotiations and they wont lose anything if they say yes, but the U.S can have problems either way.

Situations like these can easily be the result of groupthink, just because somebody or something doesn’t want to be the odd one out. They are afraid of the consequences, and this can easily affect rational decisions. And in the case of the Palestinian Vote two rivals grouped together as a part of group think.