In recognizing Palestinian statehood, Canada has betrayed Israel - opinion

One reads with amazement and disbelief the latest statement issued by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney after his July 30 discussion two weeks ago with the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas.

Or perhaps could this be a message intended by Carney and his colleagues to assuage and mollify the uncontrollable pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel lobby both in Ottawa as well as in the streets of Toronto, Montreal, and other cities in Canada that is slowly but surely undermining the integrity and internal security of Canadian society?

The message relayed by Carney to Abbas is devoid of any vestige of reality. This, for the following reasons:

This “two-state vision” may indeed have been an honorable vision of hope enunciated many years ago in 2002 by former US president George W. Bush and reiterated ad infinitum since then and up to the present day, as a meaningless form of lingua franca by international leaders and UN resolutions.

However, this two-state vision has never been accepted by the Palestinians and Israelis themselves. To the contrary, the Palestinians have refused to recognize Israel’s very right to exist independently, and the issue of Palestinian statehood remains, pursuant to the agreed-upon and still valid 1993-5 Oslo Accords, an open negotiating issue between Israel and the Palestinian leadership.

Therefore, in paying lip-service to the ‘two-state vision’ Carney is rehashing nothing more than wishful thinking without understanding what practicalities lie behind that expression.

He is surely well advised by his advisers and by Canada’s world-renowned international lawyers that there exists no such entity as a “State of Palestine.”

By the same token, he is presumably advised that UN General Assembly resolutions recognizing anything have no legally binding status and are nothing more than the political viewpoints of those states supporting them.

As such, in voicing his intention to recognize a non-existent state of Palestine, Carney is merely pulling the wool over the eyes of those wishing to believe what he is saying.

• In predicating his intention to recognize a “State of Palestine” on “the Palestinian Authority’s commitment to much-needed reforms, including… commitments to fundamentally reform its governance, to hold general elections in 2026 in which Hamas can play no part, and to demilitarize the Palestinian state,” the prime minister is surely fully aware of the fact that Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas made the same commitments in the Oslo Accords, commitments that to this day have not been realized and have been continuously violated, together with most of the Palestinian commitments in those accords.

In welcoming Abbas’s “renewed commitment to these reforms,” Carney is knowingly deceiving both himself and the Canadian people by paying valueless lip service to empty commitments that no leader of the Palestinian Authority is able and genuinely willing to implement.

Joining such regional allies as France, Russia, the UK, Norway, Ireland, Spain, and others – in ganging-up against Israel in the United Nations and unilaterally recognizing a non-existent Palestinian state – undermines the Oslo Accords – and the Palestinian commitment to negotiated resolution of the conflict. It also undermines the obligation of the very states that signed the Oslo Accords as witnesses to maintain the integrity of the accords.

As such, the prime minister’s promise to Mahmoud Abbas is the very antithesis of promoting peace. It encourages the Hamas terrorist leadership and their PA partners in their stubborn refusal to free the Israeli hostages, and in their determination to continue their terror campaign against the Jewish state. And it encourages the other states in the UN, as well as the international public, in their continued hostility to Israel and their overall antisemitism.

With this irresponsible statement, as well as the policies that it describes, Carney has blatantly abandoned Canada’s traditional support for Israel – a support that has consistently been based on a solid commonality of political, security, economic, and cultural interests between Ottawa and Jerusalem.

Indeed, former prime minister Stephen Harper declared in 2014 in the Knesset that Canada will always have Israel’s back: “Through fire and water, Canada will stand with you.”

Regrettably, and to the contrary, Canada under Prime Minister Carney – and his predecessor Justin Trudeau – has stabbed Israel in its back and continues to do so.

One may ask if this ill-advised policy really serves the genuine interests of Canada, its society, and people. This begs the question of whether the damage that has been caused will ever be repaired.