French President Emmanuel Macron and UK Prime Minister Keith Starmer have recently come out on behalf of their countries recognizing a state of Palestine. They are among the most recent heads of state to do so.
Late in May 2024, Spain, Ireland, and Norway formally recognized a Palestinian state in “an attempt to refocus attention on efforts to find a political solution to the war in the Middle East.”
Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada has plans to recognize a Palestinian state because “the expansion of Israeli settlements” annoys him. Yet his decision, too, depends on “democratic reforms,” including the Palestinian Authority holding elections next year without Hamas.
Macron declared, though, that we will have to wait until September’s United Nations Security Council meeting, when France will be “true to its historic commitment to a just and lasting peace in the Middle East.” Likewise, Starmer also clarified that his decision would be procrastinated until that gathering. Moreover, the British leader set conditions.
His country’s recognition, which he defined “as a contribution to a proper peace process at the moment of maximum impact for the two-state solution,” actually depends on whether or not Israel’s government takes substantive steps “to end the appalling situation in Gaza.”
Moreover, Israel has to refuse a ceasefire and commit itself to a “long-term sustainable peace reviving the prospect of a two-state solution” and the United Nations must be allowed to restart aid supplies while, furthermore, Israel needs clarify that there will be no annexation of the West Bank. All that sounds a bit awkward.
If Israel does, in the next month, agree to a ceasefire, there’ll be no British support for a state? If the increased transferring of humanitarian aid continues, a decision on statehood will have to wait? Is that any way to run international affairs?
Starmer's destablizing move
Starmer's announcement, in particular, was criticized as a move that would destabilize international law.
Lawyers responded to his words by pointing out that the 1933 Montevideo Convention set the criteria for the recognition of a state under international law.
They include a defined territory, a permanent population, an effective government, and the capacity to enter into relations with other states. An Arab state of “Palestine,” to understate today’s reality, is far from fulfilling those terms.
Former British prime minister Boris Johnson said at the Ketagalan Forum, a security conference in Taipei on August 5, that Taiwan has a “far more robust” claim to statehood than Palestine. He explained that the Taiwanese “actually have a recognized government. They actually have boundaries that they control. They actually have a proper democratic system – none of which you could say, with all due respect, about Palestine.” In short, Taiwan’s claims are “far more robust.”
Back in February of this year, at the World Governments Summit, Johnson did say on the one hand that while Palestinians “deserve to have the state they’ve been promised for decades,” on the other hand, “You cannot go on with a situation in which you have Gaza ruled by a government that wants to exterminate Israel.”
Renouncing Israel's extermination
Logically, there is to be another set of conditions that the people who are referred to as “Palestinians” must uphold. One of them is the renouncement of any steps that would lead to Israel’s extermination.
I am sure that Johnson knows that Hamas pursues that very goal. Moreover, anyone reviewing the statements of official of the Palestinian National Authority in Ramallah and its media would most probably come to the conclusion that that body should not be rewarded with statehood.
Johnson did add that “the Palestinian people do deserve to have the state that they’ve been promised for decades.”
It was at that point that I asked myself, “but why?”
If the former British prime minister and others point to the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan as the document that contains that “promise,” then the question that must be asked is: Why did they refuse it then?
In addition, since they rejected that proposal, as they had a different partition plan a decade earlier and every other diplomatic move until 1993, perhaps it would be a judicious strategy to find out the roots of those rejections and refusals prior to recognizing a state that is simply intended to be an instrument of Israel’s destruction.
Extensive ignorance
In her report on Johnson’s words in Taiwan, Allegra Mendelson, The Telegraph’s Asia correspondent, displayed a major problem outsiders possess when they report and comment on Israel: extensive ignorance. She informed her readers that “Palestine is a state under occupation.”
To put it generously and plainly, the young lady doesn’t have a full command of the subject upon which she writes.
Another example of lack of logic was provided by US former secretary of state Anthony Blinken in a Wall Street Journal op-ed this week. A Palestinian state would be a “rebuke to Hamas,” he wrote.
Such recognition, Blinken said, should also be “conditions-based.” After all, “No one should expect Israel to accept a Palestinian state that is led by Hamas or other terrorists [or] that is militarized,” he said.
Does not Blinken know that Hamas, as it has done in the past, will surely take over that “state” from the PA, and that terror will return? Does he truly believe that an independent Palestine “will be focused on building a state, not destroying Israel.” And what will Israel have to do then? Overrun and occupy the long-desired “free Palestine”?
For many years, any discussion of whether the Arabs residing in the territory of what could be defined as “historic Palestine” are an actual “people” that deserved a state was simply not permitted – you’d be denounced as a racist.
Yet, today, everybody discusses whether Jews are a nation and deserving of statehood. Zionism is condemned for what it isn’t (colonialist, racist, etc.), and it is to be done away with.
Foremost among those who say so, unfortunately, are Jews with liberal and progressive values.
In any case, it’s about time Jews deserve peace and security as well as honest treatment, whether or not “Palestinians” deserve a state.
The writer is a researcher, analyst, and commentator on political, cultural, and media issues.