Palestinian State Recognition – The Unfolding Disaster

The British House of Commons in session

In a spectacular display of ignorance, immorality and malice in early October, Sweden’s new prime minister announced that his government plans to extend recognition to a Palestinian state. Then, on October 13^th, a group of backbench British MPs succeeded in obtaining a symbolic, non-binding vote in the British House of Commons to the effect “that the Government should recognize the state of Palestine alongside the state of Israel as a contribution towards supporting a negotiated two-state solution.”

This action shows exactly the same European blindness to events unfolding in the Middle East that it showed when Europe recognized the right to self-determination of the Sudetenland Germans of Czechoslovakia in 1938 in an attempt to appease Nazi Germany. Unfortunately, similar positions to the British and the Swedes on Palestinian statehood are expected to take place shortly in Ireland, Spain, Denmark, France and Finland. History, in short, is set to repeat itself.

These nations fail to understand that by recognizing Palestine as a state, they are not facilitating the cause of peace, but facilitating Israel’s destruction. Their actions give political legitimacy to the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Hamas “unity government” regardless of its culpability for attacks against innocent Israelis as seen most recently in this summer’s war in Gaza. They also fail to take into account the Palestinians’…

• unwillingness to recognize Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people (which would mean acknowledgment of Israel’s character and permanence which they are not prepared to do);
• denying that Israel has any historical attachment to the Land of Israel;
• wallowing in a culture of hatred reinforced by the founding documents of Fatah and Hamas that proclaim their intention to annihilate Israel;
• maintaining their unconditional and non-negotiable position on an absolute “right of return” to Israel of millions of Palestinian “refugees” (which is a euphemism to annihilate the Jewish state);
• continuing incitement against Jews and Israelis in their schools, newspapers, mosques, media, summer camps, TV programs and educational system;
• using their daily newspapers and TV programs to demonize Jews by promoting medieval libels claiming thatJews use the blood of Palestinian children as an ingredient in baking matzah for Passover; that  The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (written by the Russian secret police in 1903 to promote hatred of Jews by claiming a Jewish conspiracy to rule the world) is “an authentic Jewish work”, that Jews injected poison into Palestinian water sources as a “war strategy” during the recent Gaza war, and that “Zionist policies” seek to cause drug addiction among Palestinian youth;
• continuing to portray Palestine on their maps as including all of Israel;
• justifying their murderous acts of violence across Israel as a “legitimate form of resistance”;
• naming tournaments, marketplaces and streets after Palestinian “heroic martyrs” whose claim to fame is that they murdered Jewish “occupiers” of Palestine;
• firing thousands of rockets into Israeli population centers;
• building terrorist tunnels into Israel for the sole purpose of kidnapping and murdering Israeli civilians;
• referring to Jews as “the descendants of apes and pigs” and, of late, “a herd of cattle”;
• lionizing hit-and-run Palestinian baby-killers;
• glorifying Nazism and Adolf Hitler;
• counseling violence against Jews (“settlers”) who visit the Temple Mount in Jerusalem (in effect, calling for an ethnic and religious apartheid against Jews on the Jewish holy site);
• providing payments to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers);
• attempting to bring war crimes charges against Israeli officers and officialsat the International Criminal Court;
• insisting that the UN Security Council impose a deadline for Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank;
• playing the victim on the international stage as opposed to taking responsibility for their own failures, and
• promoting the apartheid, racist idea that any future Palestinian state “will not see the presence of a single Israeli – civilian or soldier (read “Jew”) on our lands” – as Mahmoud Abbas stated in 2010.

To this day, the Palestinians have not presented a single complete official agreement that they would be willing to accept – an agreement that would signal the end of the conflict for the Palestinians. Only Israel and the Americans have been asked to present possible agreements. The only conclusion to be drawn from this is that there is no serious evidence that the Palestinian leadership – be it Fatah or Hamas or both – want a state of their own that will live in peace with Israel as a Jewish state. They see Israel as a satellite of Western civilization, of which Jewish culture is a central axis – and there is ample evidence that they will treat anything they get as a staging ground for further attacks on Israel until it has been annihilated or subjugated to Islamic rule.

Formal recognition of a Palestinian state (should it ever come to pass) would therefore be a disaster for many reasons:

1. The Palestinians, despite numerous historical opportunities, have consistently refused to accept a Palestinian state unless it includes the state of Israel. That is, their negotiation stance is contingent not on compromise but on armed struggle until victory. The true goal of the two-state principle is the two-stage destruction of Israel.

2. The Palestinians have never been able to set up the infrastructure of a responsible state that would include transparent governance, a fair judicial system and a competent administration. Anything short of this would be a recipe for another failed Arab state.

3. The Oslo treaty is quite clear that resolution of borders and other issues must come through direct negotiations between the parties. The EU’s unilaterally declaring a state effectively destroys the treaty that committed both sides to a negotiated settlement directly between the two parties.

4. It is a certainty that any Palestinian state so created will become a militant jihadist state controlled initially by Hamas and, later, quite possibly by ISIS – that sadistic group of Islamic barbarians who find virtue in beheading, holiness in murder, piety in genocide, and whose concept of paradise welcomes the murderers of infants, children, men, women, scholars and saints. As the 2007 Hamas coup in Gaza showed, and as polls continue to show in the wake of Operation Protective Edge, Hamas would end Fatah control over the West Bank within months. This is what the Swedish and British parliaments have endorsed in the name of a “two-state solution”.

5. With 48 Muslim majority states in the world (including 22 Arab states) – most of them failed states, none of them true Western-style democracies, and most of them belligerent – why on earth would the Europeans want to establish yet another failed Islamist state? Given the current Palestinian leadership, establishing a formal state with all the rights that come with statehood (diplomatic immunity, an army, navy and air force, sovereign control over land, territorial waters and air space; the capacity to enter into treaties and arms agreements with other states and to join specialized UN agencies such as the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), the Law of the Sea Treaty, and the International Criminal Court) would be madness.

6. Forgetting the fact that the Palestinians have been offered (and have declined) a state on numerous occasions over the past eighty years, there are plenty of other ethnic and religious peoples who have a far greater claim to statehood in the world – peoples who maintain their own language, their own religion, and in many respects, their own history – peoples that include the Kurds, Tibetans, Tamils and Chechens. To favor formal statehood to a group that shares the same language and religion as 22 other Arab states sets a dangerous precedent. In fact, senior Palestinian leaders have admitted – openly, consistently and continually – that Palestinians are not, and never have been, a distinct people identifiably different from others in the Arab world. The late Zuheir Mohsin, a senior member of the PLO Executive, in an interview to the Dutch newspaper Trouw said as much: 

“We are only Palestinians for political reasons. There are no differences between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. We are all part of ONE people, the Arab nation… We are ONE people. Only for political reasons do we carefully underwrite our Palestinian identity because it is of national interest for the Arabs to advocate the existence of Palestinians to balance Zionism. Yes, the existence of a separate Palestinian identity exists only for tactical reasons. The establishment of a Palestinian state is a new tool to continue the fight against Israel and for Arab unity. 

7. As ISIS expands its murderous Islamic crusade across Iraq and Syria and threatens Lebanon, Jordan, Yemen, Libya, Saudi Arabia and eventually Israel, Europe and the U.S., Western recognition of another failed state (Palestine) would represent a major victory for radical Islamist forces in the Levant to establish a new base of operations in Palestine that would allow them to use state status, rights and diplomatic immunity to further their global Islamic agenda.

 

8. Israel is the West’s only truly reliable ally in the Middle East. Empowering a jihadist, genocidal Islamic enemy with full state powers on her borders would not only sow the seeds of a new war with a jihadist-controlled Palestine, but would guarantee the collapse of other moderate Arab nations with whom Israel is currently allied in its war against the jihadists.

 

None of those voting for the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel appear to have taken into account any of these critical issues. Consequently, the countries who indicated they are prepared to vote for a Palestinian state as part of a “two-state solution” are not advancing the cause of peace in the Middle East. They are sowing the seeds of a future war.

 

The responsibility for the escalation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict rests with the Palestinians who continue to turn their backs on peace. Palestinian national identity is predicated on winning a zero-sum struggle with Zionism (meaning win or lose – never compromise), not on a vision of a separate state of their own. Both Fatah and Hamas want only a one-state solution – Arab rule from the river to the sea, with the ethnic cleansing of the Jews that would follow. As a result, rather than take the many opportunities offered to them to build a future state for their children, they have refused to relinquish their embrace of a culture of hatred and death. Thus, sensible proposals regarding borders, Jewish communities in the West Bank, sharing water resources and even Jerusalem are rendered irrelevant. For Israel, any two-state solution would conclusively codify another Final Solution – and simultaneously create another jihadist, enemy terrorist state in the Middle East.

 

What Britain, Sweden, France and the other European countries refuse to recognize is that no peace and no two-state solution is possible until Palestinian society ends its zero-sum culture and makes the compromise it has been unwilling to do for nearly a century – to share the land. Even if Israel´s Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu were to agree to a complete cessation of all so-called Jewish “settlement activity,” no quid pro quo of any kind would be forthcoming from any quarter of the Arab/Islamic world. There was none when Israel left southern Lebanon, none when Israel left Gaza, and there will be none if a judenrein (Jew-free) Palestinian jihadist state is established on Israel’s borders. If Western leaders actually want to help, they should use all diplomatic and economic means at their disposal to make it clear to the Palestinians that they will never achieve an independent and sovereign state while they remain set on the destruction of the State of Israel.