Last week, the United Nations General Assembly, with a heavy majority, once again endorsed a two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. 142 countries voted in favor of a resolution presented by Saudi Arabia and France, 10 countries including Israel and the United States voted against it, while 12 countries abstained from voting. Just twenty-four hours before the approval of this resolution, the Israeli Prime Minister, speaking at the United Nations, declared the establishment of a Palestinian state to be impossible.
The “New York Declaration,” presented by France and Saudi Arabia, proposed practical measures for a “solid, sustainable peace” for a two-state solution. These measures include disarming Hamas and excluding it from any administration in Gaza, as well as the establishment of relations between Israel and Arab countries. Over the past few months, this resolution has gained the support of several European countries.
The backdrop of this UN resolution and the current session is the ongoing genocide in Gaza, now in its second year, which has claimed over 64,000 lives. It includes the destruction of Gaza and a famine caused by the blockade of water and food for its inhabitants. Furthermore, Israel’s aggression, aimed at the complete destruction of Palestine, has now expanded to engulf Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and is increasingly involving Iran and Qatar.
The reality is that all those governments that have so far stood with Israel in this destruction have now begun to raise slogans of Palestinian “freedom.” The ostensible goal of this policy is “just and sustainable peace in the Middle East.” However, its real objective is to ensure Israel’s identity as a “sovereign Jewish state” while shielding it from the consequences of its own policies, thereby maintaining the privileged position of Jewish settlers and their descendants over the native Palestinians.
It has been almost two years of this massacre, yet Western governments still refuse to recognize it as “genocide.” The continuous destruction and famine, which constitute crimes against humanity happening in front of the whole world, are also invisible to them. Even declaring all these crimes as violations of international law seems difficult for many. There are no signs of any change in their attitude on this matter. They are knee-deep in this bloody game and cannot even consider a path of return, as doing so would expose their complicity in all these crimes by supplying arms and providing diplomatic protection to Israel.
When Western powers talk about recognizing a “mythical Palestinian state,” the actual root of the conflict—the issue of Jewish settlements in Palestinian territories—is pushed into the background. This is because the question of a Palestinian state is intrinsically linked to the Western powers’ support for the racist Israeli state. A key component of this policy is to strengthen the current compliant Palestinian Authority and grant it the status of a state under the Israeli settler state. This serves to divert attention from critical issues like the expansion of Jewish settlements and the terrorization of the local population in East Jerusalem (Al-Quds) and the West Bank.
The current international effort does not include stopping the theft of Palestinian land, halting Jewish settlements, or preventing the eviction of local populations. Instead, all focus is on recognizing a “mythical” state.
This effort occurring this month is not new; a look at history reveals many such attempts.
On September 22, 1948, an “All-Palestine Government” was established in Gaza, which claimed authority over the entire historic Palestine (Mandatory Palestine). But in reality, following Israeli settlement activities and Israel’s capture of over half the area allotted to Palestinians under the UN Partition Plan, this government’s jurisdiction remained limited to a part of Gaza. Six out of the seven states of the Arab League recognized it, but Jordan, which controlled the central and eastern part of Palestine (an area it named the “West Bank” after annexing it), refused to recognize this government. Western countries accepted Jordan’s claim to the West Bank but did not accept its claim to East Jerusalem. Caught between Western opposition and Jordan’s claim, this Palestinian state gradually became irrelevant and finally dissolved in 1953.
Then, in 1988, emboldened by the first Intifada, the exiled PLO parliament in Algiers unilaterally declared independence. But, in a twist of fate, when the PLO signed the Oslo Accords in 1993, the price paid was the crushing of that very Intifada wave. Although many countries were quick to recognize this “non-existent” Palestinian state, the United States outright refused. It’s worth noting that back in 1948, it was the US that, by twisting the arms of many countries at the last minute in the UN General Assembly, got Resolution 181 passed, which proposed the partition of Palestine into two states. According to this proposal, the larger part of Palestine was given to the minority Jewish settler community, and the US promptly recognized Israel in May 1948.
Under the Oslo Accords of 1993, a Palestinian Authority was established. The five-year interim period, during which negotiations on fundamental issues—full independence, border determination, the status of Jerusalem, and the return of Palestinian refugees—were supposed to take place, ended in May 1999 without any progress. Negotiations on the “Final Status” never even began. Palestinian President Yasser Arafat even threatened to declare independence for a Palestinian state comprising the full West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, but he was forced to retract that threat. Delving into details would involve naming the US and many behind-the-scenes actors, so we will not elaborate further.
Subsequent attempts to get the Palestinian Authority recognized by the United Nations were met with US vetoes and threats to cut off funding to the UN. In November 2011, UNESCO recognized Palestine as a member state, but the US stopped its funding to the organization. Although the Palestinian Authority itself never declared a Palestinian state, when the General Assembly granted Palestine the status of a “non-member observer state” with a heavy majority in its November 2012 resolution, the Palestinian Authority officially began referring to itself as the “State of Palestine” and upgraded its mission offices in Washington to the status of an Embassy. Shortly after coming to power in 2018, US President Donald Trump closed this embassy.
The fact is that since 1993, the Palestinian Authority has acted as a tool of the Israeli settler state and is now at the forefront of getting a mythical Palestinian state recognized as a reward for services rendered in maintaining the Israeli occupation and controlling its own people.
This year too, the number of countries recognizing this “mythical Palestinian state” seems to be increasing somewhat, particularly those countries that did not oppose Israeli war crimes, notably France, Canada, Australia, Britain, Portugal, Belgium, and Malta. No change is yet visible in the policy of Israel’s greatest supporter, the United States. In this regard, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, opposing this progress, argued that recognizing a Palestinian state before it is established on the ground is a “counterproductive” act. This argument seems to have some weight.
Although history has some examples where independence was declared before a country was fully formed, those circumstances do not apply to the current situation. In the present circumstances, European countries are talking about recognizing the independence of a state that does not include those struggling against colonial occupation but rather rewards those who facilitate the Israeli occupation and settler colonialism.
The meeting in the General Assembly in New York, by recognizing a mythical Palestinian state, effectively appears to provide a guarantee for Israel’s right to exist as a supremacist Jewish state. The European and Arab governments driving this campaign believe that “mythical freedom” will not only be sufficient for Palestinian aspirations but will also prove helpful in stopping the struggle for liberation—an imaginary state that poses no threat to Israeli Jewish supremacy. For Israel and the US, even a “symbolic freedom” is unacceptable, even if the Palestinian Authority itself offers it.
There is a humane alternative for the governments behind the push for an imaginary Palestinian state: they could refuse to accept Israel as a Jewish-supremacist state and impose sanctions on it until it abolishes its racist laws and grants equal rights to all its citizens without distinction based on religion. In this scenario, the need for a struggle for a separate Palestinian state would cease to exist. Of course, the ongoing human massacre must be stopped immediately first.
Short of these measures, this conference is nothing but a waste of time and resources, and its participants should be considered complicit in the Israeli genocide against the Palestinians.
