Palestinian statehood is a big deal. You can’t have the much-vaunted “two-state solution” without it, and Israel and its US lobby have fought hard against it ever happening, maybe most famously pressuring Barack Obama into scuttling a 2011 bid at the United Nations. Just last year, the US government again singularly vetoed an attempt to bring the issue to a vote at the UN General Assembly — meaning, to have all the world’s states vote to decide the matter, something the Palestinians would have easily won given that 140 of the UN’s 193 member countries already recognize Palestine.
So a recent push by largely pro-Israel governments to recognize Palestinian statehood — launched in the wake of global outrage at the horrific famine Israel has engineered in Gaza — should be good news. France, Canada, and the United Kingdom have all announced that they will recognize Palestinian statehood in September, albeit with conditions. Saudi Arabia, which has made normalizing relations with Israel a cornerstone of its current foreign policy, is leading a push to do so as we speak, which the entire Arab League, the European Union, and seventeen other countries have endorsed. In the United States, whose halls of power have tended to be exceptionally hostile to Palestinians on both sides of the aisle, more than a dozen House Democrats so far have signed on to a letter urging the Donald Trump administration to follow suit.
Why, then, does the Palestinian statehood push feel so empty?
Maybe it’s the fact that, as welcome and necessary as recognizing that statehood is, it is not even close to the most urgent priority right now. Gaza is experiencing a famine where a staggering 100 percent of its remaining population has food insecurity and nearly a quarter of its prewar population is suffering its most severe, catastrophic form, because the Israeli government is deliberately blocking aid from coming in and has almost completely destroyed the infrastructure and natural ecosystem the territory could use to feed itself. For most Gazans, the only way to get food is from Israeli aid deliveries, from either sporadic airdrops that sometimes kill and injure the people they land on or the handful of on-the-ground aid sites that have become daily, sadistic shooting galleries.
Even if aid and medical supplies are flooded into Gaza tomorrow — which they will not be — thousands, maybe tens of thousands of children would still be set to die slow, painful, gruesome deaths from starvation in the coming weeks and months, what the president of Refugees International warned is coming “mass-scale starvation mortality” that will be irreversible.
Meanwhile, Israel is on the brink of annexing the territories that are supposed to form a future Palestinian state. Its parliament just overwhelmingly voted to approve the annexation of the West Bank, which would merely formalize what is basically already the reality on the ground in the territory. At the same time, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is already working on taking control of Gaza, possibly with full-blown annexation in mind, including militarily occupying the roughly quarter of the territory Israel doesn’t already control in what one official called a “full conquest,” a plan that will involve eventually expelling its remaining Palestinian population to a group of random countries.
All the while, the Israeli military has continued to slaughter Palestinians by the dozens every single day in bombings and shootings. Over the past two weeks, from July 24 to August 6 — which has not been an exceptional period for this war — they’ve killed a daily average of seventy Palestinians a day. Incredibly, more than half of these deaths have been people at or heading to aid sites to get food, who have been killed at a rate of thirty-eight per day. Already the total number of people Israel has killed while they were trying to get aid has exceeded the initial death toll on October 7 that has justified all this (and which later turned out to be an overestimate).
It feels, frankly, more than a little absurd that in the face of all this, the solution of the world’s most powerful is to threaten a mostly symbolic measure that will come a whole month from now.
In rough descending order of urgency, the priority right now is to force Israel to open the border to a deluge of aid and humanitarian workers, stop it from advancing its plans of reoccupying all of Gaza, make it permanently end the one-sided war it refuses to stop waging there, and then begin the long, monumentally expensive effort to clear out the at least thirty-nine million metric tons of poisonous debris left over and rebuild Gaza.
These are all basic preconditions for a future Palestinian state to become a practical reality. And you could, and probably should, add to this list the rollback of all the legal and practical steps the Israeli government has taken over the last two years alone to make one an impossibility, which would include the mass expulsion of illegal settlers from the West Bank and the withdrawal of Israeli troops from both territories.
Recognizing a Palestinian state — with the full knowledge that such a move will be vetoed by the Trump administration anyway — doesn’t do any of this: it won’t let aid in, it won’t end the war, and it won’t put a stop to Netanyahu’s efforts to permanently militarily occupy Gaza and get rid of the Palestinians still alive there. We can say that for sure, because in the time since all these announcements by Western leaders, Israel’s behavior hasn’t changed at all.
The fact that the move is being proposed for September makes the whole thing even more of a cruel joke, giving Netanyahu and the Israeli military at least one extra month to keep starving children to death, slaughtering civilians with impunity, and annexing Palestinian territory. The final absurdity on top of it all is that these same countries continue to ship to Israel the military aid that is fundamental to its ability to keep the war going and going.
A generous read is that recognizing Palestinian statehood will be so anathema to Israeli leadership that they will do anything they can to head it off, including ending the genocide and the annexation of Palestinian territories. After all, they wouldn’t want to end up in a situation where continuing with their plans will put them in direct, brazen defiance of the entirety of global opinion and the United Nations.
If this is the thinking, it is naive to the point of delusion.
In these last two years alone, Israel has set a record by killing hundreds of UN personnel, deliberately and repeatedly attacked UN peacekeepers, attacked and destroyed UN schools, plotted to successfully undermine the UN’s agency for Palestinian refugees, which it officially designated a terrorist organization, and ritually accused the United Nations of antisemitism and otherwise verbally attacked it. That’s when it wasn’t threatening International Criminal Court prosecutors as part of a campaign of intimidation to make criminal charges against its officials disappear.
Does this sound like a country that cares about global opinion or what the UN thinks?
It’s hard not to be cynical and suspect that this sudden push for Palestinian statehood is just a new, creative way for world leaders to keep avoiding doing anything to stop Israel’s mass murder. Public opinion across the world has firmly shifted against what Israel is doing, and there is a growing understanding of just how bad this is all going to look in a few years time, let alone decades down the track.
Saying you tried to recognize Palestinian statehood lets you claim you did something boldly pro-Palestinian for the sake of public opinion and posterity, while safe in the knowledge it will lead to no actual restraint on Israel. And having done so, you avoid taking the actual necessary but politically fraught steps to end this horror show, namely an arms embargo or economic and diplomatic sanctions.
Think that’s too harsh? Just take a look at what the British government, now enthusiastic and all for backing a Palestinian state, said when it had a chance to vote for it just one year ago but declined: that “recognition of Palestinian statehood should not come at the start of a new process” but that rather “we must start with fixing the immediate crisis in Gaza.” Of course, now its position is the opposite: rather than starting with fixing the immediate crisis in Gaza, the world should recognize Palestinian statehood first instead. A month from now, when the vote comes up, it would not be remotely surprising if they pull this game of musical chairs again.
It’s great that the world’s leaders suddenly want to make an independent Palestinian state a reality. But their refusal to actually restrain Israel is making it a moot point. They are on track to recognize a Palestinian state whose entire territory will be owned entirely by another country, and which will be free of any living Palestinians.
Great Job Branko Marcetic & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.
