Palestinian Statehood Declarations Are an Insult to Palestinians

We’re confronted with the curious condition in which, following the recognition of Palestine as a state by a handful of Western capitals, almost no one is talking about the reaction to it among the Palestinian people. Indeed, Palestinians themselves are little more than an afterthought in the debate over their own political future. This was all about Israel.

The governments of Australia, Canada, Portugal, and the U.K., with France likely to follow their lead soon enough, talk about extending statehood to Palestine as a means of either punishing Israel or coercing it. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer hopes that his government’s maneuver will force Jerusalem to recommit to the “two-state” solution. “The current Israeli government is working methodically to prevent the prospect of a Palestinian state from ever being established,” Canada’s Mark Carney said in a bitter address that marked a supposedly celebratory day. The gambit has so far “not curbed Israel’s military campaign against Hamas in Gaza,” the New York Times admitted, a tacit confession that shackling Israel was the whole point of this enterprise.

It’s not entirely clear why these left-of-center governments thought their maneuver would have any effect on Israel’s military posture. Their recognition of Palestine is a contradictory and ill-considered policy on its merits.

The “terror group, Hamas, must release all hostages immediately,” British Undersecretary of State Mike Tapp wrote on the day his government rewarded Palestine with recognition as a state. That was always an option available to Hamas, and it is one the terrorist organization has largely spent nearly 24 months avoiding. What is the rationale that would lead Hamas to conclude that the jig is up, its terrorism has backfired, and it must surrender its last sources of leverage over Israel? Their resistance on the battlefield might be futile, but it has objectively produced dividends on the global diplomatic stage. From Hamas’s perspective, terrorism works.

Indeed, the incredible foolishness of this initiative is crystallized in the fact that the British government is preparing to impose sanctions on the entity it just recognized because, in contravention of all the principles to which the civilized world is beholden, it turns out that the Palestinian “state” is run by terrorists.

“For the first time in its history,” France’s i24 News reported, the U.K.’s “Labour Party will take concrete action against Hamas.” The report frames the Labour government’s gesture as one that is designed to “minimize the backlash” against the Starmer government among the vast majority of Britons for whom Hamas is not popular. If London were consistent, it would extend those sanctions to the whole of the Palestinian Authority. After all, in 2006, the last time elections to the Palestinian Legislative Council — a legislative body that is recognized only in the West Bank — took place, a majority of its seats went to Hamas’s political party.

In illustration of London’s cowardice, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has repaid Starmer’s generosity by demanding no less than £2 trillion in “reparations in accordance with international law.” According to the Daily Mail’s reporting, some “international law experts have described £2 trillion, roughly the size of Britain’s total economy, as a ‘good place to start.’”

Canada, too, insists that the Palestinian Authority must undergo “much-needed reforms.” It should “fundamentally reform its governance,” “hold general elections” next year, and “demilitarize the Palestinian state.” Indeed, “Hamas can play no part” in any future Palestinian government. What mechanisms does Ottawa propose to realize these objectives now that it has recognized the statehood of an entity that has met none of them? Indeed, Israel is engaged in the demilitarization of one of the Palestinian territories and is doing its utmost to expel Hamas from power, not that Canada has exactly been supportive of those efforts.

In advance of Australia’s capitulation to the demands put to it by proponents of Palestinian nationalism, Canberra also reaffirmed its commitment to sanctioning some of the region’s most active terrorist groups, including Hamas, Hezbollah, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. “We continue to work with the international community to isolate Hamas and end its grip on Gaza,” said Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong. “We have made clear that there can be no role for Hamas in a Palestinian state.”

You most certainly have not made that clear. By recognizing a Palestinian legal entity that has not expelled Hamas from its ranks, you’ve ratified the legitimacy of that legal entity as it is presently constituted. Indeed, Australia, Canada, and much of Western Europe have managed only to convince sentient observers that their commitment to constraining Israel is far deeper than their rote and perfunctory condemnations of the Palestinian regime.

But then, this whole scheme is hopelessly complicated by the reality of “Palestine” as it is presently constituted. None of the governments that recognized it as a state observed the fact that we are not talking about one Palestinian entity but two. The Gaza Strip and the West Bank are distinct and noncontiguous geographic territories. They are governed by mutually antagonistic sects that are not above going to war with one another when they get the chance. They have discrete foreign policies and divergent relations with regional actors. They have unique economies and divergent social contracts. They are, at most, proto-statelets that are wholly dependent on outside assistance for survival.

Nothing about this status quo suggests that the Palestinian territories are ripe for statehood. In fact, granting that status now functionally consigns the Palestinian people to subjugation at the hands of the authoritarian and terroristic cabals under which they’ve languished for so long. It seems that no one gave much thought to the Palestinian people in all this. No, Israel was the target of this maneuver. In that sense, this long-sought dispensation to the Palestinian nationalist cause is an insult to the Palestinians themselves. It’s not about them, and it never was. It’s all and only about the Jews and their borders.

Noah Rothman is a senior writer at National Review. He is the author of The Rise of the New Puritans: Fighting Back against Progressives’ War on Fun and Unjust: Social Justice and the Unmaking of America.

Reprinted with permission from National Review by Noah Rothman.

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.