ANALYSIS – Outrageous, immoral and stupid. Ireland, Norway and Spain are set to recognize a Palestinian state, breaking from a consensus within Western Europe and the U.S. that statehood should be achieved through negotiations with Israel.
Meanwhile, Israel and the United States have bashed the three countries' announcement.
So, the Hamas Islamist terror group, which has ruled Gaza with an iron fist for almost two decades, commits horrific mass murder, rape and kidnapping against Israelis and these three European Union (EU) member countries announce they will reward it with its own potential state, at its victim's expense.
And how would this so-called Palestinian state even work?
All three EU countries proposing Palestinian recognition are currently led by leftists, or center-left parties, all have strongly criticized Israel's prosecution of the war and the three have historically been strong supporters of the Palestinians.
Because of this, their announcements may not exert much pressure on Israel, one Mideast expert noted. (RELATED: ‘Because It's A War!' Bill Maher Defends Israel Over ‘War Crimes' Charges)
If Germany or France, which are more closely allied with Israel, were to embrace Palestinian statehood, it would carry more weight.
But the declarations by Ireland, Spain and Norway will put pressure on other countries in Europe, including the U.K., France and Germany, to follow them in supporting Palestinian self-determination.
This, as the rogue International Criminal Court (ICC) has just outrageously declared it would be issuing arrest warrants against both Israeli and Hamas leaders for “war crimes,” thus creating a moral equivalency between a democratic country and a savage theocratic terror group. (RELATED: George Clooney's Wife Amal Helped With ICC Arrest Warrants Against Israeli Leaders)
And Germany announced it would arrest Israeli leaders named in an ICC warrant.
More broadly, about 140 of the 193 member-states of the United Nations have recognized Palestinian statehood since 1988, including most of the Global South, Russia, China and India. But only a handful of the 27 European Union members have done so, mostly former communist countries as well as Sweden and Cyprus.
But this doesn't mean much since there are more basic issues to deal with first. For example, the Palestinian Authority (PA), which nominally controls the West Bank, does not satisfy the traditional criteria for statehood, including control over defined territory, a permanent population and an effective government.
The current Israel-Hamas war underscores that the PA does not control the Gaza Strip, Hamas does.
However, Gaza, along with the West Bank, is part of the purported Palestinian state that was designated under the 1993 Oslo Accords. The PA's inability to rein in Hamas and other terror groups violates a fundamental attribute of statehood, which is a monopoly over the use of force. (RELATED: Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas Survives Assassination Attempt)
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that unilaterally recognizing a Palestinian state is “a reward for terrorism.” Worse still, while some Palestinian voices accept two states whose territorial boundaries will be negotiated with Israel, others, like Hamas, declare that all of the land in the area “from the river and the sea” is Palestine.
This effectively eliminates the state of Israel. Can we say genocide?
Note that Israel already gave Gaza de facto independence in 2005 which Hamas promptly took over the next year and for the past 18 years turned the strip into a massive underground fortress and base for terror against Israel.
Most recently, and horrifically, on October 7, 2023.
As The New York Times reported: “Israel Katz, Israel's foreign minister, said he had summoned the ambassadors of Spain, Norway and Ireland for a ‘severe scolding' after their governments decided ‘to award a gold medal to Hamas terrorists.'”
In an online statement on X, Katz said he would show the ambassadors “a video of the brutal and cruel kidnapping of our daughters by Hamas terrorists, to emphasize the distorted decision their governments have made.”
On Wednesday, the Times reported that the Biden administration reiterated its view that Palestinian statehood must come through negotiations with the Israelis.
“The president is a strong supporter of a two-state solution and has been throughout his career,” said a spokeswoman for the National Security Council. “He believes a Palestinian state should be realized through direct negotiations between the parties, not through unilateral recognition.”
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
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