Eleven more countries have just recognised a sovereign state of Palestine in a desperate attempt to prevent Israel completing the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people and salvage the diplomatic goal of a two-state solution.
They include Australia, Britain and Canada and five EU countries, chief among them France.
Israel and the US threatened retaliation and condemned the wave of recognitions as a symbolic and “anti-Semitic” gesture that “rewarded terror”.
“The time has come,” French president Emmanuel Macron repeated a dozen times at the United Nations on Monday night. The Trump administration violated the 1947 Headquarters Agreement by refusing to allow Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority (PA), to travel to New York.
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“The worst can happen,” Macron warned, listing present dangers: the continued slaughter of Palestinians as Israeli forces take over Gaza City; the expulsion of the population of Gaza towards Egypt; Israeli annexation of the West Bank; the deaths of the last 20 of 251 Israeli hostages taken by Hamas, and Israel’s construction of the E1 or “Doomsday” settlement which will sever the West Bank in two, cutting any future Palestinian state from its intended capital, East Jerusalem.
Symbols matter. Before this week, only two of five permanent members of the Security Council recognised Palestine. The US is now the only holdout. Palestine is recognised by 158 of the UN’s 193 member states, only six short of the 164 states which recognise Israel.
It is essential to ensure this week’s events are not merely symbolic.
“Friends of Palestine appreciate the recognition, but they want to make sure it’s not a distraction from the most urgent priority which is ending the war in Gaza,” said John Lyndon, the Irishman who heads the Alliance for Middle East Peace (Allmep), a coalition of more than 170 Israeli and Palestinian civil society organisations. “Every other priority is secondary to that.”
Allmep hosted 400 Israelis and Palestinians in Paris last June to draw up a policy document entitled the Paris Call. Many of the ideas generated by Israeli and Palestinian civil society were included in the New York Declaration, the 42-point peace plan announced in July as a precursor to this week’s wave of recognitions.
[ France joins western allies in recognising Palestinian stateOpens in new window ]
As Macron noted on Monday night, it is not enough to defeat Hamas militarily. “It must be defeated on the political level for it to be truly dismantled.” The peace plan would ban and disarm Hamas and exclude it from general elections, which would be held within a year.
But that cannot happen without a ceasefire. The US has vetoed six UN Security Council resolutions calling for a ceasefire.
Macron was, until this year, considered the most pro-Israeli French president. But he has shown true leadership with his eleventh-hour attempt to save Palestine. The turning point was apparently his visit to a refugee camp at Al-Arish, in the Egyptian Sinai, last April. He could not forget the look in the eyes of the women and children he met there, he said.
France is the only EU member of the Security Council, the EU’s only nuclear power and the European country with the largest Jewish and Muslim population.
[ What is the aim of recognising a Palestinian state?Opens in new window ]
Macron’s partnership with Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman helped him win the support of the Gulf sheikhdoms and persuaded Qatar and Turkey – states which supported Hamas in the past – to abandon the extremist movement. The signatories of the New York declaration unanimously condemned the massacre by Hamas of 1,224 Israeli men, women and children on October 7th, 2023, as well as Israel’s killing of about 65,000 Gazan Palestinians.
If Israel’s far-right government and the Trump administration prevail, Israel may annex the West Bank, drive Palestinians out of Gaza and transform it into the “riviera” envisaged by Donald Trump.
On September 17th, Israel’s extremist finance minister Bezalel Smotrich said he anticipates a real estate “bonanza” in Gaza. “We have done the demolition phase, which is always the first phase of urban renewal,” he said. There is a detailed plan for the “renewal” of Gaza on Trump’s desk, Smotrich added.
Prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu insists that there will be no Palestinian state. In his “super Sparta” speech of September 16th, Netanyahu tried to sell Israelis a premonition of a semi-autarkic state that will live by the sword, in economic decline and in isolation from the world.
In ancient times, a few hundred Spartans fought the much more powerful Persian army. “The problem is that Sparta was annihilated,” columnist Ben Caspit wrote in Maariv newspaper.
Israel’s wanton use of force has endangered its association agreement with the EU, the Abraham Accords, which normalised relations with several Arab countries, and the 1978 Camp David accords which made peace between Israel and Egypt.
Soon after Israel attacked Qatar on September 9th, Saudi Arabia concluded a defence pact with nuclear-armed Pakistan. Egypt is massing troops to prevent Palestinian refugees pouring across its border with Gaza.
[ Gaza crisis dominates as world leaders meetOpens in new window ]
The Middle East now faces dystopian and utopian possibilities: the far-right’s vision of a Jewish people living in Eretz Israel void of Palestinians but permanently at war, or the flawed but infinitely preferable two-state solution proposed by France and Saudi Arabia and endorsed by most of the world’s nations.
“The dystopian vision should not be on the table because it is illegal. It’s immoral. It’s a war crime,” says John Lyndon. “The consequences of doing something like that should be so vast for Israel that it’s simply not available.”
The ultimate outcome hangs on the whim of the only person who could, should he choose to, wield authority over Netanyahu and his extremist allies: the erratic, volatile and staunchly pro-Israel president of the United States. That is not a reassuring prospect.
