France’s President Emmanuel Macron is leading several important democratic nations to recognize Palestinian statehood next month at the meeting of the UN General Assembly. The significant nations are the UK, Canada, and Australia. It is being regarded as a merely symbolic gesture since the Palestinians do not have a state or land they can call their own. In the Six-Day War of 1967 against neighboring Arab nations, Israel took possession of the West Bank and Gaza Strip that where mostly Palestinians had lived and therefore claimed as their land. Most Palestinians have adhered to the so-called “traditional two-state solution” for resolved the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to result in a Palestinian state in the two separated territories of the West Bank and Gaza.
Over 150 Nations to Recognize a Palestinian State
Nations began to declare their recognition of an un-birthed Palestinian state as far back as 1988. It is now 147 nations out of the 193 total UN membership. But the largest, Western, democratic nations have refrained from doing so until now. They have claimed such a declaration should be reserved only for a peace process that is close to a settlement of the conflict. But the problem with this argument is that the peace process for resolving this conflict has been dead for about ten years. Moreover, throughout this entire century, whatever coalition government Israel mustered was opposed to there ever being a Palestinian state.
Thus, Israel’s Netanyahu administration now arguing that such recognition of Palestinian statehood fuels antisemitism and rewards Palestinian opposition to Israel rings hollow since Israel has for a long time been against the peace process and there being a Palestinian state. As for the U.S. Trump administration, it has sided strongly with Israel and will not attend next month’s UN meeting because of this anticipated declaration. I regard that as a shameful act by the U.S., which is by far the largest supplier of military arms to Israel and has given $3 billion or more per year in foreign aid to Israel since the 1960s.
Macron’s rebuttal to Netanyahu’s argument is that further recognition of a Palestinian state will bolster the Palestinian Authority, which governs Palestinians in the West Bank, and pressure Hamas, which governs the Gaza Strip, into ending the Gaza War and disarming. Plus, Arab nations are supporting this France-led declaration.
Will Macron Recognize Gaza as Palestine?
Macron said this week, “We must guarantee the disarmament of Hamas, secure and reconstruct Gaza,” which Israel has so thoroughly destroyed during this nearly two-year old Gaza War. Macron added, “Finally, we must establish the state of Palestine.”
The context in which Macron said this leads one to think that he meant to reconstruct Gaza and establish it as the State of Palestine without hinging such action on including the West Bank as part of this Palestinian state. That is what I have been claiming for decades should happen and imply in my book will happen. Palestinian Is Coming: The Revival of Ancient Philistia (1990) could become prescient since I predict therein, on the basis of my interpretations of several Bible prophecies, that a Palestinian state will be established in the coastal plain as a very expanded Gaza Strip, as the image of my book’s front cover shows, and that Israel will annex all of the West Bank.
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