Recognising Palestine shows ‘desperate weakness of judgment and purpose’

The movement initiated by France and slavishly followed by the United Kingdom and Canada to recognise a Palestinian state reveals the almost desperate weakness of judgment and purpose of those countries. Palestine’s borders remain to be defined but are broadly conceived as including Gaza and the current limits of the West Bank, though large numbers of Palestinians live in neighbouring states, especially Jordan. The Palestinians could have had a Palestinian state at any time in the last 25 years. The problem has been that the Palestinian authorities, whether they represent the opinions of those they claim to be serving or not, and there is no reliable way of determining this, have not accepted Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state in any borders. Keir Starmer’s more distinguished antecedents, David Lloyd George and Arthur Balfour, created this problem in 1917  when the Turks still ruled the Levant, and they bountifully promised what was called Palestine simultaneously to the Jews and the Arabs: They sold the same real estate to two different parties at once.

For a tediously long period, what was incorrectly named the “peace process” consisted of “land for peace,” which in fact was giving back to the Arabs land they had lost in wars that they had initiated against Israel and in which they had been defeated by Israel, in exchange for cease-fires rather than peace, and the cease-fires were normally violated by the Arabs within a few weeks. Unable to defeat the Israelis in mortal combat with the support of the surrounding Arab powers, the Palestinian Arabs touted that their higher birth rate than the Jews would ultimately enable them to dominate the region demographically. Israel’s response to this and to the refusal of the so-called Palestinians to negotiate in good faith toward a genuine solution has been to encroach on Palestinian land through settlements and, as might be imagined, the settlers tend to be the most tenacious and belligerent advocates of the largest possible Israel. In conditions of such abrasive hostility, provocations tend to be reciprocated and to escalate.

For the first 25 years of Israel’s existence starting in 1948, the Arab powers, under the guidance of Egyptian President Nasser, deliberately kept the Palestinians in camps and inflamed their sense of deprivation and treated their cause as an affront to all of Islam, not because they had any affection for the Palestinians, whom they generally regarded as being commercial sharpeners like the Jews and Lebanese Christians, but to distract the Arab masses from the misgovernment almost all of them were receiving. Nasser’s successor, President Anwar Sadat, successfully crossed the Suez Canal and broke the Bar Lev Line in the Yom Kippur War of 1973. President Nixon, as he effectively delivered Israel a new air force in the midst of the war, intervened to dissuade Golda Meir’s government from surrounding the Egyptian division in Sinai,  enabling Sadat to negotiate an honourable peace that comported no humiliation for Egypt and from that point began the effort at Arab-Israeli rapprochement.

A durable settlement between Egypt and Israel was followed by a similar agreement with Jordan and eventually with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. As the Arabs’ ancient foes, the Iranians (Persians), and Turks, the Europeans having slammed the door of Europe in Turkey’s face, began to encroach upon the Arabs, the principal Arab powers recognised the advantages of composing their differences with Israel. It was presumably to interrupt this process that Iran unleashed its terrorist proxies, Hamas and eventually Hezbollah and the Houthis in Yemen, against Israel starting on October 7, 2023 with the Hamas invasion of Israel and massacre of over a thousand Israelis, largely women and children and the elderly, and the taking of approximately 250 hostages.

This was intended, and received, as an act of war; Israel announced it was at war, formed a war coalition government and has occupied all of Gaza, killed approximately 80 per cent of the trained Hamas terrorists, responded to Hezbollah attacks by substantially destroying the terrorist and war-making capability of that organisation, to the point where it could no longer prop up the Alawite Assad regime in Syria, and it collapsed, causing the Iranians to be expelled from that country and the influence of the Russians to be drastically reduced in Syria. And when Iran appeared to be on the verge of developing and deploying nuclear weapons, which it had frequently threatened to hurl at Israel, the Israelis severely reduced Iran’s military capabilities and, in accordance with his long-standing pledge not to permit a nuclear-armed Iran, President Trump, after a lengthy effort at a negotiated arrangement, eliminated that capability. These events have been a bone-crushing defeat for Islamic extremism. And not one plausible word of lamentation is being uttered by anybody in sorrow at the destruction of Iran’s status as a nuclear power, which the signatories of Obama’s feeble nuclear agreement with Iran ten years ago accepted. And while a torrent of rhetorical tears substantially greater than the diminutive Jordan River has flowed over the fate of Gaza civilians, there have been no official lamentations about the culling of the ranks of Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists.

Urban counter-terrorism always has relatively heavy collateral damage especially when, as with Hamas, schools, hospitals, and houses of worship are used for human shields hiding the terrorists. But Israel’s ratio in this has been amongst the lightest level of civilian casualties ever recorded. The Hamas practice of stealing the food that is imported into Gaza for civilians caused the mistaken initiative by Israel of reducing the food supply, which might have been effective within Gaza but has been an international public relations disaster. This is the pretext invoked by the British, French and Canadians in threatening to recognise as the government of Palestine the geriatric claque of terrorist embezzlers calling themselves the Palestinian Authority and representing nobody, on promises to which no credence can be attached, that they will clean up their government, hold free elections, and transform themselves into a progressive and compassionate and peace-loving administration, for none of which they have any precedent at all.

Allegations of genocide against Israel are a blood libel. There can be no peace until Israel’s ostensibly Palestinian neighbours are prepared to accept the existence of Israel as a Jewish state, the basis upon which it was founded by the United Nations. The final gambit of the Hamas terrorists is to exploit Israel’s susceptibility to make sacrifices for its hostages; peace will only come when Hamas has been completely exterminated as a terrorist organisation. If Israel completes that task, everyone except the disgraced and thoroughly humiliated medieval despotism in Teheran will be grateful for it. Macron, Starmer and Carney should be ashamed of this pathetic yet sinister gesture.