Recognizing 'Palestine' means denying reality.
The Jews agreed to a Palestinian state in 1947. The Arabs didn't because that meant agreeing to a Jewish state in the Jews' indigenous homeland. And much of the West still punishes the Jews.
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This is a guest essay by Daniel Clarke-Serret, author of “Exodus: The Quest for Freedom.”
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
Earlier this week at the United Nations General Assembly in New York, the governments of Britain, Australia, Canada, Belgium, Portugal, Luxembourg, Malta, San Marino, and Andorra recognized a “State of Palestine.”
To use British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s favorite adjective, this was an “appalling” decision on a moral, practical, and philosophical basis.
These governments seem to believe that their recognition policy is an innovation, that this is the first time that an Arab state has been recognized in the Holy Land. In this, they are sadly mistaken. All the way back in 1947, the United Nations recognized the partition of the land into two states, a Jewish and Arab one. Right from the beginning, two states, within secure borders, living side by side in peace, was envisaged as a just solution.
This never came to pass and the reason can be simply stated: The Jewish Zionists recognized partition, the international community recognized partition, and the Arabs rejected it.
It is here that we see the problem with this entire conflict. It isn’t a question of recognition by Israel or recognition by the international community. It is recognition by the Arabs of “Palestine” themselves. In the words of Ernest Bevin, the British Foreign Secretary in 1947: “For the Jews, the essential point of principle is the creation of a sovereign, Jewish state. For the Arabs, the essential point of principle is to resist to the last the establishment of Jewish sovereignty in any part of Palestine.”
All these European governments have succeeded in doing is returning the clock back to 1947. Like in that year, acceptance of Palestinian rejectionism and the placement of the entire burden of responsibility upon the Jews, has become international policy. Once more, the Palestinian people are allowed to choose conquering, terrorist, rejectionist governments without consequence. Once more, a Palestinian government may sanction murder, rape, kidnapping, and destruction in the full knowledge that they will never be held to account.
The Palestinian polity, supported by leftists in the Western world and hateful rejectionists throughout the Arab world, now realize that it’s impossible for them to lose. No matter how egregious their policies, no matter how immoral their conduct, they will always be supported as a faux-oppressed people.
If the Palestinians wish to have their own state, they need merely click their fingers, book a flight to the White House, and sign the relevant papers. The Jews have been waiting since 1947. Britain and the world have been waiting likewise. That they languish in tents amongst the rubble of their own murderous stupidity is their responsibility and their responsibility alone. It is they who have chosen never to come to terms, and we wait for the governments of the West to recognize this basic fact.
The idea that Palestinians have an inalienable right to statehood is false. In John Locke’s memorable formulation, no government is legitimate unless it protects the inalienable rights of its individual citizens. Not merely its Sunni Muslim citizens, but those of other indigenous faiths and creeds. Yet, like the governments of Iraq, Libya, and the other Arab miscreants, “Palestine” seeks a nation without a single Jew, all the while reducing its Christian inhabitants by the year.
The internationally recognized leader of the Palestinian Authority is a weak-man dictator who has never felt it necessary to submit himself to re-election. The likely winners of any poll would be Hamas or an organization with precisely the same ideology under a different name. Such a government would be undemocratic, homophobic, sexist, racist, and a stain on all the values that we hold dear. Individual rights would be trampled upon with abandon. Under Lockean principles of Life and Liberty, no realistic government of “Palestine” would be legitimate. As such, subjects of the Crown in Britain, Canada, and Australia may not bury their principles on the pyre of tyranny.
The Commonwealth governments are entirely aware that the state they are recognizing is fictitious; that it has no borders, currency, capital, tax-raising powers, or legitimate government. It is not committed to living in peace with the one sole minority state in the region. This is not speculation; it is proven fact.
The Palestinians were given a probationary period to form a state in Gaza since 2005, when Israel unilaterally withdrew from the territory. The Palestinians there not only failed, but they lost the moral right to govern themselves in the near future. Their elected government siphoned aid into terrorism and built terrorist infrastructure. They used their civilian population as human shields on a grand scale. They desecrated mosques, schools, and hospitals by converting them into weapon dumps.
Where Winston Churchill protected his children through evacuation and his adults through the repurposing of underground metro stations, the elected Gazan authority keeps its children in situ and reserves its tunnels for terrorist fighters and starving hostages. We have seen a Palestinian state in action. We, the subjects of the Crown, utterly deplore it.
Meanwhile, across the Middle East, we see a nation that absolutely does deserve recognition: Kurdistan, a Muslim country with a developing democracy, where women serve equally in the army and economic prosperity is national policy. Kurdistan is a country which has used its limited self- rule within Northern Iraq and Syria to create the best political proto-state it possibly can. It was the brave soldiers of this nation that were instrumental in fighting back the barbarism of the Islamic State. They share our values. They are Muslims that share our values. But we have abandoned them.
Kurdistan was promised statehood all the way back in the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres, yet despite the United Kingdom recognizing their sovereignty in 1927, Keir Starmer and his fellow Commonwealth leaders have nothing to say about our one true Muslim friend in the Middle East. Unlike the “Palestinians,” then known merely as Arabs, who rejected the UN partition plan, started a war, and brought about their own displacement through attacking their Jewish neighbours, the Kurds faced true ethnic cleansing and genocide.
While Palestinians chose, or were sometimes forced, to move a whole 10 kilometres across the Green Line1 due to their own rejectionist stupidity, the entire Jewish population of the Middle East faced total ethnic cleansing and the Young Turk leaders deported the Kurds from their ancestral lands (just as they are doing once more today in the northern Syrian region of Afrin). By the end of World War I, up to 700,000 Kurds had been forcibly displaced and in an unspoken of genocide, almost half of the displaced were murdered.
The end of World War II saw an enormous population displacement and almost unthinkable levels of death in the former British Raj. Long-settled ethnic Germans were cleansed from their former lands in Eastern Europe. Jews were emptied out of the Middle East in their hundreds of thousands. Of these we hear no calls for restitution or historic justice.
Despite the unbelievable suffering of the Kurdish people, this indomitable population moved on from its grief and established political self-government within the unjust bounds of geopolitics. But of the Kurds, we hear no calls for restitution or historic justice.
Yet, of the Arabs of “Palestine,” we hear incessant references to historical wrongdoing and the moral need for a “Palestinian state.” We hear declarations on the recognition of “Palestine” which are presented as questions of moral principle. What baloney! What historical ignorance! Where the Jews, the Kurds, the Indians, the Pakistanis, and (perhaps?) the Germans have true claims for restitution, the Palestinians caused their own suffering through their own rejection of a previous recognition of “Palestine.”
And, despite their incessant violence, education for hatred, and never-ending search for war, most Palestinians (unlike the aforementioned groups) still live in their ancestral land of the British Mandate and most Palestinians still reject their own state — at least if the necessary precondition is living with the Jews.
It is difficult to understand any moral claim for a Palestinian state until the Palestinians themselves recognize a Palestinian state, peacefully living side-by-side with Israel. Yet none of our leaders demand it of them. They don’t even demand the unconditional release of the hostages as a precondition. French President Emmanuel Macron purely said this week that France will only open an embassy to a Palestinian state when all the hostages being held by Hamas are released.
The Palestinians have two choices: accept living in a demilitarized state committed to peace with Israel, or become citizens of Jordan and Egypt, restoring the status quo ante between 1948 and 1967. No sane Israeli government — no sane Western Government — can accept a Hamas-style Gaza in the midst of the West Bank. As Jordanian and Egyptian citizens, living in a land under Israeli military control, the Palestinians can at least get that which the Germans, the Indians, and the Pakistanis were never granted. Though highly undeserved, they will at least be given the protection of continuing to live in the land of their forefathers.
I have recognized “Palestine” since before I was born. I recognized it in 1947. Yet the Palestinians rejected it. So the Palestinians are rightfully facing the consequences. Meanwhile, I recognize the State of Kurdistan. When will Britain, Canada, Australia, and the moralisers of the West join me?
The term “the green line” refer to the 1949 Armistice Line in Israel that served as a de facto border before the 1967 Six-Day War.
Thank you for this, especially for detailing Kurdish history of the past century, which seems an apt but overlooked (obviously: no Jews - no news!) comparison to “Palestine”.
Too late. We Israelis are no longer interested. Move to Jordan orr Egypt or Europe but Judea, Samaria and Gaza are now mine.