UN votes for a “two-state” conference in 2025, but Israelis no longer have patience for the world’s dangerous “solution.”
A screen shows the vote results from the resolution "Peaceful settlement of the question of Palestine" at the General Assembly 46th plenary meeting at UN headquarters in New York, December 3, 2024.
A Palestinian state wasn’t viable 18 months ago. But the nations of the world think that now, in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 Hamas invasion, it is time to push for the creation of the world’s 22nd Arab state, despite evidence that it will pose an existential threat to the world’s only Jewish state.
Calls for the urgent, immediate, and irreversible move toward a “two-state solution” have only increased since that Black Shabbat of October 7, 2023. And they reached fever-pitch this past week. Perhaps Israel’s antagonists in the international community realize that it’s now or never, before Donald Trump resumes the US presidency.
Two-state conference
The UN General Assembly on Tuesday voted by a 157-8 margin, with seven abstentions, in favor of holding a conference in June 2025 aimed at adopting “an action-oriented outcome document” to “urgently chart an irreversible pathway towards the peaceful settlement” of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the implementation of a Palestinian state.
Argentina, Hungary, Israel, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, Papua New Guinea and the United States voted no. Cameroon, Czechia, Ecuador, Georgia, Paraguay, Ukraine and Uruguay abstained.
The same resolution condemned Israeli “settler” activity, including on the eastern side of Jerusalem, and insisted that everything beyond the 1949 armistice line be earmarked for a future Palestinian state.
Bias laid bare
Israeli envoys slammed the fact that the UN resolution paid little or no attention to the Hamas massacre and that it had made plain the true intentions of the Palestinians, or at least of the majority that supports Hamas and its actions.
If the UN were “truly interested in bringing solutions to the war-torn region, they would abandon their obsessive efforts to delegitimize Israel” and instead focus on removing bad actors like Hamas, said Reut Shapir Ben-Naftaly, the Israeli UN mission’s political coordinator.
Norway divests from Israel
In a related move, Norway this week divested from the Israeli telecommunications company Bezeq for providing services to Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria.
The Government Pension Fund of Norway is also considering selling its shares in Israeli companies active in the disputed territories and assisting in Jerusalem’s war against Hamas in Gaza.
The Norwegian sovereign wealth fund’s Council on Ethics accused Bezeq of “helping to facilitate the maintenance and expansion of [Jewish] settlements,” which it called “illegal under international law.”
In September, Norwegian Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide defended his government’s decision to unilaterally recognize a Palestinian state.
Israelis now oppose a Palestinian state
Prior to October 7, 2023, a consistent, if slim majority of Israelis supported the eventual two-state outcome to the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But after that unprecedented assault and what is revealed about the Palestinians, a firm majority of Israelis recognize a Palestinian state as an existential threat.
A poll conducted in January of this year showed that 74% of all Israelis oppose the creation of a Palestinian state, and 76% support encouraging the Palestinian Arabs to voluntarily leave this land. Even among the left-leaning Yesh Atid party of former Prime Minister Yair Lapid, 61% of voters said they would like to see the Palestinians go away.
In March of this year, Israeli Minister of Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer insisted that “anybody talking about a Palestinian state right now is living on another planet because it will be the greatest reward for terrorism.”
His remarks came in response to US President Joe Biden stating that the “only solution” to the Mideast conflict was a Palestinian state.
Dermer explained the fallacy of saying such things at this time: “Anybody who cares about peace should not want a single Palestinian in five years, 10 years, 15 years or 20 years to look back on Oct. 7 and say that event—the mass murder of Jews—catapulted the Palestinian national movement forward. You cannot let the Palestinians believe that terror—that a pogrom like Oct. 7—advanced the Palestinian cause in any way.”
A month later, the US vetoed a Palestinian attempt to gain full membership at the United Nations, with the American deputy ambassador, Robert Wood, noting that at present Hamas would exert serious influence over a Palestinian state.
Joining the ranks of those trying to talk some sense to Western leaders was famed novelist Salman Rushdie, who stressed in an interview with Germany’s Bild newspaper: “[I]f there were a Palestinian state now, it would be run by Hamas and we would have a Taliban-like state. A satellite state of Iran. Is this what the progressive movements of the Western left want to create?”
https://www.deccanchronicle.com/world/un-general-assembly-pushes-for-palestinian-state-1843840
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