This week’s UN conference on the Question of Palestine, co-chaired by France and Saudi Arabia, has been denounced by Israel and the USA but has been gladly received by the PLO and Mahmood Abbas. Many are concerned that the conference could divert attention away from the most urgent issue – how to stop the blockade and the genocide in Gaza.
The United Nations High-Level Conference on the “Peaceful Resolution of the Palestinian Question and the Implementation of the Two-State Solution,” promoted by Paris and Riyad to speed up the political recomposition of the so-called Israeli-Palestinian Question, officially got underway this week.
The proposed “peaceful resolution” has some downside. It includes significant infringement on the Palestinian right to self determination. In addition to proposing a 2 state solution, it proposes:
- Western involvement in the reform of the Palestinian National Authority led by Mahmood Abbas
- the demilitarization of Hamas and its exclusion from Palestinian political life
- normalisation of diplomatic relations between Israel and the Arab states.
Concerns abound
But more immediately, the conference risks diverting attention away from Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
“The international community must force Israel to end its crimes – genocide, apartheid and illegal occupation – unconditionally and immediately – before addressing questions of statehood and governance for Palestine,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of DAWN. “The Palestinian people are the only ones who have the right to determine what their future governance looks like, and that must happen democratically, not imposed by fiat.”
DAWN submitted a 6 page brief to France and Saudia Arabia before the conference began outlining their concerns.
Amnesty International voiced the same concerns.
According to the general secretary of Amnesty international, Agnès Callamard, the top priority must be to take concrete action to end the ongoing genocide perpetrated by Israel against the Palestinians, as well as to end “its illegal military occupation of Palestinian territory, which has fueled mass violations against Palestinians, and enabled and consolidated Israel’s cruel apartheid system”.
Without an “immediate and lasting ceasefire” and an end to the “illegal blockade” imposed by Tel Aviv on the Strip, Callamard notes, “any process aimed at addressing the future of the Palestinians lacks credibility“.
President Macron declared last week that he would formally announce France’s recognition of Palestine at the UN General Assembly’s annual meeting in September despite fierce opposition from Israel and the USA. Only a handful of (smaller) European states have followed suit. France has yet to impose any sanctions on Israel.
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Canada Talks Israel/Palestine 
“According to the general secretary of Amnesty international, Agnès Callamard, the top priority must be to take concrete action to end the ongoing genocide perpetrated by Israel against the Palestinians, as well as to end “its illegal military occupation of Palestinian territory, which has fueled mass violations against Palestinians, and enabled and consolidated Israel’s cruel apartheid system”.
Agreed. But how can that happen without “significant infringement on the Palestinian right to self determination” and without “a 2 state solution …” If the Palestinians could defeat Israel without foreign involvement, they could self-determine all they like. I believe most recent polls have shown a plurality of Palestinians would prefer a single non-democratic state — just like Jewish Israelis.
I wrote 20 years ago that Palestinians and Israelis would not be able to “work it out” on their own. Foreign armies will be required to protect Palestinians from Israel and Jewish Israelis from Palestinians. To speak of self-determination in the middle of a slaughter plays in the hands of Israeli fascists and their Hamas allies.
The chimera of a two state solution has never been a path to a peaceful solution to the problems of mandate Palestine; from the start it has been a barrier to peace and a distraction from the real problems of the area. Neither side accepted the original partition proposal. Israel took what was offered to them but almost immediately set out to get more. The Arabs recognized the proposal as biased, deeply unfair and unrealistic. In the more than 75 years that have passed since partition was disingenuously “accepted” by the Israelis, trying to implement the partition has been a source of conflict that kept the parties from figuring out how they could share the land that had been the British mandate.
All parties believe that they should be allowed to live anywhere in the mandate territory. That was the case before the mandate and is still true today. The only real solution is to give both sides what they want, i.e. to leave the area undivided.
Today, the area is already effectively a single state. A single heavily armed government can, and does, send its forces anywhere within that state, arrest and hold hostage anyone in that state, seize property anywhere in that state, and build ethnically biased settlements anywhere in that state.. The problem is that that that government is completely undemocratic. Many residents are completely disenfranchised and even the small number of Arabs that can vote have no effective representation.
The solution is not to try to find a fair way to partition the area but to fix the government and allow all residents to have effective representation. The solution is not to entrench ethnic discrimination but to forbid it.
The so-called urgent task of ending the genocide has been denied, ignored, evaded, deferred, delayed for over a year.________
The very premise that this UN conference must not divert attention feels suspiciously disingenuous. Feels like an ISISraeli psy-op _______”
In the context of the ENTIRE G7 being active complicit in the genocide and in the indefensible aiding and abetting of the NatZios – duplicitously raising the spectre that a UN conference on a “2-State Solution” _could_ _possibly_ divert attention is practically a thought crime._______
Specific to Canada.. while disingenuously crying crocodile tears about the ongoing mass murder of Palestinians in public, Canadian Ministers and Apparatchiks and Bureaucrats are actively colluding and conspiring with the rogue pariah State to supply it with military equipment and other resources._______
That single bit of hypocrisy in the immediate summary irrevocable dismissal of every single miscreant whose fingerprints are anywhere on any of the paperwork .The entirety of NatZionYahoo and the IDF and Likud and the rogue pariah State of ISISrael are pathological liars with no honour or moral ethical intellectual integrity or even basic human decency._______
That is the core essence of the problems today.There are undoubtedly dark forces engaged in ensuring that this conference is critically disabled from the start… ______
Just as the IPCC and the Climate COPs have been contaminated through the active engagement of the PetroRacket and statist actors – rendering the general thrust impotent and performative.