When UN member states recognise a phantasmic Palestinian state, all they
are doing is bolstering Israel's illegality as an institutionally racist state
Joseph Massad
A
Palestinian flag, left, alongside EU and Ukrainian flags outside Leinster House
in Dublin to mark Ireland's recognition of a Palestinian state, 28 May 2024
(Peter Murphy/AFP)
On Tuesday, three additional European
states officially recognised a non-existent Palestinian state. Ireland, Spain, and Norway are the latest to join more than 140 other United Nations members in recognising
this phantom entity.
The
Palestinian Authority, which was set up in 1993 to aid Israel in suppressing Palestinian
resistance to Israeli colonisation and occupation, welcomed the
expansion of this improbable club.
Other
European states like Belgium, Malta,
and Slovenia also threatened to follow suit.
The
Israelis, who have denied Palestinians the right to a state since 1948, reacted
angrily to this largely symbolic move.
However,
as I will show, international recognition of a phantom Palestinian state has
been one of the main ways that UN members insist, in violation of UN
regulations, on recognising Israel's right to remain a Jewish supremacist
racist state.
Denying
Palestinian independence
The Peel Commission recommended the expulsion of a quarter million Palestinians and the outright confiscation of their property
Next,
it was the turn of the UN in 1947 to deny the Palestinians independence in all
of Palestine, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. The international
body rejected the minority report of its UN Special Committee on Palestine
(UNSCOP). It passed a partition resolution to divide the country between the
Jewish colonists and the indigenous Palestinians.
In 1946,
the population of Palestine was just under two million people, at 1,972,000.
Palestinians comprised nearly 70 percent at 1,364,000, while 608,000 Jewish
colonists made up the rest.
The UN Resolution 181, known as the Partition Plan, proposed
two states, each of which would have upheld an indigenous Palestinian majority,
as would Jerusalem, which was supposed to fall under UN jurisdiction.
According to the plan,
the population of the Palestinian state would consist of 818,000 Palestinian
Arabs and less than 10,000 Jewish colonists, one percent of the entire
population. The proposed Jewish state would consist of 499,000 Jewish colonists
and 509,000 Palestinians, whereby the Palestinians would make up 54 percent of
the population.
These figures led the UN to redraw the map and remove the populous city of
Jaffa with its 71,000 Palestinians from the proposed Jewish settler-colonial
state and include it as an enclave in the Palestinian state.
This remapping reduced the number of Palestinians in the Jewish settler-colony
to 438,000 or 46.7 percent of the population. The UN corpus separatum of
Jerusalem, which lay outside the two states, included 105,000 Palestinians and
100,000 Jews.
An illegal act
The
Partition Plan clearly stated that
in either state "no discrimination of any kind shall be made between the
inhabitants on the ground of race, religion, language or sex" and that
"no expropriation of land owned by an Arab in the Jewish State (by a Jew
in the Arab State)…shall be allowed except for public purposes. In all cases of
expropriation, full compensation as fixed by the Supreme Court shall be paid
previous to dispossession".
By the time the Israeli "Declaration of the Establishment of the State of
Israel" was issued on 14 May 1948, the Zionist forces had already expelled about
400,000 Palestinians from their lands, and they would expel another 360,000 in
the following months.
The Zionists realised that the best way to ensure Jewish supremacy in their
state was not only to expel the Palestinians and confiscate their property, but
also to conquer the land of the projected Palestinian state and Jerusalem,
expel their population, and confiscate their lands.
That this was an outright violation of the Partition Plan was recognised by the
UN General Assembly (UNGA) when Israel applied to
become a member in 1949.
The UNGA insisted that to approve Israel's application, Israel would have to abide by its resolutions, including the Partition Plan and the December 1948 UNGA Resolution 194, which demanded that Israel allow the return of the Palestinians it expelled and return their property, withdraw from internationalised West Jerusalem, and declare borders for its new state.
Israel gave assurances that it would adhere to these terms after negotiations
with its neighbours, which it claimed could only proceed after it became a UN
member. The UNGA finally admitted Israel
as a member on 11 May 1949 by a 37-12 vote, adopting UNGA Resolution 273.
Despite the resolution stipulating that
Israel must abide by Resolutions 181 and 194, it has yet to do so.
At the
time, nine countries, including the United Kingdom, abstained.
Soon
after the UN recognised Israel, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion unilaterally
annexed West Jerusalem on 5 December 1949 and declared that Israel was no
longer bound by Resolution 181 as it pertained both to the Palestinian
territories it had conquered and the UN control of West Jerusalem.
The UN General Assembly issued Resolution 303 four
days later, declaring that Jerusalem would be placed under a permanent
international regime. It never was. Israel also began to legislate racist Jewish supremacist laws,
starting in July 1950 with its "law of return" that applied to Jews
anywhere in the world but not to the Palestinians that Israel expelled. Such
laws have multiplied to the tune of more than 65 today.
All of this is to say that the very establishment of Israel remains an illegal
act and in violation of the very UN resolutions that proposed its
establishment. Yet one of the many prevailing ironies of western mainstream
discourse on Israel and the Palestinians is how Israeli and western denial of
the Palestinians' right to their own state is accepted as a legitimate
political position while denying Israel's "right to exist" as a racist
Jewish supremacist state is condemned as "genocidal"
or "antisemitic".
In 1988,
the PLO implicitly recognised the
right of Israel to exist as a Jewish supremacist state when its parliament in
exile declared the "independence" of a Palestinian state in the West
Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. And it would do so explicitly when it signed
the Oslo Accords five years later.
Since
the PLO declaration in 1988, the phantom Palestinian state began to garner
recognition from UN members as it did last week.
But that
state never materialised, and international consensus has emerged recognising
Israel as a racist apartheid state
since 1948 - as attested to by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch,
among others.
Given
the ongoing accusations by the pro-Israel camp, the question that arises in the
matter of state recognition for Israeli Jews and Palestinians is which
position, in fact, upholds racism and which one upholds anti-racism?
Withdrawing recognition
Since
1948, Israel has refused to recognise the right of the Palestinian people to
their own state and did everything it could to prevent its establishment.
Indeed,
this is a position that Israeli leaders continue to uphold. Benjamin
Netanyahu does not tire of repeating his rejection of the
establishment of a Palestinian state, and neither does his defence
minister, Yoav Gallant,
who affirmed that such a state would never be allowed to exist now or under any
future Israeli government.
I have
yet to see any description by any western official or the western press of such
denial of the right of the Palestinian people to exist in their own state as
genocidal or racist.
Israel,
on the other hand, was established on the lands of the Palestinian people in
1948, whether on the territory it was granted by the General Assembly in the
Partition Plan of November 1947 or on half the territory granted to the
Palestinian state that it occupied between May and December 1948.
Yet
those Palestinians who reject Israel's "right to exist" as a Jewish
supremacist state that rules with a battery of racist laws, and demand that a
decolonised democratic state, from the river to the sea, is established in its
stead, are immediately accused of being "genocidal" against the
Jewish people.
Meanwhile,
the only people subjected to genocide in Palestine have been the Palestinians.
In this
vein, it is worth noting that the aptly named Gallant was given his first name,
"Yoav",
by his Polish colonist parents after the Israeli army's "Yoav
Operation" in southern Palestine, in which his father fought during the
1948 Zionist conquest.
During
this operation, the Israelis occupied lands of the projected Palestinian state.
They committed the horrific massacre of al-Dawayima in
which more than 200 Palestinian civilians, including women and children, were
slaughtered.
Gallant's
insistence today on denying the right of the Palestinians to a state is
consistent with his support of Israel's 1948 occupation of their lands during
military operations that his own name perpetuates.
The US
and its European allies have always insisted that Israel's right to be a Jewish
supremacist state is not subject to any negotiation between the Israelis and
the Palestinians, who should only negotiate the possibility of a Palestinian
state on some truncated territory.
Therefore,
the outright racists are those who recognise Israel's right to exist as a
Jewish supremacist state, as they insist that this illegal state should
continue to benefit from its ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people from
1948 onwards and be allowed to maintain its battery of racist laws and
institutions.
The
anti-racists are, in fact, those who support the dismantlement of Israel's
racist structures and laws and advocate for one decolonised state, from the
river to the sea, in which everyone living within it is equal before the law and
does not benefit from any racial, ethnic, or religious privileges.
When UN
member states recognise a phantasmic Palestinian state, all they are doing is
buttressing Israel's illegality as an institutionally racist state. What they
need to do is not recognise a Palestinian state but withdraw their recognition
of Israel. Only that will lead to a decolonised anti-racist and democratic
outcome.
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