Brussels – Diplomacy tries to make a move in favor of Palestine. With over a month’s delay, the conference to promote the recognition of the Palestinian state, co-chaired by France and Saudi Arabia, begins today at the UN headquarters, amid divisions in the international community. In the meantime, Tel Aviv has momentarily yielded to pressure from its partners and is dropping some humanitarian aid into Gaza.
The conference had been announced over two months ago, at the end of May, and was to take place in mid-June. However, then Israel attacked Iran and, thus,
it was postponed to an undefined date – until today (July 28), when 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.
The meeting, which runs until Wednesday (July 30) at the Glass Palace in New York, also has other key objectives. The reform of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA), the administration led by Mahmoud Abbas, who, operating as a surrogate for the future Palestinian state government, manages what remains of the occupied Palestinian territories. Also on the table is the demilitarization of Hamas and its exclusion from the political life of the Palestinian nation that will be established, and, finally, the normalization of diplomatic relations between Israel and the Arab states in the region.
French president Emmanuel Macron (photo: Stephane De Sakutin/Afp)
On Thursday (24 July), with a move that shocked the Western political world, French President Emmanuel Macron announced that in September, France would formally recognize the State of Palestine, the first G7 country to do so since the Palestinian leadership-in-exile proclaimed the birth of the State in 1988. According to the French foreign minister, Joel-Noël Barrot, “the prospect of a Palestinian state has never been so threatened, or so necessary.”
“The conference offers a unique opportunity to transform international law and international consensus into an operational plan and to demonstrate the determination to end the occupation and conflict once and for all, for the benefit of all peoples,” said Palestinian Ambassador to the UN Riyad Mansour, calling for “courage” from all the delegations (around a hundred) participating.
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“. “States must be unequivocal: Israel is not above the law and accountability is a priority,” she concludes.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu (photo: Menahem Kahana/Afp)
Tel Aviv and its iron allies did not take the Franco-Saudi initiative well. For Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (on whom hangs an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court), the Paris move “rewards terrorism.” Donald Trump branded Macron and the decision as “irrelevant.”
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz also said it was a bad idea. At the same time, the British Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, came under fire from members of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition (including his own Labour MPs) for not following Macron’s example. Giorgia Meloni deploys Italy’s usual balancing act, arguing that recognizing a Palestinian state that does not exist on the map is “counterproductive.”
Currently, 147 UN member states recognize Palestine, out of a total of 193 countries. Among them are 11 EU members (Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Cyprus, Hungary, Ireland, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, and Sweden), but none of the G7 nations. A future Palestinian state should arise, theoretically, on the territories of Gaza and the West Bank (including East Jerusalem), all occupied illegally by Israel since the 1967 Six-Day War.
The hope, at least of the Elysée Palace, is that Macron’s push may induce other countries to recognize Palestine, increasing the diplomatic pressure for an end to the war – virtually the bloodiest the world has known in decades – and for relief for the civilian population of the Palestinian enclave.
Displaced Palestinians crowd to receive food from aid workers at the Nuseirat refugee camp in the Gaza Strip (photo: Eyad Baba/Afp)
Not only with bombs (half of which are made in Europe), but also by weaponizing hunger. Tel Aviv is artificially starving hundreds of thousands of human beings, denying them the humanitarian aid that is being stockpiled at the borders of the Strip – so much so that tons of it is literally being thrown away, as it has spoiled, – using a deliberate strategy reminiscent of the Holodomor, the genocide of Ukrainians perpetrated by the Soviet leadership in 1932-33.
A growing number of countries, including the traditional European allies, are insisting that the Jewish State stop the ongoing slaughter, open the crossings, and let aid into Gaza. Over the weekend, food supplies were dropped from the air, while the Netanyahu government (which blames the UN for the delays in aid delivery) agreed to “tactical pauses” of about ten hours a day, “until further notice,” and the opening of humanitarian corridors to three destinations in the Strip.
However, it is a drop in the ocean, which experts say will not be enough to rescue civilians from malnutrition. Meanwhile, there is no end to the war crimes of the Tel Aviv army, which every day continues to murder dozens of Palestinians during the distribution of food in Gaza and continues to escalate settler violence in the West Bank.
English version by the Translation Service of Withub