Instead of recognising ‘Palestine’, countries should withdraw recognition of Israel

n 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.

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Denying Palestinian independence
Soon after the British occupied Palestine in late 1917, the Palestinians demanded – and were denied – their independence. But it was not until 1937 that a proposal explicitly denying the Palestinians their own state was advanced.

The British Peel Commission recommended the partition of Palestine between the Jewish colonists and the then-young state of Transjordan.

Headed by Lord Robert Peel, the commission further recommended the expulsion of a quarter of a million Palestinians from the area designated as the Jewish settler-colonial state and the outright confiscation of their property. The remainder of Palestine and the Palestinians would be annexed to Transjordan.

The Peel Report was shelved due to outrage among the Palestinians and Arab countries.

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.

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.

The post Instead of recognising ‘Palestine’, countries should withdraw recognition of Israel appeared first on The Muslim News.