OPINION:
French President Emmanuel Macron must have thought he would achieve a place in history and much adulatory coverage by the global media when he announced that France would recognize a Palestinian “state” at the September meeting of the United Nations. His followers — British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney — must have thought the same when they made similar announcements.
However, the likelihood of global media coverage (and making history) for recognition of a Palestinian “state” has been greatly diminished by Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s announcement that Palestinian Authority representatives, including putative PA President Mahmoud Abbas, as well as representatives of the Palestine Liberation Organization, are barred from attending the U.N. session by a denial of their U.S. visas. Any previously issued visas also were canceled.
It is precisely the right thing for Mr. Rubio to have done.
There will be no joint press conferences with the PLO, no big hugs and smiling handshakes. There will be media coverage, but not what the three nations’ leaders expected.
Messrs. Macron, Starmer and Carney were playing to their Muslim populations and the media. Mr. Starmer and Mr. Macron are hugely unpopular at home because of immigration from Muslim countries and because their economies are failing. French Prime Minister Francois Bayrou is expected to lose a vote of confidence Monday, making him France’s second prime minister to be ousted since 2024.
Any dictatorship or thugocracy can join the United Nations, but a line must be drawn between nations that exist (or are fashioned by war) and fictions that are anti-historical.
Recognition of a Palestinian “state” — with no defined territory, laws or borders — is a fiction born in U.N. Resolution 242 in 1967. It called for Israeli withdrawal from land won by Israel in the 1967 war and recognition of the Jewish state by the Arab states. These conditions were further enshrined in President Clinton’s Oslo Accords, which were agreements between the PLO and Israel for peace and the establishment of a Palestinian state.
On three occasions since 2000, under three different prime ministers, Israel has tried to implement the supposed “land for peace” agreements. In 2000, Israel agreed to a plan that would have established a Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. In response, Yasser Arafat, then-chieftain of the Palestinian Authority, launched his “second intifada” (“uprising” in Arabic), which took about 1,000 Israeli lives.
In 2005, Israel dismantled all its settlements in Gaza and pulled back from the territories taken in the 1967 war. Within the next two years, the Palestinians launched a rain of missiles from the Gaza Strip. In 2005, Israel presented Arafat with a plan to give the Palestinians almost all the West Bank and Gaza and a divided Jerusalem to serve as the capital of both nations. Arafat walked away from the negotiations.
The idea of a separate Palestinian state should have died with Hamas’ attacks on Israel in October 2023, but France, Britain and Canada have proposed the formation of just such a “state.” Their endorsement of the idea is a direct support of terrorism. As Ghazi Hamad, a Hamas spokesman, said, “The initiative by several countries to recognize a Palestinian state is one of the fruits of Oct. 7. We proved that victory over Israel is not impossible, and our weapons are a symbol of Palestinian dignity.”
So what, precisely, have the Palestinians done that justifies the creation of a separate state for them, presumably made from Israeli territory?
Mr. Abbas has transferred his “pay-for-slay” program to the PLO, which pays families of terrorists who are killed or are imprisoned because of attacks on Israeli Jews.
Do the first and second intifadas, the rain of missiles from Gaza and the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks justify the establishment of a Palestinian state to Messrs. Macron, Starmer and Carney? If so, perhaps these men could, as some have suggested, volunteer to carve a state out of the French Riviera, Britain’s Lake District or some part of Winnipeg?
Even those choices wouldn’t satisfy the Palestinians. They — or those who speak for them, the Arab states and Iran — want an end to Israel.
Mr. Rubio’s cancellation of the Palestinians’ visas to the U.S. will not stop France, Britain or Canada from recognizing a Palestinian state, but it will slow their momentum. The media will inevitably pick up the ball and try to advance it, but Israel won’t budge. It is opposed to a Palestinian state, and the U.S. will, one hopes, back their play.
Neither the PLO nor the Palestinian Authority has earned a state, far less Hamas and its Iranian supporters. It is up to the U.S. to argue that point before the intentionally uncomprehending media. President Trump and Mr. Rubio are the people who have to carry that burden. They will.
• Jed Babbin is a national security and foreign affairs columnist for The Washington Times and a contributing editor for The American Spectator.
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