France is making final preparations to solve the Arab-Israeli conflict. If all goes according to plan, world peace will be inaugurated by June 20, the final day of a UN conference co-hosted by France and Saudi Arabia.
Or it may not. “Paris has been forced to downgrade expectations of the conference,” reports Politico.
What is President Emmanuel Macron thinking, exactly? Well, he had this idea: What if a bunch of countries got together, and the main European states—France and the UK, most significantly—recognized a Palestinian state, and in return a bunch of Arab countries would recognize Israel?
How likely is all this to happen? Not very. “European recognition of the Palestinian territories could ‘encourage Arab nations to define their conditions for normalizing relations with Israel,’” one diplomat told Politico, while a second diplomat suggested that “France was hoping Middle Eastern states would still take ‘steps’ toward normalization at the conference.”
So there you have it: Going into the conference, there is zero chance the Arab states will recognize Israel. There is still a chance that France will recognize a Palestinian state and encourage the UK to do so.
In other words: It isn’t a peace conference at all, it’s a Euro-Arab confab to beat up on Israel.
How original.
What it means, specifically, to recognize a Palestinian state remains unexplained, even after some European states have claimed to have done so. Since there was no previous sovereign Palestinian state in the area, we don’t know what the new state’s borders would be.
In practice, then, this would all appear to amount to nothing. But that’s not actually the case. A story in the Wall Street Journal on the International Criminal Court suggests the direction this would take, and it would bring material harm to Israel and more war but definitely no peace.
ICC chief prosecutor Karim Khan has taken a leave of absence since the Journal revealed earlier this month that he was using ICC subpoena powers to quash credible accusations of sexual assault against him. Khan had already secured arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, but the Journal reports that, before his leave of absence, he was preparing war-crimes charges against Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. Their supposed crimes? According to the Journal’s sources, “pushing construction of West Bank Jewish settlements.”
Although the ICC lacks jurisdiction over Israel, that hasn’t stopped the kangaroo court from pressing forward with its lawless crusade against the one Jewish state. But war-crimes charges over encouraging settlements is absurd on the merits as well, for a very simple reason: There is no competing claim of sovereignty.
Jordan put the area that became known as the West Bank under (illegal) occupation in 1948. Israel took the area in a defensive war in 1967 and opened the possibility of negotiating its return to Jordan. But in 1988, Jordan renounced its claim to the land. The Palestinians want most of that land for a state of their own, but that is not a legitimate claim to sovereignty. It is simply a negotiations demand.
Whatever the problems with Israeli Jews building communities in the territory, Israel’s administration of it is not an “occupation” in the traditional sense according to international law. That does not mean Israel should disregard the stateless Arabs who live there; it just means that, as far as international law is concerned, there is no “population transfer” war crime happening there. Israel is open to criticism just as any other state would be, but Jews living in subsidized apartments in Judea and Samaria isn’t a war crime.
What this reveals is that the world’s various attempts to delegitimize Israel suppose that a Palestinian state already exists there, and that this Palestinian state has existed since before the Six-Day War. The threat to “recognize” a Palestinian state wouldn’t change the reality, but it would serve as the starter pistol in a race to charge Israel with every crime under the sun by creating the pretense that there is a legitimate claim to Palestinian sovereignty in the territory.
Macron’s precious peace conference is likely just an underhanded attempt to strip Israel of its self-defense rights under international law. Perhaps one day he’ll try to convince the Palestinians to simply accept the state they keep rejecting. Until then, he’s just playing games with Israel’s security.
