Daniel Patrick Moynihan—the former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and U.S. Senator—once made famous a phrase that one would have thought obvious but at the time broke diplomatic norms: the United Nations, like the world, he said, was “a dangerous place.” And it has become only more dangerous since he first uttered that iconoclasm about his tenure at the U.N. in the 1970s.
If the statements of several nations in support of Palestinian statehood are to be taken up in earnest this week as the U.N. General Assembly reconvenes, both the U.N. and the world will become ever more dangerous and violent, yet.
The need for the full admission of statehood for a 22nd Arab state in a world of 21 extant Arab states raises even more questions. The U.N. Declaration of Human Rights, as the U.N. itself, was formed around building “freedom, justice and peace in the world.” It opposes “contempt for human rights” and “barbarous acts.” It supports “freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear.” And yet the Palestinian political leadership—along with the vast majority of supporters of that leadership—is opposed to all of that. Full statehood for a newly recognized state called “Palestine” will bring the world one more Syria, one more Libya, one more Yemen.
In a world full of rogue regimes already, the effort to normalize and formalize yet another terrorist-based entity is the highest form of international irresponsibility and, yes, danger.
A little common sense and history is in order. The concept of a Palestinian state presumably would convey and constitute statehood on the territories known as the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, where local sovereignty in those territories has been run by Hamas (in Gaza) and the Fatah party of the Palestine Liberation Organization (aka, the PLO, in the West Bank).
But neither movement has ever wanted just those territories, they have always wanted the entirety of what is modern day Israel. More accurately: they have wanted no Israel; they simply do not want an Israel of any size to exist.
If the chants of “From the River to the Sea” do not make this aspiration explicit, perhaps an ounce of history and current events can provide a tonnage of explanation. When the PLO was formed in 1964 (NB: three years before Israel ever had the West Bank or Gaza), its charter announced its goal as the “complete restoration of our lost homeland.” Given that Israel did not then have possession of Gaza or the West Bank (both of which were illegally occupied by Egypt and Jordan respectively), it was more than clear what the PLO wanted: all of Israel. Or, more precisely, they wanted all of Israel not to exist. The entire Hamas Covenant is a screed against Jews, stating, among other things, “Allah’s victory” will arrive because Hamas’s “struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious.” The Covenant quotes the Muslim Prophet Mohammed saying, “The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews. When the Jew will hide behind stones and trees, the stones and trees will say, ‘O Muslims, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’”
The Arab population in what is now Israel, or on its borders, does not have a “Palestinian” Arab cause or culture distinct unto itself, and never sought its own nationality’s recognition until Israel was created. Its arrival in the modern era was established exclusively to eradicate Israel. This is one reason the “Arab Higher Committee,” which represented the local Arab population in the 1940s at the time the United Nations was trying to create two states (one Jewish, one Arab) was called just that—with the name “Palestine” or “Palestinian” quite absent from any Arab leadership or entity.
Indeed, if one referred to a “Palestinian” in those days, one could be speaking as much of a Jewish person as an Arab person. To wit: the local major Jewish newspaper at that time was called the “Palestine Post.” And, U.N. Resolution 181, creating the 1947 partition plan, explicitly refers to both Jews and Arabs as “Palestinian,” e.g., “the two Palestinian peoples.”
To create out of whole cloth this new entity, this 22nd Arab state, just two years after its political leadership and people unapologetically engaged in the worst massacre of Jews since World War II, as it continues to hold hostages, as it continues to fire rockets into Israel would constitute a surrender of both sanity and morality. To be “rewarding terrorism” in this instance constitutes an understatement.
The PLO record is one of global terrorism, hijacking, and killing—including the massacres of kindergartners and other school children to Olympic athletes to the assassination of a U.S. Ambassador. The Hamas record is one of deploying rape, indiscriminate, and suicide bombings as weapons of war. The Palestinian cause has been the self-defining cause of Jew-hatred and other violence, it has been the cause of abuse of human rights against women and LGBTQ populations, it has been the cause of civil war and strife within its own populations, it has been the cause of anti-democratic authoritarianism.
Creating a Palestinian state right now would be illegal under the U.N.’s own charter. Chapter II of the Charter states, “Membership in the United Nations is open to all other peace-loving states which accept the obligations contained in the present Charter and, in the judgment of the Organization, are able and willing to carry out these obligations.” Some of those obligations include “To develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, and to take other appropriate measures to strengthen universal peace.”
We stand firmly against rewarding any of this with the credibility of a body such as the United Nations whose very founding was based on ending “the scourge of war” and promoting “fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person.” Given the entire history of the proposed state’s cause, to create this new state this September would be to mock any serious notion of human rights and make both the U.N. and the world, indeed, a far more dangerous place.