Palestinian statehood is a big deal. You can’t have the much-vaunted “two-state solution” without it, and Israel and its US lobby have fought hard against it ever happening, maybe most famously pressuring Barack Obama into scuttling a 2011 bid at the United Nations. Just last year, the US government again singularly vetoed an attempt to bring the issue to a vote at the UN General Assembly — meaning, to have all the world’s states vote to decide the matter, something the Palestinians would have easily won given that 140 of the UN’s 193 member countries already recognize Palestine.
So a recent push by largely pro-Israel governments to recognize Palestinian statehood — launched in the wake of global outrage at the horrific famine Israel has engineered in Gaza — should be good news. France, Canada, and the United Kingdom have all announced that they will recognize Palestinian statehood in September, albeit with conditions. Saudi Arabia, which has made normalizing relations with Israel a cornerstone of its current foreign policy, is leading a push to do so as we speak, which the entire Arab League, the European Union, and seventeen other countries have endorsed. In the United States, whose halls of power have tended to be exceptionally hostile to Palestinians on both sides of the aisle, more than a dozen House Democrats so far have signed on to a letter urging the Donald Trump administration to follow suit.
Why, then, does the Palestinian statehood push feel so empty?
Maybe it’s the fact that, as welcome and necessary as recognizing that statehood is, it is not even close to the most urgent priority right now. Gaza is experiencing a famine where a staggering 100 percent of its remaining population has food insecurity and nearly a…
Auteur: Branko Marcetic
