A tale of two nations

Editorial

Six and a half decades after the United Nations sanctioned a Jewish and an Arab state in Palestine, and 63 years after the Jewish people, in good faith, took that offer and built Israel, the UN is again ready to sanction an Arab state in Palestine.

After considering studies on the subject from the World Bank, the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund, an ad hoc committee has declared that the Palestinian Authority has put in place the structures of statehood and, based on this, the UN General Assembly seems likely this fall to recognize “Palestine” as an independent member-state.

“In six areas where the UN is most engaged, governmental functions are now sufficient for a functioning government of a state,” said the report, citing such areas as governance, education, water supplies and, notably, human rights.

Reasonable people would certainly expect the rudiments of a functional government to exist after years of the Palestinian Authority receiving more foreign aid per capita than any people on earth. Yet much or most of that money has been squandered, misappropriated, stolen or secreted in foreign banks. But this black hole is but one of the elephants the UN seems prepared to ignore while stamping its hechsher on a Palestinian state.

The report made little of the division between the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip and the Fatah-controlled West Bank. This minor inconvenience has the potential to ignite civil war, as it did in 2007, which must call into question somewhat the preparedness of a country to function normally. Likewise, little consideration seems to have gone into whether a Palestine that is a UN member-state would live in peace with its Jewish neighbors or continue decades of rejectionism. Finally, the idea that Palestinian people, under Fatah or Hamas, stand to live in anything resembling accepted standards of human rights, as the committee statement suggests, can only make sense in the context of a United Nations whose Human Rights Council is comprised of several human rights wastelands including, until last month, Libya.

In the context of the UN considering recognition of an Arab Palestine 64 years after the first offer, it is difficult to ignore the global support the Palestinians enjoy, morally and materially, and to contrast this with how little the Jewish people had when forming Israel. The entire world, apparently, is prepared to back up dump trucks of cash into the new Palestine, despite the history of money disappearing like so much shisha smoke.

A Palestinian-Canadian speaker at Simon Fraser University last month called Israel “a reparations payment” for the Holocaust. It is a common ahistoric assumption that “the West” gave Palestine to the Jews as compensation for European crimes against humanity. In fact, the West gave the Jews nothing. After the Partition Resolution vote, there was no foreign assistance or foreign aid whatsoever to help get Israel off the ground. Indeed, when the five neighboring militaries invaded the nascent state of Israel on the very day it was created, not a single international force came to Israel’s aid.

The Jewish claim to the land of Zion is ancient and historic. But even if one does not accept this historical claim, as many, for example, reject the claims of Canada’s First Nations based on nothing more than caprice, a mere reading of history should disabuse the notion that anyone “gave” Israel to the Jewish people. To suggest so is an insult to the heroes of the War of Independence, to say nothing of the calumny of monetizing the Six Million in this fashion. It is also far, far too generous to “the West,” whose real intent in voting for a Jewish state was to provide a place other than their own lands for the survivors of the Shoah.

Now, 64 years after the original offer, the UN seems prepared not only to re-up on Palestinian independence, but to do so with billions of dollars. While offering essentially what was rejected in 1947, the UN is exacting no penalty for the inconvenient delay; indeed, they are offering far more largesse than the world gave the Jews of Palestine.

For the Palestinian and Israeli parents who have lost children, and children who have lost parents, how sad it is that all this grief should result in a compromise not substantively different from that of 1947. How tragic to imagine the decades of war, death, misery and conflict that could have been averted had the Arab world accepted the two-state solution all those years ago.

Of course, underlying all this is the assumption that the de facto creation of a Palestinian Arab state 64 years after it should have been born marks the end of the era of conflict. Wise observers will see it as another step in the process, the end goal of which is uncertain.

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