Recognising Palestine: A desperate effort to salvage the two-state solution

Hardline elements in Israel want to deny Palestine statehood. Their plans need to be thwarted and Singapore has a role to play.

- Bhavan Jaipragas

A war is still raging but several nations have suddenly started talking about recognising Palestinian statehood and there has been a flurry of diplomatic activity surrounding the issue. Why?

Put very simply, this is an attempt to throw the diplomatic kitchen sink at saving the two-state solution — Israel and Palestine coexisting in peace — from irreversible foreclosure.

This is no conjecture. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government increasingly speaks of a “Greater Israel” that includes Gaza, where the war is nearly two years old, as well as the West Bank and East Jerusalem - the Israeli-occupied territories Palestinians seek for a future homeland.

If there was any ambiguity, Mr Netanyahu dispelled it on Sept 11, signing an agreement to push ahead with the contentious El settlement plan that would cut across the West Bank and sever it from East Jerusalem. “We are going to fulfil our promise that there will be no Palestinian state. This place belongs to us,” he declared at the signing event in Maale Adumim, an Israeli settlement just east of Jerusalem.

It is in this setting that France, Britain, Belgium, Canada and Australia say they will, during the United Nations summitry in the coming weeks, move to recognise Palestine as a state — a distinct break with Western orthodoxy that recognition should follow, not precede, a negotiated two-state deal with Israel.

Dovetailing this effort, on Sept 12, 142 countries — including nations that already recognised Palestinian statehood, plus several like Singapore, Germany, Finland and Denmark that have not — approved a nonbinding UN General Assembly resolution reviving the two-state solution.