UN Chief Claims the Palestinians Have a ‘Right to Statehood.’ Why?

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres ’ latest condemnation of Israel can be found here: “UN’s Guterres condemns Israel for ‘heartbreaking’ killings in Gaza,” by Elias Biryabarema, Reuters, January 21, 2024:

…Guterres added that the refusal to accept the two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians is totally unacceptable, saying denying Palestinians the right to statehood “would indefinitely prolong a conflict that has become a major threat to global peace and security.”

Were such a state to come into existence, it would prove a mortal threat — a Gaza writ large — to the Jewish state. Guterres claims the Palestinians have a “right to statehood.” Why? Where is that right written? The Arab people already have 22 states; why should they be handed a twenty-third state that would endanger the only Jewish one? And note that the Arabs deny other peoples — the Berbers in North Africa, the Kurds in the Middle East and until the creation of an independent South Sudan, the black Africans in the Sudan — the right to establish their own states. Palestinians already constitute 70% of the population in Jordan, a state built on 78% of the territory originally intended to be included in Mandatory Palestine. Why shouldn’t Jordan become the “Palestinian State of Jordan,” including in a single state the Palestinians in the PA-ruled parts of the West Bank with the mostly Palestinian population in what is now the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan?

The Palestinian state that Antonio Guterres has in mind is the same one that most of the world thinks should be established on land that Israel won in the 1967 war and would now be expected to give up, so that the Jewish state would be squeezed back within the 1949 armistice lines; it would then be stripped of even the most minimal strategic depth that control of Judea and Samaria (a/k/a the West Bank) has provided. Israel would be left with a nine-mile-wide waist from Qalqilya to the sea. No Israeli leader can agree to such an outcome; Jerusalem is not prepared to commit political suicide. And any Palestinian Arab state that is created west of the Jordan would either refuse to accept being demilitarized, or if it accepted such an outcome in order to obtain Israel’s approval sooner or later it would violate that commitment, and rearm with the help of Iran and Qatar.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared on Saturday to push back against US President Joe Biden’s remarks about Palestinian statehood after the war against Hamas ends. His office said that in talks on Friday with Biden, Netanyahu “reiterated his policy that after Hamas is destroyed Israel must retain security control over Gaza to ensure that Gaza will no longer pose a threat to Israel, a requirement that contradicts the demand for Palestinian sovereignty.”…

Netanyahu is not opposed to an arrangement whereby the Gazan Arabs would retain control of their own lives, but they would not have a military, and would have to agree to the IDF retaining security control in the Strip indefinitely. As Netanyahu has repeatedly said, “I’m certainly willing to have them have all the powers that they need to govern themselves but none of the powers that can threaten us.”

The media are reporting that Netanyahu is against any kind of self-rule in Gaza; they have misunderstood what he has been saying all along: security will remain in Israeli hands, while the Palestinians will in all other matters govern themselves. But there will be no room for the terror group Hamas in either part — Gaza or the West Bank — of this new entity called “Palestine.”

A document released late Saturday at the end of the NAM summit included a condemnation of “the illegal Israeli military aggression on the Gaza Strip, the indiscriminate attacks against Palestinian civilians, civilian objects, the forced displacement of the Palestinian population” and called for an immediate and durable humanitarian ceasefire.

Note that there is no mention in that document of the Israeli hostages. Have all those countries forgotten about them?

It is not “illegal” for Israel to fight back against those who have committed the most unbelievable atrocities against its citizens. Like any other country, Israel has the right of self-defense. The Jewish state is not the aggressor, but the responder to aggression. That aggression, we need to remind ourselves, was launched by 3,000 Hamas murderers who smashed into Israel on October 7, to rape, mutilate, torture, and murder 1,300 Israelis and to kidnap 360 more. Furthermore, there have not been any “indiscriminate” attacks against “Palestinian civilians,” but attacks only on Hamas targets. But since Hamas has embedded itself, its weapons, its command-and-control centers, and its operatives in and near and, especially, under civilian buildings, these buildings have become legitimate targets. The IDF does everything it can to minimize civilian casualties. In Gaza, it has to date dropped 6 million leaflets, made 14 million pre-recorded calls, and 72,000 personal calls, all to warn civilians to leave certain areas that are about to become battlefields, or to leave certain buildings about to be targeted. Israeli pilots routinely call off attacks if they spot too many civilians near the targeted site. None of that suggests “indiscriminate” attacks by the IDF.

There has been no “forced displacement” of Gazans. No Israeli soldiers have harried them out of their houses. They have been warned of impending attacks, and told what places they can move to that will be safe, free from IDF activity. This is only a temporary “displacement” that will end when the war ends. They are not being forced to move but, rather, are being advised to do so by the IDF. for safety’s sake. There is a difference.