In the most shameful display of diplomatic bastardry since Chamberlain and Daladier gutlessly handed Czechoslovakia to Hitler on a silver platter, a craven cabal of Western leaders are ganging up to bully Israel and reward Hamas for its mediaeval brutality. No surprises that Australia’s odious Foreign Minister Penny Wong is leading the bully pack.
Or that the jelly backed socialist Anthony Albanese is dancing to the crack of the anti-Semitic far-left’s whip, even when he clearly knows he’s in the wrong as he lets himself get wedged into recognising a “Palestinian” state.
For, as Albanese himself says, it’s necessary that such a state not pose a threat to Israel. That means no anti-Israel terrorism from that state, a complete acceptance of Israel’s legitimacy as a Jewish state, complete respect for its negotiated borders and an end of all other claims against Israel.
That should happen some time after pigs grow wings and the legacy media start telling the truth.
“How do you exclude Hamas from an involvement there? How do you ensure that a Palestinian state operates in an appropriate way which does not threaten the existence of Israel?” says Albanese. The plain answer is that you can’t. When a majority of ‘Palestinians’ openly support Hamas and, to a one, hate Jews (Pew polling found 97 per cent of Gazans hold anti-Semitic views).
One practical problem is that any Palestinian leader who agreed to a state on anything like those terms would certainly be assassinated by Islamist extremists.
Therefore, for the moment, no two-state solution is available, although it’s the only solution in the long run. But you probably need 20 years of normalisation before you get to peace treaty territory.
And any leader who recognises a “Palestinian” state is spitting on the international law they mouth such endless platitudes to.
Some of Britain’s most prominent lawyers have warned Sir Keir Starmer that his government’s pledge to recognise a Palestinian state risks breaking international law.
A letter signed by 40 members of the House of Lords says that a Palestinian state would not meet the criteria for recognition as set out under the Montevideo Convention, a treaty signed in 1933. The letter, seen by the Times, was sent to Lord Hermer, the Attorney-General and the government’s top legal adviser.
The signatories point out that Sir Keir’s pledge risks undermining the government’s commitment that international law goes “absolutely to the heart” of its foreign policy.
Among those who signed the letter were seven KCs, including Lord Pannick, one of the UK’s most respected lawyers. Pannick represented the government in its Supreme Court battle over the Rwanda relocation scheme.
How would such a recognition violate the Montevideo Convention?
The 1933 treaty laid out the four key criteria for statehood in international law. The treaty says a state must possess a permanent population, a defined territory, a government and the capacity to enter into relations with other states.
The letter adds that there is no certainty over the borders of a proposed Palestinian state and that the government would face difficulty continuing to recognise millions of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza as “refugees”, given recognition of statehood would mean they were in their own territory.
The peers also argue that there is no functioning single government, and it has no capacity to enter into diplomatic relations. Hamas, which governs the Gaza Strip, is a proscribed terrorist group in the UK.
The convention also rules that recognition is irrevocable: any Western government that tries to placate the far-left and Islamic extremism with what Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch correctly describes as a “knee-jerk recognition” is therefore enshrining a literal terrorist state for good.
And they won’t even have the bad excuse of pretending to buy ‘peace in our time’.
