Letters to the Editor: Needing Israel's Permission to Recognize Palestine

Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, May 2024, p. 6

Letters to the Editor

NEEDING ISRAEL’S PERMISSION TO RECOGNIZE PALESTINE

The Israeli government has unanimously expressed its opposition to “unilateral” international recognitions of the state of Palestine, diplomatic recognitions already accorded by the United Nations and 139 states encompassing the vast majority of mankind.

The Israeli use of the word “unilateral” is intriguing and significant.

Any state’s diplomatic recognition of another state is an inherently unilateral, one-sided decision and act.

So what does the Israeli government intend to convey by declaring only “unilateral” recognitions to be impermissible?

It appears to be reminding the states of the Global West, virtually the only significant states that have not yet accorded diplomatic recognition to the state of Palestine, that they cannot do so by their own free choice, without Israel’s prior permission.

Until now, these states have faithfully and obediently accepted this restriction on their sovereign rights.

Will they continue to do so or will at least some of them, to give peace a chance, finally assert their sovereign rights and declare their independence from Israeli domination and control?

—John V. Whitbeck, Paris, France

TIME TO PUT AN END TO ISRAEL’S IMPUNITY

How can cutting off humanitarian aid to desperate Palestinians as collective punishment for the alleged misdeeds of a handful of UNRWA workers not be considered a criminal abuse against humanity? Evidence for this claim is lacking, but on the single word of a government on trial for genocide, multiple governments led by the U.S. suspended aid. 

It’s important not to forget that UNRWA is the U.N. agency that assists millions of Palestinian refugees who were victims of the 1948 Nakba and that the 2.3 million people of Gaza have the agency’s aid as almost their sole source of help. Suspending funding to the entire aid system to punish a few accused people is vindictive retaliation, it is complicity in crimes against universal human rights. Additionally, nothing meaningful was done when Israel murdered over a hundred U.N. employees in Gaza, the worst attack on the United Nations in their existence.

The horror hardly stops there. Israel has at various times in this conflict dropped thousands of leaflets ordering Palestinians in Gaza to flee their homes and go to conflict “safe” areas, and then bombed the “safety” zones and the “safe” routes to them. You couldn’t expect anything more devious from the villains of any totalitarian regime in history. I, for one, cringe from the barefaced hypocrisy we are expected to believe and accept. The stories that attempt to whitewash Israeli atrocities in the papers and on social media and the mainstream TV news are nauseating. Has the West allowed Israel’s impunity to go on for too long to be able to put an end to it?

I can say here that I am glad to be retired and able to speak my mind without fear of workplace repercussions or damage to my non-existent professional life—not many people are so lucky these days and they perhaps could be forgiven for remaining silent.

—Ken Green, Cooper Landing, AK

U.S. CAN’T SUPPORT BOTH SIDES OF A GENOCIDE

The unfolding situation in Gaza has brought to light a perplexing dichotomy in the Biden administration’s approach to the Israel-Palestine conflict. On one hand, the United States has been actively supplying Israel with military aid. On the other, President Joe Biden has begun airdropping aid into Gaza and making appeals to Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to ease attacks.

This juxtaposition of actions—arming one side of the conflict while simultaneously calling for restraint and providing aid to victims of your own weapons—raises profound questions about the coherence and ethical grounding of the U.S. foreign policy stance.

—Jagjit Singh, Los Altos, CA