With all the talk in recent days about the French, Canadian and U.K. plans to recognize a Palestinian state if Israel doesn’t promptly make a deal with Hamas and flood Gaza with food, it should be no mystery why Hamas has lately been making deal-breaking demands in the cease-fire and hostage release talks. They will be getting much of what they want by dint of international pressure on Israel. In fact, they have most recently even scuttled the negotiations altogether in anticipation of the impact of that pressure.
Unfortunately, President Trump became part of the problem when he took to telling reporters that there was “real starvation in Gaza” and an urgent need for the war to end because too many people were dying. Yet his lack of specificity as to who was holding things up gave the impression that he was putting the onus on Israel. Indeed, Prime Minister Netanyahu was at the same time maintaining the exact opposite: “There is no starvation in Gaza, no policy of starvation in Gaza, and I assure you that we have a commitment to achieve our war goals.”
The sense that Israel should give up trying to eradicate Hamas and that Hamas’s fictions had to be taken seriously despite its history of fabrications and staged crises was palpable and not at all helpful.
But the recognition statements seemed to have become a reality check for the President and last week he cut to the chase and posted on Truth Social that, “The fastest way to end the humanitarian crises in Gaza is for Hamas to SURRENDER AND RELEASE THE HOSTAGES.”
Although he has now set the record straight, the encouragement Hamas had already received will not just disappear, especially in light of the looming recognitions even though they are on less of a roll than before.
Of course, one has to wonder what the recognizing countries are thinking other than desiring to deny the Jewish state the ability to pursue its manifest destiny, both in the Biblical sense and its success in overcoming any number of Arab attempts at policide.
There is also no central Palestinian government holding sway in both Gaza and Yehudah and Shomron. In fact, left to their own devices, Hamas would make quick work of the Palestinian Authority as it did in Gaza in 2006, which would result in a terrorist group openly vowing to seek Israel’s destruction in charge next door to Israel. Is this what the French, the British and Canadians have in mind?
So the long and short of it is, the Palestinians have never had a defining civil war to decide who will make their authoritative decisions for them. How then can anyone now even think about recognizing a Palestinian state? Aside from having little infrastructure how will the responsibilities of statehood be met?
And, then there is the question of why major Western powers would even want to reward Hamas’s Oct. 7 pogrom by granting them survival and political power. If they were truly interested in a peaceful Middle East, better they should subscribe to the Trump prescription.
