By Joseph A. Klein, CFP United Nations Columnist ——Bio and Archives--July 31, 2025
British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer declared that the United Kingdom will recognize a Palestinian state this September, unless the Israeli government takes what he called "substantive steps to end the appalling situation in Gaza."
French President Emmanuel Macron has previously announced that France would recognize the state of Palestine as part of “its historical commitment to a just and durable peace in the Middle East.” He intends to make an announcement of formal recognition of a Palestinian state at the United Nations General Assembly High Level Debate this September.
Starmer and Macron are rewarding Hamas for its genocidal October 7, 2023 massacres and abductions of Israeli civilians by putting the onus on Israel to end the war in Gaza that Hamas started. They join UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres in that regard, who blames Israel for the dire humanitarian conditions in Gaza.
It is Hamas that has rejected successive ceasefire proposals which would have stopped the fighting, freed the hostages, and allowed the safe delivery of massive amounts of humanitarian aid to those who need it in Gaza.
There can be no realistic chance of achieving a viable two-state solution as long as Hamas and other Palestinian terrorists continue to pose a mortal threat to the security of the Israeli people.
In response to the Gaza crisis and to escalate international pressure on Israel to end the war, the UN hosted a ministerial-level conference on the so-called two-state solution. The conference was held at the UN’s New York City headquarters on July 28-29. France and Saudi Arabia co-chaired the conference.
The UN-hosted conference’s output was a Declaration signed by seventeen countries, plus the 22-member Arab League and the European Union. The Declaration calls upon Israel to end the war, withdraw all its troops from the entire Gaza Strip, and agree to an independent Palestinian state that would be ruled by the Palestinian Authority. The Declaration also envisions that the independent Palestinian state would be in charge of all security within its territory (with agreed upon international assistance) and that Israel would not be permitted to establish any buffer zone on Palestinian territory to protect its people against more terrorist attacks.
The signatories foolishly assume that an independent Palestinian state admitted as a full member of the UN will eliminate the terrorist problem once and for all and satisfy the genocidal ambition of the Islamist fanatics who have vowed to destroy the Jewish state of Israel.
The Declaration’s signatories, to their credit, condemned for the first time the Hamas terrorist group’s October 7th rampage. They also called on Hamas to free all the hostages it is still holding, lay down its arms, and relinquish its rule of Gaza to the Palestinian Authority. This is a small step in the right direction. But the Declaration is still fundamentally flawed in that it equates the Hamas terrorists’ deliberate slaughter of innocent civilians (including women, children, and even babies) on October 7th with Israel’s use of military force in defense of its own people. Israel has gone out of its way to avoid inflicting civilian casualties while Hamas has deliberately put Gazan civilians in harm’s way by using them as human shields.
Israel does not need any help from self-righteous diplomats and hypocritical world leaders whose meaningless gestures will not advance real-world efforts to achieve a secure and durable peace. And Israel does not have to apologize to anyone for doing what it deems necessary to protect its people from the brutal savages who want to destroy the Jewish state.
The Jewish people have endured too many centuries of being persecuted and ostracized as a minority group in foreign lands to lose their historic homeland to hordes of genocidal Islamo-Nazi terrorists. Only Israel’s military forces can ensure that will not happen, not pieces of paper emanating from the anti-Israel United Nations.
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Joseph A. Klein is the author of Global Deception: The UN’s Stealth Assault on America’s Freedom.