It is understood that Ireland and some other EU states will announce formal recognition of Palestine once a peace initiative – expected in the coming weeks – is under way. Sources were reluctant to put a date on this but said it would be “sooner rather than later”, and was a matter of weeks rather than months.
Ireland’s Minister for Foreign Affairs Micheál Martin said he had been in discussions with other EU and Arab foreign ministers about how “a joint formal recognition of Palestinian statehood could be a catalyst to help the people of Gaza and the West Bank and in furthering an Arab-led peace initiative”.
I see this as very positive. If people want to band together and have a state. Why is anyone standing in their way? Same thing with seceding.
It’s nice that countries are starting to do that for Palestine. It’s kind of wild that it’s taken this long
It depends on the situation though…
There’s voting to secede (East Timor), seceding through civil war (South Sudan, Somaliland, Ireland), sededing through coup (collapse of the Soviet Union), wanting to secede but being oppressed by a regime (Catalonia to an extent, Cabinda, Xinjiang) and a foreign regime deciding part of your territory wants to secede because they want control over it (Abkhazia & South Ossetia being invaded by Russia, same with much of Ukraine, Armenia invading and genociding Artsakh in the 1990s and then Azerbaijan invading and genociding it back recently)
How do you define “standing in their way” with all these and when you’ve even had places like Malta and Singapore being forced to secede against their will, it’s never as clean as “this is what the people want”
That said, recognising Palestine while also very much not simple is clearly the desire of the majority of the people there, but still there are places with equal popular support and implementation of independence that aren’t recognised but you’re always going to piss someone off I guess
Don’t forget “foreign power just starts drawing borders” like India/Pakistan partition and the ensuing chaos, or the Sykes-Picot Treaty carving up the Middle East after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire.
Creating a state implies two things:
Why don’t states want people to band together and secede? Well, for the same reason those people want to secede: they want to control the land and taxes.
In the particular case of Gaza, their territorial waters include access to some of the natural gas deposits between Israel and Chipre. There are enough profit margins to subsidize a lot of weapons in a bet to get preferential access to exploitation rights.
Is the recognition of Palestine positive…? That’s a loaded question, with a lot of sides to it.
Every good anarchist understands the power analysis rarely fails, but I’m trying to be a little more optimistic lately