Recognising Palestine won’t bring peace to Gaza, but be proud anyway

While this accorded with Irish popular sympathies, it was a significant departure from Ireland’s existing careful foreign policy when it came to the conflict in the Middle East. The dramatic announcement precipitated an important change of position by the European Council, in which Haughey played a key role, on the conflict in the months that followed.

In its Venice declaration, the council — made up of the nine prime ministers of the then EEC — acknowledged Israel’s right to exist but criticised its territorial occupation of parts of the West Bank and east Jerusalem since 1967 and asserted that Palestinians be allowed to exercise their right to self-determination.

Divisions within the council, with Britain and West Germany in particularly being lukewarm in relation to criticising the Israelis, resulted in the text declaring that the PLO could be associated with dialogue that might eventually lead to peace in the region.

Now, more than four decades later, peace in the Middle East is as far away as it has ever been, tensions within the European Union about its stance on Israel’s war in Gaza are deeply divisive, and a new taoiseach once again has put his country firmly behind the idea of a Palestinian state.

Simon Harris, like Haughey, is prepared to bear the outrage of Israel and hopes Ireland can play a constructive role in bringing peace to the Middle East. While the vast majority of Irish people support Ireland’s formal recognition of the state of Palestine, the chances of last week’s symbolic announcement amounting to anything concrete in terms of peace in the Middle East must be very slim indeed.

The sad reality of the conflict is that nothing short of the complete elimination of Hamas — an almost impossible task in itself — would satisfy Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, and persuade him to call a ceasefire. Already last week Netanyahu has rejected a United States-backed plan that would have normalised Israeli relations with Saudi Arabia — a cherished Israeli goal for decades — and has reiterated his long-held view that he will not recognise or even countenance a Palestinian state.

This is just the latest Israeli rejection of American-backed plans to end the slaughter in Gaza and, as the American presidential election creeps ever closer, there is no incentive for Netanyahu to yield an inch to international pressure.

While President Biden risks losing the Arab-American vote and the progressive youth voice, frustrated over America’s continuing military support of Israel, Netanyahu can sit tight and wait for the election to come, knowing that a Republican victory and a Donald Trump presidency would enable him to continue as he pleases. He has faced more than six months of calls for a ceasefire, so what’s another six to a man now wanted by the International Criminal Court?

Ireland, Norway and Spain bring to 146 out of 193 the number of United Nations states that recognise the state of Palestine. This now includes 11 members of the EU, and the march of history towards a Palestinian state recognised by the UN seems remorseless.

The UN general assembly voting this month to grant new rights and privileges to Palestine by a significant margin was a further sign of growing international support for a vote on full voting membership of a Palestinian state, which currently holds observer status.

But the distance between a two-state solution and Palestinian recognition by the UN and its members remains a chasm of enormous proportions, and the only history Netanyahu is interested in is the one in which the security of Israel remains paramount.

Harris’s powerful statement last week was laced with the language of the decision being a positive contribution towards ending the war in Gaza. It was mirrored by equally strong speeches by the leaders of Norway and Spain. The language of all three leaders was infused with the ideas of peace, justice and what Pedro Sánchez, the Spanish prime minister, called moral consistency.

There has been a wide welcome across the political divide for the government’s decision to recognise Palestine and for all the fulminations of the hard left, and indeed Sinn Fein, about their devotion to the Palestinian cause, the decision was taken by a centrist government that has generally followed orthodoxies in economic and foreign policy.

But the decision is in keeping with Ireland’s long-held view on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict going back to the Bahrain declaration, and what makes it even braver is that there are unlikely to be any votes in it. The welcome by the opposition to the announcement last week can best be described as grudging and will not shift anyone’s vote.

Those who scream about Genocide Joe are not going to suddenly switch their allegiance because the centrist government they have no love for anyway has actually gone and done something about Palestine no matter even if it is just symbolic.

And doing something is the key point notwithstanding the possible repercussions. Any possible Israeli retaliation won’t cause too many sleepless nights in Dublin given that Israel is fast turning itself into a pariah state with its relentless bombardment of Gaza.

How the United States responds will cause more concern. But the government and the Department of Foreign Affairs have clearly concluded that Washington won’t in fact skip the St Patrick’s Day meeting with the taoiseach, which Trump’s former chief of staff Mick Mulvaney told Newstalk might happen, because the Palestinian recognition decision is seen in the United States as an acknowledgment of Hamas and a prize for terrorism.

This was a typical Trumpian response, which views everything through a lens of what Israel does is right, that American support for Israeli actions should be unconditional, and that Ireland, far from being an independent actor in foreign affairs, should simply trumpet what the United States does.

Last Wednesday’s announcement won’t make any difference in the short term to the slaughter in Gaza but it was in fact a triumph of independent Irish foreign policymaking of which the nation should be proud.