On 10 May, 2024, the United Nations General Assembly endorsed the State of Palestine for full membership. The vote was overwhelming. One hundred forty-three countries including India voted in favour, 25 abstained, and nine countries voted against the resolution.
India may come to regret its vote because of the precedent it sets.
While Palestinian leaders claim Israel illegally occupies Palestine, history suggests otherwise. Historically, Palestine was a backwater. Roman rulers suppressed development of Palestine’s Mediterranean coast as part of their punishment of the Jewish revolt. Arabs flourished elsewhere. Mecca and Medina, alternately under the control of Cairo- or Istanbul-based empires were religious centres, but Damascus and Baghdad were the centres of Arab political and cultural life.
Palestine was the land of malarial swamps and desert. Centuries of neglect had taken its toll on Jerusalem; many of the holy sites including the Dome of the Rock had fallen into disrepair. Most locals considered themselves Syrian. As Jews immigrated to Palestine and began to transform the land, poorer Syrians migrated southward to take advantage of new opportunities. Palestinian nationalism grew in parallel to Zionism, as both Jews and Arabs migrated to the Holy Land.
Subsequent history is well known. The British carved away 70 percent of historic Palestine to form the Kingdom of Transjordan. In 1947, the United Nations agreed to partition the remaining portion of Palestine into two states, Arab and Jewish. The Arabs rejected the plan; the Jews accepted and, the following year, the State of Israel was born. Arab armies expected to wipe the Jews out quickly. They issued calls for Arabs to evacuate temporarily, promising a share of the loot when they threw Jews into the sea. Few expected Israel to win.
Egypt took possession of the Gaza Strip and Jordan the West Bank. Cairo and Amman could have respectively granted residents of either statehood; after all, Israel was not present in either. Both Arab nationalist leader Gamal Abdel Nasser and King Hussein II of Jordan, however, declined. When Nasser founded the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to use as a lever against both Jordan and Israel, he plucked an Egyptian army officer—Yasser Arafat—from obscurity to act as its figurehead.
Initially, the PLO and its various offshoots repulsed the international community. They executed schoolchildren, hijacked airliners, assassinated diplomats and, in 1970, sought to overthrow the Jordanian monarchy. In 1972, Black September, a PLO offshoot still loyal to Arafat, massacred much of the Israeli Olympic team in Munich. In 1979, President Jimmy Carter fired Andrew Young, a civil rights icon and US ambassador to the United Nations, for meeting with a PLO representative.
Rejectionist Arab states and the Soviet bloc found value in cultivating the PLO, helping fund the group and promote it amongst leftist civil society. Time also legitimised the group, as did the egos and ambition of diplomats like Dennis Ross, who leveraged calls for dialogue with the group into a series of promotions as he made himself an indispensable interlocutor. Ultimately, this culminated in the 1993 Oslo Accords. The concept was simple: Arafat would run a Palestinian Authority, at first in the Gaza Strip and then in the West Bank, in exchange for recognising Israel, forswearing both terrorism and unilateral appeals to international bodies, and negotiating directly with Israel toward an independent Palestinian state. Negotiation was necessary because technically the West Bank is disputed territory, not occupied since few countries recognized Jordan’s pre-1967 occupation and no Palestinian state ever existed. Palestinians born in Gaza prior to 1967, for example, have Egyptian birth certificates, not Palestinians ones.
Unfortunately, first Arafat in 2000 and then current Palestinian Chairman Mahmoud Abbas in 2008 rejected offers, the last of which would divide Jerusalem and, through a series of land swaps, give the Palestinians more than 100 percent of the territorial area of the West Bank and Gaza while preserving Jewish contiguity with Israel. For both Palestinian Authority leaders, it was easier to accept endless subsidies and blame Israel and the United States for Palestinian failure than embrace their own agency or be accountable to their own constituents.
Today, it increasingly appears that the Palestinian strategy of terror pays off. The political Left, anti-Semites, and opponents of the liberal order coalesce to push aside history, previous diplomatic agreements, and disdain for terror. American university students did not rush to the Palestinian cause spontaneously, but rather on a trail greased for them with Qatari, Turkish, and even Iranian money. Preliminary investigation ahead of a major Middle East Forum racketeering suit suggests multibillion-dollar foundations and Students for Justice in Palestine planned this spring’s actions well in advance.
While the European public is generally more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause than Americans are, protests erupted in the United States because Hamas leaders, Israel antagonists and their financiers understood that they needed to sway the White House rather than European foreign ministries to degrade Israel’s support. That Biden seeks re-election and struggles in both Michigan and Minnesota, both states with important Muslim constituencies, simply completed the moment.
Not only is US support for Israel in doubt, but many European states and Australia also reward Palestinian terrorism. Palestinian politicians need no longer negotiate their borders or future acceptance of a Jewish state.
India should be very worried. The same coalition that opposes Israel also remains antagonistic to India, and many of the Islamic countries that are profoundly anti-Semitic despise Hinduism for the same reason.
The core of Islamist rejection of Israel and the “river to sea” narrative that delegitimises all Israel in favour of a broader Palestine is the notion that non-Muslims can never rule over Muslims in lands Muslims once controlled or claimed. Kashmir is legally Indian in its entirety. Kashmiri territory seized by Pakistan and China are not up for debate; legally, Pakistan and China occupy them.
From Morocco to Malaysia, however, public opinion in Muslim countries sympathise with Pakistan-sponsored Kashmir terrorist groups. India may be the largest country in the world with a population 155 times greater than Israel’s but in the UN General Assembly’s one-country, one-vote system, that does not matter.
Indians should be proud that they are the world’s largest democracy. Since its independence, Pakistanis have lived under military rule almost as much as they have under elected governments. Even their elected governments, however, are subordinate to the diktats of the Inter-Services Intelligence Agency. But just as Western progressives demonise Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, so do they slander Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Such demonisation reflects how the world’s authoritarians reflexively seek to undermine democracies. China, Pakistan, Myanmar, and even Russia might fund civil society groups professing to support Kashmiri or Khalistani liberation. European NGOs in Israel are anything but non-governmental, but often fund terror groups with European governmental grants while giving European foreign ministries plausible deniability. Such European NGOs and even the U.S. Agency for International Development could be used to bolster Indian separatists despite their lack of legitimacy.
A decade ago, the director of the Middle East and North Africa division at Human Rights Watch struck a corrupt bargain with Saudi funders: She would downplay Saudi abuses and criticism of gay and lesbian issues in the Kingdom if they would donate money to Human Rights Watch to bash Israel. It is likely Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the International Crisis Group, or other Western human rights and conflict resolution organizations might similarly try to use the Kashmir cause to raise millions of dollars from Qatari, Turkish, Pakistani and other Islamist financiers. It is a pay-to-play world for the world’s largest human rights groups, and India’s enemies will pay more. The corruption of human rights groups is an open secret to which most American and European intelligentsia remain blind.
Western journalists are often superficial if not ignorant and, increasingly, they are activists operating under the guise of journalism. When a Human Rights Watch report lands on their desk, few question the motivation of the authors or the funding underwriting the study. If Khalistan activists running drugs, extortion rackets and immigration schemes can fool the Canadian prime minister, why should they not also treat foreign correspondents, professors, and even diplomats as useful idiots?
Anti-India activists could use another element of the Palestine playbook to strike a blow to India’s territorial sovereignty. A common refrain for pro-Palestinian activists is the demand that there should be a right of return for Palestinian refugees. The trick here is that the United Nations embraces a definition for Palestinian refugees used nowhere else on earth: Essentially, Palestinians remain refugees in perpetuity and across future generations. It does not matter where they settle, if they live in historic Palestine or, conversely, if they and their parents have never stepped foot in Israel, the West Bank, or Gaza. If by a normal definition of refugees there are perhaps 14,000 Palestinian refugees left, by the UN’s count there are about six million. A right of return, therefore, would essentially eradicate Israel. Nor does the UN extend rights to the millions of Jewish refugees expelled from Arab countries and Iran.
Should activists embrace the same definition of refugee they apply to Israel to the 1947 Partition of India, there would be more than 250 million refugees. While only a fraction of these hail from Kashmir, Pakistan could leverage their descendants to wrest Kashmir away from India further prior to any referendum they would surely demand.
India may have voted for Palestine, but its diplomats should have no illusion: They also voted to affirm a strategy that enemies will use against India in the coming decades. Justice is on India’s side, but the world is an unjust place. Indians may, like Israelis, bluster that they are sovereign and they do not care what the outside world thinks. This would be a mistake. It would also be wishful thinking to believe that Palestine is unique and sets no precedents.
The enemies of democracy use both diplomacy and international humanitarian law as an asymmetric warfare strategy to encourage and excuse terror and target democracies and religious minorities. Today, the world’s sole Jewish state is in the crosshairs. Tomorrow, the world’s largest and most significant Hindu state will be as well. The battle in international organisations and American and European university campuses begins now. New Delhi should be ready.
