Days after pledging to recognise Palestine as a state, France has called on the European Union to back its drive to get Israel to agree to a two-state solution.
France’s Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said it was time the major powers backed a political solution to the conflict with actions rather than words.
“The European Commission, on behalf of the EU, has to express its expectations and show the means that we can incentivise the Israeli government to hear this appeal,” Barot told media at the United Nations on day one of the high-level UN conference on a two-state solution being co-chaired by France and Saudi Arabia.
Fifty ministers are among the representatives of the 125 countries attending the conference. Notably absent are Israel and the US, both having refused to participate. The meeting was originally scheduled for June.
According to Barrot, the conference aims “to reverse the trend of what is happening in the region — mainly the erasure of the two-state solution, which has been for a long time the only solution that can bring peace and security in the region.”
He urged the European Commission to call on Israel to remove its block on the €2bn he claims the Israeli government owes the Palestinian Authority; to stop settlement building in the West Bank; and to end the “militarised” food delivery system in Gaza by the Israeli-backed US Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which has resulted in hundreds of killings.
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected the two-state solution repeatedly. Yesterday, the US called the conference “unproductive and ill-timed.”
“The United States will not participate in this insult but will continue to lead real-world efforts to end the fighting and deliver a permanent peace,” a US State Department statement declared. “Our focus remains on serious diplomacy: not stage-managed conferences designed to manufacture the appearance of relevance”, spokesperson Tammy Bruce said
President Emmanuel Macron had already made clear that France intended recognising Palestine as a state when world leaders gather at the UN General Assembly in September.
France is the sole member of the Group of Seven industrialised nations to recognise the state of Palestine. More than 140 countries recognise a Palestinian state, including more than a dozen in Europe.
As the UN conference got underway, the Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammed Mustafa urged countries that had yet to recognise Palestine as a state to do so “without delay.” Recognition was the “path to peace” that would preserve Palestine “from destruction,” he said.
Also being discussed at the UN meeting is the normalisation of relations between Israel and the Arab states in the region. Prince Faisal bin Farhan, the Saudi Foreign Minister, stressed that normalisation of relations with Israel “can only come through the establishment of a Palestinian state.”
With global anger rising over desperately hungry people in Gaza starting to die from starvation. US President Donald Trump on Monday called for increasing aid to Palestinians, a rare glimpse of daylight between him and Netanyahu, who has said there is no starvation.
Both Barrot and Farhan acknowledge the US as an essential actor in the region. “I am firmly in the belief that Trump’s engagement can be a catalyst for an end to the immediate crisis in Gaza and potentially a resolution of the Palestinian Israeli conflict in the long term,” the latter declared.
