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Ireland, Spain, and Norway to Formally Recognise Palestine

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Context

  • Norway, Ireland, and Spain announced that they will formally recognize the state of Palestine.

About

  • A total of 143 out of 193 member-states of the UN have recognized a Palestinian state. The UK and the US are among nations that do not formally recognize a Palestinian state.
  • Israel does not recognize Palestinian statehood and opposes the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. It argues such a state would be a threat to Israel’s existence.

Israel-Palestine Conflict

  • Inception of Conflict: The United Nations (UN) proposed an Arab-Jewish partition of Palestine between Palestine and the new state of Israel.
  • This partition plan mandated 53 percent of the land to the Jewish-majority state (Israel) and 47 percent to the Palestinian-majority state (Palestine).
  • This idea wasn’t received well by the Arab countries in the Middle East.
  • First Arab-Israeli war: Jewish paramilitary groups, however, formed the state of Israel by force in 1948. This prompted a deadly war with its Arab neighbors – Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan in 1948. This was the first Arab-Israeli war.
  • Israel won this war and ended up occupying more land than previously envisaged in the 1947 UN partition plan.
  • The Palestinians were forced out of their homes when the State of Israel was created in historical Palestine in 1948 (the Palestinians call the events ‘Nakba’, or catastrophe).
  • Twenty-eight of those Palestinian families moved to Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem to settle there.
  • Six-Day War of 1967: In 1967, the Arab countries again refused to recognize Israel as a state, which led to another war, known as the Six-Day War.
  • Israel won this war too and occupied even more parts of Palestine.
  • The West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem, which houses the holy Old City, came under Israel’s control.
  • It also occupied the Syrian Golan Heights and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.
  • By the early 1970s, Jewish agencies started demanding that families leave the land.
  • Oslo Accords: It was backed by the United Nations (UN) and signed between the Israeli government and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1993.
  • Under this, a part of the West Bank came under the control of the Palestinian Authority.
  • Abraham Accords: Abraham Accords are a series of agreements to normalize relations between Israel and several Arab states.
  • The accords are named after the patriarch Abraham regarded as a prophet in Judaism and Islam.
  • The accords, all of which were signed in the latter half of 2020, consist of a general declaration alongside bilateral agreements between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco.
  • The accord has normalized the relations between many West Asian countries and Israel.
  • 11-day war: In May 2021, Israeli police raided Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, the third-holiest site in Islam, which set off an 11-day war between Israel and Hamas that killed more than 200 Palestinians and more than 10 Israelis.

Way Ahead

  • Peace based on a “two-state solution” is much needed with the help of international organizations and can only be achieved through Israel-Palestine talks.