Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu angered Palestinians and their defenders Friday after presenting a map of “The New Middle East” without Palestine during his speech to the United Nations General Assembly in New York.
Speaking to a largely empty chamber, Netanyahu—whose far-right government is widely considered the most extreme in Israeli history—showed a series of maps, including one that did not show the West Bank, East Jerusalem, or Gaza. These Palestinian territories have been illegally occupied by Israel since 1967, with the exception of Gaza—from which Israeli forces withdrew in 2005, while maintaining an economic stranglehold over the densely populated coastal strip.
Middle East Eyereported Netanyahu also held up a map of “Israel in 1948”—the year the modern Jewish state was established, largely through the ethnic cleansing of more than 750,000 Arabs—that erroneously included the Palestinian territories as part of Israel.
Palestinian Ambassador to Germany Laith Arafeh said on social media that there is “no greater insult to every foundational principle of the United Nations than seeing Netanyahu display before the UNGA a ‘map of Israel’ that straddles the entire land from the river to the sea, negating Palestine and its people, then attempting to spin the audience with rhetoric about ‘peace’ in the region, all the while entrenching the longest ongoing belligerent occupation in today’s world.”
As Middle East Eye noted:
The inclusion of Palestinian lands (and sometimes land belonging to Syria and Lebanon) in Israeli maps is common among believers of the concept of Eretz Yisrael—Greater Israel—a key part of ultra-nationalist Zionism that claims all of these lands belong to a Zionist state.
Earlier this year, Netanyahu's finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, spoke from a podium adorned with a map that also included Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria as part of Greater Israel. In the same event, he said there was "no such thing as Palestinians."
The use of such maps by Israeli officials comes at a time when Netanyahu's ultra-nationalist government has taken steps that experts say amount to the "de jure annexation" of the occupied West Bank.
Netanyahu used the maps in an attempt to illustrate the increasing number of Arab countries normalizing relations with Israel under the Abraham Accords brokered by the administration of former U.S. President Donald Trump.
“There’s no question the Abraham Accords heralded the dawn of a new age of peace,” the Israeli prime minister said. “But I believe that we are at the cusp of an even more dramatic breakthrough, an historic peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia will truly create a new Middle East.”
ritics have countered that peace between apartheid Israel and Arab dictatorships has come at the cost of advancing Palestinian rights. In the case of Morocco, the United States recognized the North African nation’s illegal annexation and brutal occupation of Western Sahara in exchange for normalization with Israel.
Netanyahu’s props on Friday reminded numerous observers of the time during his 2012 General Assembly speech when he used a cartoon drawing of a bomb to illustrate Iran’s progress on advancing a nuclear weapons program that both U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies said did not exist.
In an area full of ethnocracies, authoritarian regimes and dictatorships,I doubt that a free Palestinian state wouldn’t be one as well. After years of persecution from Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Jordan, Egypt… A free Palestinian state would most likely copy the Israeli model and make a refuge for all Palestinians of the world. I’m interested to hear why you think it wouldn’t be an ethno state.
The area is full of authoritarian regimes, but ethnocracies? Where are those?
I mean the “free” part is pretty dubious but there are already two Palestinian states and it doesn’t seem they’re interested in going down that route. Also considering being Palestinian an ethnicity is already pretty dubious when the Palestinian identity evolved as a response to Zionism in the 20th century. The factors that led to Israel being in its current state simply don’t exist for Palestinians.
Lebanon, Turkey…
I would argue that we can’t really know because Palestinian states are not really free states - they don’t have an army, don’t have their own monetary system, limited foreign trade, Israel and other international bodies control it’s borders, Jordan controls it’s religious sites, etc.
I also disagree with how you characterise the Palestinian identity, but we can ignore that for the sake of discussion. According to 2018 statistics - West Bank: 72% Arab (Sunni), 28% Jewish. (We can ignore the Jewish number as is mostly in eat Jerusalem) Gaza: 98%-99% Arab (Sunni) Both have less than 1% Other.
But if you want to insist that they have a functional government(s) at the moment, then their demographics are worst than Israel’s. And I can’t see how it’s not an ethno state.
What kind of policies do the Palestinian authorities offer to attract minorities?
Yeah fair point about Turkey, but is Lebanon an ethnostate?
I mean you can call Gaza a lot of things, but they’re free in the domestic politics sense. As in nobody can really tell them what to do with their people because they’re already cut off from the world by Israel.
An ethnostate isn’t just a state compromised of one ethnicity; it’s a state that’s meant for one ethnicity. Like, Germany is an ethnostate, for example. And then Israel takes that to another level by creating laws that favor that ethnicity. While most developed ethnostates have abandoned their ethnocentric roots, Israel actively embraces them. That’s not how a modern state should be, as it compromises equality between citizens from the get-go.
Oh and also, while Arab is a collective identity, it’s not an ethnicity. There are things you can call ethnicities within the Arab world (Egyptian, for example), but Arab itself is more of an umbrella term for native Arabic speakers.
No no that’s not the level we’re talking about. Jewish law actively favors Jews over non-Jews. Does any Palestinian state have something like that? A state that does nothing has that beat.
And Egypt.
This is incorrect. There’s a scientific consensus of nationality, ethnicity and identity. Arabs are an ethnicity. Egyptian are a nationality. I gave you demographical statistics, you can check them yourself - they clearly state Palestinian Arab (Sunni) - nationality ethnicity (identity). I’ve dropped the Palestinian part because of your previous comment.
This whole paragraph makes no sense. You use the same criteria but apply it differently as you see fit.
I didn’t see any facts to prove otherwise. There’s a reason why Palestinian minorities like the Palestinian Druze, Baha’i, etc. live outside of the Palestinian authorities - like Israel or Lebanon.
I was wondering if Ethno state actually means anything. But it seems to be just a buzz word that people use. Either that, or people conflate it with apartheid.
If you said that Israel is an apartheid state, I would agree with you. When there’s no difference in other countries, to say ethno state is hypocritical at best… or straight on antisemitic.
I’ll give you the benefit of a doubt and assume that you just confused your terms and meant apartheid.
Yeah true enough.
No no, Egyptian is a nationality and an ethnicity. Quick reminder that Egyptians have shared a collective identity for 6000+ years. And to correct myself earlier, Arab is also an ethnicity, but one that only applies to people from the Arabian peninsula. As an Egyptian I certainly wouldn’t say I share an ethnicity with someone from, say, Qatar.
How so?
I didn’t say Palestine didn’t have discrimination. I just said that ethnic discrimination there wasn’t baked into the law.
Now that I looked up the definition, what I was talking about was basically Apartheid, but I was talking more about the philosophy behind the policies that make it an Apartheid. So to rephrase myself earlier, Israel sees itself as the land of the Jews, not the land of Israelis, and bakes that view into law. Therefore any non-Jewish Israeli is automatically disadvantaged, creating an Apartheid state.