Let’s not fool ourselves or our supporters by pretending that the recent move by the Canadian government to conditionally “recognize the state of Palestine” in September bodes well (in any way) for the liberation of the Palestinian people. It does not. In fact, this flush of Western leaders recently making the same declaration are all part of a well-orchestrated maneuver to once again disenfranchise Palestinians, an Oslo 2.0.
You need only to look at Carney’s statement and the document released by the UN meeting this week to see the trajectory of how this is supposed to unfold. An entity (we can’t call it a state) that must be demilitarized and is forbidden to decide who can run in its own elections. And, as has been detailed before, all of this is expected to occur with “mutual” recognition of Israel by those Arab states who have not yet done so and the eventual dismantling of UNRWA.
Both are full of fine-sounding phrases that have been heard before… “an independent, viable, and sovereign Palestinian state” or “achievement of a just solution to the Palestinian refugee issue”. Palestinians have been hearing such nice words for literally decades now, since Oslo was signed in 1993. But its a smokescreen as history has shown clearly, a smokescreen to cover further Israeli aggression, ethnic cleansing and now genocide.
And the timing of this new diplomatic flurry is particularly dastardly, as it seeks to cover up and distract attention from the horrors of the ongoing US-Israeli genocide and the complicity of most Western governments. Complicity like Canada’s ongoing arms shipments to Israel that were further highlighted in a new report out just this week.
We all want a progressive Canadian policy on Palestine, but this is not it. In past statements, we in CPA have been clear that legitimizing the corrupt Palestinian Authority was a dangerous and flawed policy and that the phoney “two-state” solution is a vehicle for normalization.
However, this will not be the first time that one of the US imperialist schemes won’t go according to plan; the people of the region will reject all of these infamies and determine their own destiny.