Violent Palestinian rejection of a Jewish state for over three-quarters of a century got an enormous boost at the United Nations this week. The plan to create a permanent existential threat to the state of Israel, to terminate the paradigm of a negotiated settlement, and to allow Israel’s enemies to avoid recognition of a Jewish state, was billed as a “two-state” solution. It was a lie.
The United States and Israel refused to join the antisemitic mob mentality at a three-day confab held at UN Headquarters or to sign on to its imperiously billed “New York Declaration.” At the same time, the Trump administration had no impact on the majority of UN states – including some of America’s closest allies.
From the top, the “New York Declaration” sets out to impose on Israel what Palestinians want instead of facilitating negotiations between the parties, contrary to legally-binding prior agreements. Conditions that pose an existential threat to the State of Israel.
Jewish anything – history, religion, identity or self-determination – is nowhere to be found.
Led by France and Saudi Arabia, the assembled gang met to conjure up support for immediate recognition of a Palestinian state under the banner of a “one gun policy.” Accordingly, all the weapons of one group of Palestinian terrorists should be turned over to the Palestinian Authority (PA), notwithstanding the PA’s official practice of financially rewarding terrorists who kill Israeli Jews, in the name of peace.
The lengthy 42-paragraph manifesto is a veritable minefield for all those genuinely seeking an end to the Arab-Israeli conflict. It is necessary, therefore, to mine the fine print.
What it says
The “New York Declaration” allegedly decides all the elements that were supposed to be subject to negotiations as listed in the Oslo agreements, including borders, settlements and Jerusalem.
It holds the expansion of collaborative, productive and respectful relations between Arabs and Jews hostage to the demands of Palestinian rejectionists and terrorists. It says only by first granting “Palestinian Statehood” “can normal relations and coexistence among the region’s peoples and States be achieved.”
Negotiations are mentioned at the tail end vaguely “to achieve mutually assured peace and stability” – because there is nothing left to negotiate.
It calls for “an end to terrorism and violence in all its forms.” But it deliberately omits any definition of “terrorism,” because the express policy of the Arab League and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) is that murdering Israeli Jews is not terrorism but justified resistance. “All its forms” is the UN formula for depicting Israeli self-defense as illegal.
It exalts Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas for his “rejection of violence and terrorism.” The man who denies the Holocaust, describes Jews as having “filthy feet,” supports and implements a law that punishes the crime of selling land to Jews with life imprisonment, pays the salaries of Palestinian terrorists on an increasing scale with the severity of their crimes (the pay-to-slay scheme), and repeatedly says that a Palestinian state will be Judenrein.
It agrees “to promote Palestinian economic development” and demands Israel hand over fistfuls of money to the Palestinians – in the full knowledge that those dollars bankroll the pay-to-slay outrage.
It demands an end to (supposed) “dehumanization” by Israel of Palestinians and then dangerously dehumanizes all Jews living wherever Arabs say they can’t. The favored nomenclature is “violent settlers” or “violent extremist settlers.”
There should be no illusion here. “Illegal settlements” is UN-speak for the rejectionist mentality of 1947. One and the same document both embraces boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS) and promotes “reiterating the right of return.” The signatories are “committed to adopting restrictive measures” against any and all “entities and individuals supporting illegal settlements.” And also favor the idea that millions of Palestinians have a right to invade the Jewish state and take over from the river to the sea.
A Palestinian state is to come before “mutual recognition” of the Jewish state. The manifesto calls for a “State of Palestine” and subsequently speaks of “thus enabling…mutual recognition.”
It obscenely equates innocent Israeli hostages with Palestinian convicts having blood on their hands. By simultaneously calling for “the release of all hostages, the exchange of Palestinian prisoners,” the Declaration’s signatories have the blood of more hostages on their hands.
It gives Hamas the ultimate win. It makes the release of the hostages conditional. First comes “the full withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza” and then “In this context, Hamas must free all hostages.”
By repeatedly embracing the “one gun policy,” it actually ensures that the Palestinian state will be militarized, not demilitarized.
It supports the Hamas practice of human shielding, the UN policy of forcing Palestinians to remain in the Gaza conflict zone against their will, and denying Palestinians a host of human rights: the right to flee, the right to leave any country including one’s own, and the right to seek asylum. Instead of saving Palestinian civilians, the document spins this outcome as the Arab-OIC plan of “ensuring that Palestinians remain in their land.”
It fully backs UNRWA, the UN refugee agency for Palestinians, without any accountability for UNRWA’s direct and indirect involvement in October 7 and Palestinian terror operations in Gaza before and after October 7.
It supports the deployment of international troops allegedly to protect Palestinian civilians, at the invitation of the Palestinian Authority and without Israeli approval. In other words, it backs even more Palestinian-directed armed forces to stymie Israel’s right of self-defense against Palestinian violence.
It turns the lethal xenophobia at the heart of the conflict upside down, claiming Israelis are racists and Palestinians are visionary peaceniks. Israel is ordered to take steps to combat incitement, dehumanization, violent extremism and discrimination, while Palestinians are congratulated for their “ongoing efforts” to combat all of the above. This comes less than two years after Palestinians en masse celebrated the mass murder, torture and sexual mutilation of Jews because they were Jews.
It preposterously praises the Palestinian Authority, which it claims should “continue implementing its credible reform agenda” – despite the fact that the PA has failed to implement any credible reforms for thirty years.
It “welcomes President Abbas’ commitment to holding democratic and transparent general and presidential elections…within a year” – a promise that he has made routinely over the last ten years. Call it – selling the same rug twice. Or maybe outright support for Hamas’s reelection, or for a one-party state headed by Fatah dictators instead.
It reeks of moral relativism and equates the democratic state of Israel with the fact of Palestinian authoritarianism: “We call on both sides to pursue efforts for their respective political parties to adhere to the principles of non-violence.”
It talks about protection of “legal and historical…Islamic and Christian” claims in Jerusalem and says nothing about Jewish claims, Jewish history, or Judaism’s holiest sites.
What it does not say
There is no reference to a Jewish state or to Jews – or to antisemitism, the driver of the Arab-Israeli conflict in the first place.
On the contrary, organizers dragged out former UN High Commissioner and former Irish President Mary Robinson as their keynote speaker to demand the arrest of Israel’s Prime Minister and former Defense Minister, a total arms embargo on Israel, claim that Israel (not Hamas) is guilty of genocide, and explain that worldwide pogroms to seize Israelis and throw them into dungeons in the Hague “are not antisemitic.” Of course, Robinson is the same person who chaired the infamous global UN hatefest in Durban, South Africa in 2001. There, she told Holocaust survivor and U.S. Congressman Tom Lantos that declaring the state of the Jews to be the world’s one racist state was not antisemitic either.
The New York Declaration makes no mention of the legally-binding agreement known as the Oslo Accords or its key promise of a negotiated settlement that would have finally required the parties to recognize the legitimacy of the other.
On the contrary, it laments that “there is no ongoing negotiations between the parties” – and then says absolutely nothing about why they don’t exist. Because the truth is that Palestinians have zero incentive to negotiate when the United Nations and the likes of the French, the Saudis and the British are committed to imposing whatever Palestinians want on Israel without negotiating.
It claims that Israeli “actions are posing an existential threat to the realization of the independent State of Palestine” when the exact opposite is true. The Jews accepted the creation of two states in 1947 and the Arabs rejected it. Missing from the Declaration: the existential threat posed to the Jewish state by more than 75 years of violent Arab attempts to eradicate their neighbor.
Its plan for the future
The mob decided the “New York Declaration” must be embraced by world leaders. Hence, the assembled promised the following:
“We agreed to mobilize the international community at leaders’ level around these commitments on the sidelines of the 80th United Nations General Assembly in September 2025.”
It is wrong to pretend that this is all hot air or doesn’t matter so long as the United States and Israel are not present. In reality, holding this conference, adopting this declaration, and scheduling a “follow-up” meeting to convince Presidents and Prime Ministers to jump on board while in New York in September is a very serious blow to the Trump administration.
The President’s foreign policy is under attack both by the United Nations and by all those trading partners that are set to inflict new expenditures on the United States – because a Palestinian state, or “timebound” “irreversible” guarantees of such a state, at this moment in time guarantees more war and global instability.
The UN, the Palestinians, their French, Saudi, British, and Canadian enablers – and all the other lemmings poised to follow suit – have laid down the gauntlet to the defender of the free world. It is a battle that can and must be won. Starting with real bilateral consequences and by taking a decision to throw the belligerent and treacherous United Nations out of the United States.
