Only now, over four months since stepping down from its half- Now Sánchez is going on tour, starting this weekend in Norway and Ireland, to lobby
other European nations for the two- Spain thus hopes to lead the EU to official recognition of Palestine, something for which the bloc's parliament first called in 2014. If Spain were to recognise a Palestinian state by the summer, as Sánchez has promised, it would become only the second country to do so as a member of the EU. Currently, only nine of the bloc's 27 members regard Palestine as a state, eight of which did so prior to joining the bloc: Bulgaria, Malta, Cyprus, Poland, Czech Republic, Romania, Slovenia and Hungary (the last is also one of Israel's staunchest allies). Sweden became the first EU- |
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But is this the right time for the EU to recognise Palestine as a state? One enormous problem is how to ensure that such recognition is anything other than symbolic at the same time as maintaining the bloc's historically strong relations with Israel. Obviously, this cannot be achieved when there is not even consensus between different factions within the Palestinian leadership, let alone between Israel and Palestine, on where the borders should be drawn. An even bigger problem is presented by Hamas, which wants all the land between the
Jordan and the Mediterranean - Hamas doesn't want to exist alongside Israel. Its founding charter, written in the
late 1980s, committed it to a war against all Jews in the region - The document was revised in 2017, partly to redefine the terrorist cell's quarrel
as being with Zionist 'occupiers', not Jews as a whole - Pedro Sánchez is trying to garner support for a plan that won't even be fit for negotiation until Palestinians are represented by a political organisation committed to dialogue and coexistence with the state of Israel. |