Spain, Ireland and “other EU countries” consider officially recognizing Palestine as a State

Spain and Ireland are considering officially recognizing Palestine as a State on May 21, a date that coincides with the Spanish Council of Ministers. “Several other member states” of the European Union will do the same, says RTE News, the Irish public channel, citing two unidentified sources.

Although it does not mention that other countries will join Madrid and Dublin in this decision, it is possible that Slovenia and Malta are part of the “other Member States”, as the four countries have maintained contacts in this regard.

In a statement signed jointly on March 22, the then Irish Prime Minister, Leo Varadkar, and his Spanish, Maltese and Slovenian counterparts said they had discussed “readiness to recognize Palestine when the circumstances are appropriate”.

Meanwhile, this Monday the new head of Government of Ireland, Simon Harris, had “a good and complete conversation” with Pedro Sánchez about “the serious situation in the Middle East”. Both “agreed that formal recognition is an important part of the two-state solution” and that “the only way to achieve peace and stability in the region is with a State of Palestine and the State of Israel living side by side”, announced a spokesperson.

The news comes one day before the vote on Palestine’s full entry into the United Nations General Assembly. Accession was already blocked by the United States at the UN Security Council on April 18, however, this Friday it will be voted on again: all resolutions that are vetoed are forced to go to the Assembly for a new debate.

Since the US veto — which led the President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, to threaten to review relations with the US — Arab countries have issued a new resolution proposing that the Assembly grant Palestine certain rights that it now lacks as an observer state. (status he received in 2012).

Process resumed a month ago

It was in 2011 that Palestine submitted its application for full membership to the United Nations for the first time. At the beginning of April — and with the new Government sworn in — the Palestinian National Authority officially resumed the process to become a full member.

In the midst of the war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian ambassador to the United Nations, Riyad Mansour, delivered a letter addressed to Secretary-General António Guterres asking the UN Security Council to analyze the request for membership made 13 years ago.

According to Riyad Mansur, cited by the France-Presse news agency, Israeli aggression is exactly one of the reasons why Palestine wants to go from observer to full member as quickly as possible.

One of the organization’s main objectives is “to maintain international peace and security and, to that end, take effective collective measures to prevent and eliminate threats to peace and to suppress acts of aggression or other violations of the peace”, as if reads in the Charter of the United Nations.

To date, there are 140 countries that officially recognize Palestine and 53 that have not yet done so. As diplomat Riyad Mansour argued at the time, it was the international community that decided to create two states in 1947. Therefore, “it is the duty of the international community, together with the Palestinian people, to complete this process by admitting Palestine as a member state”, he concluded. .