Palestinian recognition welcomed in the West Bank despite fears of the Israeli annexation

States are there to protect. But the fathers too.

Abdel Aziz Majarmeh stood next to his 13-year-old son, Islam, when he was shot dead by Israeli forces this month at the entrance to the Jenin refugee camp, in the occupied West Bank.

“My son fell on the ground, then I heard the sound suddenly,” he said. “An army jeep appeared and five or six soldiers pointed their weapons on me, telling me to leave. I didn’t even know that my son was martyred. I started dragging him.”

Abdel Aziz said he had gone to the camp – occupied by the army of Israel since January – to recover family documents from his home there.

“There is no one for me to complain,” he told me. “They control everything. The Palestinian authority cannot even protect itself – it implements only the decisions of the Jews.”

As a Palestinian, Abdel Aziz is resigned to his helplessness. As a father, he is tormented.

“In my mind, I continue to ask this soldier: why choose a 13-year-old boy? I just stand by him. Pulling me. Why were you shooting children? I am here.”

The Israeli army said it had fired to neutralize a threat posed by suspects who had approached them in a closed military zone and examined the incident.

He refused to clarify the threat that the teenager had posed.

Cities like Jenin were placed under the total control of the Palestinian authority three decades ago, under the Israeli-Palestinian peace agreements in Oslo.

They were supposed to be the seeds from which would develop.

But Israel says it was terrorism that prospered it. In January, he sent tanks to Jenin and the neighboring city of Tulkarem to crush armed Palestinian groups, saying that this would apply the lessons learned in Gaza.

Since then, Israeli forces have remained, shaving large areas of the camps in the two cities and demolishing buildings in other regions.

The United Kingdom, France and other countries should now recognize a Palestinian state, while Israeli control spreads through the West Bank and the Gaza War is essential.

The mayor of Jenin, Mohammed Jarrar, took me to the entrance to the camp near the place where Islam was shot. Army vehicles parked here during my previous visits are not found, but a large earth berm now blocks the road, and the inhabitants say that the Israeli elite shooters still scan the zone of buildings above.

Mr. Jarrar told me that around 40% of Jenin was now a military zone for Israeli forces, with about a quarter of the residents – which all camp – moved from their homes.

“It was clear from the start that it was a major political plan, not a security operation,” he told me. “This Israeli government wants to annex the West Bank and, in preparation, it wants to prevent any opposition (army) to its plan.”

Israel also placed the Palestinian authority under a long -term economic seat, retaining the tax revenues that AP needs to pay for teachers and the police.

Israel accuses him of funding terrorism by compensating for the families of Palestinian activists killed. AD says that he has now abandoned this payment system.

Jarrar said it was now very difficult to provide basic services to the local population and persuade young people not to leave.

In this context, he said, the recognition of a Palestinian state by Great Britain, France and others is important, even after more than 140 other nations have already done so.

“This confirms the fact that the Palestinian people have a state, even if it is under occupation,” he told me. “I know that this recognition will lead to a (greater) occupation of the West Bank. But even so, I believe that recognition is more important, because it will shape the future of the Palestinian people, and the international community will be called upon to defend their rights.”

The recognition of a Palestinian state by the United Kingdom and France is also recognition of the political abyss between Israel and its European allies on this issue.

“There will be no Palestinian State,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said to the settlers in the West Bank last week. “This place is ours. We will see our heritage, our land and our security.”

Netanyahu built her career on the prevention of a Palestinian state, and his government has grown hard for the expansion of colonies in the West Bank.

Its extreme right allies have pressure for a formal annexation, the Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich recently describing a plan to annex 82% of the West Bank, the Palestinian enclaves remaining cut from each other.

President Donald Trump opposed the recognition of a Palestinian state, but has not publicly criticized the Israeli movements towards annexation.

Israel seized Jordan’s West Bank in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and never left.

The establishment of civil colonies on occupied lands is illegal under the Geneva conventions, but Israel maintains that it has a historic Jewish right in the West Bank.

About half a million settlers now live there, and the Israeli organization, Peace Now, which follows the expansion of the regulations, says that more than 100 new outposts have appeared in the West Bank in the past two years.

The outposts are illegal under international and Israeli law, but they receive the tacit approval of the Government of Netanyahu as well as the support of the State in the form of roads, security and public services.

Earlier this summer, Ayman Soufan saw new neighbors arriving on the hill next to his house, in the hills south of Nablus.

From his window, he and his grandchildren have a clear view of the simple wooden refuge and the wavy sheet metal set up by Israeli settlers who, according to Ayman, come from the neighboring colony of Yitzhar.

“This outpost they have set up here is to push us out of our house. Each day, a colonist comes, fringe the house, shouting” gone! “” He told me. “They throw their garbage at our door. I call the authorities and they say:” We will send the army “. But the army never comes. The colonists are the army, they are the police, they are everything.”

Ayman’s family built this house, near the village of Burin, a few years after Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967.

Israel has temporarily controlled rural areas like this under the Oslo peace agreements, with the intention that they are finally transferred to the future Palestinian state, after negotiations on regulations.

But Israeli control has remained, the colonies have multiplied and that human rights groups say the Israeli forces are supporting settlers’ attacks.

Ayman said that his father died of a heart attack when the settlers set fire to the house in 2003, and that his house had been burnt down several times since.

“Who is supposed to protect me,” asked Ayman. “The Palestinian police? They can’t even prevent it from happening in cities, how will they come here? Here, my security is in the hands of people who occupy me.”

The international recognition of a Palestinian state is a good thing, he says, even if little will change on the ground.

“What happens is worse,” he said. “But if I never leave this house, it will be when I am dead. This house where I was born, where I grew up and lived my childhood; every corner has a memory for me. How can I leave it?”

During the decades that followed the Oslo agreements, the Israeli accounts have hardened, the armed Palestinian groups were strengthened and the control of the Government of the Palestinian Authority was gnawed.

“Palestine has never been theirs and will never belong to them,” said the bereaved Father Abdel Aziz Majarmeh. “Sooner or later, today, tomorrow, in a year or two, they will leave this country. And Palestine will be released.”

The United Kingdom and France hung on to the idea that two distinct states – Israeli and Palestinians – are the solution to the conflict here, even if the Palestinian territory has been taken and that the Palestinian institutions have undermined.

Now, the Gaza War, and the questions on which Gaza will go by later, forced this political gradation to an open confrontation, while the extreme right of Netanyahu grows hard for annexation.

Some Israelis say that the West Bank is like Far West: a place where the State and sovereignty are decided not by laws and declarations but by facts on the ground.

Israel has long argued that there can be no Palestinian state without its agreement.

Now, by advancing with recognition, the United Kingdom, France and others point out that Israel cannot cancel alone from the State.

A political fact by the allies of Israel to counter its facts on the ground.