New York, September 21st, 2025 – As the Jewish world prepares to mark Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year which begins on Monday evening, the international community is gathering in New York to push for a unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state at the UN High-level International Conference for the Peaceful Settlement of the Question of Palestine and the Implementation of the Two-State Solution.
Meanwhile forty-eight Israeli hostages remain in captivity in Gaza as we approach the second anniversary of the deadliest pogrom against Jewish people since the Holocaust. In an open letter to all the European Permanent Representatives to the United Nations last week the European Coalition for Israel stated, “Recognizing a Palestinian state under these circumstances would be a great injustice to the Jewish people and a travesty of international law as it would reward Hamas for its atrocities on October 7, 2023. History will judge those who support terrorism.“
In a special conference in the Italian Senate in Rome on Thursday afternoon hosted by Senator Giulio Terzi, ECI Founding Director Tomas Sandell noted that “whereas previous roadmaps for a two-state solution have been carefully conditioned on certain fundamental benchmarks, such as rule of law, human rights and democracy the current French-Saudi Arabian initiative mentions no such conditions as it simply speaks about an “irreversible and time bound process for Palestinian statehood.”
“This is a clear recipe for another major failure in the ongoing efforts to create a Palestinian state as Hamas refuses to release the remaining hostages and lay down its arms”, Sandell said. Despite being recognised as a terrorist organisation by the EU, the US and most of the Western world and even after the horrendous terror attack of October 7, Hamas remains the most popular political group by far in the Palestinian territories which would make up the proposed state.
As ECI leaves for New York this evening its message to the conference delegates is clear. Embarking on an irreversible path to Palestinian statehood under these circumstances would hardly advance peace in the region but rather prolong the conflict and create more chaos. The international community is now faced with the same choice as the Jewish people some 3,300 years ago which we can read about in this week’s Torah portion from Deuteronomy 30:19. In choosing between a culture of life and a culture of death, we must always choose life. Peace can only be achieved through negotiations. Terror can never be rewarded.
Rewarding terror in order to appease anti-Israeli sentiments fuelled by antisemitism may stop the current anti-Israel protests but only for a brief moment. For the radical Islamists and their sympathisers in the West who demand a “Free Palestine from the River to the Sea”, the call for the eradication of the Jewish state will only grow stronger. But it does not stop there. As former Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar has noted, “If Israel goes down, we all go down.”
The 80th session of the UN General Assembly (UNGA 80) opened on 9 September 2025. The High-level General Debate will run from 23–27 September and conclude on 29 September 2025.
