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The New York Times online debating forum Room For Debate asked me to participate in an online forum regarding the rationale for recognizing the non-existent state of Palestine.

Here’s what I wrote:

When Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven announced his decision to recognize the non-existent state of “Palestine” earlier this month, he inadvertently gave the game away.

Lofven said, “A two-state solution requires mutual recognition and a will to peaceful coexistence. Sweden will therefore recognize the State of Palestine.”

The Palestinians refuse to recognize or peacefully coexist with the State of Israel.

Like his coalition partner Hamas terror master Khaled Mashaal, and despite his sweet talk to Western audiences, PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas has pledged, repeatedly, over decades that he will never, ever recognize Israel. During his speech to the UN General Assembly last month he reverted to PLO language from the 1970s, referring to Israel repeatedly as “the occupying Power,” and “the racist occupying State.”

So when Lofven recognized “Palestine,” he joined the Palestinian campaign to destroy Israel. He used the language of the “two-state solution,” to reject the Jewish state.

Former British foreign minister and Labor MP Jack Straw went a step further this week as he addressed his Parliament before its lopsided 274-12 vote to recognize “Palestine.”

The vote, he explained, was not about advancing peace. It was a straightforward bid to harm Israel.

In his words, “The only thing that the Israeli government…understands is pressure.”

Lofven, Straw and their colleagues throughout Europe aren’t stupid. They know what they’re doing.

They know that Gaza, which Israel vacated nine years ago, is a terror state run by the genocidal jihadists of Hamas.

They know that if Israel succumbs to their political and economic warfare and cedes its capital city and historic heartland to its enemies, it will be unable to defend its remaining territory.

And they know that like Gaza, those areas will quickly be taken over by Hamas, which will use them to launch a war of annihilation against Israel in conjunction with its jihadist brethren in surrounding states.

In other words, they know that in recognizing “Palestine” they are not helping the cause of peace. They are advancing Israel’s ruin.

If they were even remotely interested in freedom and peace, the Europeans would be doing the opposite. They would be working to strengthen and expand Israel, the only stable zone of freedom and peace in the region.

They would abandon the phony two-state solution, which as Straw and Lofven revealed is merely doublespeak for seeking Israel’s destruction and its replacement with a terror state.

With strategic blindness and moral depravity now serving as the twin guideposts for European policy towards Israel, Israel and its supporters must tell the truth about the push to recognize “Palestine.”

It isn’t about peace or justice. It’s about hating Israel and assisting those who most actively seek its obliteration.

Originally published in The New York Times.