"Canada intends to recognize the State of Palestine at the 80th Session of the United Nations General Assembly in September 2025."

"This intention is predicated on the Palestinian Authority's commitment to much-needed reforms, including the commitments by Palestinian Authority President Abbas to fundamentally reform its governance, to hold general elections in 2025 in which Hamas can play no part, and to demilitarize the Palestinian state."

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney

 

"I recognize the legitimate concerns regarding Israeli co-operation access to polling stations, and the integrity of the electoral process, particularly in Gaza."

These are serious challenges, but they must be addressed rather than used to justify another indefinite postponement of Palestinian democracy."

"I am therefore appealing to you to intervene personally and urgently with President Abbas, together with Canada's international partners, to ensure that the Palestinian Authority honours its commitment to hold elections."

Sameer Sinijlaw, head, New Path (Masar Jadid) political movement 

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is seen last month in the West Bank city of Ramallah. Palestinian elections set for next month have been delayed by a year. (Mahmoud Illean/The Associated Press)

 

"[We] deeply regret Abbas' decision to postpone elections scheduled for November 28]."

"Credible elections are an important element of the commitment that President Abbas and the Palestinian Authority made to reform, including democratic renewal and accountable governance, and are in line with the July 2025 New York Declaration."

"Strengthening Palestinian governance is essential to continue building the institutional foundation of a viable two-state solution, which is the only path to lasting peace and security for both Israel and Palestine.

"[The undersigned will] continue to support efforts to deliver on these elections."

Foreign Ministers of Australia, Canada, France, U.K. 

 

"While the Canadian government pursues punitive measures and sanctions against Israel, it must demonstrate that the Palestinians will also be held accountable for failing to honour their commitments and undermining the prospects for peace."

"Yet the Canadian government offers no indication of what consequences the PA will face, while suggesting that Israel is somehow to blame." 

Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs  

Israeli medics and volunteers treat the injured at the site of a Palestinian suicide bombing in Jerusalem, Israel. (credit: GETTY IMAGES)

 

When Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas announced a week earlier that the scheduled November 28 Palestinian elections, about two decades overdue, would be postponed to September 2027 as a result of "obstacles posed by Israeli measures" that would interfere with the "free, fair and inclusive elections", he was simply acting true to form. The last election, held in 2006, demonstrated the popularity of Hamas among Palestinians, enabling it to take majority rule of Gaza. Since then, Hamas has grown even more popular among Palestinians, and the Palestine Authority president more unpopular.

 

Western countries supporting Palestinian statehood urge a democratic election take place, one that does not include the terrorist Hamas group. But in trusting Palestinians to elect their politicians to reflect the values of a civilized society those same Western democratic countries reveal their ignorance of the Palestinian voting psyche. Immediately following the gruesome mass rapes, mutilations, slaughter and hostage-taking of 7 October 2023, the majority of Palestinians both in Gaza and the West Bank approved of the mass carnage that took place in southern Israel. Given the chance they would vote overwhelmingly for Hamas.

 

Mahmoud Abbas, whose Fatah-led administration's school curricula teach young Palestinians that the Jews living next door are their implacable enemies, prepared to liquidate them, not merely oppress them -- urge their children to dedicate their futures to the extermination of Israel, that in engaging in missions to murder Jews they guarantee themselves a place in Paradise. Those that do commit crimes against humanity in Israel are guaranteed a place of honour and a lavish salary from the PA's Martyr's Fund, popularly called its "pay for slay" fund. These are the neighbours that France, the U.K., Canada, Spain and Ireland feel Israel should accommodate itself with.

 

"Israeli measures" that so irritate the  Palestinian Authority include the pressing, ever-present need to remain militarily vigilant in the prevention of suicide attacks against Israelis. Before the separating wall between Israel and the territories and the several Intifadas, the murders perpetrated by Palestinian terrorism on Jewish Israelis kept mounting. That vigilance against further and future such attacks against Israeli civilians is interpreted by Mahmud Abbas as 'occupation'. By a nation unable to trust its neighbour, knowing that once its guard is relaxed, it becomes an invitation for mass slaughter.

 

When Samer Sinijlaw wrote to Canada's Mark Carney to appeal to him to 'do something' about the postponed election, he was writing to a leader of a country which has never been in the unenviable position of having its intelligence services, military and police on constant duty to ensure that any dire plots of mass murder are nipped before they become reality, and living with the knowledge that they cannot possibly stop all such plans and there will be those that succeed. From afar, leaders like PM Carney posit their simple solutions.

 

Protesters march during a pro-Palestine demonstration in London, May 16, 2026. (AP Photo/Thomas Krych)

 

To the perennially threatened these are not solutions, but risible black humour unworthy of world leaders whose neutrality in recognizing an established civil nation with values and laws like their own in a democratic union with its people that include not only Jews, but a significant number of Arabs, Druze, Bedouin, Christians, Kurds, B'hai and others with full citizenship rights. In choosing to abandon the human rights of this civilization by viewing those who continually threaten its existence by mass violence with equal consideration, these world leaders betray their own commitment to human rights, the rule of law and international civil and social mores to an underlying suspicion, if not enmity toward Jews and the Jewish state.

 

Continuing to support a Muslim fundamentalist aspiring state that rejects the presence of a different ethnic and social, cultural and religious group legitimately existing on its ancestral land hoping for peace with all its neighbours, and succeeding with a growing number, the Western leaders who decry Israel's reaction to mass slaughter of its citizens as 'disproportionate' and make use of language totally out of context with the reality of a forced invasion, betray both a lack of conscience and a subliminal distrust and dislike of the very qualities that the Palestinians reject and plot murder against. 

 

Their attitudes, statements and  deliberate isolation of Israel, their voting patterns in the United Nations General Assembly, and their tolerance for the demeaning of a nation and its people is shocking yet predictable, as a reflection of the world's most ancient pathology. That very attitude is transmitted to their own general publics which sense the censure and adapt it as their own. That the West has been suffused in the past several decades with waves of immigrants, refugees and migrants from the Middle East and North Africa leading to a surge of Muslims living in the West, bringing with them their own traditions of Jew-hate, compounds the issue of growing global antisemitism. 

 

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas announced Oct. 10, 2026, that elections will be postponed, again. (Screenshot State of Palestinian website)

 

"Postponing these elections would undermine precisely those Palestinians who are working to build a credible, peaceful political alternative."

"For the sake of our children, I ask Canada to stand firm. They deserve accountable leadership, a voice in their future, and a reason to believe that peaceful political change is possible."

Samer Sinijlaw, Palestinian New Path