Israel's meltdown over western recognition of Palestinian statehood reveals its deepest fears

Middle East Eye

4 days ago

Now that France and Britain, both members of the United Nations Security Council and the G7, have indicated they are prepared to recognise the State of Palestine, the dam has burst.
On Thursday, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney indicated his government also intends to recognise Palestine during the upcoming session of the UN General Assembly in New York, and an increasing number of western states are adopting or preparing similar positions.
It is far from certain whether any of these governments will actually follow through on their statements of intent. By attaching various conditions to their plans, they have already given themselves an escape clause should they need to use it.
Given that a two-state settlement has been the official position of these western governments for decades, the question arises as to why they have waited so long to recognise the state without which their proclaimed strategic objective is impossible, particularly since a majority of countries recognised Palestine long ago.
One reason lies in their domestic politics and the profound transformation of western public opinion. The shift has been building over many years, and is the harvest of continuous, persistent efforts by countless individuals and organisations to bring about changes in official policy.
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In large part, thanks to their campaigns, the impact of the Gaza genocide on public opinion manifested itself much more rapidly and broadly than would otherwise have been the case. It is safe to conclude this change is now irreversible, similar to that experienced by South Africa after the 1960 Sharpeville massacre.
Public pressure
Faced with a deepening humanitarian crisis in Gaza and mounting public pressure, western governments were compelled to act. Most have chosen the symbolic and comparatively cost-free approach of recognition.
They have done so in large part to avoid adopting concrete measures, such as an arms embargo, trade sanctions, or diplomatic isolation. Yet their response has also demonstrated that the pressures generated by protracted public campaigns can and do produce results, and can indeed force governments to change course.
Western governments are now acting on recognition because Israel's own words and actions have backed them into a corner and left them with no other choice
The continuation and intensification of these campaigns is therefore more justified and necessary than ever.
They must now focus on compelling these governments to take active measures to end their complicity in Israeli crimes, bring these crimes to a halt, and replace the shield of impunity that governments continue to provide to Israel with policies that impose actual accountability.
A second reason western governments are now acting on recognition is that Israel's own words and actions have backed them into a corner and left them with no other choice.
For decades, these states have treated "two-state settlement" and "Palestinian state" not as policies requiring concrete actions in order to bring them about, but rather as political slogans, under the cover of which Israel was permitted to turbocharge its efforts to annex Palestinian territory and dispossess its inhabitants with the express purpose of making a two-state settlement impossible.
As long as Israel was willing to pretend it sought peace with the Palestinians and make occasional statements that it, too, supported a two-state settlement, western states could deflect pressure to confront its annexationist activities on the pretext that doing so would undermine Israeli-Palestinian negotiations and thus the consummation of a two-state settlement.
The peace process had to be kept alive at all costs. In this Kafkaesque world, "two-state settlement" served as a fig leaf for its elimination.
Cornered by Israel
As Israel shifted ever further to the extreme right, the pretence of negotiations became increasingly untenable. With the Gaza genocide, it has become simply impossible to sustain.
Israeli leaders - all of them - now openly speak of their intention to collectively expel the Palestinians they have not killed from the Gaza Strip, to annex the West Bank, and to ensure a Palestinian state is never established.
It is official Israeli government policy.
In explaining Canada's new position, Carney explicitly referenced Israel's actions, not only in the Gaza Strip but particularly in the West Bank, as justifications. These include "accelerated settlement building across the West Bank and East Jerusalem", the "E1 Settlement Plan", and this month's vote by the Knesset calling for the annexation of the West Bank, as well as soaring settler terrorism.
Like its predecessors, Canada recognised that its continued embrace of a two-state settlement and Palestinian statehood, while supporting these only with empty slogans, had become at best nonsensical and politically costly. Israeli extremism left Ottawa and other western capitals with exactly two options: recognise Palestine or endorse formal Israeli annexation.
In addition to other factors, last year's International Court of Justice (ICJ) advisory opinion that Israeli rule in the occupied territories is illegal and must end as rapidly as possible would have complicated a move to legitimise Israeli annexation.
Failed alternative
A third reason for the recognition of Palestinian statehood is the failure of the alternative formulated by the first Trump administration: Arab-Israeli normalisation as a substitute for Palestinian self-determination.
Rather than promote normalisation as the icing on the cake of a two-state settlement, the grandiloquently titled Abraham Accords were designed to weaken, isolate and ultimately marginalise the Palestinians.
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They essentially aimed to remove the Question of Palestine from the regional as well as international agenda with official Arab support. They enabled Israel to unilaterally resolve the Question of Palestine as it saw fit. Israel was given all the time and space it required to discard the Palestinians into the dustbin of history while the world looked the other way.
These efforts, however, ended in resounding failure on 7 October 2023. While claims that Hamas specifically acted that day to thwart a purportedly impending Saudi-Israeli normalisation agreement were never convincing, by 2025, any such deal that excludes provisions for Palestinian statehood is no longer a tenable proposition.
Nearly two years on, Palestine continues to dominate the headlines.
Selective memory
Israel and its apologists have responded to these recognition announcements with predictable rage and fury. The eruption of Mt Hasbara is almost without precedent.
Among the arguments put forward by Israel and its flunkies are that recognition is a "reward for terrorism", represents "a prize for Hamas", and even that it encourages Hamas to harden its position in negotiations to end the Gaza genocide.
It is, of course, true that political crises and armed conflicts typically result in modifications, changes, and even transformations of policy. This has been an observable pattern since the dawn of history.
Israeli settler terrorism isn't new. It is foundational to the Zionist project Read More »
If reality were any different, Ho Chi Minh City would still be an American brothel named Saigon, Algeria would still be an administrative department of France, and Zimbabwe would still be known as Rhodesia, to give but a few recent examples. In their time, those who brought these changes about were vilified as terrorists, and the achievement of their rights similarly denounced as rewards for terrorism.
There is nothing new under the sun here, though the Hasbara Symphony Orchestra is admittedly more shrill than its historical counterparts by orders of magnitude. What the orchestra's musicians omit entirely is how this pattern worked to their own advantage.
After Britain successfully crushed the 1936-39 Arab Revolt in Palestine, during which it empowered Zionist militias to serve as auxiliaries in its counterinsurgency campaign, the latter increasingly turned their guns on their British sponsors.
Throughout the 1940s, Zionist militias conducted a growing volume of attacks against British forces, and in addition to killing British soldiers, assassinated British officials in Palestine and abroad.
In 1946, they blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, which housed the headquarters of the British Mandatory government in Palestine, killing nearly 100. Two future Israeli prime ministers, Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, were classified as wanted terrorists by the British authorities. The Zionist campaign against the British played an important role in London's decision to terminate the Mandate, which gave way to Israel.
But that was "good" terrorism.
Political blackmail
In the specific case of Palestine, every country now announcing an intention to recognise its statehood has been on record supporting this position for decades. And for roughly half a century, the recognition of a Palestinian state in the occupied territories has formed a key component of the international consensus on Arab-Israeli peace.
As for the Palestinian people, their right to national self-determination has been recognised as inalienable since the 1970s. For good measure, the ICJ in 2024 ruled that Israel has no right to exercise authority over even a square millimetre of Palestinian territory.
The more pertinent question, therefore, is why it took the Gaza genocide and Israel speeding towards formal annexation of the West Bank for these states to finally begin the process of recognising Palestinian statehood.
Why have they spent the past several decades appeasing Israel at every turn rather than confronting its crimes and illegal activities? And why have their announcements regarding recognition not been accompanied by specific, concrete and meaningful measures that promote it in practice?
Palestinian UN representative Riyad Mansour attends the General Assembly's 46th plenary meeting on the Question of Palestine at UN headquarters in New York, 3 December 2024 (Kena Betancur/AFP)
The indisputable reality is that it is Israel that has, year after year, been rewarded for its illegal occupation and criminal policies, and has been endlessly appeased.
That it took a genocide, and two years after its onset, for western governments to reconsider this state of affairs is the true scandal.
As for Hamas's negotiating position, it is unclear how a symbolic political act that may or may not be carried out in several weeks is going to harden or in any way change its calculations in ongoing negotiations about an end to Israel's genocidal military campaign, which has now also produced a famine in the Gaza Strip.
Rather, we are dealing with either pure hysteria, a desperate effort at political blackmail, or a talking point designed to provide Israel's government with yet another pretext to sabotage ceasefire negotiations.
It also bears mentioning that those announcing an intention to recognise Palestinian statehood have typically conditioned this on a removal of Hamas from governance in the Gaza Strip, and in a number of cases, such as that of Canada, even the exclusion of Hamas from new Palestinian Authority elections.
Israel's real fear
When it comes to negotiations, Israel has never acted in good faith to bring the occupation that commenced in 1967 to a definitive end.
In each round of negotiations, Israel invariably insisted upon, among other things, retaining occupied territory in a manner that ensured most illegal settlements and settlers would remain in place.
The territory Israel sought to annex would not only fragment a Palestinian state but, together with other demands, also leave Israel in effective control of its external borders - as though Jordan and Egypt were poised to invade Tel Aviv.
As the two-state paradigm becomes a thing of the past, and recognition of Israeli annexation remains off the table, a deeper crisis awaits the genocidal apartheid regime
What Israel was offering the Palestinians was a state in name only: for all intents and purposes, an Israeli protectorate lacking meaningful sovereignty. It is what former Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad perceptively called a "Mickey Mouse State".
Today Israel is not only rejecting any negotiations with Palestinians on an end to the occupation as a matter of principle, but these talks have also been made superfluous by the ICJ ruling. The ruling declared the occupation illegal in its entirety and requires Israel to withdraw to the 1967 boundaries as a matter of legal obligation, without Palestinian territorial concessions save mutually agreed, reciprocal, and minor border adjustments.
Given this context, it is noteworthy that the final document of the recent High-Level International Conference on Palestine, organised by France and Saudi Arabia, co-chaired by 19 states, and convened at UN headquarters in New York, repeatedly speaks of implementing a two-state settlement without once referencing that tired old saw, "negotiations".
Ultimately, Israel's meltdown over western recognition of Palestinian statehood is not about recognition as such. Rather, it reflects its fear - an entirely justified one - that the dam has burst. Slowly but surely, these governments are beginning to respond to the campaigns and demands of their citizens for an entirely different approach to Palestine.
It won't end with symbolic political gestures, and Israel understands this better than anybody.
As the two-state paradigm becomes a thing of the past, and recognition of Israeli annexation remains off the table, a more fundamental crisis awaits the genocidal apartheid regime.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.