23 Sep Statehood and Resistance: Scholars Reflect on the West’s Recognition of Palestine(‘s Existence)
From Liberation in Algiers to Pacification in Brussels
More than most disciplines, international law has found it difficult to escape the stability of its canon, a series of venerated doctrines and texts that circumscribe legal imagination within the confines of Western thought. Indeed, international law has long stood as an essential feature of the structuring logic of imperial domination—including the doctrine of recognition, on full display this week in the machinations of Carney, Macron, and Starmer.
As the dominant/dominating power during international law’s rise, Europe secured a legal foothold for its preferred hierarchy of values. False universals, self-referential logics, and an ingrained moral psychology that insists on the status quo as the outer limit of ontological and epistemic possibility continue to inform the field. Unsurprisingly, they also guide Europe’s approach to Israeli occupation and Palestinian resistance.
Thus, even in the midst of genocide and famine perpetrated by Israel, Europe insists on structuring recognition from the specificity of Israeli colonial rule: to Starmer, “a safe and secure Israel” is the UK’s primary motivation in recognising Palestinian statehood; Belgium advises that formal measures of recognition will only materialise once Hamas is disarmed and exiled; while Macron refuses to label Israeli actions as genocidal, lamenting what he dismisses as a political act.
It would be foolish to expect Europe to think in non-European ways or to privilege non-European aspirations. What is more troubling is international law’s stoicism when confronted with the self-serving partialities of Europe. Like sovereignty, the doctrine of recognition was fashioned through colonial episodes that deny the agency and humanity of the colonised.
In 1988, the PLO declared independence in Algiers, a radically disruptive act that sought to test the usefulness of international law in advancing the causes of anti-colonial self-determination. Yet, as Siba Grovogui explained, the dreams of post-colonial states are only permitted when they do not threaten entrenched hierarchies. In the case of Palestine, this has translated into four decades of European opposition to Palestinian self-determination.
Europe’s belated recognition of Palestine will not alter the structuring logic of domination that continues to impede Palestinian freedom. On this occasion, three questions would be more useful and demand investigation and reflection. First, what obstacles to liberation does statehood precipitate? Second, what type of statehood has and will Palestine produce? Third, what do answers to these questions mean for our understanding of international law? By relocating the locus of analysis from colonial rule to anti-colonial resistance, we are better placed to generate the juridical and conceptual innovation needed to liberate Palestine from the violence of international law.
Mohsen al Attar
Shrinking Palestine
It has taken nearly two years of sustained violence in Gaza for the UN to acknowledge the situation as genocidal. Yet, recognition alone does not translate into action. Zionism’s project of expansion and elimination has persisted for over seventy-seven years. The pressing question remains: how much longer will it take for the world to declare Israel a settler colonial formation, and act accordingly?
From its inception, Israel relied on imperial sponsors, beginning with Britain and later sustained by the United States and Europe. Western governments did not merely endorse the creation of Israel; they enabled a logic of elimination in which land is secured through displacement, population transfer, and colonial violence. Recognition of Palestine by these same powers cannot be understood apart from this history. It does not challenge the settler colonial order; it manages its permanence.
The two-state solution, repeatedly declared the only path to peace, if a fig leaf for Greater Israel. It demands that Palestinians accept ghettoised bantustans alongside an ethnocratic settler state. To frame Zionism as an irreversible reality is thus to endorse Palestinian erasure.
As Steven Salaita rightly asserts:
Everybody without cynical intentions understood that Nazism needed to be expunged, not accommodated. The same is true of Zionism. So we protect ourselves from the annoyances of bourgeois pragmatism—the half-baked Orientalism, the high-handed pontification, the snitching and scabbing, the appeals to civility, the ideological discipline—each act landing squarely on death’s side of the binary.
Pseudo-recognition of a ‘Palestine’ by Western powers constitutes continuity rather than rupture with zionism. Historical instruments such as the Balfour Declaration, the UN Partition Plan (UNGA Res. 181), and the Oslo Accords were steps toward the usurpation of Palestine; each deepened Palestinian dispossession by translating the right to self-determination into externally imposed blueprints that constrain Palestinian existence while securing zionist control.
While two-state solution pontification is presented as pragmatism, it functions as a form of necropolitics, whereby one has power to dictate who is worthy of living. Salaita demonstrates that, when zionism is given oxygen to live, Palestinians are, by necessity, awarded the death penalty. Zionism can only thrive on the ruins of Palestinian villages and through the eradication of Palestinian natives, from the 1948 Nakba until the genocide of Gaza. This logic is visible in Bethlehem today. Israel is annexing the surrounding villages of Battir, Nahalin, and Walajeh, among others, registering Palestinian land under the Israeli Land Authority, restricting mobility through checkpoints, and conducting censuses that determine inclusion and exclusion.
Palestine cannot be reduced to the borders of 1967 or to the diplomatic designs of colonial capitals. To recognise a shrinking Palestine without simultaneously de-recognising Israel’s settler colonial regime is to endorse both the settler state and the elimination of the people it dispossesses.
False Equivalency
In joining the 140+ states that have recognized the State of Palestine, the UK, France, Australia, and Canada congratulated themselves on their support for peace even as Israel and the U.S. condemned recognition as a “prize for terrorism”. Of course, recognition itself hardly constitutes peace or violence. Moreover, with no further action, the declarations will remain largely symbolic – and yet not insignificant. The manner, timing, and history of statehood and recognition reveal the embedded hierarchies of the legal and political regimes at work.
Most obviously, the space between recognitions of the State of Palestine and the reality of Palestinian devastation, genocide, and catastrophe is so gaping as to swallow any declarations whole. It took declared famine for the recognizing governments to speak at all; it is hard to imagine what would be needed to make them act.
The current push for recognition of the State of Palestine comes largely thanks to the high-level UN General Assembly (GA) “two state solution” conference hosted by France and Saudi Arabia. The New York Declaration emerging from the July meeting was a remarkable revisitation of classic themes of the Oslo Process, barely updated: the language of shared responsibility between parties obscuring radical inequality; international legal norms submerged in conditionality; calls for peace without attention to justice.
According to the Declaration, Palestinians must–-among other things—reject violence, commit to a demilitarized state, maintain a security system beneficial to “all parties”, implement governmental reforms, hold elections, and develop “good governance, transparency, financial sustainability”. Israel by contrast, is called upon to publicly embrace the two-state solution and effectively to obey basic international rules, including ending unlawful violence, annexation, and confiscation.
These lists are written as if two equivalent parties have been called upon to fulfill parallel requirements when in fact neither the parties nor the rules are comparable. Inequality dressed up as parity is not new; it began the moment PLO Chairman Arafat exchanged letters with Israeli PM Rabin kicking off the Oslo Process in 1993: Arafat recognized the “right of the State of Israel to exist in peace and security” alongside several other substantive commitments. In return, Israel simply recognized the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people — and only “in light of” those commitments. The discrepancy continued through the recognition campaign led by Palestinian PM Salam Fayyad in the 2000s, in which the Palestinian Authority built the limited institutions it was allowed, cooperated with Israeli security forces, and voiced support for a peace process long since decimated by Israel. Throughout, international aid subsidized Israel’s occupation and international governance rewrote Israel’s ongoing destruction of Palestinian life as an issue to be resolved through negotiation.
Using international law, and particularly the currency of sovereignty, for purposes of Palestinian emancipation has long been about strategic—even cynical—engagement. The contexts of today’s declarations reveal, however, not only the limits of recognition but the hierarchies embedded in the announcements and the complicity in atrocity of those making them.
Performing Recognition
Ghassan Kanafani once opined, ‘They steal your bread then give you a crumb of it… then they demand you thank them for their generosity… O their audacity’.
The recent public declarations by various Western governments claiming that the time has now come to ‘recognise’ a Palestinian State, whilst simultaneously doing all they can to facilitate its total erasure, tells us much about the arrogance and self assuredness of Western ‘superpowers’.
Statehood is not something that can be gifted, it is a legal entitlement and the legitimate right of the Palestinian people. Nor is it something that requires the rubber stamping of former colonial powers, those whose own nation states are built upon the bones of indigenous communities long denied their own justice oriented futures.
More crucially, recognition devoid of practical measures to end genocide, dismantle apartheid, and facilitate justice interventions that foreground Palestinian return and repair through tangible avenues for land back, is Western state gaslighting in the extreme. Afterall, ‘the white man’ as Malcolm X once warned ‘will try to satisfy us with symbolic victories rather than economic equity and real justice’.
If it were to have even a semblance of relevance, recognition of Palestinian statehood would be declared alongside recognition of the illegality of the Israeli state, one that has been characterised as apartheid in nature, based on Jewish supremacy and indigenous Palestinian subservience. Only then would there emerge a genuine pathway to meaningful, equality based resolution for all who inhabit the land from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean sea.
One can only reach the conclusion that the performance of ‘recognition’ being led by those actors who for the past 2 (and 77) years have provided material and political support for the zionist settler colonial state-building enterprise, is nothing other than a shameless attempt to distract, and to shift the focus away from the extensive charge sheet of culpability that lies squarely at their feet.
A Will to Exist
As a child, I was confronted with the idea that my homeland—where I was born and raised and where we annually celebrated the Declaration of our Independence as a national holiday—was not quite a country. This realisation was discombobulating, as if my entire reality were an illusion. Due to the absence of a legal imprimatur that others commanded, we did not quite exist or we might one day exist, if…
How does one claim existence? How does one assert control over land, body, and destiny? The answer lay in international law, a system that both affirmed and denied our existence, through a colonial lens that presented a distorted image of us, the wretched of the earth.
I thus embarked on a quest to uncover evidence of Palestine’s existence beyond my own reality. I discovered that Palestine was printed on the UN map of Resolution 181 (II), that Palestine met the Montevideo Convention’s criteria for statehood, and that much of the Global South—meaning most of the world—recognised us. I tracked pivotal votes like lifelines: Resolution 3236 affirmed our right to self-determination while Resolution 67/19 conferred non-member observer status, allowing access to the International Criminal Court and other forums. Did these permissions mean we existed? Through whose eyes?
When thinking about Palestinian statehood, I am aware that the outcome is not contingent upon legal frameworks but the entities that claim the authority to confer recognition. The system remains hierarchical and colonial, with Europe pretending for nearly forty years that the support of the global majority was irrelevant to their geopolitical position. Recognition that happens without dismantling a Eurocentric order remains spurious, a prize for the oppressed if we behave well, or as we learned over the past two years, if sufficient numbers of us die brutally.
As a child, I wondered why Europe didn’t see us and I would have been elated with this week’s declarations. As an adult, I understand that Europe still does not see us for us, but seeks to absolve itself of the guilt of having helped Israel’s extermination campaign. However, as a Palestinian, I know that our survival, resistance, and will to live provide all the recognition we ever needed.
Long Overdue
The recognition of the State of Palestine by the British government, the former colonial/mandatory power in Palestine, is long overdue. This is especially as the UK was responsible for fostering the ethnic divisions and violence that plagued Palestine through British policies of occupation, repression and partition from 1917-1948. These included large scale demographic engineering involving the mass immigration of Jewish persons to Palestine – a country that when Britain occupied it in 1917, was more than 93 per cent Palestinian Arab. Britain denied self-government to the Arab majority, violently suppressed opposition to Zionism, and left the country in the summer of 1948 in a state of chaos and anarchy. British troops stood by amidst the massacres and plundering of Palestinian property that followed.
Some readers may be asking themselves, why does recognition of Palestine’s existence as a state matter so much for Palestinians? As Palestinian Ambassador Majed Bamya put it:
“When your people’s very existence has been denied for decades, when it is under threat today, recognition is a stance and a shield. It does not stand on its own in a vacuum. It is part and parcel of the affirmation of the rights of a people denied all rights.”
Seeing the Palestinian embassy inaugurated in London today was a moving experience for me and all those present though we know the situation on the ground is worse than it has ever been.
Now we need to press the British government to go further. The appropriate response to a genocide is to stop it – by all lawful means, and this is where the debate needs to shift. Israel’s unlawful occupation of Palestinian lands since 1967 also needs to end, as the International Court of Justice reminded the world in an advisory opinion last year. Concerted pressure is needed beyond civil society. States need to support boycotts, divestments and full-spectrum sanctions, until the occupation ends, and the Palestinian state is independent.
The UK has a special responsibility towards the Palestinian people given its colonial past. As a British citizen of Palestinian heritage, I was proud to have been asked to hand deliver a 433-page petition to HMG at 10 Downing Street requesting an apology and reparations alongside Munib al-Masri, the 91-year-old Palestinian industrialist, who was shot and wounded by British troops as a child, as was his grandson who was shot by Israeli troops. We were honoured to be accompanied by Oxford University Professor Avi Shlaim, the British-Israeli historian. The petition is part of the Britain Owes Palestine campaign which seeks an official public apology and other reparations from the British government for Britain’s crimes in Palestine.
What a Sincere Recognition of Palestine Should Look Like
Until the mid-1990s recognition was an act of utmost importance. It entailed the dispatch of a diplomatic mission, engagement in bilateral and multilateral relations and assisting the new state in its adjustment within the community of nations. The spate of recent recognitions of Palestine by Britain, France and Canada bear no such hallmarks. These unilateral acts are predicated solely on the immense and overbearing weight of public opinion and constitute unavoidable political acts that are meant to buy precious political time until these governments figure out something else that suits their ally Israel and the Trump administration, which is hell bent on the idea of a Gaza Riviera.
Days before its recognition of Palestine, the British government found no evidence of famine by Israel and has consistently refused to acknowledge a genocide. In that past week the British government was happy to shake hands with the President of the country accused of committing open and blatant genocide against the Palestinian people. Going against its own constitutional arrangements, it has criminalized free speech, especially that which calls for recognition of Palestinian self-determination and has proscribed peaceful entities such as ‘Palestine Action’ as terrorist organizations. A silent purge of academics and intellectuals is underway in Britain for those that call out Zionism as a racist and apartheid ideology.
How can a state recognize Palestine without calling out Zionism for what it is? The two are clearly incongruous. A sincere recognition would entail all of the following: a) the creation of a multilateral conference for the consolidation and drawing of definitive boundaries of a Palestinian state; b) the establishment of an immediate peace-keeping mission for the inviolability of said borders and safety of its people; c) the imposition of intolerable sanctions on Israel and its isolation until at the very least the genocidal elements in its government are removed and meaningful relations with the new Palestine entity are restored; d) provision of unequivocal support to the International Criminal Court in its pursuit of justice; e) restoration of the life and dignity of the Palestinian people, both in Palestine proper and its diaspora.
Until all this is achieved, please do not shed crocodile tears for the Holocaust that you have congratulated in earnest all these years.
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