النذير

Many have cheered the unprecedented wave or countries recognizing the state of Palestine in the wake of the Gaza war, with many Arab outlets celebrating Saudi’s role in the recognitions.

Unlike other initiatives in the past, these recognition are not mere symbolic, but they are nonetheless far from worth celebrating, for two main reasons:

First: it is too late

Those who recognized Palestine today, including the UK, Australia and Canada, should have done this a long time ago. Instead they stood against it.

When the UN General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to recognise Palestine as a non-member observer state back in 2012, both Australia and Canada where in the minority who voted against. The UK abstained.

Similarly, in 2015, the General Assembly voted for the raising of flags by non-member observer States at the United Nations, with Palestine being the focus of this resolution. A record 119 voted in favor, only 8 countries voted against including Australia and Canada, while 45 abstained including the UK.

These countries saw the Israeli atrocities of the past few decades and witnessed Israel’s consistent and very vocal refusal to abide by international law when it comes to the West Bank, Gaza, the Syrian Golan heights, the settlements, the wall, WMDs, the arming and training of illegal settlers, etc. Since 2008, Israel’s genocidal attitude towards Gaza was declared when Israel’s deputy defence minister threatened Gaza with “bigger shoah”, using the Hebrew word for holocaust.

They were not blind or unaware, they saw what we saw, the have seen the long list of massacres against civilians, the forceful removal and displacement of Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank, home demolitions and other forms of collective punishment, apartheid policies, blockades, the killing of 10 unarmed civilians in international waters during the raid on the 2010 Freedom Flotilla, etc. Even when it comes to starvation, we have had evidence of the use of food as a weapon by Israel many times, even a “calorie count” for the besieged people of Gaza.

Even after the ongoing genocidal war in Gaza, the UN security council had to vote in 2024 for Palestine’s bid to become a full member was vetoed by the US – naturally – while Switzerland and the UK abstained.

This is the unfortunate record.

These countries have long stated their support for the two state solution while remaining idle at Israel’s systemic explicit destruction of any prospect for a Palestinian state. This destruction was no secret, it was practiced very openly on a daily basis, and it was articulated quite clearly by Israel’s top officials. The current Israeli prime minister Netanyahu has explicitly rejected a Palestinian state back in 2013, a decade before the 7th of October attacks, then reiterated his rejection more powerfully the next year, and then again the following year. He was very adamant about his political project, so let us not act as if the countries recognizing Palestine today are doing us a great favor. They did not discover Israel’s monstrosity today, they knew it all along, many of them also helped in it, financed it, armed it and thus enabled some of the worst war crimes in the 21st century.

Second: it is ineffective

Israel has changed everything on the ground by force. Decades of systemic efforts were conducted in broad day light to make the Palestinian state an unattainable state.

The wholesale destruction of Gaza is an intentional attempt to make Gaza uninhabitable, depopulated, and simply impossible to be part of the future Palestinian state. But again, this is not new nor surprising, the blockade has been making Gaza uninhabitable since it began in 2007. By 2012 the UN was warning Gaza ‘will not be liveable by 2020’, and in 2015 launched the same warning with more concern this time due to the 2014 war.

As for the West Bank, which is the bulk of the aspired state, Israel’s illegal settlements and the illegal wall have effectively annexed about 50% of the territory, rendering it obsolete for Palestinian statehood. The current conditions in the West Bank are irreversible. Palestinian communities are shattered fragmentations unable to form any meaningful continuity or unity. Road blocks, permanent check points, blockades as well as continuous violence by the occupation forces and illegal settlers make the proposed “two state solution” a joke. There is no way to imagine a Palestinian state in these settings.

If you add to this the significant importance of east Jerusalem to the Palestinians, you can understand why no Palestinian leadership will accept any form of statehood without their capital city. Israel, and Netanyahu in particular, have annexed the eastern part of the city and declared Jerusalem to be the eternal undivided capital city of Israel. Netanyahu knew that no Palestinian leader will ever accept this, so he made it one of his 2009 preconditions for accepting a Palestinian state, intentionally making it impossible for the Palestinians to accept his offer.

His 2009 preconditions are very noteworthy. He stated that a Palestinian state can only exist if a) it recognizes Israel as a Jewish sate, b) gives up on the Palestinian refugees right of return, c) have nothing to do with Jerusalem, d) agrees to having no military, e) agrees to having no control over its airspace, and f) forms no relations with entities Israel deem as hostile. He later added that inside any future Palestinian state there will have to be a permanent Israeli military presence, specifically in the Jordan valley. In 2019, Netanyahu announced his plans to annex the Jordan valley altogether, which is again not surprising given his declared intentions on the subject since his 1997’s “Allon Plus Plan”.

With the recent major expansions of Israeli settlements, and the sharp increase of settler violence, one can easily see why it is delusional to take about a “Palestinian state” and how misleading it is to celebrate the recent recognition of a that state.

The current situation cannot be changed through the usual means and tools. What the west has done to Palestine cannot be fixed by recognizing Palestine now, and it is no wonder why many now believe in the inevitability of dismantling the Zionist project by constant pressure, by a resistance that makes Israel an enterprise so expensive (financially and morally) until no one can afford to support it any more.