Recognition
of Palestine as a State
Josh Butler, What
conditions
has Australia put on recognition of a Palestinian state – and
what will happen if they are not met? (13 August 2025)
John
Kilcullen, September 2025
1.
“Recognising a state of Palestine as as part of a peace process
in support of a two-state solution” will not stop the killing
and destruction, unless it is supposed that the Israeli
government cares about world opinion – they don’t.
2. The killing
and destruction won’t stop unless the UNSC intervenes. See UN
Charter arts 35, 41, 42.
3. Australia
should be working to persuade Trump that backing Israel "no
matter what" is not in the national interest of the US, that the
US derives no advantage from vetoing
intervention.
4. After the
killing and destruction has stopped, the aim should be a single
multi-cultural Israel/Palestine – the occupied territories and
Israel together integrated into one polity (as before 1948),
everyone with full and equal political rights, and minority
safeguards. To achieve this would require strong international
pressure and maybe peacekeepers.
5.
“Recognising” Palestine is an empty gesture. No such state
exists to recognise (the PA has no
credibility). Recognition will not bring it into existence
against determined Israeli opposition.
6. A
demilitarised state (as Mr Albanese
proposes) is not a state. Every state has “a right to
self-defence”. More exactly: state functionaries have a duty to
protect citizens and others present in their territory against
one another and against outsiders. Israel has repeatedly
attacked recognised states such as Lebanon and Syria and would
freely raid a demilitarised Palestine.
7. To
exclude Hamas from Palestinian politics (as Mr Albanese also
proposes) will not be easy to achieve. One way is for Israel to
arrest candidates it accuses of being terrorists, as happened last
time
there were Palestinian elections. How would Australia, or
any other country, ensure that Hamas was excluded from
Palestinian politics? Maybe Palestinian electors will have to be
trusted not to vote (by secret ballot) for people who have done
them so much harm.
8. In any
case, a separate state of Palestine never will exist, because
Israel rejects
such a state and will use overwhelming military force to
prevent it from coming into existence. Also, admission as
a state to the UN requires Security Council action (art.4),
which as things stand the US would veto.
9. Netanyahu
gave his reasons for opposing a Palestinian state long ago, his
views have not changed, most Israelis agree with him (note 8A).
10. Unless
there is a very clever drawing of boundaries, each state would
include many people of the other ethnicity (and of other
ethnicities). This is clear from previous
attempts to draw borders. If there ever are two states, each
will be, or should be, “multi-cultural”.
11. Bi-lateral
negotiation between Israel and the Palestinians won’t succeed.
Neither negotiating team will be politically able to offer
anything that the other team would be politically able to accept
as sufficient – both teams will be closely watched by
irreconcilables.
In short: What
is needed is immediate UNSC intervention to stop the killing and
destruction; no recognition of a Palestinian state that does not
exist and never will; not two states, no bi-lateral "peace
process", but international pressure to bring about a single,
multicultural state.
Some
articles worth reading:
Bernark Keane,
Australia's
silence
on genocide gives Netanyahu a free pass to exterminate
Palestinians (4 July 2025), On
Palestinian
recognition, Albanese has outsourced Australian foreign policy
to Netahyahu (28 July 2025): Making recognition of
Palestine contingent on Israel entering a peace process, making
it conditional on whether “the circumstances are met”, as
Albanese wants — let alone making it depend on fantasies like
“resolving the issue of settlements” — is to cooperate with
Netanyahu’s strategy. If left to his own devices, Albanese would
wait until there was no longer any possibility that a
Palestinian state could functionally exist, delivering a
historic victory to the most extreme, racist Israeli leader in
history.
Hussein Agha and Robert Malley, France
and Britain’s recognition of a Palestinian state won’t stop
Israel’s onslaught (30 July 2025): For
Palestinians, the day after France’s announcement will be much
like the day prior. Israel will continue to bomb, starve and seek
to ethnically cleanse Gaza; it will carry on land grabs, home
demolitions, displacement of Palestinians, and will further
entrench its presence in the West Bank. Already, close to 150
countries recognize the State of Palestine, barely 20 fewer than
the number that recognize Israel. The entity so recognized has no
defined territory, no effective government, no sovereignty. It
has, in short, none of the attributes that define a state. To the
Palestinians will go empty statements and diplomatic gimmickry. To
Israelis, the land, the resources, the wealth. Some deal.
... Domestically, Israel’s opposition may blame the prime minister
for putting the country in this position, but it feels compelled
to close ranks, unanimous in its condemnation of anything that
hints at a Palestinian state. Hostility to Palestinian statehood
is not the province of the current Israeli government alone. On
the eve of 7 October, it pervaded Israeli society; in the wake of
the bloodiest attack in the nation’s history, it has become an
article of faith. A year ago, presented with a bill rejecting the
establishment of a Palestinian state, 68 members of the Knesset
voted in favor; only the Arab parties voted against.... France and
European governments that follow in its lead... might
conclude that, for now, their work on behalf of the Palestinians
is done. They will expect from them deep gratitude. They might
feel relieved of any obligation to exert pressure on Israel where
it really hurts and really matters – to impose tangible
consequences, demand accountability, or enforce sanctions if it
does not stop the war, end the siege, halt its settlement
enterprise....The priority today is to end the butchery in Gaza, which will
not be done without imposing material costs on the Israeli
government that is perpetrating it and depriving it of the weapons
with which it does so. Beyond that is a need to reimagine creative
approaches to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that
renounce deceit and pretense, put aside the illusory goal of hard
partition between two states, and seek a different pathway to
dignified coexistence between the two peoples.
Gideon Levy, Recognising
Palestine
won't stop the Genocide in Gaza: Sanctions on Israel will
(3 August 2025): International recognition of a Palestinian
state rewards Israel, which should be thanking each and every
country doing so, since such recognition serves as a misleading
alternative to what must actually be done – imposing
sanctions....
It would be best if practical punitive measures were first
taken, forcing Israel to end the war – Europe has the means –
and then bring to the agenda the only solution now remaining: a
democracy between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River; one
person, one vote. Apartheid or democracy. To our horror, there's
no third path anymore.
Andrew
O'Hehir, There
is
no “two-state solution.” Can we stop pretending? No meaningful
Palestinian state will exist anytime in the foreseeable
future. Facing that truth is crucial (10 August 2025):
...Macron, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and other Western
democratic leaders who have decided to recognize a Palestinian
state that does not exist and probably never will.These people
are well-informed and not idiots; we must assume they are aware
of the opinions expressed by Walt and any number of other actual
experts: The two-state solution imagined 32 years ago in the
Oslo accords was fanciful then — when 60 percent of the land in
the West Bank was left in Israeli control, and the Palestinian
population was split up into 165 non-contiguous chunks of
territory, often called “bantustans” — and is entirely fictional
now, as illegal Israeli settlements have replaced Arab villages,
one at a time, year after year after year.
Martin
Kear, Beyond
recognition:
Challenges of creating a Palestinian state are so formidable,
is it even possible? (11 August 2025): Redressing
these issues and the myriad others will take time, money and
considerable effort. The question is, how much political capital
are the leaders of France, the UK, Canada and Australia (and
others) willing to expend to ensure their recognition of
Palestine results in an actual state?
John Lyons, Western
nations'
moves still fall short of real pressure on Israel, but there
are more options (12 August 2025)
Guardian: Recognising
Palestinian
state must not distract from ending Gaza mass deaths, UN
expert [Albanese] says (13 August 2025): “Ending the
question of Palestine in line with international law is possible
and necessary: end the genocide today, end the permanent
occupation this year, and end apartheid,” she said. “This is
what’s going to guarantee freedom and equal rights for everyone,
regardless of the way they want to live – in two states or one
state, they will have to decide.”
Alaa Salama, Forget
symbolic
statehood — the world must recognize Israeli apartheid: The
push to recognize a Palestinian state creates the illusion of
action, but delays the real remedies: sanctioning and
isolating Israel's apartheid regime (29 August 2025): Let
us not waste another 30 years of Palestinian lives on the
partition paradigm — a colonial “solution” to a colonial
problem. Israel has long made clear it will never accept a
Palestinian state; clinging to the two-state solution is
gaslighting on an extraordinary scale, and it has brought us
only despair... Now, more than ever, symbolic gestures are worse
than useless, as they buy time for the regime committing the
crimes and drain urgency from the only remedies that matter:
ending the genocide, sanctioning the perpetrator, isolating the
apartheid system, and insisting without apology on equal rights
and the right of return. This is not extremism. It is the bare
minimum of justice.... If countries wish to recognize a
Palestinian state, so be it, but they must not pretend that it
changes reality. Real change begins with acknowledging the
truth: there is already one state here, and it is an apartheid
state. From there, countries must act legally, diplomatically,
economically until the cost for Israel to maintain apartheid
outweighs its benefits.
Shatha Yaish, "As the world recognizes a Palestinian state, Israel’s E1 plan moves to bury it" 12 September 2025 “performative diplomacy”: a way for governments to show they are doing something in the face of ongoing violence without confronting Israel or taking the concrete steps required under international law. “What they effectively do is contradictory to that: You’re recognizing the Palestinian state, but at the same time, your actions are aiding and abetting the very system that is destroying that potential state,” she continued. “So this is pure hypocrisy.” Recognition, Abdel Razek argues, has done none of this. Even with 147 of the UN’s 193 member states recognizing Palestine, Israeli settlements continue to expand, Gaza is being annihilated, and East Jerusalem is increasingly cut off from the rest of the West Bank. Moreover, recognition further empowers a PA that wields little real power and, with no elections in nearly 20 years, little legitimacy — while the population remains under de-facto Israeli control. “For the PA, recognition is a victory. But if you look on the ground, there is little resembling a Palestinian state,” she said. “What does exist are Palestinians themselves, fighting to remain on their land and to see their fundamental right to self-determination fulfilled.” “If a Palestinian state were recognized now, would it exist in the air? Without land or people? The Israeli government is destroying everything in its path,” she added. “Our president [Mahmoud Abbas] and the world should first protect the people and stop this war at any cost. Only after that should we think about anything like a state.”
Dana
El Kurd, Recognizing
Palestine
While Ignoring Palestinians 17 Sep, 2025
Palestinian
analysts in particular have pointed out that these statements
are an easy way for
international actors to give the semblance of action without
actually holding
Israel accountable for the impacts of the war in Gaza.
…Instead of holding
Israeli leadership accountable, recognition is a fig leaf
that can be held up
in front of domestic audiences to placate growing public
discontent. In
addition to avoiding issues of accountability, recognizing
Palestine does
nothing to pressure Israel to end the war. … Perhaps most
importantly,
Palestinians are not blind. They can see that Gaza has been
perhaps
irreversibly destroyed, with Palestinian society there
reduced to conditions
never before seen in Palestinian history. They can also see
that the
demographics of the West Bank and East Jerusalem are being
reengineered before
their eyes: villages depopulated, refugee camps razed and
residents sequestered
into smaller and smaller areas. Scholars have long viewed
this trend as a sign
that the two-state solution is no longer a possibility.
Under these conditions,
Palestinians must ask: What state is now being recognized?
What good is that
recognition?
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