THE reluctant recognition of Palestinian statehood by Britain, France, Australia, and Canada this week is a con — it is the same switch and bait that has been blocking the creation of a Palestinian state for three decades now.
Imagine that these four leading western countries had recognised Palestine not in late 2025, when Palestine is in the final stages of being eradicated, but in the late 1990s, during a period of supposed Palestinian state-building.
That was when the Oslo accords were signed with western backing. The Palestinian Authority was established under Yasser Arafat with the apparent aim that Israel would gradually withdraw from the territories it still occupies in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem and the PA begin ruling an emergent Palestinian state.
At Israel’s insistence, let us note, the Oslo accords carefully avoided any mention of the ultimate destination of this process. Nonetheless, the message from western politicians and media was the same: this was heading towards a Palestinian state living in peace alongside Israel.
Looking back, it is evident why that did not happen when it still looked feasible.
The Israeli leader of the time, Yitzhak Rabin, told the Israeli parliament that his vision was not of a state but of ‘an entity which is less than a state’: a glorified Palestinian local authority utterly dependent on its bigger neighbour, Israel, for its security and economic survival.
After Rabin was assassinated by a far-right gunman, his successor, Benjamin Netanyahu, was propelled into power by a majority of the Israeli public on a mandate to stop the Oslo process in its tracks.
The Palestinian state ‘recognised’ by Starmer is envisioned as the same sham, wholly dependent ‘entity’ Israel has been abusing for 30 years
He repeatedly reneged on commitments to withdraw Israeli soldiers and Jewish settler-militias from the West Bank. In fact, in this period of supposed ‘peace-making’, Israel colonised Palestinian land at the fastest rate ever.Ìý In 2001, during his time in opposition, Netanyahu was secretly caught on camera explaining how he achieved this reversal.
He said he had held on to Palestinian territory, in violation of the Oslo accords, by imposing ‘my own interpretation to the agreements’ so that vast swaths could continue to be defined as a ‘security zones’. He added: ‘I halted the fulfillment of the Oslo accords.’
Was there not a pushback from western powers, he was asked. ‘America is something that you can easily manoeuvre and move in the right direction,’ he replied.
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Sabotaging peace
WHAT that meant in practice, since the effective end of the Oslo process a few years later, was a series of US presidential initiatives ever-less favourable to the Palestinians.
In 2000, Bill Clinton’s Camp David summits between Israeli and Palestinian leaders failed to hammer out even a minimalist Palestinian state that Israel was willing to accept.
Instead of sanctioning Israel, the West is retreating into the fantasy of a ‘virtual state’
George W Bush’s Road Map for Peace in 2003 half-heartedly tried to resuscitate Palestinian statehood but was stymied by the US accepting 14 impossible Israeli ‘preconditions’ for negotiations, including continuing settlement expansion.
Barack Obama entered office with a grand vision of peace that was quickly sunk by Israel’s refusal to stop expanding its illegal settlements and stealing more land in the West Bank needed for a Palestinian state.Ìý
Donald Trump’s 2020 hyped ‘deal of the century’ plan, conducted over the heads of the Palestinian leadership, dressed up annexation of large parts of the West Bank as Palestinian statehood.
Trump’s team also considered a plan to economically incentivize, on the most charitable interpretation, Gaza’s Palestinians to relocate to Egypt’s Sinai desert.
In reality, these two decades of time-wasting while Israel carried on brutalising the Palestinians and taking their land, incentivised not peace but greater Palestinian resistance, culminating in Hamas’ one-day breakout from Gaza on October 7, 2023.
Israel’s response was a genocide in Gaza, one in which US president Joe Biden became an active partner from the outset, sending bombs to help level the enclave and providing diplomatic cover. Meanwhile, Israel accelerated its de facto annexation of the West Bank undisturbed.
Trump’s latest contribution has been unveiling a ‘Gaza Riviera Plan’, in which whoever survives of the 2.3 million Palestinians there is ‘cleaned out’ and the enclave rebuilt with Gulf money as a playground for the rich.
Reports this week of a watered-down version of the plan suggest Tony Blair, who has been accused of war crimes over his role in the invasion and subsequent destruction of Iraq two decades ago with George W Bush, may be appointed effective ‘governor’ of a Gaza in ruins.
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Hollowed out
SO WHY now, after 30 years of the West conspiring in this slow-motion eradication of Palestine, a state long recognised by the rest of the world, have several western capitals broken ranks with the US and recognised Palestinian statehood?
The short answer is that such recognition is now relatively cost-free.
In typical fashion, British prime minister Keir Starmer made the announcement as he pulled the rug from under his own act of recognition by dictating what kind of state Palestine would have to be.
Not a sovereign one, in which the Palestinian people made their own decisions, but one that echoed Rabin’s ‘entity less than a state’.
Starmer insisted Hamas, Gaza’s elected government and one of Palestine’s two main political factions, could play no part in running this state. The Palestinian state would also, of course, have no military to defend itself from the genocidal state next door.
A report this week in the Telegraph indicates that, even after formal recognition, Starmer is still imposing new conditions designed to hollow out his declaration.
They include: demands for new Palestinian elections, elections that can only take place with Israel’s permission, which it will not give; an overhaul of any latent Palestinian nationalism Israel objects to in the Palestinian education system, even as Israel’s own education system has long been laced with genocidal incitement; a requirement that the Palestinian Authority not compensate families of anyone Israel declares a ‘terrorist’, which pretty much covers any Palestinian killed or jailed by Israel.
In other words, the Palestinian state ‘recognised’ by Starmer is envisioned as the same sham, completely dependent ‘entity’ Israel has been abusing for 30 years.
That was always the West’s two-state ‘vision’.
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‘Reward for terror’
BUT the deeper truth Starmer’s recognition is intended to obscure is that, if there is no Palestinian territory left — Gaza is razed and its population dead or cleansed, and the West Bank annexed — statehood becomes moot.
That is what is meant when the media talk about recognition being chiefly ‘symbolic’. Starmer and others see it as amounting to little more than a retrospective rap on the knuckles for Israel not playing fair.
It is a cost-free exercise because, while Israel feigns indignation about recognition serving as a supposed ‘reward for terrorism’, it and its patron in Washington know nothing tangible is really at stake.
If the Trump administration were vehemently opposed even to symbolic recognition, as earlier administrations appear to have been, when statehood might have been realizable, who really imagines Starmer or Canada’s Mark Carney would have dared step out of line?
Further, recognition sends an entirely false message to their own publics that these western capitals are ‘doing something’ for the Palestinians. That they are standing up to Israel, and behind it the US.
Starmer is especially keen to send such a message when he is about to face an annual Labour Party conference two years into a genocide he has been openly backing.
Recognition is a giant deflection exercise, an image-laundering operation, that ignores the substantive reality: that, aside from this ‘symbolic’ act, these western states continue to arm Israel, train Israeli soldiers, provide Israel with intelligence, trade with it, give it diplomatic support.
Starmer still warmly greets in Downing Street the Israeli president, Yitzhak Herzog, who at the outset of the slaughter in Gaza offered the central rationale for genocide, arguing that no one in Gaza, not even its one million children, were innocent.
Not only will recognition of Palestine not improve the situation of Palestinians but it will not demand any change of behaviours from Israel and its western patrons either. It will continue to be business as usual.
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Complicity in occupation
BUT there is a final reason why some western governments are now raising their voices in support of Palestinian statehood. To save their own skins.
Unlike Washington, which treats with open contempt international law and the international courts invested with upholding it, many US allies fear their vulnerability.
There is a final reason why some western governments are now raising their voices in support of Palestinian statehood. To save their own skins
Unlike the US, they have ratified the Convention Against Genocide and they are subject to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court in the Hague, which can put their officials on trial for complicity in war crimes.
This month was marked not just by the recognition of Palestine by Britain, France, Canada, Australia, Belgium, Portugal and a handful of small states.
Far less noticed, September 18 was the deadline set by the United Nations General Assembly for Israel to honour a ruling last year from the International Court of Justice that it withdraw its ‘unlawful presence’ from the occupied territories.
It is not just that Israel is flouting this resolution, the international community’s attempt to implement the World Court’s ruling. Over the past year Israel has headed in exactly the opposite direction: it has intensified its destruction and ethnic cleansing of Gaza, and is poised to annex the West Bank.
Entirely separate from the issue of genocide, the UN resolution also requires states to end arms transfers to Israel and enforce sanctions until it ends the occupation.
Britain and the others presumably hope that they can cook the books to argue that they did not understand there was genocide in Gaza until it was all but over, at the point, a year or two down the road, when the ICJ issues its ruling.
But they cannot make that same argument, ‘We did not know’, about the World Court ruling on the illegality of the occupation.
It should hardly need pointing out that dismantling the occupation of the Palestinian territories is the flip side of establishing a Palestinian state. They go hand in hand.
Britain and others need an alibi, feeble as it is, to argue that they are respecting the ICJ ruling and not complicit in aiding the occupation, even as their actions prove the precise opposite.
They are not only helping to prop up the genocide in Gaza. Their trade ties, arms sales, intelligence-sharing and diplomatic manoeuvres are also essential to the maintenance of Israel’s illegal occupation.
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Pariah status
IF THERE is a small hope to be derived from these western states’ grudging recognition of Palestinian statehood, it is of the unintended consequences variety.Ìý
Recognition may yet force on their leaders linguistic and legal gymnastics so extreme that they are further discredited with their publics and pressure grows inexorably for more meaningful change.
Either way, Israel’s ever-greater pariah status seems guaranteed.
But no one should take Starmer, Macron, Carney and the others at their word. If the establishment of a ‘viable’ Palestinian state were really their goal, these leaders would already have imposed on Israel sanctions and diplomatic isolation.
They would be shunning visits from Israeli officials, not welcoming them. They would be vowing to uphold the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant for Netanyahu, not allowing him, as France did in July, to use its air space to travel to the US.
They would not be turning a blind eye to Israel’s repeated attacks on aid flotillas to Gaza on the high seas. Rather, like Spain and Italy, they would at the very least be seeking to protect their own citizens. Better still, they would have set up by now their own naval armadas to bring food to a starving population in Gaza.
They would be drawing parallels with Russia and impose a trade embargo on Israel, ending its economic privileges, to echo the more than a dozen EU rounds of measures against Moscow over its war in Ukraine.
Instead, they are still aiding Israel as it demolishes the last buildings in Gaza, while it starves the population and ethnically cleanses them.
Don’t believe a word Starmer and the rest tell you. There is as much chance of Palestinian recognition tempering their complicity in Israel’s crimes as the Oslo ‘peace’ process, celebrated by their predecessors, did a generation ago.
In fact, the evidence suggests that, as happened with Oslo, Israel will use this latest ‘concession’ from the West to the Palestinians as the pretext for expanding and intensifying its atrocities, with Washington’s blessing.
Already, Israel is reported to have shut the main crossing into the West Bank from Jordan, to further strangle what little aid is reaching Gaza and heighten the West Bank’s isolation.
Starmer, Macron and the rest are war criminals who in a rightly ordered world, one where international law had clout, would already be in the dock. Their current manoeuvrings must not let them off the hook.
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Middle East Eye, September 26. Jonathan Cook is the author of three books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His website and blog can be found at www.jonathan-cook.net
