Recognizing Palestine While Ignoring Palestinians

 In recent weeks, a number of Western countries have announced their intention to recognize Palestine as a state, including France, Canada, Malta and Belgium. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer followed suit but in the form of an explicit threat: His government would recognize the state of Palestine if Israel did not agree to a ceasefire in Gaza.

These announcements represent the most high-profile push for Palestinian statehood recognition since 2012, when Palestine was given observer status at the United Nations. For many years prior to the Hamas-led attacks on Oct. 7 and Israel's military campaign in Gaza that followed, the international community seemed to have given up on the idea of a two-state resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Instead, U.S. policymakers pursued Arab-Israeli normalization arrangements through the Abraham Accords, which bypassed the Palestinian question altogether. Meanwhile, the international community neither took Israel to task for its de facto annexation of the Palestinian territories, nor held the Palestinian Authority to account for its growing illegitimacy and authoritarian tilt. Indeed, they have in some ways encouraged it.

Palestine is already recognized as a state by 145 countries, but because the latest push for recognition comes from powerful states, including some permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, the news has been met with a great deal of attention. Yet amid unprecedented levels of mass violence in Gaza, what can recognition actually achieve? Would it meaningfully change material conditions in Israel and Palestine, or is it political theater?

These questions have ignited a debate among Israel-Palestine analysts, international relations scholars and legal experts. Political scientist and WPR columnist Paul Poast, writing in these pages, argued that recognition alone may not resolve the conflict but remains a meaningful signal by international actors. He noted correctly that recognition is tied to sovereignty, or "the notion that a government has both control over its territory and that other governments legally acknowledge that control."

Tanja Aalberts, writing on sovereignty and international recognition, has noted similarly that sovereignty is a state's "identity," constituted by the norms of international society. In this formulation, states are recognized as sovereign if they fulfill the right to self-determination for a group of people. On rare occasions in the past, the international system has even refused to recognize certain political entities as states because they violated this right. Rhodesia, for example, was controlled by a white minority government that failed to grant self-determination to its population and therefore only achieved widespread recognition as a sovereign state in 1980, when it transitioned to majority rule and was renamed Zimbabwe. Accompanied as it was by a U.N. trade embargo of Rhodesia, the international community's decision to withhold recognition was hugely important.

The more recent announcements for recognition of Palestine have been greeted in some corners with cynicism, suspicion and even alarm. 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. These include hundreds of thousands of people killed or injured, many civilians detained and tortured, millions displaced and subjected to famine, and the destruction of almost 80 percent of the Gaza Strip's infrastructure. These conditions have been credibly identified as genocide by legal experts and human rights organizations globally as well as within Israel itself.

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. As other analysts have argued, there are many levers available to apply pressure to Israel, including an arms embargo, sanctions and compliance with the International Criminal Court's arrest warrants on Israeli leaders. Recognition of Palestine uses none of this leverage.

The question of what Palestinian people want is not merely a moral question but a strategic one, for without public support, solutions will go nowhere.

Moreover, the countries considering recognition of Palestine have set some conditions. French President Emmanuel Macron says that Paris will only recognize Palestine if Hamas is "demilitarized." Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, similarly, conditioned his country's recognition on the Palestinian Authority eventually holding elections that exclude Hamas. As Palestinian legal experts Noura Erekat and Shahd Hammouri noted last month, the Palestinian Authority is upheld as the rightful representative of Palestinian sovereignty in seven separate clauses of the document released by the international conference on Palestine convened by Saudi Arabia and France last month, which preceded France's announcement of recognition.

This speaks to the main issue at stake with these recognition announcements: At no point has any international actor considered what the Palestinian people want or even what they would accept. This is not merely a moral question, but a strategic one, for without public support, solutions will go nowhere.

So, what do Palestinians actually think? First, they are deeply dissatisfied with the Palestinian Authority. According to the latest polling, released in May, 81 percent of Palestinians want President Mahmoud Abbas, head of the PA, to resign. Only 15 percent are satisfied with the PA's conduct over the past two years. The PA is often referred to as a "subcontractor of occupation," accused of focusing on security coordination with Israel over the defense of Palestinians, and of holding on to its own dwindling power at the expense of the Palestinian people's aspirations.

Hamas does not have a popular mandate either. To be sure, 32 percent of Palestinians support the militant group compared to Abbas' Fatah party, which garners 21 percent. But 34 percent of Palestinians polled-the largest group-said they did not know who they support or refused to answer the question.

Clearly, recognition of Palestinian statehood at the cost of upholding the Palestinian Authority in its current undemocratic form would have no basis of support among Palestinians. Calls for limited elections would not solve this issue, and in fact would only worsen the PA's perceived illegitimacy.

When asked about statehood aspirations, 47 percent of Palestinians support a two-state solution while only 15 percent support a confederation and 14 support a one-state solution where they live in Israel with equal rights. However, what a two-state solution actually means to Palestinians-a state of their own with meaningful sovereignty-is not something Israel is willing to accept. And this shows, as 67 percent of Palestinians believe the two-state solution is simply no longer feasible.

Palestinians have always desired self-determination and actual sovereignty, which does not mean cantonments of limited self-governance, but rather control over their territory, defense and people.

Palestinians in 1993 thought that the Oslo Accords promised them a path to such statehood. But this has never been something Israel was willing to negotiate toward; then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin clearly stated in 1995 that what was on offer was "an entity less than a state." Today, Israeli leaders such as Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich reject even the notion of self-governance, offering Palestinians complete surrender or else involuntary transfer.

The U.S. has seemed to accept, and indeed encourage, this state of affairs. During President Donald Trump's first administration, Jared Kushner's "Peace to Prosperity" plan spoke of Palestinian sovereignty as an "unnecessary stumbling block" to negotiations that needed to be cast aside to focus on "pragmatic and operational concerns." The Biden administration then ignored growing hardship for Palestinians and reaffirmed Trump's foreign policy commitment to Arab-Israeli normalization rather than Palestinian-Israeli peace.

But this was, and remains, unacceptable to Palestinians, who have repeatedly reaffirmed their desire for self-determination, for Palestinian unity despite fragmentation, and for sovereignty. These commitments have only strengthened today. Palestinian activists often invoke thawabit, or "constants," in their struggle, which include self-determination, the right to resist, Jerusalem as their capital and the right of return for Palestinian refugees. These constants are the basis of Palestinian demands, both in the occupied territories and across the globe. Whether or not international actors view this as a reasonable starting point is irrelevant; the fact remains that the Palestinian people continue to be committed to these constants. Therefore, recognition of something less than that, without public input, would not garner public buy-in-especially as the war on Gaza rages on.

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? Without earnestly grappling with these questions, foreign powers' statements of recognition will fall on deaf ears.

Dana El Kurd is an associate professor of political science and a senior non-resident fellow at the Arab Center Washington. She is a specialist in Arab and Palestinian politics with a focus on authoritarianism, international intervention and mobilization processes. Her work has been published with media outlets such as the Financial Times, The Nation, The New York Times, Foreign Policy and more.