The Real Reason to Recognize Palestine
Absolutists have attempted to kill the two-state solution for years. The international community just called their bluff.
By Yair Rosenberg
Eyad Baba / AFP / Getty
September 30, 2025, 7 AM ET
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This past week, Britain, Canada, and Australia, along with several smaller countries, officially recognized the state of Palestine, in the run-up to a United Nations conference devoted to the two-state solution. Yet for all the ceremony and celebration, it’s not clear whether these pronouncements actually matter. Critics have labeled the recognition effort “ empty,” “ a distraction,” or “ even harmful,” and it isn’t hard to see why. The diplomatic declarations do nothing to help Palestinians in Gaza or those menaced by Israeli settler violence in the West Bank. They will not arrest the gradual, de facto annexation of occupied Palestinian areas under the successive governments of Benjamin Netanyahu.
The countries recognizing Palestine have insisted that Hamas should have no role in its governance, but pious pledges do not change the fact that the terrorist group remains the dominant Palestinian power in Gaza—and still holds dozens of Israelis hostage, despite the Gazan population’s desperation for the war to end. These inconvenient complications suggest that recognizing a Palestinian state that does not actually exist, governed by people who are not currently in charge, is not a solution but rather a restatement of the problem.
A cynic might end the story here. But there is more to this moment than mere symbolism. International recognition of a theoretical Palestinian state alongside Israel does little for Palestinians today, but it sets the stage for a full-.....
theatlantic.com |
