147 out of 193 United Nations member states recognize the State of Palestine. Yet the declaration of several Western countries to do so has sparked hysteria as if it were a new idea.
French President Emmanuel Macron stated his intention to recognize Palestine last week. This was followed by the threat to do so from the United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Both Macron’s declaration and Starmer’s threat drew a hysterical reaction from Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who accused both Starmer and Macron of “rewarding terrorism.”
Canada followed suit on Wednesday, stating that it would recognize Palestine because, according to their Prime Minister Mark Carney, “the prospect of a Palestinian state is literally receding before our eyes.”
What do we make of these declarations of promised recognition? Will they have any impact on Israel’s behavior?
Political theater, but not totally empty
Recognition by Canada, France, and the UK is not going to bring about any immediate change in Israel’s policy of starvation and genocide in Gaza. Indeed, all three countries will, from all appearances, continue doing business with Israel, including trading in weapons, even after recognition.
It is clear by now, even to the densest advocate of appeasing Israel, that nothing short of boycotts and sanctions, as advocated by the BDS movement around the world, will change Israeli policy. It beggars belief that Macron, Carney, and Starmer don’t know this.
These declarations are meant to appease the critics of French, Canadian, and British policy without having to take more drastic and admittedly complicated steps that would actually affect the Netanyahu government.
Still, that doesn’t mean recognition is a completely meaningless action. It’s far from the impactful move one would think it is, given the shrillness of Israeli wailing over it, but it means something in the long term.
Recognition from France and the UK would mean that the United States is the only permanent member of the UN Security Council that doesn’t recognize Palestine, as Russia and China recognized Palestine in 1988. Canada is the U.S.’s most intimate neighbor, and its decision will reverberate south of its border.
That will give Palestine and its advocates some additional weight in trying to push the United States, the only country that Israel cares about, to recognize Palestine as well. That may seem unimaginable, but the shifting public view of Israel in the U.S. means a future administration could be moved in the right direction.
Recognition will also energize the forces in Canada, the UK, France, and the rest of Europe to push harder for policy changes. At some point, European, Canadian, and even American leaders cannot ignore such overwhelming opposition to support for a genocidal, apartheid ethnocracy. Indeed, we are seeing unprecedented public momentum for change. It’s growing rapidly, even among some on the right, and it is starting to have an effect.
Macron’s, Carney’s, and Starmer’s statements are not identical. We need to look at each individually and consider the significant role the Donald Trump regime is playing in all of this.
United Kingdom
Keir Starmer’s use of recognition of Palestine as a hammer over Israel’s head turns reality inside out. It also defies any kind of logic. Starmer is telling Palestinians that he will recognize their right to a state unless the state that is currently starving their babies to death eases up just a little, in which case he won’t do it. So, Palestinians, in Starmer’s view, only deserve a state if they’re dead.
Either Palestinians are entitled to a state of their own or they are not. If they are, then that should be recognized regardless of what Israel does. If they are not so entitled, then there should be no recognition. But the idea that recognition can be used as a lever against a genocidal state is obscene, in and of itself. Rights are not bargaining chips.
There is no logic in using recognition as a cudgel if resolving the oppression and dispossession of Palestinians and ending violence is really the goal of diplomacy. Starmer has demonstrated that this is not the goal of British diplomacy.
France
Macron has done something different, but almost as slippery.
Palestine has been a significant source of tension for a long time in France, and the genocide has obviously made this worse. Not wanting to take the meaningful step of sanctioning or boycotting Israel, Macron did this instead.
It was not a useful move, but criticism of his decision at this point must consider that it will be even worse if he backs off again. Each time a state says it will take a stand, even a performative one, against Israel’s crimes but backs off in the face of Israel’s whining and the potential of consequences from Washington, it increases domestic pressure on other leaders to stay out of this fight while emboldening Israel and the U.S. to double down on their refusal to allow Palestinians one breath of life.
Recognition can be a useful step if it is the culmination of a process. It does little to start one.
This was demonstrated by the letter from 34 former European ambassadors of July 23. In that letter, they called on the EU to act against Israel’s genocide in a more strategic way.
The ambassadors outlined eight steps the EU should take before recognizing Palestine at the UN General Assembly in late September:
1. Resume international aid deliveries immediately at scale and flood the Gaza Strip with humanitarian supplies.
2. Immediately suspend all arms and dual-use exports to Israel.
3. Ban trade with Israel’s settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory and prohibit EU and member states’ commercial and investment relations with any entity or company doing business in or benefiting from Israel’s settlements.
4. Suspend all preferential commercial arrangements for Israel under the EU’s Association Agreement, which includes an article that conditions the deal on observing international law and human rights norms.
5. Cancel Israel’s participation in Horizon Europe and all dual-use research, academic and technology programs of the EU.
6. Impose targeted sanctions on Israeli ministers, government officials, military commanders, and violent settlers responsible for war crimes, crimes against humanity, facilitating genocide, and carrying out state-sanctioned terrorism.
7. Support international and national judicial mechanisms — including the ICC and domestic courts under universal jurisdiction — to bring perpetrators to justice.
8. Provide political, legal, and financial support to Palestinian civilian victims, human rights defenders, and humanitarian organizations operating under impossible conditions.
9. Recognize Palestinian statehood.
Some of these steps could not be taken by EU members like France alone, and it would require unanimous agreement for the EU to carry them out. Some can be taken by individual member states. But merely raising these proposals in public and calling for the citizens of member states to support them would create more political pressure than recognition by itself.
Canada
Canadian PM Mark Carney hewed closer to Macron’s stance, but he gives away the colonialist game when it comes to Palestinian rights. In announcing his recognition plan, the Canadian leader said, “Canada condemns the fact that the Israeli government has allowed a catastrophe to unfold in Gaza.”
Leaving aside the fact that this echoes Starmer’s egregious spin that bases Palestinian rights on Israel’s bad behavior, can you imagine if someone at the Nurenburg Trials said that they “condemned the fact that the German Nazi government has allowed such a catastrophe to happen throughout the area of Europe they controlled”? Would anyone say the United States “allowed” the atomic bombs to drop on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
This erases Israel’s responsibility for Gaza, even while cloaking it in language that appears to accuse Israel. It implies that Israel was merely an irresponsible bystander while some natural calamity befell the people of Gaza. This is a well-worn trick to salvage an image of Israel that is at least innocent enough to maintain trade and military relationships. But what it really does is absolve Israel, if not completely, then surely for the worst of its crimes.
Carney even goes one step further by conditioning Canada’s recognition of Palestine on Palestinian Authority reforms. While the PA surely does need to be reformed (though the nature of that necessary reform is seen very differently by Palestinians than by Western leaders), this is an insane double standard.
Whatever the PA’s and PLO’s crimes, they pale before Israel’s genocide. Yet recognition of Israel does not depend on stopping that worst of all crimes. After all Palestinians have been through, Carney feels they need to “earn” recognition of their national rights, while Israel can keep its status regardless of genocide.
Carney is playing these games because he has to manage a difficult relationship with Donald Trump and the United States while also appeasing a population that has become increasingly critical of Israel.
The United States and why this is happening now
Last week, as the United States was pulling out of ceasefire talks with Israel, Qatar, and Egypt, Donald Trump told reporters, “It’s sort of disappointing,” referring to his recent conversation with Benjamin Netanyahu.
What was Trump disappointed about? It is clear that he wanted Netanyahu to end the genocide in exchange for exchanging the remaining hostages in Gaza for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. Trump’s attempts at foreign policy dealmaking have been major failures, and his “trade deals” are unpopular. He wants a win badly.
But Netanyahu wanted no part of that idea. Trump, recognizing that Hamas was not simply going to give up the remaining hostages and allow Israel to continue its genocide unimpeded by that concern, decided there was nothing more to do and withdrew from the process.
But that decision has implications for Trump’s regional vision. Israeli columnist Zvi Bar’el had it right when he wrote on Tuesday, “It seems that Trump has concluded that his ambitions to create a ‘new Middle East,’ to establish peace between Israel and several other Arab countries, and the big prize, to bring about normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia, will have to wait a while longer.”
That’s correct, and the result is that Trump is frustrated and tired of dealing with the entire issue. He wants to turn away from it, especially now, as his personal scandals involving the late and unlamented pedophile sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein are not going away.
A Mideast deal, even just a ceasefire in Gaza, would have helped, but it’s not going to happen. And he isn’t happy with Netanyahu about it.
While Trump dismissed France’s announcement, he did not do, say, or even imply any pressure on Macron to reverse his position. He simply called it irrelevant.
His reaction to Starmer was even milder. He parroted the Israeli line about recognition “rewarding Hamas,” but also said, “I’m not going to take a position, I don’t mind him taking a position (on recognizing Palestine).” Starmer had met with Trump just before his announcement, and he clearly would not have taken this step if he thought there would be any serious response from Washington.
On Thursday, the State Department announced new sanctions on the Palestinian Authority and PLO. The sanctions were based on old complaints, chiefly that the PLO went to the ICC and ICJ after finally admitting the U.S would never pressure Israel into a two-state solution.
There was no real reason to do this now, other than to balance Trump’s public position. In his usual, schizophrenic way, he expressed his annoyance with Netanyahu by essentially permitting France and the UK to go ahead with their moves toward recognition (he seems less at ease with Canada, possibly because Carney didn’t consult him first as Starmer did), but he remains concerned that his evangelical base will see him as leaning too heavily toward the Palestinians, even while some of his MAGA base are souring on Israel.
Recognition might matter somewhere down the road, after the genocide is already over. But, as usual, the Palestinians are not going to see any immediate, substantive help from Europe, much less from North America.