Recognition without justice: Why Palestine needs sanctions, not symbolic gestures
For decades, Palestine has been recognised as a state by the majority of the international community. One hundred and forty-three countries have granted it diplomatic recognition — a figure that should, on the surface, represent an unassailable consensus on the Palestinian right to self-determination. Yet Gaza remains under suffocating blockade, West Bank settlements metastasise across stolen land, and millions of refugees remain in exile. This dissonance between symbolic recognition and lived reality exposes a hard truth: recognition alone has no coercive force. It changes nothing in the calculus of an apartheid state whose survival depends on racism, colonial expansion, and the brutalisation of an entire people.
Israel’s conduct over the past 76 years is not an accident of policy but the deliberate architecture of domination. From the Nakba of 1948 — the mass expulsion of over 700,000 Palestinians — to the present-day bombardment of Gaza, Israel has operated as a colonial settler project, rooted in the displacement of the indigenous population and the monopolisation of land, resources, and political power. Legal scholars, including Richard Falk, former UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, have consistently characterised Israel as practising apartheid in violation of the 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid (Falk & Tilley, UN ESCWA Report, 2017). The International Court of Justice, in its July 2024 advisory opinion, reaffirmed that Israel’s occupation and annexation policies in the West Bank violate international law and must end “as rapidly as possible” (ICJ, 2024). Yet, without enforcement mechanisms, such declarations become toothless pronouncements — easily ignored by the very state they indict.
This is why recognition, though diplomatically valuable, is politically inert without measures that strike at the infrastructure of Israel’s apartheid regime. Israel continues to function as a privileged member of the global system — trading freely, participating in international cultural and sporting events, receiving billions in military aid (chiefly from the United States), and enjoying the shield of Western vetoes in the UN Security Council. Recognition of Palestine changes none of these realities. It does not ground planes supplying weapons for bombing campaigns; it does not freeze the foreign accounts of companies profiting from occupation; it does not prevent the Israeli prime minister from being welcomed on red carpets in Western capitals.
History offers an unambiguous lesson. Apartheid South Africa did not capitulate because the world recognised the African National Congress (ANC) or the legitimacy of the liberation struggle. It collapsed when it became a global pariah: when international sports teams refused to play in its stadiums, when artists and academics refused to cross its borders, when sanctions choked its economy, when arms embargoes left its military exposed, and when exclusion from the UN and Commonwealth stripped away the veneer of normality. Recognition was necessary, but isolation was decisive. Without such isolation, South Africa’s white supremacist government would have continued to entrench itself, just as Israel does today.
The call for Palestine now must mirror — and even exceed — the anti-apartheid campaign. Israel is not simply another state in violation of international law; it is a serial violator whose actions have been documented in meticulous detail by human rights organisations including Amnesty International (Israel’s Apartheid Against Palestinians, 2022), Human Rights Watch (A Threshold Crossed, 2021), and B’Tselem (A Regime of Jewish Supremacy, 2021). These reports converge on one conclusion: Israel’s system is not a temporary response to “security threats” but a permanent regime of racial domination designed to privilege Jewish Israelis at the expense of Palestinians in every domain — from land ownership and movement to political participation and resource access.
Recognition that is not backed by sanctions allows this regime to thrive. It gives governments in the Global North an easy out — they can posture as supporters of justice while maintaining lucrative arms deals and intelligence partnerships. It allows multinationals to continue profiting from illegal settlements without fear of losing access to markets. It permits the brutes in Israel’s political and military elite to carry on their siege and slaughter, secure in the knowledge that the cost to them is negligible.
Sanctions are not merely punitive; they are preventive. The UN Charter (Articles 39–41) empowers the Security Council to impose measures — from economic restrictions to severance of diplomatic relations — against states that threaten peace. The Genocide Convention obliges its signatories to prevent genocide “by all means reasonably available,” not merely to punish it after the fact. The International Court of Justice’s provisional measures order in January 2024, in South Africa’s case against Israel, underscored the plausibility of genocide in Gaza and instructed Israel to prevent acts prohibited by the Convention. That order has been defied in full view of the world. Continued inaction by states thus risks making them complicit under international law (Cassese, International Criminal Law, 2013).
Suspension from the United Nations, while politically difficult, is not unprecedented. Apartheid South Africa was suspended from the General Assembly in 1974 under Resolution 3207 (XXIX) due to its policies of racial segregation. The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro) faced exclusion from the General Assembly in 1992 over aggression in Bosnia. If the UN’s own legal standards mean anything, Israel’s apartheid and colonial enterprise — combined with credible allegations of genocide — justify similar measures. Such suspension would strip Israel of the legitimacy it craves and signal that the international community will not normalise permanent occupation and ethnic cleansing.
Those who argue against sanctions and isolation often claim they would “harm dialogue” or “alienate” Israeli society. This mirrors the same apologetics used during the South African boycott debates, when opponents claimed isolation would entrench the regime. In truth, the opposite occurred: it delegitimised the system internally and galvanised dissent within. Israeli society today is overwhelmingly complicit in the occupation, with polls showing majorities opposing a sovereign Palestinian state and supporting the siege on Gaza (Israel Democracy Institute, 2024). Breaking this consensus requires breaking the comfort that comes from international acceptance.
It is equally important to confront the double standards of Western powers. The European Union, United States, and other allies have shown they can deploy sanctions with lightning speed when geopolitical rivals are involved — as in the case of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Yet, when Israel commits prolonged aggression, they fall back on the language of “restraint” and “both sides.” Such hypocrisy undermines the credibility of the international system and exposes the racial hierarchy embedded within it — where the lives of Palestinians are accorded less worth, their suffering less urgency.
Recognition without sanctions is a dangerous sedative. It numbs global conscience into believing that a moral obligation has been fulfilled, when in fact nothing has changed on the ground. Gaza’s children will still drink contaminated water; West Bank farmers will still be driven from their land by settler violence; the diaspora will still be denied the right of return. Israel’s leaders will continue to expand settlements, demolish homes, and bomb refugee camps, secure in their immunity.
The choice before the world is stark. Either recognition becomes the starting point for a campaign of total political, economic, and cultural isolation of the apartheid state, or it remains an exercise in empty symbolism — a diplomatic flourish in the shadow of ongoing ethnic cleansing. The time for incrementalism has passed. The machinery of Israel’s racist colonial project is not slowing; it is accelerating. Only when the cost of occupation outweighs its perceived benefits will the brutes who administer it be forced to dismantle it.
In the words of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, whose moral clarity on apartheid remains unassailable: “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” Neutrality today means accepting recognition as the end goal. Justice demands that we go further — to sanctions, suspension, and total isolation until freedom is not a diplomatic fiction but a lived Palestinian reality.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.