On 12 September, the United Nations General Assembly voted overwhelmingly in support of a resolution to revive a two-state solution.
Adopted by 142 states, the “New York Declaration” paves the way for a 22 September summit to push for greater recognition of a phantasmatic Palestinian state.
In recent months, a chorus of western governments has lined up behind this French- and Saudi-led statehood scheme.
The upcoming UN conference comes as Israel’s genocide in Gaza nears its two-year mark, with at least 64,000 Palestinians killed and a catastrophic humanitarian crisis inflicted through weaponised starvation and the systematic destruction of the territory.
As Israel pursues its final solution against Palestinians, its belligerence has extended beyond Gaza to Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iran, Tunisia and even Qatar, where its strikes in Doha last Tuesday targeted Hamas negotiators and killed six people in the process.
New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch
Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on
Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters
Indeed, the very governments that continue to abet Israel’s war of annihilation now claim to champion Palestinian “independence”.
The ostensible aim of this manoeuvre is to achieve a “just and lasting peace in the Middle East”. Its real purpose, however, is to save Israel from itself by safeguarding its right to remain a Jewish-supremacist state, underwritten by dozens of laws that privilege Jewish colonists and their descendants over the indigenous Palestinians.
When western powers recognise a non-existent Palestinian state in defiance of reality, the central issues of Israeli colonisation are relegated to the background
Western recognition of a fictive Palestinian state hinges entirely on their long-standing recognition of the racist state of Israel alongside it. It is also engineered to shore up the collaborating Palestinian Authority as a reliable subcontractor of Israel’s colonial occupation of Palestinian land by christening it a “state”.
When western powers recognise a non-existent Palestinian state in defiance of the reality of its non-existence, the central issues of ongoing Israeli Jewish colonisation – the takeover of East Jerusalem and the West Bank, the terrorisation of the indigenous Palestinians there, let alone the unremitting genocidal war on Gaza – are relegated to the background.
In view of French and Saudi efforts, the struggle is no longer to reverse Jewish settler-colonisation and the theft of Palestinian lands, or to halt the continuing pogroms in the West Bank. Instead, it is to direct all international efforts – including this obscene conference – to securing “recognition” of a non-existent state.
Earlier attempts
This month’s summit is not the first attempt to establish a Palestinian state.
On 22 September 1948, the All-Palestine Government (APG) was founded in Gaza and claimed sovereignty over all of Mandatory Palestine.
In practice, it could only operate in what became the Gaza Strip, after the establishment of the Israeli settler-colony the previous May and Israel’s occupation of half the territory that the UN Partition Plan had designated as a Palestinian state.
Instead of recognising ‘Palestine’, countries should withdraw recognition of Israel
Read More »
Six of the then seven members of the League of Arab States recognised the APG immediately. Only Jordan, in control of central and eastern Palestine, which it annexed the following year and renamed “the West Bank”, refused to extend recognition. The West soon recognised the Jordanian annexation of the West Bank, though not of East Jerusalem.
Due to western hostility to the APG, and complicity in the division of Palestine between Israel and King Abdullah I of Jordan to prevent any Palestinian sovereignty, the APG faded and dissolved itself in 1953.
In 1988, the Palestine National Council – the Palestinian parliament in exile, an organ of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) – unilaterally declared “independence” in Algiers in support of the first Palestinian Uprising (1987-1993), which the PLO would ultimately crush as the price it pledged to pay for signing the 1993 Oslo Accord.
While dozens of countries rushed to recognise that non-existent independent state, the United States adamantly refused.
The US had, in fact, been the party responsible for blocking Palestinian independence in 1947, when it strong-armed several countries to change their votes at the last minute and support UN General Assembly Resolution 181 – the Partition Plan.
Thanks to American efforts, that plan awarded most of Palestine to the minority Jewish colonists, whose state the US recognised readily in May 1948.
The US also made sure not to recognise the APG, a strategy it maintained by denying recognition to the PLO’s declaration of independence in 1988.
After Oslo
After the 1993-94 Oslo Accords, which created the Palestinian Authority (PA), negotiations with Israel on the core issues – independence, borders, Jerusalem and the return of refugees – never materialised, despite the passage of an agreed five-year interim period ending in May 1999.
When no “final status” talks were even started, PA President Yasser Arafat threatened to declare the independence of Palestine in the entire West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza – territories where the PA exercised either extremely limited or no actual control. Amid American threats and warnings from pro-American Arab governments, Arafat backed down.
Subsequent PA attempts to be recognised by the UN as a state were met with the threat of a US veto and of cutting off US funding to UN organisations that dared to do so.
Follow Middle East Eye’s live coverage of Israel’s genocide in Gaza
Unesco admitted Palestine as a member state in November 2011, but subsequently lost US funding.
Even though the PA never declared a Palestinian state (only the PLO did), following UN General Assembly resolution 67/19, which upgraded Palestine’s status to a “non-member observer state” in November 2012 with an overwhelming majority, the PA officially began using the name “State of Palestine” on its official documents and called its mission office in Washington DC an “embassy” – which US President Donald Trump closed in 2018 during his first term in office.
Recognition drive
Capitalising on the Israeli genocide in Gaza, the PA, which has acted as a loyal enforcer of Israel’s occupation since 1993, pushed for more recognition of the fantastical Palestinian state as a reward for its compliance with Israeli diktat from the very European countries that have been active participants in the Israeli genocide.
The PA, which has acted as a loyal enforcer of Israel’s occupation, pushed for more recognition of the fantastical Palestinian state as a reward for its compliance with Israel
Last year, this effort accelerated to include several such countries, though not the principal abettors of the genocide.
As of May 2025, 143 countries out of 193 around the world had recognised Palestine as an independent state. That number is set to increase by at least half a dozen this month, including Israel’s major partners in crime: France, Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom, as well as Belgium, Portugal, Malta and possibly Finland.
The US, Israel’s chief accomplice in all its crimes against the Palestinian people, has maintained the position it has taken since 1948: preventing the Palestinians from establishing a phantasmatic state, let alone a real one.
Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni, however, has objected to the project of recognition, arguing that “recognising the State of Palestine before it is established could be counterproductive”. She added: “I am very much in favour of the State of Palestine, but I am not in favour of recognising it prior to establishing it.”
She has a point.
Empty declarations
The question of declaring the independence of a state before its creation and before its actual independence is not as strange as it first appears.
Some countries indeed declared independence long before they achieved it, including the US, which declared the very first independence in 1776, even though the British were not defeated until 1783. The French recognised US independence in 1778.
The Greeks followed suit by declaring independence in 1822, even though their revolution against the Ottomans was not victorious until the end of that decade. In 1830, European powers that had aided the Greeks recognised their new state – and promptly took it over.
In contrast, Haiti declared its independence in 1804, 13 years after the start of its revolution, and after the formerly enslaved succeeded in overthrowing slavery, the French settlers and the colonial French state. Still, the slave-holding US refused to recognise it until 1862.
In the case of the US, Greece and Haiti, those who declared independence were the ones who fought to evict the ruling empire from their state-to-be.
In the case of the PA, however, the European imperial countries are seeking to grant recognition of an independent Palestinian state not to the resistance fighting the colonists, but to collaborators with Israeli colonialism and occupation.
This may not be Meloni’s point, but it should be the concern of those who think such recognition will end rather than deepen Israeli colonialism and control – and further strengthen their Palestinian collaborators.
Exercise in futility
After decades of denying Palestinians the right to independence, western imperialist states and white settler-colonies are now set to enlarge the number of countries recognising the Palestinian right to self-determination and statehood.
But next week’s conference will do no more than reassure Israel that its right to exist as a Jewish-supremacist state will be best guaranteed by its sponsors’ recognition of a fictive Palestinian state.
Why western plans for another Palestinian client regime will fail
Read More »
The US and Israel refuse to accept “yes” for an answer, and believe that the Palestinians, including the collaborator PA, must be forever denied even a symbol of independence and a state.
The Europeans and the Arab regimes driving this initiative, by contrast, believe that the trappings of “independence” are the best way to curtail Palestinian aspirations and derail their struggle for liberation into an illusion of statehood that does nothing to threaten Israeli Jewish supremacy.
What will therefore remain of this international recognition is the part that affirms Israel as a Jewish-supremacist state existing alongside a non-existent Palestinian state that will never see the light.
As I argued last year here, the only way for these states to penalise Israel diplomatically is to withdraw recognition of Israel’s right to be a Jewish-supremacist state, and to boycott it and impose international sanctions against it until it abrogates all its racist laws.
Short of that, the entire conference is an exercise in futility and is further proof of the ongoing complicity of its participants in Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
