Britain, Canada, Australia and Portugal on Sunday recognized the State of Palestine ahead of a conference this week at the United Nations. Other countries were expected to do the same during the gathering, which was designed to revive prospects for a two-state solution as a basis for peace between Palestinians and Israelis.
Recognition of Palestinian statehood — now formalized by some 150 countries — is welcome in the face of Israel’s decades-long denial of the Palestinian right to self-determination and a settlement expansion plan that “buries the idea of a Palestinian state,” as Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, recently put it.
However, it is empty symbolism at best, and at worst, a distraction from a lack of action to stop Israel’s war in Gaza and the starvation and forced displacement of roughly two million Palestinians living there. Any recognition of Palestinian statehood should be accompanied by concrete action to hold Israel accountable for its illegal, destructive policies.
Watching from the West Bank, where for decades Israel has been expanding its settlements to block Palestinian statehood, I am struck by a strong sense of déjà vu at how the push for a two-state solution never seems to take into account the one-state, apartheid reality Israel has imposed on Palestinians and is entrenching more deeply every day.
In August, in an apparent response to France and others announcing plans to recognize Palestine, the Israeli government approved settlement expansion in the so-called E1 area east of East Jerusalem. That will effectively sever in two the occupied West Bank, which is supposed to form the heartland of a Palestinian state. Israel had refrained from building settlements in the area for decades out of concern for the international repercussions. Doing so had been seen as a death blow to the two-state solution, even though to many it already appeared to be moribund.
Since Israel’s far-right government took power in December 2022, the E1 approval is just the latest in a wave of illegal settlement expansion, including the approval of 22 new settlements in the West Bank this spring. As explained in a joint statement by Mr. Smotrich and Defense Minister Israel Katz, those settlements “are all placed within a long-term strategic vision, whose goal is to strengthen the Israeli hold on the territory, to avoid the establishment of a Palestinian state and to create the basis for future development of settlement in the coming decades.”
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