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-blown clash in the future between Israel’s government and the wider world. That’s because recognition is a fundamental rejection of the reality that Israel’s settler right has worked to impose on the conflict—one in which Israel has the unilateral ability to forever foreclose Palestinian sovereignty.
For decades, Israel’s settler movement has attempted to snuff out the possibility of a two-state solution by strategically constructing small outposts that disrupt the territorial contiguity of the West Bank and slice any envisioned Palestinian state into unworkable pieces. The intention, openly espoused by far-right activists, is to pepper the land with pockets of Jewish settlers—what they call “facts on the ground”—that will prevent any cohesive Palestinian state from being established. Put another way, these communities have a small geographic footprint but are deliberately distributed so as to have an outsize political impact.
Last month, Bezalel Smotrich, a far-right minister in Netanyahu’s government, made this plan explicit when he spearheaded the preliminary approval of new settlement housing in what is known as the E1 corridor. If built, these homes would bisect the West Bank and cut off Jerusalem from a future state of Palestine. Smotrich, who has pushed to expel and disenfranchise Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, hailed the E1 move as a “significant step that practically erases the two-state delusion.”
“The Palestinian state is being erased from the table not by slogans but by deeds,” he crowed. “Every settlement, every neighborhood, every housing unit is another nail in the coffin of this dangerous idea.”
But the notion that the two-state solution can be prevented by this or that settlement or some Israeli declaration has always been a bluff—and those recognizing Palestine today are calling it. The two-state solution cannot be killed, because it is just a line on a map. Nothing, other than a lack of political will, is stopping the parties or the international community from drawing a border tomorrow through the Holy Land and saying, This side is Israel and this side is Palestine, and we will treat it that way. What happened at the UN was a nascent expression of that political will.
As the diplomats in New York recognized, contrary to the claims of Smotrich—and some left-wing critics who have unwittingly accepted his framing—the presence of settlers is not an existential threat to the possibility of territorial compromise. Once a border is set, any settlers remaining on the Palestinian side would become Jewish citizens of Palestine, just as Israel today has a large Arab community that makes up some 20 percent of its population. Under this scenario, which has been proposed in the past by peace negotiators and think tanks, the inhabitants of Smotrich’s prized E1 settlements would vote in Palestinian elections—or move back to Israel if they did not want to. Both states would undoubtedly experience internal tensions, discrimination and racism, even terrorism, but such a situation would be infinitely better than the one we have now.
The recent lurch toward Palestinian recognition brings this eventuality closer but is not yet enough to actualize it. American buy-in would accelerate the process. Donald Trump’s recently unveiled peace plan for Gaza does envision a “pathway” to two states, but Netanyahu has already distanced himself from that language, even as he provisionally agreed to the plan, and in any case, Hamas has not yet accepted the terms.
Still, recognition doesn’t require American or Israeli backing to be consequential. Down the line, international commitment to Palestinian statehood could lead to full-fledged boycotts of Israeli settlements and even a refusal to recognize the Israeli passports of those who live in them. If Israel’s settler right manages to cling to power after the country’s next election, it may discover that although it can declare the two-state solution dead, the world may refuse to come to the funeral.
To imagine Palestinians and Israelis living in relative peace in their own states, or under some sort of confederation, seems impossible today. But that is how the future always feels during times of cataclysmic conflict. The purpose of a political process in Israel and Palestine is to imagine something better that can take the place of perpetual war. The Israeli right has spent decades trying to prevent people from conceiving any alternatives to its ultimate victory. The countries now recognizing a Palestinian state and publicly committing themselves to the prospect are rejecting that premise and denying the settler right’s attempt at a fait accompli. By also rejecting Hamas and its repeated attempts to annihilate Israel, they are telling the region’s absolutists that extremists do not have the power to impose a zero-sum outcome on the conflict. That realization is not the end of the story. But it is necessary for any new beginning.
The post Recognizing Palestine Is Symbolic. It Still Matters. appeared first on The Atlantic.
