The firmness and speed with which a number of countries in the West have been according recognition to Palestine as a state changes, in that positive sense of the meaning, the contours of international politics. Britain, Canada and Australia have acknowledged -- and it is a pity that the acknowledgement has come long after the murder of more than 65,000 Palestinians by Israeli forces in Gaza and elsewhere -- the reality of Palestine being a nation, of the necessity of its emergence as a sovereign state.
That point was made all the more manifest at the United Nations by French President Emmanuel Macron on Monday. Paris’ recognition of Palestine, along with that by Belgium, underscores the unvarnished truth -- that the Middle East will never be a place of peace without Palestinians being accorded the right to their own state.
To be sure, there are the powerful men in Washington and Tel Aviv gravely disturbed by this turn of events. For them, it would only be proper to demonstrate the sagacity that will qualify them for statesmanship through informing themselves that Palestine is an inevitability which can no more be pushed under the rug, that Gaza and the rest of Palestine under Israeli occupation must be vacated in order to create the conditions for a two-state solution to be fulfilled in the region.
Benjamin Netanyahu may go on peddling his bellicosity on the issue. That ought not to prevent the West, and one speaks of Trump’s America as well in this context, from ramping up the pressure for Israel where taking itself out of occupied Arab land is the issue. That includes a dismantling of all illegal Jewish settlements in Arab territory.
Britain, France, Canada, Australia, and other states in the West as well as away from the West now believe that Palestine is a state. That is a fine template to begin with, which must be followed by global efforts toward creating the conditions that will formally and legally lead to the establishment of the State of Palestine in terms of geography.
The conditions are simple, laid bare before the world. All Israeli military operations must cease in Gaza and all steps must be taken to have Netanyahu and his far-right regime desist from anymore violating the norms of a rules-based international order, violations Israel has committed through raining down firepower on Beirut, Doha, Ramallah, and other sovereign capitals in the region. It is also important that sanctions be readied for application against Israel should Netanyahu, encouraged by his friends in Washington, remain adamant about continuing to pursue his policy in the region.
The West is certainly right to argue that all remaining Israeli hostages, dead or alive, seized by Hamas in October 2023 be freed in order for conditions conducive to the creation of a sovereign Palestine to be in place. The West, in addition, must carry out a more important task, that of formally condemning the genocide Israel has been perpetrating in Gaza.
To ask Hamas to free the hostages is welcome. But any silence by Western nations which have now come forth to recognize the sovereignty of Palestine on the killings, famine conditions and displacement of people in Gaza will render hollow their diplomatic support for Palestine. In short, pressure must be built by the West for Israel and its American backers to understand that the time is finally here for the long injustice caused to Palestinians to be rolled back through an application of international law.
The Palestinians have lost much in the course of modern history. Losing a country, losing a heritage is forever a wrenching affair; and yet that is precisely what came to afflict the Palestinians in May 1948 through the creation of Israel. You could safely argue that Palestinian legitimacy was buried under a weighty Zionist illegitimacy in that year.
It was illegitimacy which gained fresh fury and strength through the Six-Day War of June 1967 when the Israeli army occupied the West Bank. When that happened, something of hubris came to be added to illegitimacy when Israel’s rulers made it known that Jerusalem would henceforth be the capital of their state. No more would the ancient city be home, in that biblical sense, to diverse faiths but would be part of Israel. It mattered little that the Israelis were an occupation force. What did matter was that they felt happier annexing territory not their own.
Which is when you understand the nature of the long Palestinian struggle against occupation. Gaza and the West Bank, after June 1967, turned into symbols of a future Palestinian state. There was Fatah with its intent to wage battle against the Israelis. To be sure, successive Israeli politicians and their friends in the West all too easily dismissed Fatah and other resistance organizations as being but another name for terrorism. And then Fatah, with Yasser Arafat at its head, reordered its policies.
It was, given the emergent realities, a shift that ought to have produced some of the more historic results in terms of an inauguration of a new era. Arafat made peace with Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, nearly convinced that things were on the right track. They were not, as subsequent developments were to show. Successive Israeli administrations -- and you can certainly trace them all the way back to the Menachem Begin era -- carefully nurtured a policy of keeping Palestinian statehood at bay.
There is that essential element of morality too that one cannot quite ignore about Palestine. Think here of Palestine being a metaphor for everything that has been lost and all that may yet be reclaimed. The old homes, the orchards that bore fruit across the generations, the hills and valleys which shaped the lyrics of unsurpassable melody, passed under Israeli control long ago. You have here a condition where a state, Israel, was cobbled into shape through means patently injudicious. And you have too the unambiguous immorality of that state extending its reach through seizing and keeping what is not its own. It is this deep-rooted injustice that successive Tel Aviv governments have nurtured without embarrassment.
The dream of Palestine needs to endure and translate into a solid fact of history. Because history is bigger than men of Machiavellian ambitions, on a higher pedestal than parochial politics. Palestine remains a necessarily historical struggle in defense of the rights of man.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is an author and writes on politics and foreign affairs.