It is too early to say if the historic move to recognize the Palestinian State by England, France, Belgium, and Portugal will make any tangible difference for the Palestinian people, chafing under the triple oppression of Israeli occupation, Hamas, and the proven incompetence and corruption of their only recognized government led by Mr. Abbas.
It may very well be that, despite their best hopes, the Recognizers will have only added to the agony of the Palestinians instead of decreasing it. The only effective power that has leverage over the fate of the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank today is Israel. It is the ultimate source of all decrees, legislations, permits, and prohibitions that shape their daily lives. This also applies to those nominally under the rule of the PNA.
The recognition will have one unquestionable consequence: it will make Israel’s government even more determined to proceed on the road of disenfranchisement by removing all necessary contraptions of statehood from the Palestinians. Let us remind ourselves that statehood, as an academically defined principle, has four key requirements: a defined territory, a population, a government, and the capacity to enter into relationships with other nations.
Palestine has a quasi-virtual area resembling territorially non-contiguous patches of land that are currently being chopped up into even smaller chunks by the relentless policy of West Bank settlement construction of Israel. Even this area is under threat by further annexation. Its population is a mix between Palestinians holding Israeli citizenship and refugees, most of them Gazans, still under Hamas authority. As for the government, the West Bank Palestinians have the PNA, which is internationally recognized but widely disparaged, even by Middle Eastern governments, over its corruption and refusal to hold elections, an anomaly when considering a supposedly democratic government (even with democratic elections in short supply in the region). The only condition of the four associated with statehood that stands beyond any doubt is the ability to enter into contact with other governments. This is happening day in and day out with an intensity that puts many other governments to shame.
All European nations, much like Australia and Canada, two further “new Recognizers,” are aware of this. Still, they were determined, independent of each other, and against the opprobium of the US, which will likely never recognize a Palestinian state, to go ahead and take the historic step.
What drove them? Beyond any reasonable doubt, one factor was frustration. Watching the carnage in Gaza, regardless of whether Hamas brought it upon themselves and the innocents who bear the brunt of the killings and destruction, public opinion the world over reacted with increasing anger and exasperation. Governments needed to react, and the recognition of the Palestinian State, the ultimate aspiration of the people suffering the inexpressible horrors of Gaza, seemed the “last resort act” after countless exhortations for self-restraint addressed to the Government of Israel, with no effect.
Add to this the factors of bad conscience and remorse that prevailed in the cases of England and France. For long, the two were held accountable in the eyes of not just the Palestinians but the entire Middle East over what has transpired between Jews and Palestinians on account of the Balfour Declaration and the Sykes-Picot Agreement, both paving the way for the emergence of the Middle East we see today. The UN partition decision of 1947 was, in the eyes of Middle Eastern observers, only the logical end result of the Great Power machinations of the preceding three decades. Add the Suez crisis, where the two were complicit with Israel in their attempt at strangling the young Egyptian revolution and staging a neocolonialist comeback, a project eventually nixed by the US. All along the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, they were seen by the Middle East as biased towards Israel.
Times are changing. Today, for both Britain and France, the Palestine issue is not simply a geopolitical problem with various implications. Rather, it is a domestic political challenge with direct bearing on their elections. The two, already straddled with the onus of an illegal immigration crisis, cannot ignore the fact that a significant part of their citizens of Muslim and/or Arab origin sees them complicit with Israeli policies they have condemned as genocidal, and protested vehemently, even before the UN came to this conclusion. Their voices—and votes—may make all the difference in upcoming elections. At stake in both countries is keeping the far-right at bay.
What remains the most troubling question of all in the uncharted waters surrounding the Recognition is not so much the motivations at the root of the decisions, though. It remains to be seen if the Palestinians, gaining a foothold of their ancestral land large enough to serve as the kernel of a State, can themselves come together to form a viable Government.
Their current conditions of fragmentation are, if anything, not an encouraging omen. First, it is unclear if the majority of Palestinians wishes to live in a secular state. To go even further, if they wish to live in a state as opposed to a Caliphate, that Hamas, arguably the most popular of all the political parties Palestinians ever had, has advocated for. An ideological twin brother of ISIL, Al Qaeda, and the Muslim Brotherhood – no denial – Hamas strived for not just a total liberation of Palestine from the river to the sea, meaning destroying Israel and the full dispossession of its Jewish population, but also an Islamic State to replace it. Logically, this would be followed by the incorporation of Palestine into a broader polity based on religion, as defined in the doctrine of the fundamentalists, a Caliphate, the ultimate objective of the Muslim Brotherhood. It is anybody’s guess how much traction Hamas still has among Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank; if cursory polls are to be believed, a lot. Not for reasons of ideological affinity, but because Hamas is perceived as the only Palestinian political entity that stood up to Israel. Assuming that during the reconstruction phase of Gaza and after a cooling-down period in the West Bank, elections are held to establish the Government that the Recognizers wish to see materialize, what if Hamas wins again? Even discounting such an option, it is hard to envision how a plethora of conflicting and ideologically disparate political groups could come together to form a Palestinian Unity Government.
Still, let us imagine that the various Palestinian political groups and parties can break with their tradition of soliciting support (and resources) from various Arab countries that puts them in a bind, as was the case for a myriad “liberation movements” of Abu X, Y and Z. Ultimately, the great test of Palestinian self-government and by extension statehood will be the Palestinians’ ability to govern themselves. Historic precedents are not encouraging.
The recognition of a Palestinian State may be a rare moment of triumph for Palestinians and their sympathizers worldwide, and the UNGA this year will be remembered for it for generations to come. Whether it will remove the stain of Balfour and Sykes-Picot from the conscience of the two major architects of the modern Middle East is one matter. Whether it will bring the dream of a homeland for the Palestinian people closer to coming true is another question. With the US inexorably opposed, it is, for now, a plain gesture. True, gestures can go a long way in shaping history. France and Britain, flanked by a helpful Saudi Arabia for better measure, tried to square the circle, creating a virtual Palestine along a very real Israel. How the story will unfold will depend much on whether or not Washington and the two Gulf capitals with leverage on Jerusalem, Riyadh, and Abu Dhabi can appeal to the common sense of a skeptical Israel about accepting a virtual Palestine down the line.
Anaxagoras failed in squaring the circle, but never gave up.
