Between Recognition of a Palestinian State and Its Actual Establishment
Al-Khamisa News Network - Gaza
By Dr. Ibrahim Ibrash
The popular international movement and governmental actions toward recognizing a Palestinian state — and the possibility that the number of recognizing countries could exceed 160, including Western states that have long been strategic allies of Israel — along with Israel’s growing international isolation, represent, despite the ambiguities and conditions attached to some of these recognitions and the realities on the ground in the West Bank and Gaza, a strategic shift in favor of the justice of the Palestinian cause for the following reasons:
1- A reaffirmation of the Palestinian people’s right to political national self-determination, a UN decision issued in 1974.
2- The collapse of the Zionist narrative that denies the existence of a Palestinian people and claims there is no Palestinian state.
3- The return of the Palestinian issue to being a political struggle of a people seeking national self-determination, and not merely a humanitarian issue, as Tel Aviv and Washington are now trying to portray it.
4- It blocks Israel’s plan to establish an exclusively Jewish state in Palestine between the sea and the river, and consequently thwarts Israel’s grand illusions of expansion from the Nile to the Euphrates.
4- Israel has lost one of its most important soft-power assets — its narrative and image in the West, which relied on the historical victimhood of Jews, especially the Holocaust, its image as a democracy, and its army as the most ethical in the region — because the current generation in the West does not know modern Israel and Jews except through the massacres, destruction and starvation they are carrying out in the Gaza Strip.
Despite all this, these important shifts should not be overestimated as if a Palestinian state will be established tomorrow and the Palestinian people will gain their freedom in the near term.
What has happened and is happening brings us closer to the goal but is not the final goal. There remain many challenges, the most important of which are:
1- The continuation of the occupation and the ongoing war of annihilation in Gaza and the West Bank with no regard for the world or international legitimacy.
2- The ambiguity surrounding the two-state solution, whether in terms of its borders, sovereignty, the future of East Jerusalem, and the right of return for refugees.
3- The discussion concerns recognition of a state under occupation, and ending the occupation requires other, more difficult and challenging measures and calculations than mere recognition of the state — a point hinted at by Starmer, the British prime minister, who said that recognition of a Palestinian state does not mean the establishment of a Palestinian state.
5- There is a fear that international efforts will stop at recognition of a Palestinian state, with some saying we have done what we can and what the Palestinians asked of us by recognizing the state, and that the ball is now in the Palestinian and Israeli courts.
In this context, caution is required regarding the U.S. stance and Trump’s attempt, at the summit he will host in New York next Tuesday with leaders of Arab and Islamic states, to sidestep these international shifts by proposing a new peace initiative or a new “Deal of the Century,” which could undermine the General Assembly’s deliberations on the two-state solution and dilute the near-international consensus on that solution.
