Nasir QadriOn July 29, as the UK cabinet announced that Britain would finally begin the process of recognising the State of Palestine, I was on a Zoom call with a young Palestinian law graduate in exile.
Her eyes were swollen, her voice composed but heavy. Only hours earlier, nine members of her family, including children, had been killed in an Israeli air strike on Nuseirat's new camp.
She was not seeking sympathy. Her resilience was striking; she turned back to documenting torture and mass displacement for the cases we compile, and quietly asked, "Does the world need a Palestinian state if there are no Palestinians left to live in it?"
While Britain tethered its recognition to a conditional ceasefire, others – France, Spain, and Ireland – reaffirmed theirs, and on July 30, Canada announced its intent to follow suit. This was hailed as a diplomatic shift.
But Palestinians know the choreography too well: recognition divorced from enforcement is not justice, it’s duplicity.
Canada, even as it pledges symbolic recognition, continues to arm Israel. The UK invokes statehood while still refusing to halt weapon exports.
For both, recognition functions less as a moral stance than as an escape hatch, shielding them from accountability while maintaining support for the Israeli war machine.
These statements, framed as part of a broader European initiative, were offered as evidence that the ‘two-state solution’ continues to hold symbolic standing within the legal order, despite its material collapse.
However, for Palestinians, facing persistent Israeli-enforced starvation in Gaza and escalating settler-colonial violence in the occupied West Bank, such gestures are hollow. They are reminders that while Europe proclaims Palestine a state, it offers no protection to the people being erased on the ground.
For Palestinians, the reality is different. Since October 7, 2023, Gaza has been a site of Israeli forced mass starvation, aerial bombardment, and mass civilian killings, while the occupied West Bank has splintered under settler expansion and military raids.
Recognition, when divorced from enforcement, feels less like progress than theatre, a diplomatic ritual that acknowledges sovereignty on paper while ignoring a campaign of erasure on the ground.
Britain’s long imperial legacy in Palestine casts a long shadow over its present posture. The 1917 Balfour Declaration, issued without consulting Palestine’s indigenous Arab population, promised a “national home for the Jewish people” on land it did not own.
More than a century later, the UK now extends conditional recognition to the Palestinian people, but only if Israel does not stop the war. The structure of permission continues to flow in one direction: from coloniser to colonised, from occupier to occupied.
The question, then, is not whether Palestine qualifies as a state, but whether the international community will tether its words to actions that make statehood meaningful.
Palestine’s statehood exists - the law already speaks
Recognition by London, Paris, or any other capital does not conjure Palestine into being; it merely acknowledges what international law already affirms.
The Montevideo Convention sets four objective criteria for statehood: a permanent population, a defined territory, a functioning government, and the capacity to engage in international relations. Palestine meets every one of them.
As the late James Crawford argued in The Creation of States in International Law, “occupation or contested borders do not negate statehood… statehood is determined by objective criteria, not the fullness of sovereignty.”
Since the 1988 Palestinian Declaration of Independence, more than 140 states, overwhelmingly from the Global South, have formally recognised Palestine.
The UN General Assembly has acknowledged it as a non-member observer state, granting access to international treaties and the International Criminal Court.
The International Court of Justice, in its 2004 Advisory Opinion on Israel’s construction of the separation wall, went further: it affirmed that the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination is a norm erga omnes, owed by all states, and cannot be suspended by occupation, annexation, or “negotiations”.
In 2024, Judge Gomez Robledo, in his separate opinion in that case, delivered a warning that resonates today.
He cautioned that recognition must not become “a substitute for concrete action to end occupation,” nor a pretext to delay the full enjoyment of Palestinian sovereignty.
Nevertheless, that is precisely the risk posed by the current wave of Western gestures: declarations that invoked the language of statehood as ritual, functioning to normalise Israel’s annexationist project rather than challenge it.
Without enforcement, sanctions, legal action, and active measures to dismantle occupation, recognition risks legitimising a status quo built on starvation, dispossession, and what UN experts now describe as apartheid and potential genocide.
Recognition without enforcement becomes collusion
In the absence of enforcement, declarations of Palestinian statehood, whether from Europe or elsewhere, risk operating as little more than diplomatic choreography.
They soothe international consciences while leaving Palestinians exposed to a campaign of dispossession and annihilation. These gestures are routinely framed as resuscitating the two-state solution.
However, that framework has been rendered void through deliberate strategy.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated plainly in late 2024, “Under my watch, there will be no Palestinian state.” Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, architect of occupied West Bank settlement expansion, has repeated his mantra: “There is no Palestinian people; the land is ours alone.”
These are not isolated provocations; they are the governing doctrine of a state that continues to expand settlements, fragment Palestinian territory, and normalise annexation as policy.
Recognition that fails to explicitly affirm the 1967 borders, as mandated by UN Security Council Resolution 2334, does not confront this reality; it fortifies it.
By allowing borders to be treated as negotiable while settlements metastasise, Recognition, when unaccompanied by enforcement, becomes complicity, a performance that mimics justice while shielding atrocity crimes. International law does not permit such equivocation.
The ICJ, the UN General Assembly, and the Geneva Conventions obligate states not only to withhold recognition of unlawful situations but also to act to end them through sanctions, arms embargoes, enforcement of ICC warrants, and coordinated measures to dismantle occupation.
Palestinians do not need another hollow “process,” another ceremonial acknowledgement wrapped in Western rhetoric.
They need recognition substantiated by material consequences: dismantling the siege and illegal settlements, holding perpetrators accountable in international courts, and activating collective measures to stop the machinery of erasure.
Without that, recognition remains a mask, a performance that declares statehood abroad while Palestinians are subjected to enforced starvation, displacement, and burial at home.
Until states turn words into protection, accountability, and justice, every proclamation will remain what Palestinians already know it to be: a press release, not a reprieve.
