Recognition of a Palestine state is like adding insult to injury

The recent recognition of the state of Palestine by Britain, Australia, and Canada adds an unprecedented degree of insult to the injury suffered by the Palestinian people. Especially as it comes during the Israeli campaign to obliterate the Palestinian presence in Gaza, the decision signifies the highest form of hypocrisy one has witnessed in international politics.

This so-called recognition comes at a time when there is nothing left to recognise with Gaza in ruins and the West Bank all but formally annexed by Israel. The fiction that parts of the West Bank have not been fully annexed is maintained mainly to deny its population the civil and political rights that will accrue to them as Israeli citizens. Maintaining the fiction of a Palestinian Authority serves this purpose very well. The settlement project has, in fact, been gaining speed in the West Bank to deprive its inhabitants from the choicest pieces of land left to them and to create a Jewish presence that will in time dwarf the Palestinian population in the so-called occupied territories.

The widespread notion that these settlements are the product of the “extremist” government now in power in Israel is nothing but a myth. The settlement project was the brainchild of Labour governments immediately after the 1967 war and is a continuation of the Zionist idea that all of Palestine was/is “a land without people” that was ready to be settled by “a people without land”.

Britain’s part in legitimising this notion is well documented in the Balfour Declaration of 1917 which promised a homeland for European Jews in Palestine in order to secure their support against Germany during the First World War. The British Mandate in Palestine facilitated large scale emigration of Jews from Europe into Palestine and laid the foundation of the Israeli state.

Since the creation of the Israeli state, Britain has been supportive of its policies almost as much as the U.S. Its current posture of recognising the state of Palestine is nothing more than a sop to international and domestic opinion horrified by the killings in Gaza. Australia and Canada have traditionally followed Britain’s policy toward West Asia and especially towards the Israel-Palestine issue. It is, therefore, no surprise that they have followed suit.

However, such symbolic recognitions are no substitute for concrete steps that could force Israel to acknowledge the Palestinian reality. In fact, they obfuscate the issue by creating an aura of “movement” on the issue when none exists. Knowledgeable observers of the Israel-Palestine issue have recognised for years that thanks to Israeli policy of creeping annexation, the two-state solution is as dead as a dodo. The real problem that needs to be addressed is what will be the nature of the single state called Israel covering all the land between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean Sea plus the Gaza Strip. Would it be a state with equal rights for all its citizens or would it have a two- tier legal and political system that would perpetuate the current situation of ethnic dominance? No member of the international community is willing to raise this issue in public forums and, therefore, everyone takes refuge in the delusion that a two-state solution is still a viable option. It is time to shed this delusion to address the reality of the Israel-Palestine problem.

Mohammed Ayoob is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of International Relations, Michigan State University; views expressed are personal