Faced with Genocide Recognising Palestine as a state is an empty gesture
1. Four of the Western Imperialist states, Canada, Britain, Australia and France now formally recognise a Palestinian state, joining the 150 members of the United Nations that have already done so. But the one state that counts not only rejects and condemns this action, but has taken the UN Assembly hostage by denying the head of the Palestine National Authority entry to the world gathering in New York; a more powerful “symbolic act” than that of Starmer or Macron.
2. Britain’s Keir Starmer has repeated the toothless call for a ceasefire and negotiations for a two state solution. As most observers have stated – too little, too late. Too little because it does not include recognition of any defined area (even the 1967 ‘legal’ borders) nor does it threaten any punishment for Israel violating this imaginary state’s sovereignty. Above all these powers continue to adamantly refuse call the IDF’s ongoing destruction of Gaza a genocide and do nothing whatsoever against its expanding its 82% direct occupation of the West Bank with new settlements and expulsions of Palestinians from their lands and demolition of their homes.
3. It is too late because Netanyahu and his fascist ministers Smotrich and Ben Gvir have repeatedly stated that there will never be any Palestinian state, no matter how reduced and fragmented. Back In May, Smotrich boasted, “Within a year… Gaza will be entirely destroyed, civilians will be sent to… the south to a humanitarian zone… and from there they will start to leave in great numbers to third countries.” And Netanyahu’s response to the recognition was, “It will not happen. A Palestinian state will not be established west of the Jordan.”
4. Whilst Starmer and Macron wash their hands with empty gestures, they refuse to impose any real measures to inhibit the genocidal war machine. And the reason is clear. They do not want to challenge Israels global backer, the Trump regime, which they try to “appease” wherever they can anyway. And the US is not limiting its actions to mere symbolism. Far from pressurising Israel to stop its genocide let alone recognise Palestine, despite Israel’s attacks on Lebanon, Syria, Iran and Qatar, Trump is planning to send a further $6 billion in weaponry to Israel, including 30 Apache attack helicopters, doubling the IDF’s current tally, plus 3,200 infantry assault vehicles. In short he is actually strengthening the forces of genocide. He sent his Secretary of State Marco Rubio to Israel to call the Palestinians “barbaric animals.”
5. Now, as France, Canada and Britain – three of the G7 – make their empty gestures of recognition, the other part of Zionism’s ‘final solution’ to the Palestinian Question, the clearance of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, is also underway. Since October 7, 2023, in the West Bank Israeli settler gangs have been armed and supported on their raids by the IDF, forcibly displacing Palestinian farmers, with a sharp increase in house demolitions and movement restrictions. All in the service of settlement expansion. Since October 2023 Netanyahu has also placed the Palestinian Authority under economic siege, withholding clearance revenues (taxes due to the PA but collected by Israel) and needed to pay teachers, civil servants and the police.
6. There are two reasons why Spain, Britain, Australia, Canada and now France felt obliged to this largely symbolic recognition of Palestine. Firstly, the mass pressure from the solidarity movements who force those governments, who never get tired to ensure their defence of Israel’s right to exist, to back the imperialist and Zionist attacks on Iran, Syria, Lebanon or Jemen and to brand any Palestine resistance as “terrorist”. This forces them to distance themselves a bit from the total support for the Israeli state. Secondly, they fear that the completion of the genocide by the Zionist state and the full scale support by the US, will eventually undermine Western imperialist dominance in the Middle East. This is why they recognised Palestine and claim to stand for a Palestinian state, whilst carefully avoiding to link this to any concrete demand on Israel like the withdrawal of the army from Gaza and the West Bank or undoing the illegal settlements. The socalled to state solution, which has long been revealed a reactionary utopia, only serves as a diplomatic fata morgana.
7. But even this is too much for the Zionist regime and for the US administration. They denounce even a largely symbolic and empty gesture as a “gift to” or even “an endorsement” of Hamas. Even an empty gesture, even a largely symbolic act, is a gesture too much towards the Palestinians for Netanyahu or Trump. They fear that other states might follow under the pressure of the masses; they fear that Spain or France and the EU might follow a different, though rather symbolic, strategy for the Middle East. However, within the Western imperialist camp, Israel and the US can still count on the German and Italian governments (and some smaller states in the EU like Austria or Hungary) block even the suspension of the association agreement from 2000, proposed by the European commission. The rejection to even symbolically recognise Palestine, to even suspend some of the treaties with Israel, reveals once again the complicity of the German, Italian, Austrian and other government with the genocide, but also the fake and largely symbolic sympathies of the French and Spanish governments, who do not want to risk any real rapture with the US or their European imperialist “partners”.
8. To the suffering of the Palestinian people must be the added the failure of the strategies of the relying on the regions Arab and Muslim regimes and the Palestinian leaderships whether Fatah or Hamas. This despite the ‘steadfast’ refusal of its people to accept their national annihilation. As a result, too, of the failure of the Arab Spring uprisings to dislodge the monarchies and military regimes, corrupted by imperialism, and the defeat of the so-called Axis of Resistance, the masses of the region have not been able thus far to exert enough pressure on the streets to force even a complete break with Israel and its US backers.
9. Nor has the asymmetric warfare of Hezbollah or Hamas, dubbed terrorism by those whose terrorism far exceeds theirs, been able to halt the Zionist project. Where sympathy and support has attained mass proportions in certain of the Western imperialist states, this has received legal pushback and repression from the pro-Zionist governments, expelling and prosecuting activists in Germany, France, the US and Britain. The near silence of the Russia-China camp, beyond their votes in the Security Council is also noteworthy for those who think these ‘new’ imperialist powers are a force for progress.
10. The weakness of the mass pro-Palestine movements in Europe and America remains their failure to turn protest into direct action by the main forces of their working class movements, due in large measure to their political and trade union leaderships subservience to their own imperialisms interests. But these obstacles, are no alibi for acceptance of this huge crime against humanity by the main enemies of the working masses of the world. And as a number of workers and trade union actions in Europe, most recently on 19th and 22nd of September in Italy demonstrate, there is an increasing number of workers and youth prepared not only to demonstrate with their Palestinian sisters and brothers, but also to take strike action. But in order to make this a reality in a movement across Europe and in the US, we need coordinated united front action of all trade unions, of all working class parties. Where bureaucratic and pro-zionist leaders block solidarity action or even side with the Zionist state or its institutions like in Germany, internationalists need to fight inside the unions and parties like Die Linke to break with this tacit policy and those treacherous miss-leaders. Where the unions or working class organisations have committed themselves to action, rank and file unionist and the mass movement must fight to turn words into deeds.
11. If the IDF attacks the fifty ships and boats of the Gaza Flotilla – as they have done before, in 2010 killing nine of their crew, this must be a signal to trade unionists across the world to take action not only against Israel’s arms suppliers, and its economic interests but against the governments which supply those arms and protect their investments. We must fight to boycott all Israeli government and private enterprises but also the closing of their embassies and the sending home of their ambassadors.
12. It should now be as plain as it could be that as long as a racially defined “Jewish” state, exists and expands denying and expelling the Palestian majority from their own country, nothing short of its dismantling can bring freedom to the Palestinine people and those Israelis who accept a democratic state with freedom but no privileges for nationalities or religions. The only real solution, both for the historic suffering of the Jewish Israelis, and the subsequent long suffering of the Palestinians is a single socialist state. This is indissolubly tied to socialist revolution within the entire region and in the imperialist powers that originated and sustained have this ongoing crime.