Western Governments Recognize Palestinian State, But Continue to Fund Israeli Government Making It Inviable

Multiple Western governments over the weekend, including the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia, jointly recognized Palestine as a state for the first time.

However, many advocates for Palestinian freedom and self-determination have said that the official recognition of Palestine is only a symbolic first step and will not do anything to change the situation so long as these governments continue selling weaponry being used by Israel to level Gaza.

In a column written for The Guardian, French journalist Rokhaya Diallo criticized French President Emmanuel Macron, who is expected to officially recognize Palestine on Monday, for not doing more to hinder Israel's power to wage war against the Palestinians.

"Macron's 'solemn announcement' to the UN General Assembly on Palestine is planned for next Monday, 22 September," she explained. "Wouldn’t it be a better first step for France to announce concrete sanctions against Israel? Netanyahu is under an international arrest warrant for war crimes and crimes against humanity, yet he was allowed to use French airspace when traveling to the US in July."

The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant last year.

Writing in +972 Magazine, Palestinian journalist Alaa Salama similarly argued that recognizing Palestine would simply create "the illusion of action" unless Western governments take further steps to sanction Israel.

"Now, more than ever, symbolic gestures are worse than useless," he argued. "They buy time for the regime committing the crimes and drain urgency from the only remedies that matter: ending the genocide, sanctioning the perpetrator, isolating the apartheid system, and insisting without apology on equal rights and the right of return. This is not extremism. It is the bare minimum of justice."

Chris Doyle, director of the Council for Arab-British Understanding, told Al Jazeera on Monday that the actions of Western governments were still "utterly failing to stop the genocide" and that they needed serious sanctions in order to "stop Israel’s atrocities" in Gaza.

Since 2015, the UK has supplied an estimated USD $676 million worth of arms to Israel, making it the second largest supplier of weapons to Israel behind only the US. The Labour government suspended 30 out of 350 arms export licenses last year—but did not include F-35 fighter jet parts in the ban. The UK supplies 13-15% of the components of the jet, which are manufactured in the US and sent to Israel.

Inès Abdel Razek, executive director of the Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy, said in a roundtable discussion with Palestinian think tank Al-Shabaka that Western nations' support for a theoretical Palestinian state were not the same as support for actual Palestinian self-determination.

"In this context, genocide in Gaza is met not with consequences but with ceremony," she said. "The [Palestinian Authority] clings to optics, and Western states embrace symbolic gestures, while Palestinians are left with neither justice nor statehood, only a widening gap between lived reality and international performance."

Yara Hawri, co-director of Al-Shabaka, argued during the same panel discussion that recognition of a Palestinian state at this point was pointless given that Israel has made Gaza unlivable and is moving forward with plans to annex the West Bank as well, with officials recently approving the E1 settlement plan that would cut off the key city of East Jerusalem from the rest of the territory and make Palestinian statehood impossible.

"We are a colonized, besieged, and occupied people facing genocide in Gaza," she said. "Any serious political engagement must begin from this reality, not from the illusion of a state that does not exist. Instead of halting genocide and forced starvation—much of it facilitated by the very states offering recognition—we are told to focus on a fantasy of statehood that no one is willing to bring into being."