Schuyler Mitchell – Palestinian Statehood Is Not a Political Bargaining Chip

The UK and Canada have added conditions — but no arms embargoes — to their recognition of a Palestinian state

Schuyler Mitchell is a writer, editor and fact-checker

Cross-posted from Truthout

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s announcement on July 29 that the U.K. will formally recognize a Palestinian state was a moment of stunning clarity — just not the moral kind. That’s because the proclamation came with a huge caveat: The U.K. will only move forward with its plan in September if Israel fails to agree to a ceasefire with Hamas. Never mind that Palestinians have been demanding the right to self-determination for decades; it took Israel committing a genocide and stoking a starvation crisis in Gaza for the U.K. to acknowledge that, perhaps, Palestinians deserve a seat at the United Nations, too. What better illustration of the arbitrary nature of borders — and Israel’s legacy as a British colonial project — than for a Western power to wield the promise of statehood as a political bargaining chip?

Starmer’s announcement followed on the heels of France’s more direct promise to acknowledge a Palestinian state, the first G7 country to do so. “This recognition, a major decision by France, is also a call,” said French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot during a UN summit on July 28. “It is a call to the Israeli government. Listen to the indignation that is swelling around the world. Grasp the hand that is being offered to you to get out of this deadlock. Open your eyes to the aspirations of your neighbours to live in peace and security with you. Call a ceasefire. Lift the humanitarian blockade on Gaza.” Unlike the U.K., France’s choice doesn’t hinge on negotiations with Israel.

Then, on July 31, Canada announced it would join the U.K. and France in recognizing an independent Palestinian state — but only if the Palestinian Authority commits to certain reforms, and if Hamas releases all Israeli hostages and agrees to “play no role in the future governance of Palestine.” Canada also said that any future Palestinian state would have to be demilitarized, even as it continues to ship arms to Israel.

This wave of announcements by three G7 nations marks a major break from the U.S. position on Palestine, and a turn toward the international consensus: Most members of the UN — 147 out of 193 countries — have already recognized Palestinian sovereignty. On July 31, Barrot released a statement, signed by the foreign ministers of 14 other countries, calling on more nations to formally recognize Palestine.

This growing diplomatic push is far too little, too late. The Israeli parliament is dead-set on annexing the occupied West Bank, where Israeli settlers have also increased their campaign of targeted violence against Palestinians. Increased recognition at the UN won’t put a stop to Israel’s genocide in Gaza or resurrect the more than 60,000 Palestinians killed since October 7, 2023 — an official death toll that’s likely a significant undercount. Still, Israel is strongly opposed to the proposal, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claiming that recognizing a Palestinian state “rewards Hamas’s monstrous terrorism.” (It bears repeating that Hamas is not in the West Bank.)

Offering statehood with strings attached makes a mockery of Palestinians’ fundamental right to self-determination under international law — a mockery that has been ongoing for decades. In 1916, during World War I, the U.K. and France agreed to divvy up the Ottoman Empire’s territories in the Middle East, assigning separate spheres of influence to their respective imperial powers through the Sykes-Picot Agreement. Six years later, the UN’s predecessor, the League of Nations, issued the British Mandate for Palestine, granting the U.K. governance over the lands that now comprise Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. In 1947, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution calling for the division of the U.K.-administered lands into a “Jewish state” and an “Arab state”; after the British Mandate expired the following year, Zionist militias began violently expelling more than 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland, in an event known as the Nakba, or “catastrophe” in Arabic.

This is just a broad summation of many years of violence and injustice. But I recount these events now because they get at the heart of the current genocide and the half-hearted attempts by Western nations to put a stop to it. Israel and the U.S. have consistently portrayed history as beginning on October 7, 2023, when Hamas militants attacked Israel. In reality, imperial Western powers have long played God with international borders, in acts of arrogance totally divorced from the realities on the ground and always aimed at preserving their own geopolitical power. The UN’s broken promise of a two-state solution in 1947 was insufficient then, and it’s even less politically feasible now. As Yousef Munayyer, a senior fellow at Arab Center Washington, D.C., where he heads the Palestine/Israel Program, wrote in Foreign Affairs in 2019, “The only alternative with any chance of delivering lasting peace: equal rights for Israelis and Palestinians in a single shared state.”

While the U.K., Canada and France all pay lip service to a two-state solution, each country’s ongoing supply of military equipment to Israel undermines their stated goal of peace. An analysis from Middle East Eye found that, even after the Labour Party-controlled government partially suspended arms exports to Israel in 2024, the U.K. approved $169 million of military equipment in three months. The U.K. also continues to ban the activist group Palestine Action under anti-terrorism laws, despite strong international opposition. “We are concerned at the unjustified labelling of a political protest movement as ‘terrorist’,” UN experts said on July 1. “According to international standards, acts of protest that damage property, but are not intended to kill or injure people, should not be treated as terrorism.” A U.K. judge has allowed Palestine Action’s co-founder to challenge the group’s proscription in court, stating that the ban’s potential “chilling effect” on political speech could cause “considerable harm to the public interest.”

Still, despite the U.K.’s repressive measures to censure support for Palestine, formal opposition to the ruling Labour Party’s support for Israel’s war is growing. On July 24, former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn and independent parliament member Zarah Sultana announced they’re forming a new political party to “take on the rich and powerful.” Corbyn laid out the party’s agenda in a recent op-ed in The Guardian, writing, “Labour has failed to deliver the change the British people deserved. Refusing to scrap the two-child benefit cap. Taking support away from disabled people. Providing political and military support to Israel as starving Palestinians are shot in the street. From the moment this government was elected, it has inflicted suffering and injustice at home and abroad.”

As the Labour Party fails to represent workin-class interests in the U.K., it engages in empty “gesture politics” in the Middle East. Formal UN recognition is the bare minimum; tepid commitments to Palestinian statehood must be backed by material action. Without halting the flow of arms to Israel, the latest announcements are part of the same imperial playbook, in which the U.S. and its European allies have long gotten to circumscribe the sovereignty of others.

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