More countries recognising a hypothetical entity called “State of Palestine” is positive in terms of its symbolic impact in recognising the Palestinian people’s right to a state, a right denied by most components of the Zionist establishment, especially the far-right Zionist spectrum that currently governs Israel. However, the meanings and implications of this recognition greatly vary with time.
The countries that recognised the State of Palestine following its declaration by the Palestinian National Council, held in Algiers in 1988, against the backdrop of the great popular Intifada in the 1967-occupied territories, supported what was seen at the time as a major episode in the history of Palestinian struggle. This was how it appeared, even though the declaration was, in fact, a diversion of the Intifada from its original course. 
Yasser Arafat and his aides in the leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization sought to pursue the illusion of an “independent Palestinian state” by harnessing popular energy for a diplomatic negotiation process sponsored by the United States. Thus, the 1988 declaration was immediately followed by Arafat’s shameful acquiescence to the condition Washington had imposed on him for negotiations: his resounding public statement that “We totally and absolutely renounce all forms of terrorism” (reiterated at a press conference in Geneva on 14 December 1988).
The declaration of statehood at the time nevertheless had the character of a defiant gesture. It was backed by the countries that effectively supported the right of the Palestinian people in the 1967 territories to free themselves from Zionist occupation. A total of 88 countries recognised the newly proclaimed State of Palestine, including almost all Arab countries (except for the Syrian Assad regime, which was a bitter opponent of the Palestinian leadership), most countries in Africa and Asia (with some natural exceptions, such as the apartheid regime in South Africa, a long-standing ally of the Zionist state), and the countries of the Eastern bloc dominated by the Soviet Union. 
In a notable global split, no country of the Western bloc, led by the United States, recognised the State of Palestine at the time, except Turkey. Nor did any Latin American country, except Cuba and Nicaragua, the two rebels against Washington’s hegemony.
Recognitions continued after 1988, gradually encompassing the remaining countries in Asia, Africa—with a few exceptions (Cameroon and Eritrea, for opposite reasons)—and Latin America. The first NATO member states to recognise the State of Palestine—in addition to Turkey and the Eastern European countries formerly within the Soviet Union’s orbit, which had therefore recognised it before joining the alliance—were Iceland in 2011 and Sweden in 2014. 
Other NATO member states did not follow suit until the full scope of Israel’s genocidal war in the Gaza Strip became obvious. Norway, Spain, and Slovenia recognised the State of Palestine in 2024, followed by the remaining Latin American countries (the most recent being Mexico this year).
Until the French president announced his intention to formally recognise the State of Palestine next September, when the UN General Assembly convenes, all the powers of the geopolitical West—particularly the United States, Germany, Britain, Italy, Japan, and Australia—had refused to do so and still refuse to this day, citing various pretexts, particularly the highly hypocritical argument that recognition could hinder peace efforts. [This article was written before Keir Starmer’s conditional announcement that the UK too would recognise the State of Palestine in September unless Israel agrees to a ceasefire and an improvement of the situation in Gaza.] 
Public pressure is mounting in these same countries over the ongoing genocide in Gaza, at a time when the deliberate nature of the crime has reached its peak with the current organised starvation of the people of Gaza. This could lead to new recognitions and has already led to increased pressure on Israel to allow food aid into the Strip.
The truth is that those who waited for Israel to commit the ongoing atrocities in plain sight of the entire world before recognising the State of Palestine are primarily trying to cover up their tacit complicity in the Zionist occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip for nearly sixty years. The last-minute awakening of the British prime minister and the German chancellor, and their decision to participate in Jordan’s and the United Arab Emirates’ airdrop of aid to the Gaza Strip—a move condemned by humanitarian relief organisations as a useless symbolic act—deserve nothing but contempt, especially since the two mentioned NATO countries are among the most important military collaborators of the Zionist state after the United States.
What should be obvious is that current efforts to establish a Palestinian state, such as the conference held in New York under French and Saudi sponsorship, bear now a very different meaning than recognition in 1988. That year witnessed the best political conditions the Palestinian people have ever known since the 1948 Nakba. The Intifada garnered international popular sympathy and caused a severe morale crisis within Israel’s society and military. It created the conditions for the Zionist Labour Party’s return to power and its conclusion of the Oslo Accords with the Arafat leadership, something unimaginable before that time, although the agreement included deeply unfair conditions that Yasser Arafat accepted out of sheer delusion.
However, what seemed like a hypothetical but achievable State in 1988, and even in 1993 (despite the Oslo process being doomed to failure), is now less realistic than a mirage in the desert. Perhaps a tenth or more of the Gaza Strip’s population has been slayed, and at least 70 percent of the Strip’s buildings have been destroyed, including 84 percent of buildings in the northern part and 89 percent of the buildings in Rafah (according to a recent geographic survey conducted by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem). 
So what kind of Palestinian state are they talking about? The most generous of them see it as governed by the Oslo framework, which resulted in a Palestinian Authority under Israeli tutelage, whose nominal “sovereignty” is limited to less than a fifth of the West Bank, in addition to Gaza. Others envision an even more limited entity, following Israel’s reconquest of most of the Gaza Strip and the expansion of Zionist settlements in the West Bank.
The conditions set by the Palestinian National Consensus in 2006 (the Prisoners’ Document) as minimum requirements for the establishment of an independent Palestinian state—namely, the withdrawal of the Israeli army and settlers from all Palestinian territories occupied in 1967, including East Jerusalem; the release of all Palestinian prisoners held by Israel; and recognition of the right of Palestinian refugees to return and reparations—have been consigned to oblivion as “extremist” demands, whereas they were originally conceived as minimum conditions, expressing a willingness to compromise. 
The truth is that any Palestinian entity that ignores these basic conditions will be nothing more than a renewed version of the vast open-air prison in which the Zionist state confines the Palestinian people within the 1967 territories, with an ever-shrinking geographic area and a population that continues to dwindle as a result of genocide and ethnic cleansing.
Translated from the Arabic original published in <a href="https://www.alquds.co.uk/?p=3513911">Al-Quds al-Arabi</a>.

Gilbert Achcar

The mirage of a Palestinian state

The counter-offensive launched by Hamas against Israel on 7 October, a day after the 50th anniversary of another Arab surprise attack on Israel—the October 1973 war, is a much more spectacular feat than the latter. Whereas fifty years ago, the two Arab states of Egypt and Syria launched a conventional war to attempt to recover the territories that Israel had seized from them six years earlier in the June 1967 war, the new counter-offensive launched by Hamas evokes the boldness of the biblical David in his fight against the giant Goliath. Combining rudimentary air, sea, and land means—the equivalent of David’s sling—Hamas’s fighters executed an amazing and highly daring offensive all along the border zone between the Gaza strip and the Israeli state.
In the same way as Israel’s arrogant self-confidence in the face of its Arab neighbours was shattered in 1973, the security and impunity that it has been taking for granted in dealing with the Palestinian people and combatting Palestinian guerrillas have been severely and irreversibly impaired. From that angle, Hamas’ October counter-offensive is to the Israeli population and state a powerful reminder of their vulnerability and of the fact that there can be no security without peace and no peace without justice.
Whatever one may think of Hamas’ decision to launch such a massive operation against the Israeli state, thus inevitably unleashing the Israeli government’s massive murderous retaliation and inciting it to attempt to wipe Hamas and its allies from the Gaza Strip at a huge cost for civilians, the fact remains that this counter-offensive has already and undoubtedly dealt a heavy blow to the unbearable haughtiness of the Israeli racist far-right government and their belief that Israel could ever reach a “normal” state of coexistence with its regional environment while persecuting the Palestinian people and inflicting upon them a protracted Nakba of territorial dispossession, ethnic cleansing and apartheid.
No less unbearable is the precipitation with which Western governments (and a Ukrainian government that ought to know better about the legitimate fight against foreign occupation) have expressed their solidarity with Israel, very much in contrast with their muted reactions to Israel’s brutal onslaughts on the Palestinian population. The Israeli flag was projected on Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate on the evening of 7 October in a contemptible display of fawning over the state of Israel, the usual hallmark of German misoriented redemption-seeking for Nazi crimes against European Jews by endorsing Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians. This becomes even worse at a time when Israel’s government is composed of the whole gamut of Jewish far-right forces, including people whom a prominent Israeli Holocaust historian did not hesitate to aptly describe in Haaretz as neo-Nazis!
No less contemptible are the attempts at “analysing” Hamas’ offensive as an Iranian plot to derail the ongoing US-fostered rapprochement between the Saudi kingdom and the Israeli state. Even if it were true that Tehran wishes to derail that rapprochement instead of using it to enhance its own claim of monopoly over anti-Zionism, a very disputable hypothesis indeed, this denial of Palestinian agency by way of conspiracy theory is the exact equivalent of every oppressive government’s reaction to popular revolt. It postulates that there are no sufficient grounds for oppressed people to revolt against their oppression and that any such move is necessarily inspired by the invisible hand of some foreign government.
Anyone familiar with what the Palestinian people have been enduring for decades, and aware of the kind of open air prison that the Gaza Strip has become, ever since it was occupied in 1967 and then evacuated by Israeli troops in 2005—an open air prison that is periodically the target of a murderous Israeli “turkey shoot”—can easily understand that the only reason why such quasi-desperate act of bravery as Hamas’ latest operation does not actually happen more frequently is the huge military disproportion between the Palestinian David and the Israeli Goliath. Gaza’s latest counter-offensive brings indeed to mind the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
There can be no doubt that this new chapter will end with a terrible cost for the Palestinians in general, the Gazans in particular, and Hamas specifically—much higher than the cost endured by the Israelis, as has unfailingly been the case in every round of fighting between Israel and the Palestinians. And whereas it is not difficult to understand the “enough-is-enough” logic behind Hamas’ counter-offensive, it is much more doubtful that it will help advance the Palestinian cause beyond the blow to Israel’s self-confidence mentioned above. This would have been achieved at a hugely disproportionate cost for the Palestinians.
The very idea that such an operation, however spectacular it was, could achieve “victory” can only stem from the religious type of magical thinking that is characteristic of a fundamentalist movement like Hamas. The distribution by its information service of a video showing the movement’s leadership praying to thank God on the morning of 7 October is a good illustration of this thinking. Unfortunately, no magic can alter the fact of Israel’s massive military superiority: the result of Israel’s new ongoing war against Gaza is certainly going to be devastating.
The 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington dealt the United States’ arrogance a spectacular blow. Eventually, they tremendously enhanced George W. Bush’s popularity and enabled him to launch eighteen months later the occupation of Iraq that he ambitioned. Likewise, Hamas’ October counter-offensive has already succeeded in reunifying a previously deeply divided Israeli society and polity, and it will allow Benjamin Netanyahu to implement his wildest plans to inflict massive terror on the Palestinians to precipitate their forced displacement.
On the other hand, if Hamas’ leadership had been betting on Lebanon’s Hezbollah—and Iran behind it—to join the war at a level that would really put Israel in jeopardy, this bet would be very risky indeed. For not only it is far from certain that Hezbollah would take the high risk of massively entering a new war with Israel, but such a situation, if it were to happen, would inevitably bring Israel to resort unrestrainedly to its massive destructive power (which includes nuclear weapons), thus bringing about a catastrophe of historic magnitude.
Against an oppressor that is far superior in military means, the only truly efficient way of struggle for the Palestinian people is by choosing the terrain on which they can circumvent that superiority. The peak in Palestinian’s struggle effectiveness was reached in the year 1988 during the First Intifada, in which the Palestinians deliberately avoided the use of violent means. This led to a deep moral crisis in Israel’s society and polity, including its armed forces, and was a key factor in leading the Israeli Rabin-Peres leadership to negotiate the 1993 Oslo Accords with Yasir Arafat—however flawed these accords were, due to the Palestinian leader’s indulging in wishful thinking.
The Palestinian struggle must rely primarily on mass political action against Israel’s oppression, occupation, and settler-colonial expansion. The new underground armed resistance organised by young Palestinians in Jenin or Nablus can be an efficient adjuvant to the people’s mass movement, provided it is predicated on the latter’s priority and conceived in such a way as to incentivise it. The regional support that the Palestinian people should rely upon is not that of tyrannical governments like that of Iran, but that of the peoples fighting against these oppressive regimes. Herein lies the true potential prospect for Palestinian liberation, which needs to be combined with the emancipation of Israeli society itself from the logic of Zionism that has inexorably produced its polity’s ever-expanding drift to the far right.
First published at <a href="https://gilbert-achcar.net/on-hamas-october-offensive">Gilbert Achcar’s blog</a>.

The mirage of a Palestinian state

Hamas’ October counter-offensive

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