A handful of Western countries announced their recognition of a Palestinian State on Sunday, September 21, including the UK, Canada, Australia, and Portugal.
France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Malta, and Andorra also joined the move on Monday, September 22, followed by the Republic of San Marino, which announced its recognition on Tuesday September 23.
The new wave of recognition raises the number of sovereign states that have recognized Palestinian statehood to 159 out of 193 member states at the United Nations, representing over 80% of the international community.
Timeline of the recognition of a Palestinian State
The recognition of Palestine as a state has gone through many phases since late Palestinian leader and president Yasser Arafat declared the Palestinian State in 1988.
Almost half of the sovereign countries in the UN recognized Palestine in 1988
The year 1988 marked the first time Palestine was officially recognized as a state by as many as 83 countries. The recognized state encompassed the territories occupied by Israel in 1968, with East Jerusalem as its capital.
Arab countries that recognized a Palestinian state that same year were: Algeria, Bahrain, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Tunisia, Yemen, Jordan, Somalia, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Djibouti, Egypt, Sudan, and Oman.
Meanwhile, European and Asian countries included: Türkiye, Iran, Indonesia, Malaysia, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Brunei Darussalam, India, Vietnam, China, Sri Lanka, Albania, the Greek Cypriot Administration, Czechia, Serbia, Ukraine, Slovakia, Belarus, Russia, Cambodia, Hungary, Mongolia, North Korea, Romania, Bulgaria, Maldives, Laos, Poland, Nepal, and Bhutan.
African countries that also recognized Palestinian statehood in 1988 were: Madagascar, Zambia, Mauritius, Gambia, Nigeria, Seychelles, the Gambia, Namibia Burkina Faso, Comoros, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Senegal, Cape Verde, Tanzania, Niger, Ghana, Togo, Zimbabwe, Chad, Sierra Leone, Congo, Uganda, Angola, Mozambique, Sao Tome and Principe, Gabon, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Botswana, Burundi and the Central African Republic.
From the Americas, only Cuba and Nicaragua joined the recognition campaign in 1988.
During that year, Malta also sent a letter to the United Nations reaffirming the right of the Palestinian people to establish their own state, and welcomed the UN declaration of Palestinian statehood. Nonetheless, it did not formally recognize the Palestinian state then.
From 1989 to 1998: dozens more countries recognized Palestine as a state
During the following decade, dozens more countries joined the recognition of Palestinian statehood, including: Rwanda, Ethiopia, Benin, Equatorial Guinea, Kenya, Vanuatu, the Philippines, Swaziland, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Georgia and Bosnia, Herzegovina, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Papua New Guinea, South Africa, Kyrgyzstan, and Malawi.
Another wave of recognition between 2004 and 2019
Scores of other countries also recognized Palestine as a state during the period extending from 2004 to 2019.
These countries include Timor-Leste, Montenegro, Costa Rica, Lebanon, Ivory Coast, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, Argentina, Bolivia and Ecuador, Chile, Guyana, Peru, Suriname, Paraguay, Uruguay, Lesotho, Liberia, South Sudan, Syria, El Salvador, Honduras, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Belize, Dominica, Antigua and Barbuda, Grenada, Brazil and Iceland, Thailand, Guatemala, Haiti, Sweden, the Holy See (Vatican), Saint Lucia, Colombia, Saint Kitts and Nevis.
Further recognitions between 2023 and 2024
Other countries extended their recognition of Palestinian statehood between 2023 and 2024, including Mexico, Barbados, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, the Bahamas, Norway, Ireland, Spain, Slovenia, and Armenia.
The recent recognition by Western countries in the eyes of Palestinians
The Palestinian Authority (PA) has always welcomed the recognition of a Palestinian state by different countries, and considered it a diplomatic victory that resulted from its painstaking efforts in international forums.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas issued separate statements thanking the UK, Canada, Australia, Portugal, France, Monaco, Malta, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Andorra for recognizing Palestine as a state.
Abbas considered the moves taken by these countries as “historic and crucial steps toward achieving just and lasting peace”.
However, realities on the ground indicate that Israel has been indifferent to these recognitions and to the international community as a whole. For decades, no sovereign country, UN body or even coalition of countries has been able to stop any violation or crime committed by Israel, not only inside Palestine, but across the West Asia region, particularly over the last couple of years.
Palestinian grassroots slammed the recognition as symbolic, unjust, and absurd
The recognition has not stopped the genocide
For his part, Director General of the Ministry of Health in Gaza, Dr. Munir Al-Bursh, criticized the wave of recognition via his social media accounts, from what he described as a “medical point of view from within Gaza”.
“International recognition of the State of Palestine while the genocide continues is like a doctor checking a patient’s ID in the operating room while leaving him to bleed to death without attempting to save him,” Al-Bursh wrote.
What about Palestinian refugees?
The recognition has also been perceived by many as an unjust solution, due to the elimination of the right of return for Palestinian refugees, who were forcibly displaced from Palestine by the Israeli occupation forces in 1948, as well as their offspring’s right to return to their homeland.
The latest figures published by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) in August 2023, indicated that the number of Palestinian refugees registered with the organization was estimated at 5.9 million.).
This number includes refugees living in the occupied West Bank, the besieged Gaza strip and diaspora, not to mention unregistered Palestinian refugees, who are prevented from entering Palestine. The overall Palestinian population is approximated at 15 million today, with only half of them living inside historic Palestine.
Commenting on this particular aspect of the recognition, West Bank-based Palestinian journalist, Hafez Abu Sabra posted on Facebook:
“Does this hypocrite planet think that I, the Palestinian whose grandfather was forcibly displaced from Lod (the eighth [Arab] state), and the neighbor of Jaffa (the bride of the earth), in a journey that pushed him to Gaza (the lady of the planet), before he finally arrived in Nablus (the defeater of the oppressors), and the neighbor of libertarian Jenin, does this planet think that I would be waiting for its recognition that our Palestine is a state?” Abu Sabra wondered.
“We, who were born chanting, live long Palestine, all of Palestine, free, with the holy city of Jerusalem as its capital, would be waiting for that? Oh Western world, we are indifferent to your diplomacy,” he asserted.
The recognition came at the cost of tens of thousands of Palestinian victims
Other Palestinians scoffed at the recent wave of recognition, as it took place only after Israel intensified the mass killing of their people in the last couple of years, leaving at least 65,500 Palestinians dead and around two million starved and displaced.
They slammed Western countries for remaining silent and unmoved throughout the decade-long tragedy of the Palestinians being forced to live under an oppressive military occupation. Some Palestinians feel that the West was waiting for a genocide as heinous as this one, to finally take a symbolic action that will not save the lives of Palestinians in any way.
Palestinian activist and media figure Amina Khandaqji said in a video:
“You should have told us a long time ago that you wanted a genocide to happen, so that you would sympathize with us. Why didn’t you tell us from the beginning that you wanted over 60,000 of us to be martyred, and that we have to lose the best young people of Palestine before you would care about us?”
A state or a fragmented land which lacks sovereignty and control?
Khandaqji also slammed the recognition, as it will not grant Palestinians a sovereign country. They currently live scattered over small parts of their territories, fragmented by Israeli settlements and military checkpoints, and mainly controlled by the Israeli occupation without defined borders.
She also touched on the idea of not having an airport, and not enjoying the authority to operate the only border crossing that would allow her people to leave Palestine from the occupied West Bank to other countries.
Her comment came a few hours after the Israeli government announced on Wednesday, September 24, the closure of the King Hussein Bridge (also known as the Allenby Bridge) until further notice, stopping the passage of goods and passengers, including senior Palestinian officials.
A conditional recognition which seeks to create a weak-willed disarmed state
Instead of seeking to end the illegal Israeli military occupation of Palestine, and end its crimes and violations, Western countries set demilitarizing the prospective state, where Hamas should have no role, as a condition for recognizing a Palestinian state.
This in turn constitutes a coup against international law, which acknowledges the “right to self-determination” of peoples living under foreign occupation, colonial domination, and apartheid regimes by all available means – including armed struggle – to achieve independence, territorial integrity, national unity, and liberation.
UK’s recognition of Palestinian statehood and the Balfour Declaration dilemma
The UK was the most heavily criticized for the nominal, conditional recognition of a Palestinian State. They argued that Britain is the most blameworthy for the tragedy of the Palestinian people, which has lasted for 108 years, following the Balfour Declaration that supported the establishment of “a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine” in 1917.
The Palestinian grassroots believe that the United Kingdom has an obligation to correct its historic mistake of bringing the Zionist colonial project to the region, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.
Therefore, its conditional, symbolic recognition of a Palestinian state has placed the UK in a pickle, and rekindled the collective memory of the Palestinian people, who consider it the number one culprit for their prolonged ordeal.
The post Western recognition of Palestinian statehood: a symbolic move or real progress towards a just solution? appeared first on Peoples Dispatch.
From Peoples Dispatch via this RSS feed