At UN, western powers push phantom ‘Palestine’ recognition to safeguard Israel
Pro-Palestine activists gather outside the United Nations headquarters in New York City on 9 September 2025
Joseph Massad writes in Middle East Eye on 16 September 2025:
On 12 September, the United Nations General Assembly voted overwhelmingly in support of a resolution to revive a two-state solution. Adopted by 142 states, the “New York Declaration” paves the way for a 22 September summit to push for greater recognition of a phantasmatic Palestinian state.
In recent months, a chorus of western governments has lined up behind this French- and Saudi-led statehood scheme. The upcoming UN conference comes as Israel’s genocide in Gaza nears its two-year mark, with at least 64,000 Palestinians killed and a catastrophic humanitarian crisis inflicted through weaponised starvation and the systematic destruction of the territory.
As Israel pursues its final solution against Palestinians, its belligerence has extended beyond Gaza to Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iran, Tunisia and even Qatar, where its strikes in Doha last Tuesday targeted Hamas negotiators and killed six people in the process. Indeed, the very governments that continue to abet Israel’s war of annihilation now claim to champion Palestinian “independence”.
The ostensible aim of this manoeuvre is to achieve a “just and lasting peace in the Middle East”. Its real purpose, however, is to save Israel from itself by safeguarding its right to remain a Jewish-supremacist state, underwritten by dozens of laws that privilege Jewish colonists and their descendants over the indigenous Palestinians.
Western recognition of a fictive Palestinian state hinges entirely on their long-standing recognition of the racist state of Israel alongside it. It is also engineered to shore up the collaborating Palestinian Authority as a reliable subcontractor of Israel’s colonial occupation of Palestinian land by christening it a “state”.
When western powers recognise a non-existent Palestinian state in defiance of the reality of its non-existence, the central issues of ongoing Israeli Jewish colonisation – the takeover of East Jerusalem and the West Bank, the terrorisation of the indigenous Palestinians there, let alone the unremitting genocidal war on Gaza – are relegated to the background.
In view of French and Saudi efforts, the struggle is no longer to reverse Jewish settler-colonisation and the theft of Palestinian lands, or to halt the continuing pogroms in the West Bank. Instead, it is to direct all international efforts – including this obscene conference – to securing “recognition” of a non-existent state.
Earlier attempts
This month’s summit is not the first attempt to establish a Palestinian state.
On 22 September 1948, the All-Palestine Government (APG) was founded in Gaza and claimed sovereignty over all of Mandatory Palestine. In practice, it could only operate in what became the Gaza Strip, after the establishment of the Israeli settler-colony the previous May and Israel’s occupation of half the territory that the UN Partition Plan had designated as a Palestinian state.
Six of the then seven members of the League of Arab States recognised the APG immediately. Only Jordan, in control of central and eastern Palestine, which it annexed the following year and renamed “the West Bank”, refused to extend recognition. The West soon recognised the Jordanian annexation of the West Bank, though not of East Jerusalem. Due to western hostility to the APG, and complicity in the division of Palestine between Israel and King Abdullah I of Jordan to prevent any Palestinian sovereignty, the APG faded and dissolved itself in 1953.
In 1988, the Palestine National Council – the Palestinian parliament in exile, an organ of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) – unilaterally declared “independence” in Algiers in support of the first Palestinian Uprising (1987-1993), which the PLO would ultimately crush as the price it pledged to pay for signing the 1993 Oslo Accord.
While dozens of countries rushed to recognise that non-existent independent state, the United States adamantly refused. The US had, in fact, been the party responsible for blocking Palestinian independence in 1947, when it strong-armed several countries to change their votes at the last minute and support UN General Assembly Resolution 181 – the Partition Plan. Thanks to American efforts, that plan awarded most of Palestine to the minority Jewish colonists, whose state the US recognised readily in May 1948. The US also made sure not to recognise the APG, a strategy it maintained by denying recognition to the PLO’s declaration of independence in 1988.
After Oslo