On Monday, the UN General Assembly in New York will hold a special summit on the war in the Gaza Strip. It is a continuation of a diplomatic project led by France and Saudi Arabia to push for the revival the two-state solution — in which Israelis and Palestinians would exist side by side — as the only answer to the decadeslong conflict.
At Monday’s meeting, several countries have said they will join the more than 145 UN members that already recognize a Palestinian state. These include France, Canada, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Australia, Luxembourg and Malta.
Most of the recent European declarations on recognizing Palestinian statehood have come as a result of Israel’s ongoing military campaign in Gaza that has killed more than 65,000 people, according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry, although international researchers have estimated the toll much higher. Last Monday, the UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory published a report concluding that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
Israel and its primary ally, the United States, have rejected this report and others that have come to the same conclusion and denounced any plans to recognize Palestine as a state, claiming that doing so would be a “reward for terror” — referring to the October 7, 2023, attacks on Israel led by the militant Hamas group, which resulted in the deaths of nearly 1,200 people and preceded Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.
Just ‘political theater’
Even supporters of Palestinians say recognizing Palestine as a state could be insufficient if it’s not combined with action.
“Western states embrace symbolic gestures, while Palestinians are left with neither justice nor statehood, only a widening gap between lived reality and international performance,” Ines Abdel Razek, advocacy director for the Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy, based in Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank, argued in an August text for Palestinian think tank Al Shabaka.
On Wednesday, Guardian columnist Owen Jones wrote that “every action taken against Israel has been performative, in order to dampen calls for action from the public.”
There is also concern about how Israel would react to a new batch of recognitions, Richard Gowan, the UN director for think tank International Crisis Group, wrote this week in the US-based policy journal Just Security.
“Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu … has a long track record of defying the rest of the UN membership,” Gowan wrote. “One scenario that worries diplomats is that Netanyahu — who declared last week that ‘there will be no Palestinian state’ — could respond to the recognitions process by announcing plans to formally annex parts of the Palestinian territories in his speech.”
Can recognition bring peace?
It’s clear that recognition of a Palestinian state alone won’t stop Israel’s war in Gaza.
“Recognition is an erroneous substitute to boycotts and punitive measures that should be taken against a country perpetuating genocide,” columnist Gideon Levy argued in Israeli newspaper Haaretz in August. “Recognition is hollow lip service. … This will not stop the genocide, which will not be halted without practical steps by the international community.”
In fact, as legal experts point out, the issues are separate. Whether Palestine is a state or not, international law already obligates other nations to do whatever they can to stop a suspected genocide from taking place.
A diplomatic upgrade
What recognition of a Palestinian state could do is make a stronger case for a ceasefire within existing international diplomatic, bureaucratic and legal structures.
In the fall 2025 edition of the quarterly academic journal The Cairo Review of Global Affairs, Egyptian political analyst Omar Auf pointed out that Palestinian officials had previously tried to accede to the Geneva Conventions in 1989 but were rejected by Switzerland because, the Swiss said, there was “uncertainty” about the existence of a Palestinian state.
In August, Nomi Bar-Yaacov, a peace negotiator with the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, told DW that recognition “doesn’t change anything immediately but it gives the Palestinians a much higher stake in negotiations, because when you’re negotiating state versus state, it’s not the same as negotiating between a state and an unrecognized state [or] a state that is just an entity.”
Bilateral recognition could be considered a form of diplomatic upgrade. Recognizing countries — say, France or Belgium — must review ties with Palestine, as well as assess their legal obligations toward it. That’s why it could also lead to a review of ties with Israel, they argue.
But it must be accompanied by practical steps, Hugh Lovatt, a senior policy fellow with the Middle East and North Africa program at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), told DW.
“Recognition is not a policy, it is an opening. The real work begins the day after,” Anas Iqtait, a lecturer in the political economy of the Middle East at the Australian National University, argued in August in Akfar , which is published by the Doha-based Middle East Council on Global Affairs.
‘An important reaffirmation’
It is true that recognition is very symbolic, conceded. “But symbolism is not always a bad thing. Given the countries doing the recognizing — France and the UK, in particular — it is an important reaffirmation of Palestinian rights and self-determination, the right to live free from occupation, the right to statehood and so on.”
Still, symbolic measures must be accompanied by practical steps, he said.
At a press conference in Brussels on Wednesday, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, encouraged member states to increase tariffs on some Israeli goods and to sanction settlers and two senior Israeli politicians. These are measures that experts at the ECFR have previously recommended. A source in Brussels told DW that Italy, which had previously opposed stopping the EU’s scientific funding for Israel, might even drop its objections soon.
“Even three years ago, recognition might have been the end of the story,” Lovatt said. “But I think, because things have moved on so dramatically in terms of public and political opinion, it is no longer a question of either you recognize [Palestine] or you do something else.”
At the moment multiple measures are being advanced simultaneously, Lovatt said, and that’s reflective of how public opinion across the political spectrum has changed since 2023.
“[Recognition] should be seen as the trajectory of travel,” Lovatt said. “We may not get there tomorrow, but the trajectory is clear.”
Edited by: M Gagnon
