The coordinated wave of recognitions for a Palestinian state by the UK, Canada, Portugal, Australia, and soon France and Belgium is being hailed as a diplomatic watershed. Yet such gestures, however historic on paper, remain hollow without enforcement. They arrive decades late from powers that either enabled or ignored Palestinian dispossession—powers whose colonial fingerprints shaped today’s fractured borders. Britain and France carved up the Arab world under Sykes–Picot, issued declarations dismissive of indigenous sovereignty, and midwifed a century of instability. To declare recognition now, absent accountability for occupation or a roadmap to sovereignty, is not progress but performance.
The United States remains the indispensable actor—and the most glaring enabler of the status quo. Its military aid, diplomatic protection, and serial vetoes at the UN have shielded Israeli policies from meaningful consequence. Washington’s insistence that recognition must follow negotiations rings hollow when no negotiations exist. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s flat declaration that a Palestinian state “will never happen” is not hyperbole but strategy—anchored by accelerated settlement construction, de facto annexation, and unrelenting military control. Recognition without enforcement will not alter that calculus; it risks becoming the very fig leaf that perpetuates impunity.
Turning symbolism into substance requires wielding real levers of power. Western governments must suspend arms transfers to Israel until settlement expansion ceases and occupation policies comply with international law. Settlement goods should be barred from global markets to demonstrate that illegal annexation carries economic cost. They should back, not undermine, the International Criminal Court and International Court of Justice inquiries when rulings prove politically inconvenient. Without these steps, diplomatic recognitions merely launder injustice.
The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) must likewise move beyond rhetoric. It holds collective economic and political power that, if marshaled, can reshape the calculus. Coordinated boycotts of settlement products, pooled reconstruction funds for Palestinian institutions, and strategic use of energy and trade leverage can pressure Western partners and Israel alike. In concert with Arab and European states, the OIC should advance a UN-mandated stabilisation or protection mission, anchored in the Oslo Accords and the Arab Peace Initiative, to secure Gaza and parts of the West Bank after hostilities cease. Properly structured and internationally backed, such a force would not represent foreign domination but a temporary guarantee against further displacement, a space for rebuilding governance, and a foundation for genuine self-determination.
We at the Islamic Economist strongly believe that recognition without enforcement is an abdication of duty. Financing free, internationally monitored elections and rebuilding Palestinian governance are obligations, not charity. If the international community refuses to move beyond gestures, Netanyahu’s boast that Palestinian statehood “will never happen” may well become self-fulfilling. History will not remember these recognitions as acts of courage, but as polite declarations masking complicity in a century of dispossession.
