Palestinian statehood has never had so much international support — or seemed less attainable.
As world leaders gather in New York City on Monday for the UN General Assembly, the question of Palestinian statehood is at the top of the agenda. On Sunday, the governments of the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia confirmed that they now recognize Palestine as an independent state, following France, which announced its intention to do so last July and formalized it with a speech by President Emmanuel Macron on Monday. Belgium, Portugal, Luxembourg, and Malta, among others, have announced plans to recognize Palestine as well.
On Monday, representatives of most of the world’s countries — but not the United States or Israel — gathered on the sidelines of the assembly for a meeting, co-chaired by France and Saudi Arabia, to discuss implementing a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas also missed the meeting after being denied a visa to travel to New York by the United States, but addressed the assembly by video. Monday’s meeting followed the passage, on September 12, of a UN General Assembly resolution now being referred to as the “New York declaration,” outlining “tangible, timebound, and irreversible steps” toward a two-state solution. The resolution was backed by 142 of the assembly’s 193 members.
“Denying statehood would be a gift to extremists everywhere,” UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said at Monday’s meeting. “Without two states, there will be no peace in the Middle East, and radicalism will spread around.”
In Washington, a new resolution cosponsored by eight senators calls on President Donald Trump to recognize Palestinian statehood. Calling for a two-state solution is hardly a radical position in US politics, but calling for unilateral recognition of Palestine — rather than supporting a process by which a Palestinian state would emerge out of negotiations — is a more dramatic step, and it’s unlikely the resolution would have gotten even this level of support before the war in Gaza. Still, even though none of those senators are Republicans, and the resolution is unlikely to pass, the level of support for a measure that calls for unilateral recognition is an indication of how politics on this issue have shifted in the United States.
Not that any of this is swaying the Israeli government. “There will be no Palestinian state. This place is ours,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared earlier this month at a ceremony announcing Israel’s expansion of the West Bank settlement of Maale Adumim. In fact, his government is weighing formally annexing parts of the West Bank in retaliation for the wave of recognition by Western governments. This in turn prompted a warning from the United Arab Emirates — arguably the most significant of the Arab countries that normalized relations with Israel as part of the Abraham Accords during Trump’s first term — that it would downgrade diplomatic ties if Israel went ahead with annexation. At the same time, the war in Gaza is only escalating, as the Israel Defense Forces advance into Gaza City and thousands flee.
The reality in Israel and Palestine is so intractable that it raises the question of whether the global mobilization behind statehood is anything more than political theater. It also raises the possibility that the world may be coming to consensus on Palestinian statehood just as it slips out of reach as a realistic possibility.
Since former Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat unilaterally declared independence in 1988, some 145 countries have recognized Palestine, including the recent additions, according to a tally by Agence France Presse. That includes nearly all of Africa, Latin America, and the former Communist bloc. Most of those who do not recognize it are close US allies like Japan, South Korea, and Germany. Western Europe had, for the most part, refrained from recognizing, but that has shifted rapidly during the war in Gaza, with Norway, Spain, Ireland, and Slovenia making the decision to recognize Palestine last year.
The additions of Britain and France to the list are particularly significant, as it means that the United States is now the last permanent member of the UN Security Council that does not recognize a Palestinian state. Palestine currently has “permanent observer status” at the UN, meaning it can participate in debates, but not vote on resolutions in the main UN bodies. The Security Council has to approve new members and all five permanent members have veto power, so membership is not on the table for now. But the Senate resolution suggests that won’t necessarily be the case forever.
Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), one of the cosponsors of the resolution, told Vox that the senators pursued it because “we have to create some light at the end of the very dark tunnel in the Middle East right now.” He added: “I do believe that the best way to ensure security and dignity and self-determination for both Israelis and Palestinians is through a two-state solution.”
In an interview with CBS on Sunday, Macron said that “recognizing the Palestinian state today is the only way to provide a political solution to a situation which has to stop.” US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has charged that France’s move is a “reckless decision that only serves Hamas propaganda and sets back peace.” Macron countered that in fact it would “isolate Hamas from the rest of the Palestinians” and provide an alternative political vision. Notably, the New York declaration, which the majority of Arab states supported, calls for disarming Hamas and the end of its rule over Gaza.
Skepticism about the recognition declarations has come not just from supporters of Israel, but also from its critics, who see recognition as a means for governments to deflect criticism over their failure to hold Israel to account for the carnage in Gaza.
“This is worse than political theater,” said Tamara Kharroub, deputy executive director of the Arab Center in Washington, DC. “It’s a smokescreen to mask their decades-long failure to implement this very two-state solution and to end Israel’s occupation and apartheid, and their complicity in the genocide that has been taking place in Gaza for the past two years.”
Richard Gowan, UN director at the International Crisis Group, said the flurry of activity around Palestinian statehood at the UN this week would be a form of “fantasy diplomacy.”
He added that the leaders of these countries “felt they had to make a declaration, but there isn’t really a plan to go with it. The only way that you can really back this up would be for these countries and the wider UN membership to agree to some sort of framework for sanctions against Israel. I just don’t think the political will is there to put the amount of pressure on Israel that you would need to actually dissuade Netanyahu and his government from the current course of action.”
Two-state dreams, one-state reality
Meanwhile on the ground in Israel and occupied territories, a two-state solution looks farther off than ever. Only 21 percent of Israelis believe their country can coexist peacefully with a Palestinian state, according to a Pew poll, down 14 percentage points since before Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attacks. (The infeasibility of a two-state solution may ironically be one of the few things Israelis and Palestinians can agree on.)
As the war in Gaza drags on, members of Netanyahu’s government like Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich are now publicly discussing proposals to annex parts of the enclave if Hamas does not surrender; late last week, Smotrich touted the territory as a potential “real estate bonanza.” Those comments are in line with Trump’s apparently still active proposals to turn Gaza into a tourist resort after the “voluntary” relocation of its civilian population.
Israeli officials have also discussed responding to the wave of Palestine recognitions by formally annexing parts of the West Bank. This could take several forms: from annexing Israeli settlements close to Israel, to annexing the area along the border between the West Bank and Jordan, to annexing all of what’s known as “Area C” — the 60 percent of the West Bank currently under Israeli security control. Far-right ministers like Smotrich have proposed going even further and dissolving the Palestinian Authority entirely.
Van Hollen, who recently visited the West Bank, dismissed these threats, saying it’s clear that plans for annexation are already underway. “For them to pretend that the actions they’re taking in the West Bank are in response to calls for recognition of a Palestinian state is just a cover story,” he said. “It’s a big lie.”
Yoel Guzansky, a former Israeli government adviser who now leads the Gulf Program at the Institute for National Security Studies, an Israeli think tank, told Vox that Netanyahu “needs a green light from the Trump administration” to move ahead with annexation. “He could not do it without it.”
Trump and his advisers have sent mixed signals on the issue over the years. Axios has reported, citing Israeli officials, that Rubio, who visited Israel earlier this month, has signaled that the Trump administration is not opposed to annexation, but other administration officials disputed the Israeli characterization. While a “two-state solution” was long bipartisan orthodoxy in Washington, Trump has suggested in the past he’s not wedded to the idea, and some members of his administration, such as Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, are openly annexationist.
What may deter Trump from giving Netanyahu a green light is the effect that annexation would have on one of his signature accomplishments: the Abraham Accords. Even a “limited” annexation of West Bank territory would likely drive a deeper wedge between Israel and its erstwhile partners in the Arab world. West Bank annexation would be another red line crossed, and the government of the UAE — which has close relations with the Trump administration — has warned the White House that it could unravel the accords, entirely.
Guzansky said that the Abraham Accords countries “might not cancel the agreement entirely” if Israel went ahead with annexation, but that the agreements are “becoming an empty shell of something that was once seen as a model peace agreement between Israel and its neighbors, a ‘Cold Peace’ agreement.” That could mean the Arab states continue cooperating with Israel on security, but do so without the people-to-people exchanges or deeper political and economic integration that the accords had promised.
Israel’s path toward isolation
A few years ago, Netanyahu likely would have also pointed to normalizing relations between Israel and countries like the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco as one of the crowning foreign policy achievements of his long era in office. The grand prize, normalization with Saudi Arabia, seemed at least a realistic possibility. The Abraham Accords saw many Arab governments willing to sidestep the Palestinian issue to find common ground with Israel on trade and their shared rivalry with Iran.
The sheer level of devastation in Gaza, though, and the global reaction to it, have made that sidestepping much more difficult for even the most jaded and autocratic governments to maintain. Israel’s military strikes throughout the Middle East in recent months, particularly the recent airstrike on Qatar, have further convinced these governments that Israel is increasingly a source of regional instability.
In a recent speech, Netanyahu warned Israel that it would likely have to accept an increasingly isolated position on the world stage for the time being, and transform into a “super Sparta” and “adapt to an economy with autarkic characteristics.”
Regional integration and good relations with its neighbors would be nice, in other words, but in the Israeli government’s view, if the price is a negotiated end to the war in Gaza and serious steps toward accepting Palestinian statehood, it’s just not worth it.
This week’s events in New York are unlikely to bring about a Palestinian state in reality — or end the carnage in Gaza — but they may one day be seen as an inflection point in Israel’s path toward isolation on the world stage.