The State of Palestine

France and the UK, and possibly Canada, are floating the idea of unilaterally recognizing a Palestinian state — and doing so in the midst of an active war, with an estimated 50 Israeli hostages still held in Gaza by Hamas. Let that sink in.

Recognition of statehood, once a hard-earned diplomatic milestone, is now being used as a bargaining chip — or worse, a threat — against Israel. What was once the culmination of internal organization, external negotiation, and international consensus is now being dangled to placate angry domestic constituencies and to pressure a sovereign nation into changing its military strategy.

The implications of this shift are not just dangerous — they are deeply destabilizing.

Statehood is not conjured by proclamation. A viable state needs internal political coherence, functioning institutions, defined borders, a monopoly on force, and economic sustainability. None of these conditions currently exist within the Palestinian territories. Gaza is still being ruled by Hamas after almost two years of war, and it remains a terror organization with genocidal aims. The West Bank is governed by a weak and increasingly irrelevant Palestinian Authority. The two are not only rivals — they are at war in all but name.

So yes, any Western recognition of “Palestine” now is purely symbolic. But symbols matter. They set precedents. They signal legitimacy. And in this case, they dangerously conflate mass terror with diplomatic reward.

An Israeli commentator recently suggested that this was Hamas’s fallback strategy all along: to provoke a war horrific enough to cast Israel as genocidal and force the international community to bestow Palestinian statehood — not through negotiation, but through revulsion. It’s a grim but plausible reading. The Palestinian version of the Jewish genocide giving birth to Israel. This is an historical  simplification. Israel was the result of almost a century of institutional groundwork by the Zionist movement: education, immigration, land acquisition, and the formation of parallel state structures under the British Mandate. The Holocaust catalyzed global sympathy, but the infrastructure of statehood was already in place.

What has Hamas built? What has the Palestinian leadership built? Where is the groundwork for peace, for governance, for coexistence?

If this moment feels historically jarring, it’s because it is. In past cases — Kosovo, South Sudan, even Taiwan — recognition followed a long, difficult process of internal preparation or internationally mediated negotiation. Sometimes recognition was withheld despite state readiness (Taiwan); sometimes it followed a peace process and referendum (South Sudan); and sometimes, as with Kosovo, it entrenched a frozen conflict that persists to this day.

But in none of these cases did recognition follow mass murder and hostage-taking — at least not with the open, barely concealed logic of appeasement we’re seeing now.

For 75 years, the postwar international system was built on a fragile but real consensus: disputes should be settled through diplomacy. Recognition was to be earned, not extorted. That framework is now cracking — not just because of Russia’s war in Ukraine or China’s threats toward Taiwan, but because Western democracies are turning their own values inside out.

If you reward terror with a flag and a seat at the table, you don't just abandon your ally. You abandon the principles that gave your diplomacy any meaning in the first place.

This is not diplomacy. It’s panic masquerading as policy. And we will all be paying for it for a very long time.