Most of the world’s nations now recognise a Palestinian state. In May 2024, the ranks of those nations were swelled by Spain, Ireland, and Norway. Under Emmanuel Macron and Keir Starmer, respectively, the French and British governments have now signalled their commitment to joining them in September. As conditions deteriorate in Gaza, one British government minister has even said that the UK should recognise the state of Palestine “while there is a state of Palestine left to recognise.”
Palestine is usually said to comprise Gaza and parts of the West Bank, with its capital in East Jerusalem. But in the real world, the West Bank enclave is ruled by Fatah, what remains of the Gaza Strip is still nominally ruled by Hamas, and East Jerusalem is not the capital of anything. With the two mutually hostile Palestinian parties locked in a frozen conflict, there is no prospect that either will hand over control to the other. And neither Hamas nor Fatah can be considered democratically legitimate because neither has held elections in decades.
So, what does it mean to recognise a physically discontinuous, politically divided polity as a single state? And why have no conditions for recognition been placed upon Hamas—a detail that has led some British commentators to see the promise of recognition as a reward for the pogrom of 7 October 2023?
I. History
The international expectation is that a Palestinian state will be established within borders “based upon” the 1949 armistice lines that existed on 4 June 1967, the day before the Six Day War. But no Palestinian state existed before that war. Indeed, no Palestinian state existed even before Israel’s 1948 declaration of independence.
Until 1918, “Palestine” was a province of the Ottoman Empire: an impoverished backwater, ruled from Constantinople hundreds of miles away. And like most parts of the Ottoman Empire, it was inhabited by multiple ethnic groups. Following the breakup of the Ottoman Empire—which had picked the wrong side in the First World War—the territory was temporarily administered by the British under the name of “Mandatory Palestine.”
Throughout this period of British administration, there was substantial immigration from elsewhere in the Middle East. Many of the new arrivals were Jews, a persecuted minority in the Arab world, which had learnt (like many persecuted peoples of the day) to dream of national self-determination. Some Arabs wanted to make peace with the Jews, but the dominant force in Arab politics was Amin al-Husseini, the British-appointed Mufti of Jerusalem and a Jew-hating Nazi collaborator.
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Author: Ruth King
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