On September 21 and 22, Australia, Canada, France, the United Kingdom, and six other countries recognized a Palestinian state. Israel has responded defiantly. Following Sunday's recognitions, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared in a Hebrew-language video statement: “It will not happen. A Palestinian state will not be established west of the Jordan.” Although Netanyahu will only make a final decision on Israel's full response when he returns to the region after meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump, his coalition has repeatedly threatened to annex West Bank territory and collapse the Palestinian Authority (PA) entirely.
This tit-for-tat serves nobody's interests. Israelis will lose as the momentum around recognition and their government's aggressive response accelerate their country's diplomatic, economic, and cultural isolation. Palestinians will lose, too. On their own, the recognitions fail to afford real, tangible benefits to the Palestinian people or to help the struggling PA escape crisis. Instead, they give hard-line elements of the Israeli government more pretext to try to suppress Palestinian self-determination and further weaken the PA. Even before the recognitions were formally announced, the Israeli government had begun to cite them in fresh steps to expand settlements in the West Bank. On August 20, Israel approved the construction of the controversial E1 settlement that effectively bisects the West Bank; Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich explicitly framed the move as a response to calls for Palestinian statehood. “This reality finally buries the idea of a Palestinian state,” he said, “because there is nothing to recognize and no one to recognize.…”
The remainder of this commentary is available at foreignaffairs.com.
