Recognition of Palestine: Like an arsonist returning to the crime scene

On September 21, 2025, the British government followed Canada and Australia in formally recognising the State of Palestine. Prime Minister Keir Starmer reasoned his announcement to keep "alive the possibility of peace and of a two-state solution", with Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper framing the recognition as an affirmation of the Palestinian right to self-determination.

Yet this declaration contained no practical change, arriving at a time when Israel’s war on Gaza and the occupation of the West Bank are deepening with unprecedented levels of aggression.

The irony is impossible to ignore. The 1917 Balfour Declaration that supported “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” overlooked someone else’s home rights. A century later, Britain returns with a symbolic gesture, akin to arriving with a fire extinguisher long after the house has burned down, assuring everyone that it seeks to “keep alive the possibility of peace”.

From its colonial rule to its mandate-era administration, Britain’s fingerprints are all over the dispossession of Palestinians. That colonial history acts as a roadmap to why the recognition of Palestinian statehood in 2025 carries profound symbolic weight.

Palestine’s ambassador in London, Husam Zomlot, described the recognition as “an irreversible step towards justice, peace and the correction of historic wrongs”. Yet, the delay underscores how colonial powers still ration Palestinian rights according to their own convenience.

International law enshrines self-determination as sacrosanct, which makes the Palestinian case the stark exception. Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) explain why: doctrines like terra nullius and uti possidetis juris were designed for the legitimisation of empire building. Yesterday’s recognition appears less like the beginning of a new dawn and more like the persistence of empire’s logic, sticking to legal obligations only when advantageous. The case of Palestine is thus a century of dispossession draped in the whitewashing of recognition, as recognition is a veil to conceal the violence that demanded it.

Recognition has been cast as a courageous humanitarian stand, yet it is doubted whether it will materially change Palestinians lives. David Lammy, the British Deputy Prime Minister, said that bringing a Palestinian state will require a long peace process.

The recognition statements by the UK, Canada, and Australia are “a symbolic response to Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza and territorial expansion in the occupied West Bank.” This performative recognition gives green light to colonial powers to claim moral high ground while maintaining the structures that perpetuate Palestinian suffering, avoiding justice or the possibility of holding the perpetrator accountable.

Former Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn welcomed the move as positive but insufficient: in his words, “the UK should recognise the genocide in Gaza, end its complicity in crimes against humanity, and stop arming Israel”. Corbyn’s intervention highlights that symbolic progress without tangible measures risks remaining a performative gesture devoid of practical impact.

Nowhere is the emptiness between symbolism and reality clearer than in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Since October 2023, Israel’s genocide in the Gaza Strip has produced one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes in recent history. Beyond bombardment and mass displacement, Israel executed systematic starvation against Palestinian civilians, with famine conditions confirmed by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification. These horrific conditions reflect a deliberate policy of displacement and destruction.

Meanwhile, settler violence and annexationist rhetoric in the West Bank carry on unrestrained. On the very same day recognition was announced, the killing and expulsion persisted, as Netanyahu responded to the recognition: “A Palestinian state will not be established”. Starmer’s recognition excluded engagement with Palestinian leadership, reinforcing a pattern in which external powers dictate Palestinian futures.

Recognition has neither restrained military aggression nor curbed settler-colonial expansion.

Anas Iqtait warns that recognition, absent enforcement, risks becoming a distraction. Palestine stays confined to the status of a “non-member observer state” at the UN, unable to exercise sovereign rights rendered dependent on US consent. As Forensic Architecture work asserts, entangling recognition with symbolic gestures only distracts from deeper root problems of the absence of sanctions, arms embargoes, or international protection risks, which only deepens domination instead of working on its erasure.

Salem Barahmeh described recognition as a “carefully crafted performance” masking genocide in the Gaza Strip, military occupation in the West Bank, and dispossession in Jerusalem. 

What is also striking is that neither governments nor academic circles are mentioning the right of return for the millions of Palestinians in the diaspora or the fate of over two million Palestinians who live in the land colonised in 1948, which is now called “Israel”. Hence, what some present as a path to liberation is, in fact, the entrenchment of the very colonial order it performs to oppose.

International discourse remains trapped in the shallow waters of the “peace process”, never sailing toward accountability for apartheid and occupation. By presenting the dispute as one between two equal parties, governments merely reproduce what obscures the structural imbalance between the coloniser and colonised. What is presented as a benevolent gift of statehood becomes instead a diplomatic device that masks one-sided aggression beneath the illusory promise of “two states living side by side”.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has twice affirmed the illegality of Israel’s occupation, yet enforcement remains theoretical. Recognition becomes another performance of morality with no teeth, rooting Israel's impunity deeper.

The deeper issue is that recognition functions within a racialised framework that portrays Israel as rational, while casting Palestinians are irrational, suspect, or expendable. By accepting Israel’s narratives and dismissing the Palestinian voices and experiences — despite decades of documented evidence since the beginning of the colonisation-Western governments reveal why true accountability remains sidelines

As the Palestinian artist Sliman Mansour said: “Statehood cannot be declared in press releases while genocide burns Gaza, and land is stolen daily in the West Bank. Recognition of Palestine is hollow if it ignores the uprooting of people and the violence that became a daily reality”.

Aya Talahmeh is an LLB Law graduate from the University of Exeter, with professional experience primarily in the in-house legal field. She is currently pursuing a master's degree in Human Rights at Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, with a strong interest in business and human rights.

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