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Recognizing Palestine and the Two-State Solution Mirage

International recognition of Palestine cannot put a "brake" on a peace process that isn't going anywhere.

Philip Stephens follows up on the non-binding Commons vote to recognize Palestine as a state:

The Israeli argument, echoed as it was by a handful of supportive MPs, is that the process of recognising Palestine as a state, which began in the UN general assembly two years ago, is a brake on peace. Statehood is a prize to be “earned”. To concede it now would be to reduce the pressure for Palestinians to make tough compromises.

There was never great logic in this. As several MPs pointed out, the formulation offers Israel an extraordinary veto over the choices of other sovereign states. Even if this once made tactical sense, the proposition has been robbed of reason by Mr Netanyahu: Palestinians cannot be denied statehood because of Israel’s intransigence.

The argument against recognition might have made sense twenty years ago, but over the last two decades it has become increasingly obvious that international recognition of Palestine cannot put a “brake” on a peace process that isn’t going anywhere. It would be one thing if recognizing Palestine genuinely risked derailing a possible peace deal, but that argument now rings hollow. For much of this time, Western governments and their publics could kid themselves that a two-state solution was still possible and might even be realized in the near future, but it has been shown to be a mirage in the last few years. In the wake of the collapse of the latest attempt to revive that process, the most recent Gaza war, and the persistent expansion of settlements, it has become clear that the current Israeli government has no interest in such an outcome.

Even if it did want to reach an agreement, its actions over the last few years have made it impossible for an increasing number of people in the West to believe that it does. No doubt the Israeli government would like to have things both ways by sabotaging the process through continued settlement expansion without having to pay a political price with other countries. As the Commons vote indicates, that is starting to backfire in countries that are otherwise sympathetic to Israel, and that will likely keep happening. Israel can maintain the pretense for the rest of the world that it wants to reach a lasting accommodation with the Palestinians, or it can keep expanding settlements, but it has reached a point where it can no longer do both.

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