It took 108 years after the Balfour Declaration, when the British first professed support for the establishment of a Jewish national home “in Palestine”, for London to even commit to recognising Palestinian statehood. Last month, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced that Britain would recognise the state of Palestine in September, unless Israel ended the war in Gaza and took urgent measures aimed at long-term peace, based on the two-state framework. France, another close ally of Israel and an enabler of Israel’s nuclear weapons programme, also said that it would recognise Palestine in the UN General Assembly session. Canada, Australia and a few other nations in the western alliance system have also pledged to follow suit.
Make no mistake. This is not a moment of sudden moral awakening against Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories. Israel has occupied Palestinian territories since 1967. Several countries in the Global South, including India, recognised Palestinian sovereignty in the late 1980s, following the declaration of independence by the Palestine Liberation Organization. Even after the Oslo Accords of 1993 and 1995, which promised a two-state solution, most western governments insisted that they would recognise Palestine only as part of a final settlement. Today, such a settlement based on the two-state formula appears as remote as ever. But more and more countries in the Global North are now stepping forward to recognise Palestinian sovereignty. Why?
Charges of genocide
There are two possible explanations.
First, the charge that Israel is committing genocide, the most serious crime before international law, is no longer a fringe theory. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu now faces an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court, while the International Court of Justice is examining the genocide charge. Within Israel, two leading rights organisations, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel, have accused the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) of committing genocide, a position also echoed by Amnesty International and Médecins Sans Frontières. Omer Bartov, an Israeli-American genocide studies scholar and a veteran of the IDF, has stated that Israel is committing genocide. David Grossman, one of Israel’s most respected writers, has said that “with immense pain and a broken heart” he must use the word genocide to describe his country’s war on the Palestinians.
In just 22 months, Israeli forces have killed 2.6% of Gaza’s pre-war population, wounded over 6.5% and displaced nearly all of them. Among the dead are over 18,000 children. Israel had also imposed a total blockade in March 2025, weaponising hunger and aid delivery, and triggering a mass starvation crisis. Since May, over 1,000 Palestinians have been killed while trying to collect food and other relief, according to the United Nations. Such systemic violence against an entire people in an occupied territory by their colonial rulers has been unprecedented in recent history, which makes the war increasingly impossible for even Israel’s staunchest allies to defend — the United States remains the outlier.
Second, mounting allegations of war crimes, ethnic cleansing and genocide have shifted international public opinion decisively against the Jewish nation. Across Europe, public protests have swelled, fuelled by anger not just towards the war but also towards the hollow position most of their governments, which, otherwise, are vocal about human rights, have taken. A YouGov poll in June found that only 13%-21% people in western Europe have a favourable view of Israel. In some countries, the support for the Gaza war has dropped to as low as 6%. Dissent is growing even in the U.S., which is Israel’s patron and partner. An Economist/YouGov Survey in August found only 27% Americans to be supportive of Mr. Netanyahu, while 84% backed an immediate ceasefire. Nearly half of American voters now believe that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians.
Ideological regime
Israel is aware of the strains in its ties with its traditional allies and that it is losing global public opinion. The stain of Gaza will not fade easily. The most prudent and humane thing for Israel to do is to end the war through a ceasefire for a hostage deal, open all humanitarian corridors, pull back from Gaza and take steps to hold itself accountable for its failures and violations. But Mr. Netanyahu’s regime, driven by a settler, expansionist neo-Zionist ideology, is unable to pursue any of these measures. Instead, Mr. Netanyahu seeks to escalate the war further. Last week, his security cabinet cleared a proposal to take control of Gaza City.
How did the ‘start-up nation’, imagined as a collective of communes for what Pankaj Mishra calls “a pitilessly abused people”, become a victimiser? The answer lies in a collective failure of both the post-War world and an expansionist Israel. This failure reached catastrophic proportions following Hamas’s brutal October 7, 2023 massacre. Nations typically go to war with clearly defined objectives and a theory of victory. Israel’s declared objectives were the destruction of Hamas and the release of hostages. But in Gaza, the target has not just been Hamas. It has been Gaza itself. Twenty-two months later, Hamas is far from destroyed. And some 50 hostages, most of them dead, remain in captivity.
If Mr. Netanyahu ends the war and leaves Gaza, that would be tantamount to admitting defeat. If he agrees to a ceasefire, his far-right allies — Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir — will abandon his government, which has already lost its majority in the Knesset. And once he is out of power, he will have to face a reckoning, not just about the corruption charges he faces but also about the failures of October 7 and the war that followed. So, it is in Mr. Netanyahu’s interest to prolong the war even if it continues to devastate Palestinian lives and erode Israel’s standing in the world.
Shoa and Nakba
The second problem is more structural. Mr. Netanyahu, a child of revisionist Zionism, has long supported Jewish settlements in disputed areas. The settlers, a big political bloc in Israel, want more Lebensraum (living space). For them, the war is an opportunity to “return to Gaza after 20 years”. But Gaza is the home of two million Palestinians. What becomes of them?
Mr. Smotrich, the Finance Minister, has openly called for “Gaza to be totally destroyed” and the Palestinians expelled. Defence Minister Israel Katz wants to push them to the “humanitarian city” in Rafah, which is widely criticised even by former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, as a concentration camp. If Palestinians are expelled or confined to such concentration camps, Jewish settlers can return to the enclave. This is the theory of victory for Israel’s far-right. And this theory aligns well with Mr. Netanyahu’s plans to escalate the war and seize control of the territory. When the world pushes for a two-state solution, Mr. Netanyahu is pushing for a no-state solution — no sovereignty for the Palestinians, no state for the Palestinians and no rights for the Palestinians.
Milan Kundera once wrote: “The struggle of a man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”. For over seven decades, Israel not only remembered but also reminded the world of the horrors endured by the Jews in Europe. The organised and institutional remembrance of the Shoah has, at times, become a tool in the hands of extremist Zionists to silence criticism of the Israeli state, branding dissent as anti-Semitic. But today, the organised and systemic violence in Gaza, live streamed to millions across the world, is forging a new collective conscience about the Palestinian Nakbas.
Watch: Is Israel committing genocide in Gaza?
The decision by Israel’s closest allies to recognise Palestinian sovereignty and subjectivity may not immediately alter the situation on the ground. But it is a breaking moment in the post-1948 Israel consensus in the West. Messrs Nentanyahu, Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, blinded by their shared ethno-nationalist ideology and drunk with hard power, are programmatically incapable of grasping the shifts unfolding around them.
Published – August 13, 2025 12:16 am IST
