Normally, recognition of a new state comes belatedly, after that state has already come into being. First come the facts on the ground - a government that controls a territory, with recognised borders and institutions of governance and so on, and bit by bit, other countries recognise that this is indeed a whole new country.
Not with Palestine. Instead it is the other way around: with Palestine, statehood is deemed to exist in principle before it exists in practice. It’s just another example of the unique, even surreal, way that people relate to this part of the world. Israel and Palestine are in a category all of their own, in which things follow a different set of rules to any other conflict on earth.
The recognition of Palestinian statehood by the UK and other western governments is less an acknowledgement of reality, and more an expression of faith. The official statements announcing recognition do not even try to pretend that Palestine meets the criteria for statehood as set out in international law, because it obviously doesn’t (this is a separate question from whether Palestinians as a people have the right to statehood). Not for Palestine, the need to fulfil the laborious challenge that every other state that has come into being in the modern era has had to meet.
Instead, it is as if these governments hope that they can imagine Palestine into being simply by saying it is so. It is statehood through the Tinkerbell Effect - the idea that something exists if enough people believe in it.
The justification offered for this is that the Two State Solution is in its death throes, and if it is not kept alive then any hope of a better future for Israelis and Palestinians will perish with it. And there is some truth in this. Support for two states is at its lowest ebb, and the practical conditions for its implementation have never seemed more remote. Meanwhile, those in the region and beyond who seek to bury the Two State Solution for good are yet to propose an alternative that is legal, moral and viable. In this context, and whatever the other political motivations for this step, recognition is being deployed by Western governments as a diplomatic tool in the hope that it prevents the concept of two states from disappearing forever.
However, the problem with this recognition tactic is that it makes the same mistake as all its predecessors, by focusing on the mechanics of achieving a two state solution, rather than its purpose.
The idea that peace between Israelis and Palestinians (and before those terms existed, between Jews and Arabs) is to be found by dividing the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea into two states has been the settled view of the international community since 1947, when the United Nations voted for partition. It has been been on the table for at least a decade before that, when it was proposed by the 1937 Peel Commission. This has been the basis for numerous UN resolutions, diplomatic initiatives, peace processes and US-hosted summits, all to try to bring the elusive Two State Solution into being. Buried within all this effort is an assumption that this is the only rational option: rational in both the equitable distribution of land and in the pursuit of peace as the highest objective. Who could object to that?
And yet, despite almost eighty years of trying, efforts to make two states a reality have repeatedly failed; and not enough people are asking why, eighty years on, it still hasn’t worked as a proposed solution.
It’s easy enough to think of the reasons why the basic land-for-peace premise of the Two State Solution has been repeatedly rejected by one or other of the parties to this conflict. Fear, mistrust, extremism and messianism, grievances and hatreds, all play a role. At times this is driven by political leaders, and sometimes it comes from the Israeli and Palestinian populations themselves. There are numerous examples of deals that seemed perfectly reasonable to outsiders being rejected by the protagonists (Yasser Arafat was especially guilty of this). It is counterintuitive to suggest that Palestinians and Israelis don’t want to live in peace - of course they do - but that is different from being willing to accept what is being offered as part of the package. However difficult and painful this conflict has been, it seems that many Israelis and Palestinians believe they have more to lose by paying the price that peace would involve, than what it would cost to keep hold of what they currently have (whether this involves holding on to land, or to security, or refusing to give up the hope they can still secure total victory and all of the land for themselves in the future).
But rather than doing the hard work of truly understanding, at a profound level, what motivates the decision making of Palestinian and Israeli politicians and publics, instead the international community of diplomats, governments, journalists and NGOs assume that they just need another push and this time it will work.
You don’t have to be a pessimist to question this approach. I fear that this latest initiative falls into the same trap of asking “How”, rather than “Why”: how can we make two states happen, rather than asking why has it never happened previously.
I’ve felt for decades that the Two State Solution offers Israelis and Palestinians the best chance of a peaceful future in which they control their own destinies, in their own nation states; but I’m not naïve enough to imagine that it is remotely achievable with conditions as they are right now. At the same time, I don’t see any other options that could work either. The Two State Solution may be impossible, but it is still less impossible than any alternative plan that is moral, legal and viable.
Instead of pretending that the international community can imagine a Two State Solution into being, those who want to make it a reality would do better to try working out what steps need to be taken to help Israelis and Palestinians reach a place where a permanent peace between them is even imaginable. Perhaps the formal step of recognising Palestine is supposed to be a step on that road; but on its own, it has as much chance of bringing a Two State Solution to fruition as all those previous efforts that came to nought.
In contrast to Taiwan which is in everyway a State, but we don’t recognise.
Interestingly, this paper reflects the same errors as all previous endeavours. There is only one way to create as separate Palestinian state. That is to dismantle UNWRA and its support for fundamental Islamism's efforts to exterminate Jews.
It seems forgotten that post WW2, around 10 Million people have been displaced from their homelands, and relocated into other countries. This does not require that they change their identity, but, just as Jews throughout the centuries, integrate into host societies.
Similarly, it's forgotten that the land issue, i.e. Israelis taking Palestinian Land, from people inexistent prior to 1967, was actually bought from Arab landowners.
Inconvenient though these facts are, they are still facts.