Cool thinking behind the recognition wave

As of September 22, during the 80th session of the United Nations General Assembly, another ten countries recognized Palestine: the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Portugal, Belgium, Monaco, Belgium, Luxembourg, Malta, and Andorra. The important feature of this “recognition wave” is that the State of Palestine has received widespread recognition from influential developed Western countries, bringing an explosive surge of large-scale and high-quality diplomatic recognition to the cause of Palestinian independence. Weighty countries in the Western world such as Germany, Italy and Japan, although under tremendous pressure from the United States, have also respectively stated that “recognizing the State of Palestine should be the end point of negotiations on the ‘two-state solution’,” “will recognize the State of Palestine conditionally,” and “recognizing the State of Palestine is only a matter of time.”

At this point, among the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, only the United States refuses to recognize the State of Palestine; among the 193 UN member states, the number that recognize the State of Palestine has reached 157, only nine fewer than Israel, which has been established for 83 years. Therefore, this roaring “recognition wave” can be called a historic victory for the Palestinian people. It embodies the international community’s collective affirmation of historical fairness, social justice, and the axioms of civilization; it reflects the unstoppable trend of the times; and it also reflects the great sympathy and firm support of the international family for the Palestinian people, who have endured profound suffering. On the 23rd in New York, U.S. President Trump, during a meeting with leaders and dignitaries of eight Arab and Islamic countries, proposed a “21-point peace plan” aimed at ending the Gaza war and also explicitly pledged to prevent Israel from annexing the West Bank.

The emergence of this “recognition wave,” in a certain sense, is also a victory of the Palestinian people’s continued struggle based on their natural rights endowed by international law, and can even be called a political victory for the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas). As I have analyzed many times, by launching the large-scale cross-border suicide attack “Al-Aqsa Flood,” inflicting heavy damage on Israel and thereby igniting the “Sixth Middle East War” that has lasted nearly two years and affected the entire Middle East, and by paying the price of unprecedented loss of life and property by the Palestinian people as well as plunging the entire region into war, turmoil, and insecurity, Hamas has made the world community feel the pain of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and enabled the international community to truly realize that the Palestinian issue is the core issue of Middle Eastern disputes.

Of course, Hamas must be condemned for harming Israeli civilians in the cross-border attacks, for kidnapping, abducting and detaining hundreds of civilians for long periods and causing the deaths of some detainees. It must also be pointed out that Hamas’s “self-mutilating” radical strategy of awakening the international community and seeking international sympathy at the cost of the unprecedented suffering of 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza and the sacrifice of 65,000 lives is not worthy of affirmation and certainly not of praise. Under no circumstances can lofty goals and just demands be premised on the mass death of civilians, nor can they be achieved by means of mutual destruction.

The emergence of this “recognition wave” is of course a major historical failure for Israel and even for the Jewish nation. It not only reflects the international community’s firm rejection of Israel’s zero-sum thinking, law-of-the-jungle approach, logic of might, and fetishization of the military in its national policies and behavior, but also a firm opposition to Israel’s creation of a “hell on earth” in the Gaza Strip, its ethnic cleansing, its implementation of a “scorched-earth policy,” and its use of hunger as a weapon. It is also a firm resistance to Israel’s barbaric acts of arbitrarily invading neighboring sovereign countries in violation of the bottom line of human civilization, extinguishing the conscience of civilization, and violating the UN Charter and international law.

Israel can be described as having “asked for the hammer and gotten hammered.” In order to realize the mirage of “Greater Israel,” to nibble away at and annex the ancestral land of the Palestinian people, to obtain unilateral, one-sided, even selfish so-called absolute security, and even for the ethnic ideals, political propositions, and personal futures of extreme right-wing groups, it has been willing to place the country in a constant “state of war,” to seize cities and expand battlefronts through militarism and state terrorism, and even to openly and brutally attack friendly countries, ultimately turning itself into an undisputed “outcast of the West” and an “international orphan.”

Israel’s war-mongering and retrograde actions over the past two years have long provoked the wrath of heaven and the resentment of people, and have ultimately forced a large number of European countries that had long indulged its policies of aggression and expansion to take the opposite side, to stand with the Palestinian people, turning a country that entered the First World through innovation and self-struggle into a sovereign actor driven by war, speaking with its fists, flaunting force, and maintaining regime stability through endless military operations. Israel’s unscrupulous practice of “sustaining war with war” and “sustaining governance with war” has also completely overdrawn the international sympathy accumulated by the “Jewish Holocaust” and the millennia of Jewish suffering, and has in many countries triggered anti-Israel waves and even awakened anti-Semitism. This is a major loss for Israel and the Jewish people that is immeasurable and difficult to remedy.

However, the “recognition wave” is only a moral highlight, a diplomatic spectacle, and a momentary bustle; the Israeli-Palestinian conflict still needs cool-headed thinking to seek its path to resolution.

First, the State of Palestine announced its establishment as early as 1988, and became one of the only two observer states of the United Nations as well as a member of multiple UN organizations. However, the State of Palestine remains a de jure state, a state on paper, although it possesses inherent land recognized and guaranteed by international law, has a semi-autonomous government that has fallen into paralysis, and enjoys diplomatic recognition by most sovereign states along with extensive diplomatic relations.

The key problem is that the territory set for the State of Palestine, namely the limited space that accounts for only 23% of the entire area of Palestine before the partition between Arabs and Jews — East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank of the Jordan River — still remains entirely in Israel’s hands. Broad international recognition cannot automatically bring about the independent, autonomous and free presence of the State of Palestine on this land. Therefore, the State of Palestine remains a national dream yet to be realized.

Second, Israel resolutely opposes the establishment of a Palestinian state, especially one that is unilateral or imposed from outside. Owing to the strong and unconditional protection of the United States, even if the State of Palestine, in accordance with international law and the collective self-defense obligations stipulated in the UN Charter, were to call on the international community to take all measures to “liberate Palestine,” it would still be impossible for a multinational force led by great powers to use military threats or even military action to forcibly recover from Israeli occupation the sovereign land recognized by the international community for the State of Palestine. Israel will inevitably, with the posture of a nationwide war, thwart any attempt to establish a Palestinian state through external military intervention.

So long as American hegemony does not decline, so long as the American view of Israel does not change, so long as the strong alliance between the United States and Israel remains, and so long as the conditions for Israel to accept the establishment of a Palestinian state are not met, the State of Palestine will have no hope of truly rising in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, and East Jerusalem cannot become a capital under Palestinian control.

Third, the underlying logic of the “recognition wave” is the acknowledgment that historic Palestine belongs to both Israelis and Palestinians, the support for Palestinians to achieve effective partition, and the adherence to the “two-state solution,” or in other words, the opposition to Israel’s scheme to expel the Palestinian people and monopolize their land. Therefore, the greatest value of the “recognition wave” lies in urging Israel to abandon its illusions, and also urging Hamas and its regional allies to recognize Israel, so that both sides return to the right track of “land for peace,” reconciliation through negotiation, and seeking development through coexistence. Zero-sum victory and unilateral survival, development and prosperity are but the fantasies of a single country or a single side, and cannot be the fundamental way out for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Middle Eastern disputes.

Fourth, what inevitably follows the “recognition wave” is the cruel and complex reality that cannot be avoided. Whether it is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the disputes in the Middle East, or the peace and security development of the entire region, all must return to the level of basic common sense, to the level of seeking truth and pragmatism, to the rational and realistic right path of changing mindsets, adjusting policies, altering strategies, avoiding single-win outcomes and striving for multiple-win outcomes, and must reject all the byways and even the crooked paths that have prolonged war and chaos in the Middle East for more than 80 years.

Fifth, the key to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict lies in the sincere will and bold actions of both sides. This is the fundamental point. It is simply unrealistic for Israel to enjoy exclusively this historic land of Palestine, and a Palestine without Israel has long since become history. Israel and Palestine must follow the broad framework of the “two-state solution,” pick up the basic principles of the “Oslo Accords,” return to the negotiating table, and through consultation resolve all issues of partition between the two states and the establishment of the State of Palestine, including all the elements of how the future State of Palestine will be implemented — borders, capital, national defense, internal affairs and foreign affairs. One of the basic prerequisites for resuming negotiations is to end the current situation in Palestine of “a state without a government,” “a government without governance,” and the lack of a unified, authoritative, efficient decision-making center that truly holds the power to decide in negotiations.

Sixth, resolving Middle Eastern disputes is not limited to ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; it must also simultaneously resolve Israel’s territorial disputes with Lebanon and Syria, so as to eradicate at the root the lesions that frequently trigger clashes and wars. Israel must completely and thoroughly withdraw from the Golan Heights, and hand over the old territorial accounts of the Golan Heights, especially disputes such as the Shebaa Farms over which Lebanon claims sovereignty, to be handled through consultations between Syria and Lebanon. Once Israel no longer occupies an inch of Syrian or Lebanese land, the two countries should recognize Israel’s legitimate existence as a sovereign state and normalize relations with it, just as in 1978 when Egypt and Israel achieved land for diplomacy and secured security through diplomacy. Once Israel and Syria and Lebanon achieve normalized diplomatic relations, the two countries must also dismantle all non-state armed groups targeting Israel and stop all hate-Israel, anti-Israel and resist-Israel propaganda.

Seventh, resolving Middle Eastern disputes, in addition to systematically addressing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Israel-Syria conflict and the Israel-Lebanon conflict, must also eliminate external factors that hinder the peaceful settlement of Middle Eastern disputes, especially by achieving normalization of relations between Iran and Israel. Israel has no territorial dispute with Iran; the hostility in Israel-Iran relations is entirely based on the ideology of Iran’s Islamic regime. Because Iran’s Islamic regime pursues pan-Islamism and uses support for anti-Israel forces in the Middle East as a policy tool to intervene in Middle Eastern affairs, seek great-power status, or pry at geopolitical relationships, it has thereby plunged itself into the game board of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Middle Eastern disputes.

More than forty years of lessons show that this policy of Iran’s Islamic regime has made itself a mortal enemy of Israel and has also turned itself into a financier, instigator and protector of anti-Israel forces; it has not only overdrawn vast amounts of the people’s wealth and national resources, but has also seriously impeded normal relations with the United States and the Western world, thereby enduring blockades and sanctions over the long term, long restricting the country’s opening to the outside world and normal development, and even ultimately bringing the flames of war from Israel and the United States onto its own soil, humiliating the country, the regime and the nation, and causing ordinary people to suffer from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Middle Eastern disputes. The Iranian authorities must understand that in today’s 21st century, ancient Islamic law cannot replace the existing norms of international relations and international law. To continue clinging to a predetermined anti-Israel policy in such a rigid, futile way is tantamount to entangling oneself in the snarls of the Israeli-Palestinian and Middle Eastern conflicts, a thorough case of spinning a cocoon to bind oneself.

Eighth, in resolving Middle Eastern disputes, the Arab states are the principal actors. The hard-won favorable momentum of Arab-Israeli reconciliation must not be reversed. While firmly opposing Israel’s expansion and militaristic policies, the Arab countries must adhere to the established principle of “land for peace,” stick to the overarching direction of peace and development, and strive to create an increasingly relaxed, secure, stable and harmonious macroclimate for Arab-Israeli relations, thereby creating external conditions for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian, Israel-Syria and Israel-Lebanon conflicts.

By making peace with Israel in 1978, Egypt thus rid itself of prolonged war and won half a century of peace and development. By reaching the “Oslo Accords” with Israel in 1993, Palestine was able to launch the process of transitional autonomy, once presenting a bright prospect for the two peoples. By making peace with Israel in 1994, Jordan, a tiny country wedged among powerful neighbors, managed to save itself from dire straits and has long basked in the sunshine of development and prosperity. The process initiated by the “Abraham Accords” in 2020 enabled the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco to normalize relations with Israel, thereby stepping into a new era in which Arab states and Israel expand peaceful coexistence and engage in all-round contacts and exchanges.

If the Arab world and Israel move toward each other in both directions and jointly promote peace, they can fundamentally change Israel’s strategic security environment, relax Israel’s high-tension diplomatic posture, allow Israel to see new hopes and prospects for focusing on development and prosperity through resolving Middle Eastern conflicts, and ultimately help ease Israel’s taut geopolitical and security perceptions. This may also facilitate the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian, Israel-Syria and Israel-Lebanon conflicts, and may even force the Iran that is “seeking defeat in solitude” to abandon its rigid Middle East policy, thereby laying a solid foundation for the region’s transition from war to reconciliation.

Of course, some may say that the successive reconciliations between Arab countries and Israel have not led Israel to give up the Palestinian occupied territories and Syria’s Golan Heights, have not prevented the marginalization of the Palestinian issue, and have not avoided the ignition of the “Sixth Middle East War” and its gradual expansion and escalation. However, from the perspective of grand history, Arab nationalism has completely ebbed, and Israel, as a sovereign state and a neighbor of different ethnicity and religion, is being widely accepted by the Arab public. The general indifference and coolness of Arab societies toward the plight of the Palestinians in the past two years, in stark contrast to Western societies, is clear evidence of this.

Moreover, it is precisely because the dead knots between Israel and Palestine, Syria and Lebanon have never been untied that today’s “butterfly effect” affecting the Middle East has formed. Therefore, to systematically resolve local conflicts, country-specific conflicts and the entire Middle Eastern dispute, and to achieve peace and stability across the whole region, efforts must proceed in parallel, with many parties working together to bring it about.