The Limits of Recognition

The Atlantic

2 days ago

On a prominent ridge in the center of Toronto stands a big stone castle. Built in the early 20th century, Casa Loma is now a popular venue for weddings and parties. The castle is flanked by some of the city's priciest domestic real estate. It is not, in short, the kind of site that usually goes unpoliced.
On May 27, Casa Loma was booked for a fundraiser by the Abraham Global Peace Initiative, a pro-Israel advocacy group. The gathering was to be addressed by Gilad Erdan, a former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations and United States.
A crowd of hundreds formed opposite the castle. They temporarily overwhelmed police lines, closing the street to the castle entrance. Protesters accosted and insulted individual attendees. One attendee, a former Canadian senator now in his 90s, told me about being pushed and jostled as police looked on. Eventually, two arrests were made, one for assaulting a police officer and the other for assaulting an attendee.
Last year, the city of Toronto averaged more than one anti-Jewish incident a day, accounting for 40 percent of all reported hate crimes in Canada's largest city. Jewish neighborhoods, Jewish hospitals, and Jewish places of worship have been the scenes of demonstrations by masked persons bearing flags and chanting hostile slogans.
Gunmen fired shots at a Toronto Jewish girls' school on three nights last year. A synagogue in Montreal was attacked with firebombs in late 2024. On Saturday, an assailant beat a Jewish man in a Montreal park in front of his children.
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Canadian governments—federal, provincial, municipal—of course want to stop the violence. But their inescapable (if often unsayable) dilemma is that many of those same governments depend on voters who are sympathetic to the motives of the violent. Canadian authorities of all kinds have become frightened of important elements in their own populations. Just this week, the Toronto International Film Festival withdrew its invitation to a Canadian film about the invasion of southern Israel on October 7, 2023. The festival's statement cited legal concerns, including the fear that by incorporating footage that Hamas fighters filmed of their atrocities without ' legal clearance,' the film violated Hamas's copyright. (In polite Canada, it seems that even genocidal terrorists retain their intellectual-property claims.) Another and more plausible motive cited by the festival: fear of 'potential threat of significant disruption.' A small group of anti-Israel protesters invaded the festival's gala opening in 2024. The legal violations have been larger and more flagrant this year. All of this forms the backdrop necessary to understand why the Canadian government has joined the British and French governments in their intention to recognize a Palestinian state.
The plan began as a French diplomatic initiative. In July, France and Saudi Arabia co-chaired a United Nations conference on the two-state solution. Days before the conference began, French President Emmanuel Macron declared that his nation would recognize a Palestinian state in September.
The French initiative was almost immediately seconded by the British government. Canada quickly followed. This week, Australia added its weight to the group. Anti-Jewish violence has been even more pervasive and aggressive in Australia than in Canada, including the torching of a Sydney day-care center in January. (Germany declined to join the French initiative but imposed a limited arms embargo on Israel.)
All four governments assert that their plan offers no concessions to Hamas. All four insist that a hypothetical Palestinian state must be disarmed, must exclude Hamas from any role in governance, must renounce terrorism and incitement, and must accept Israel's right to exist. Those conditions often got omitted in media retellings, but they are included in all the communiqués with heavy emphasis. As Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney told reporters on July 30: 'Canada reiterates that Hamas must immediately release all hostages taken in the horrific terrorist attack of October 7, that Hamas must disarm, and that Hamas must play no role in the future governance of Palestine.'
All those must s make these plans impossible to achieve, from the outset. How do the French, British, Canadian, and Australian governments imagine them being enforced, and by whom? Even now, after all this devastation, Hamas remains the most potent force in Palestinian politics. A May survey by a Palestinian research group, conducted in cooperation with the Netherland Representative Office in Ramallah, reported that an overwhelming majority of Palestinians reject the idea that Hamas's disarmament is a path to ending the war in Gaza, and a plurality said they would vote for a Hamas-led government. Observers might question the findings from Gaza, where Hamas can still intimidate respondents, but those in the West Bank also rejected the conditions of France, Britain, Canada, and Australia.
What does recognition mean anyway? Of UN member states, 147 already recognize a state of Palestine, including the economic superpowers China and India; regional giants such as Brazil, Indonesia, and Nigeria; and the European Union member states of Poland, Romania, Slovenia, and Sweden. About half of those recognitions date back to 1988, when Yasser Arafat proclaimed Palestinian independence from his exile in Algiers after the Israeli military drove Arafat's organization out of the territory it had occupied in Lebanon. Such diplomatic niceties do not alter realities. States are defined by control of territory and population. In that technical sense, Hamas in Gaza has proved itself to be more like a state than has the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. Even the mighty United States learned that lesson the hard way over the 22 years from 1949 to 1971, when Washington pretended that the Nationalist regime headquartered in Taipei constituted the legitimate government of mainland China.
Macron, Carney, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese are savvy, centrist politicians. All regard themselves as strong friends of Israel. Starmer in particular has fought hard to purge his Labour Party of the anti-Semitic elements to whom the door was opened by his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn. If they're investing their prestige in a seemingly futile gesture, they must have good reason.
They do.
All four men lead political coalitions that are fast turning against Israel. Pressure is building on the leaders to vent their supporters' anger, and embracing the French initiative creates a useful appearance of action.
The Canadian example is particularly stark. Prime Minister Carney has pivoted in many ways from the progressive record of his predecessor, Justin Trudeau. He canceled an increase in the capital-gains tax that Trudeau had scheduled. He dropped from the cabinet a housing minister who had championed a major government-led building program. (The program remains, but under leadership less beholden to activists.) Carney has committed to a major expansion of the Canadian energy sector after almost a decade of dissension between energy producers and Ottawa. The new Carney government is also increasing military spending. Many on the Canadian left feel betrayed and frustrated. Recognizing a Palestinian state is a concession that may appease progressives irked by Carney's other moves toward the political center.
But appeasement will not work. In the Middle East, the initiative by France, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom has already pushed the region away from stability, not toward it. Cease-fire talks with Hamas 'fell apart' on the day that Macron declared his intent to recognize a Palestinian state, according to Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Hamas then released harrowing photographs of starved Israeli hostages, one shown digging his own grave. Embarrassed pro-recognition leaders had to deliver a new round of condemnations of Hamas at the very moment they were trying to pressure Israel to abandon its fight against Hamas.
Nor does the promise of Palestinian recognition seem to be buying the four leaders the domestic quiet they had hoped for. On Sunday, British police arrested more than 500 people for demonstrating in support of a pro-Palestine group proscribed because of its acts of violence against British military installations. Those arrests amounted to the largest one-day total in the U.K. in a decade.
Hours before Prime Minister Albanese's statement promising recognition, some 90,000 pro-Palestinian demonstrators blocked traffic on Sydney Harbour Bridge. Their organizers issued four demands—recognition was not one of them. 'What we marched for on Sunday, and what we've been protesting for two years, is not recognition of a non-existent Palestinian state that Israel is in the process of wiping out,' a group leader told CNN. 'What we are demanding is that the Australian government sanction Israel and stop the two-way arms trade with Israel.'
On August 6, 60 anti-Israel protesters mobbed the private residence of former Canadian Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly, banging pots and projecting messages onto her Montreal dwelling—an action especially provocative because Canadian cabinet ministers are not normally protected by personal security detachments. The present foreign minister, Anita Anand, had to close her constituency office in Oakville, a suburb of Toronto, because of threats to the staff who worked there.
From the December 2024 issue: My hope for Palestine
The issue for protesters is Israel, not Palestine. During the Syrian civil war, more than 3,000 Palestinian refugees in the country were killed by Syrian government forces, hundreds of them by torture. Nobody blocked the Sydney Harbour Bridge over that. It's Israel's standing as a Western-style state that energizes the movement against it and that is unlikely to change no matter what shifts in protocol Western governments adopt. After all, on October 6, 2023, Gaza was functionally a Palestinian state living alongside Israel. If the pro-Palestinian groups in the West had valued that status, they should have reacted to October 7 with horror, if nothing else for the existential threat that the attacks posed to any Palestinian state-building project. Instead, many in the pro-Palestinian diaspora—and even at the highest levels of Palestinian official life—applauded the terror attacks with jubilant anti-Jewish enthusiasm.
The chants of 'from the river to the sea' heard at these events reveal something important about the pro-Palestinian movement in the democratic West. The slogan expresses an all-or-nothing fantasy: either the thrilling overthrow of settler colonialism in all the land of Palestine, or else the glorious martyrdom of the noble resistance. It's not at all clear that ordinary Palestinians actually living in the region feel the same way. The exact numbers fluctuate widely depending on how the question is framed, but at least a significant minority—and possibly a plurality—of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza would accept coexistence with Israel if that acceptance brought some kind of state of their own. But their supporters living in the West can disregard such trade-offs. They can exult in the purity of passion and still enjoy a comfortable life in a capitalist democracy. These are the people that Albanese, Carney, Macron, and Starmer are trying so desperately to satisfy. They are unlikely to succeed.
The Hamas terror attacks of October 7 provoked a war of fearsome scale. Almost two years later, the region is almost unrecognizable. Tens of thousands have been killed, and much of Gaza laid to ruin. Almost every known leader of Hamas is dead. Hezbollah has been broken as a military force. The Assad regime in Syria has been toppled and replaced. The United States directly struck Iran, and the Iranian nuclear program seems to have been pushed years backward, if not destroyed altogether.
In this world upended, the creative minds of Western diplomacy have concluded that the best way forward is to revert to the Oslo peace process of 30 years ago. The Oslo process ended when the Palestinian leadership walked away from President Bill Clinton's best and final offer without making a counteroffer—and gambled everything on the merciless terrorist violence of the Second Intifada. Now here we are again, after another failed Palestinian terror campaign, and there is only one idea energizing Western foreign ministries: That thing that failed before? Let's try it one more time. But this time, the hope is not to bring peace to the Middle East. They hope instead to bring peace to their own streets. The undertaking is a testament either to human perseverance, or to the eternal bureaucratic faith in peace through fog.