The Middle East is in crisis, with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict escalating dangerously. Reports of a postponed UN conference on Palestinian statehood, U.S.-involved wars, and intensifying violence in Gaza and the West Bank underscore this perilous reality. Marc Lynch and Shibley Telhami’s analysis, “The Promise and Peril of Recognizing Palestine”, published July 15, 2025 in Foreign Affairs, and Ian Martin’s UN report on UNRWA ( United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East), published on July 7, 2025, offer crucial insights, linking the two-state solution to global stability. This essay argues for Palestinian recognition, highlighting its moral imperative, strategic utility, and the critical dangers of a merely symbolic approach, advocating instead for a robust, conditional framework.
The Shifting Geopolitical Landscape
The current moment is defined by diplomatic paralysis and escalating violence. The postponement of a crucial UN conference on Palestinian statehood, due to regional war and a U.S.-involved conflict, symbolizes international impotence. This broader regional conflagration, impacting global energy and security, makes the Palestinian question a systemic global risk.
Within the Palestinian territories, violence is evolving into a systematic campaign of erasure. Gaza’s civilian infrastructure is being destroyed, its population displaced, and settler violence in the West Bank represents a calculated effort to fragment Palestinian society and undermine future statehood claims. Despite Israel’s current leadership showing no interest in a two-state framework, international momentum for recognition is building. French President Emmanuel Macron has pledged recognition, and Saudi Arabia is reconsidering the Arab Peace Initiative, seeking regional stability through renewed commitment to Palestinian rights. This impatience stems from a dawning realization that the status quo is not only morally indefensible but strategically unsustainable, threatening to unravel global security.
The Imperative for Recognition
Recognition of Palestine serves both profound moral and pragmatic strategic purposes. Morally, it powerfully rebukes Israel’s creeping annexation, characterized by relentless settlement expansion and legal fragmentation. Recognition asserts a competing legal claim, reaffirms international law, and symbolizes enduring global commitment to Palestinian self-determination and human rights. It represents a long-overdue acknowledgment of historical injustices, offering hope and dignity to a stateless people.
Crucially, Lynch and Telhami warn that recognition pursued in a vacuum—without meaningful changes on the ground—risks becoming a hollow, even counterproductive, gesture. If recognition is not tied to robust protections, enforceable sanctions, and transparent international oversight, it risks legitimizing a de facto apartheid. Symbolic recognition, devoid of tangible consequences, could inadvertently embolden hardliners and become a cynical exercise that relieves international moral pressure without altering the grim realities faced by Palestinians daily.
Strategically, recognition moves beyond altruism. Regional stability, a core U.S. and European interest, is increasingly jeopardized by the unresolved conflict. Formal recognition could provide a new framework for de-escalation, offering a diplomatic off-ramp from the cycle of violence. It could also bolster counter-terrorism efforts by addressing root causes of radicalization and enhance international actors’ credibility by aligning policies with international law. The two-state solution remains the only viable framework for a just and lasting peace. Recognition is not an abandonment of this framework, but a critical step in preserving it, reinforcing self-determination and the illegitimacy of territorial acquisition by force.
Arguments for recognition are built upon the harsh realities unfolding daily. Gaza’s destruction is catastrophic: over 70% of its buildings destroyed, displacing nearly 90% of its residents, leading to widespread famine and collapse of essential services. In the West Bank, settler violence has reached alarming levels, systematically displacing communities. The Israeli government appears increasingly untethered from international norms, openly defying UN resolutions and advocating for further annexation. Compounding this bleak picture is the sobering military assessment that Hamas cannot be destroyed solely through military means. If military victory is unattainable, a political solution becomes imperative.
Within this bleak context, the Trump administration’s transactional posture offers a peculiar, perhaps ironic, form of leverage. Trump’s frustration with the financial costs of Israel’s war, combined with concerns over regional instability, has pushed him toward a transactional realignment. Recognition of Palestine, framed not as a moral imperative but as a strategic concession, could become a powerful bargaining chip. It could unlock normalization deals with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, offering Israel integration into the region without requiring significant concessions to Palestinians. For Trump, this could be a signature foreign policy achievement, leveraging his unpredictability. This paradox suggests a recognition campaign driven by realpolitik might succeed where decades of traditional diplomacy have failed.
UNRWA: Locus of Crisis and Opportunity
For seventy-five years, the international community has skirted the urgency of Palestinian statehood. UNRWA, established in 1949 as a temporary relief effort, now stands as a permanent proxy for a state not allowed to exist. For generations of Palestinians, UNRWA has been the only semblance of state-like services, underscoring their unique statelessness. Now, as UNRWA teeters on the edge of collapse—under siege by Israeli legislation, military strikes, and a global funding crisis—the question of Palestine can no longer be deferred. Recognition, long symbolic, must become the cornerstone of a new international posture. To fail now is to betray the very possibility of a just peace and to formalize the erasure of Palestinian rights.
UNRWA is not a mere charity; it is, as Ian Martin’s report makes clear, an institutional embodiment of international responsibility. It educates children, provides healthcare, and distributes aid to over three million refugees. Crucially, it preserves the legal and archival framework for the right of return—a foundational principle of international law. The ongoing Israeli campaign—military, legislative, and diplomatic—against UNRWA has reached an unprecedented scale. Since October 7, 2023, Israel’s response has killed over 54,000 Palestinians and devastated UNRWA infrastructure. This military onslaught, paired with legislation seeking to prohibit UNRWA’s operations and strip its personnel of immunities, is a coordinated campaign to dismantle the final institutional framework of Palestinian refugee rights, effectively attempting to erase the refugee issue.
Martin outlines four potential futures for UNRWA: full collapse; partial reduction; governance reform; or gradual transfer of services to the Palestinian Authority while maintaining the rights-based mandate. Each scenario carries immense political weight and profound humanitarian consequences. A full collapse would lead to an unimaginable humanitarian catastrophe, destabilizing host countries and fueling further radicalization. Failure to act decisively will deepen the humanitarian crisis and fuel regional instability.
A Path Forward: Recognition with Enforcement
Recognition of Palestine is a legal and moral imperative rooted in international law. The ICJ has declared Israel’s prolonged occupation unlawful, and the ICC has issued arrest warrants. These represent the slow, grinding machinery of international law, built to uphold justice and prevent impunity. Yet, without enforcement or accompanying political recognition, these legal pronouncements risk irrelevance. Recognition aims to bridge this gap. UNRWA’s potential collapse would not dissolve the legal claims of Palestinians; rather, it would leave them without institutional articulation. Recognition is essential to safeguard the principle that international law applies to all. Furthermore, recognition directly supports the principle of the right of return. Martin affirms this right, guaranteed under customary international law and UNGA Resolution 194. Without a sovereign Palestine or an institutional protector, the right becomes a legal fiction. Recognition reasserts that Israel’s statehood was never meant to negate Palestinian nationhood.
Amid escalating regional conflict, recognition of Palestine may seem both small and dangerously provocative. Yet, paradoxically, it may now serve as a stabilizing wedge. France and Saudi Arabia’s initiative and France’s unequivocal pledge reflect growing international impatience. Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza, paired with aggressive settlement expansion, has laid bare its disregard for the two-state framework. Even hawkish Israeli leaders concede that Hamas cannot be fully defeated militarily, underscoring the futility of the current military-centric approach. Within this bleak context, the Trump administration’s transactional worldview offers a strange opening. Trump’s frustration with the financial costs of Israel’s war has pushed him toward realignment. Recognition of Palestine, framed as leverage to broker normalization deals or advance a new nuclear agreement, could become a signature foreign policy achievement. It may also be the only mechanism left to create political rupture inside Israel itself, potentially leading to a collapse of Netanyahu’s coalition and the redirection of international aid toward rebuilding Palestinian governance.
A recurring fear is the erasure of Palestine—not only as a state-in-waiting but as a people, a history, a legal subject. The obliteration of Gaza’s civic infrastructure, the delegitimization of its institutions, and the systematic dispossession of Palestinians in the West Bank all point to a deliberate campaign of erasure. Recognition offers an antidote—not a solution, but a stand. It grounds the conversation in international law, reinforces the permanence of Palestinian identity, and reasserts that statelessness is not a permanent condition. In affirming statehood, the world pushes back against the logic that only facts on the ground—not principles—shape sovereignty. Moreover, recognition helps immunize Palestinians from political abandonment. If donors can rally $3 billion annually for Israeli military aid, then the $1.5 billion needed to sustain Palestinian humanitarian systems is not an economic impossibility; it is a matter of moral and political will.
Still, recognition without enforcement is a trap. If the international community recognizes Palestine but does not impose consequences for annexation, does not restrict the transfer of arms to Israel, and does not enforce ICJ and ICC decisions, then recognition will be hollow. Recognition must be tied to concrete commitments—protection of civilians, restrictions on settlement activity, the rebuilding of Gaza, and robust international funding of Palestinian institutions. Otherwise, it becomes a way to relieve global moral pressure without changing the political dynamics on the ground, effectively “washing” the occupation with diplomatic niceties. Worse still, symbolic recognition can be weaponized. To be meaningful, recognition must be embedded in a broader diplomatic strategy. It must be paired with funding for reconstruction, robust support for Palestinian political reform, and new international monitoring bodies capable of enforcing agreements. It must, above all, signal to Israel that indefinite occupation and apartheid will carry real costs, not just rhetorical condemnation.
Conclusion
In this, the analyses by Lynch and Telhami and Ian Martin’s UNRWA report agree: the world is reaching a moment of reckoning. Either it affirms the legitimacy of Palestinian nationhood in action as well as word—or it formalizes their erasure. Recognition alone is not justice, but it is a beginning. The dream of a two-state solution has been steadily undermined. The Israeli state now controls all territory west of the Jordan River. It governs two unequal populations under radically different legal regimes: one with voting rights, passports, and mobility; the other with curfews, checkpoints, and drone surveillance. This is not a temporary security measure; it is the scaffolding of a permanent apartheid. And it will not be dismantled by silence. The recognition of Palestine is not a panacea. But it is the clearest way for the international community to say: we have not given up. That justice is still possible. That erasure will not be the final word. Anything less is complicity. The credibility of international law in the 21st century, and indeed the very prospect of a just and stable Middle East, hinges on this pivotal decision.
THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN BY AI AND EDITED BY INTELLICUREAN