Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is displayed on a screen as he speaks remotely during a UN Summit in New York on Monday.LUDOVIC MARIN/AFP/Getty Images
Hamas performed a public execution on a Gaza City street on Sunday night. Three men in blindfolds, who had been accused of collaborating with Israel, were lowered to their knees in front of hundreds of onlookers. While members of the crowd cheered, jeered and took videos on their phones, the men were shot at point-blank range.
Just hours earlier, a dispatch had come from Ottawa: Canada was officially recognizing a Palestinian state.
The Palestine that Canada now recognizes bears no resemblance to the Palestinian territory that actually exists on the ground.
A statement released by Prime Minister Mark Carney said that Canada is “recognizing the State of Palestine, led by the Palestinian Authority,” though the reality is that the PA currently has no authority beyond the West Bank.
Mr. Carney said this recognition is predicated on a commitment by the PA to hold general elections next year, though the reality is that the PA hasn’t held general elections in the West Bank in nearly 20 years.
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Mr. Carney’s statement said the gesture “in no way legitimizes terrorism,” but the reality is that Hamas sees it as precisely that; in an August interview, Hamas official Ghazi Hamad said that the decision by various countries to recognize a Palestinian state represents one of the “fruits of October 7.” It doesn’t matter that leaders of Canada, France, Britain and Australia insist that their recognition of Palestinian statehood is not a reward for Hamas’s actions. If you give a terrorist a prize, they’re going to see it as a prize.
When Canada announced its intention back in July to recognize a Palestinian state, Mr. Carney said the decision was essentially based on a promise: a promise of governmental reforms, of total demilitarization, of the exclusion of Hamas from any future elections (never mind that the people of Gaza elected Hamas to lead in 2006).
What Canada has decided to recognize, then, is an idea: a hypothetical Palestinian state that exists mainly in the minds of doe-eyed diplomats in Geneva, but is completely divorced from the current Palestinian reality, where Hamas is very much still in control of life on the ground and carrying out the occasional execution on the street.
For a near-century, the Western consensus has been that international recognition of a Palestinian state would be conditioned not on a promise, but on a negotiated peace deal with Israel, where a Jewish and an Arab state could co-exist peacefully, side by side.
In that scenario, statehood would mean clearly defined borders, clear leadership and so on: the tangible elements that typically comprise a nation. Yet the argument now being advanced by Canadian leaders and like-minded others is that conferring statehood is necessary to keep the prospect of a two-state solution alive; that officially recognizing a Palestinian state led by the PA emboldens and empowers Mahmoud Abbas, who is a far likelier partner for peace than anyone leading Hamas.
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So what Western nations are doing, essentially, is making a bet: Hoping that a pre-emptive reward will secure the peace that has eluded the region for generations. But what it might actually do, in fact, is make negotiations more difficult by giving up an important element of a peace agreement before those negotiations begin, while also reinvigorating popular support for Hamas, which has delivered the Palestinian people their most important geopolitical win in generations.
Mr. Carney’s statement also implied that Canada’s decision to recognize a Palestinian state now has much to do with Israel’s actions under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which include settlement expansion in the West Bank and the killing and displacement of, and famine imposed on, Palestinian civilians. But if the intention of Canada recognizing a Palestinian state was to compel Mr. Netanyahu to rein in his actions in Gaza and the West Bank, it hasn’t worked.
Settlement expansion, for example, has intensified between the time Canada announced its intention to recognize the state of Palestine and its actual announcement. It should be clear to all parties that if a two-state solution is indeed still possible, it will only happen when both Hamas and Mr. Netanyahu are no longer at the table.
If Mr. Carney’s intention was otherwise to placate his domestic audience, that hasn’t worked either. Supporters of Israel are aghast that our government has effectively rewarded Hamas for Oct. 7, while supporters of Palestine are frustrated that this recognition does not come with the normalization of diplomatic relations and/or cutting off ties with Israel. That’s what happens when you formally recognize an aspiration, based on imprecise criteria, seemingly because your international friends are. You please no one. Well, except for Hamas.