By Latheef Farook –

Latheef Farook

Diverting the world attention from Israel’s ongoing medieval barbarity in Gaza several western countries which planted Israel in Palestine began recognizing the state of Palestine. Most of these countries supply arms to Israel while going through the charade of recognizing a Palestinian state.

Israel – with full western backing – continues to subject 2.3 million beleaguered men, women  and children to a relentless campaign of displacement, extermination and starvation without much external distraction . 

In the aftermath of World War I Britain ruled Palestine through a League of Nations mandate from 1922 to 1948.  During this period Britain helped Zionist Jews to massacre  Palestinians, drive them out and grab their lands to create the illegal state of Israel to destabilize the Muslim Middle East.

United Nations member countries were bribed and blackmailed to pass a resolution to partition Palestine to create illegal state of Israel.

Palestinians want a state in the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, all Palestinian territory captured by Israel in the 1967 war with neighboring Arab states.”.

So far more than 145 countries, around 75% of the UN’s 193 member states, recognized a Palestinian state. This include more than a dozen in Europe especially Britain, France, Canada  and Australia.

At the UN, it has the status of a “permanent observer state”, allowing participation but no voting rights. With the British and French recognition, Palestine will soon enjoy the support of four of the UN Security Council’s five permanent members.

Amnesty’s Crisis Response Manager, Kristyan Benedict, said that: “Recognition is no doubt significant but will be a hollow gesture if the UK does not also seek to end Israel’s genocide, illegal occupation and system of apartheid against the Palestinian people.”

He said “UK needs to take action now to ensure Israel lifts the blockade on Gaza, dismantles illegal settlements, ends apartheid, respects Palestinians’ right to return, and upholds the rights of victims on all sides to justice and full reparation.”

Columnist Joseph Massad, professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia University, New York.  said instead of recognizing ‘Palestine’, countries should withdraw recognition of Israel. When UN member states recognize a Palestinian state, all they are doing is bolstering Israel’s illegality as an institutionally racist state

In an article titled  Recognition, Pacts, and Other Elegant Ways of Doing Nothing in Palestine “columnist Junaid S Ahmad had this to state;

The bombs fall in Gaza. Day after day, night after night. Schools collapse into dust. Hospitals—those sanctuaries of mercy—become morgues. Children, the most fragile units of human existence, are pulled from the rubble, their names never to be written on school registers. Water turns scarce, food impossible, electricity a rumor. And yet, while Gaza is burned into ash, the world’s capitals break into applause—applause not for courage, but for gestures.

We are told to cheer when Western governments “recognize the State of Palestine.” To applaud when Saudi princes and Pakistani generals ink new defense pacts, as though signatures on paper could shield a child from a missile. It is all theatre, masterfully staged. Recognition ceremonies. Defense alliances. Manufactured outrage. Each a scented veil over the stench of mass death. Each designed not to halt the genocide, but to distract us from it.

What does it mean to “recognize” Palestine at this hour? To recognize a state that has been bombed into near nonexistence? To recognize a people who are denied the very conditions of life? Recognition has become the diplomacy of the lazy: expensive in rhetoric, cheap in action.

Defense Pacts for Palaces

Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, we are told, are forging an “historic” defense alliance. Commentators marvel. Analysts speculate. The monarchs and the generals beam for cameras. But let us be honest: what, precisely, are they defending?

These pacts are not about defending Palestine, or Muslim dignity, or the oppressed. They are about defending privilege, palaces, and personal power. They are insurance policies for regimes terrified of accountability, terrified of their own people. Saudi princes trade oil wealth for guarantees of protection. Pakistani generals, ever entrepreneurial, offer up their armies like a mercenary service. Together they celebrate a pact that defends everything but justice.

What the masses receive: no bread, no jobs, no dignity. What the rulers receive: more arsenals, more prestige, more excuses to do nothing while Gaza is immolated. These treaties are security blankets stitched from hypocrisy. They secure the rulers, not the ruled.

Meanwhile, Gaza’s morgues overflow. Yet the world is glued to the spectacle of invented controversies, as if these were the battlegrounds of morality. It is tragic, yes. But it is also comic in its absurdity. The theatre is elaborate. The script is polished. The actors are convincing. But the set is built upon the graves of children.

If the world were serious—if rulers were sincere—then the path forward would be unmistakable. It requires not gestures but rupture. Not polite resolutions but radical measures:

* Cut the weapons. An immediate halt to all arms transfers to Israel. Without weapons, the bombs stop. Without bombs, Gaza breathes.

* Sanctions that sting. Freeze the assets of war criminals. Ban their travel. Cut their trade. Isolate the apartheid state until its machinery of death is dismantled.

* Un-recognize Israel. Withdraw recognition until apartheid, occupation, and genocide end. If recognition is moral currency, stop spending it on criminals.

* Name and shame profiteers. Citizens must ask their governments: whose bombs fell today? Which company made them? Which minister signed the deal?

* Solidarity with teeth. Less tweeting, more organizing. Less posturing, more material aid. Solidarity must be measured not in slogans but in lives saved.

Generals and Princes: The Merchants of Betrayal

The betrayal is not only Western. The betrayal runs deep within the Arab and Muslim world itself.

Pakistan’s generals, eager to posture as defenders of the oppressed, in reality behave as subcontractors of empire. Their loyalty is not to the people of Pakistan, nor to the children of Gaza, but to their Swiss accounts, their Washington liaisons, their own careers. They will issue fiery speeches, then retreat to air-conditioned villas, unmoved by the ash clouds over Gaza.

Saudi Arabia’s princes, meanwhile, speak of Muslim solidarity while signing contracts with the very powers that arm Israel. They build golden towers while Gaza’s towers are reduced to rubble. Their pacts are not about Palestine; they are about securing their thrones. They defend their palaces, not Al-Aqsa.

And then there is the so-called revival of a farcical version of the earlier “Non-Aligned Movement”—now a masquerade of monarchs and generals who wear the language of anti-imperialism like a borrowed costume. They align themselves with wealth, not with justice. They align themselves with empire, not with liberation.

This is not solidarity. It is betrayal, dressed in ceremonial robes.

Let us be clear: every empty recognition is a fraud. Every defense pact signed while Gaza starves is a betrayal. Every Western distraction is an accomplice to genocide.

History will not remember the resolutions passed in European parliaments. It will not remember the handshakes between monarchs and generals. It will not remember the televised martyrdom of pundits. It will remember, with fury, that while Gaza bled, the world applauded itself for gestures.

If recognition is to mean anything, it must be linked to rupture: the closing of the arms spigots, the imposition of sanctions, the refusal to normalize apartheid. If solidarity is to mean anything, it must risk comfort, risk alliances, risk wealth.

The world must choose: Gaza or spectacle. Justice or gestures. Action or complicity.

And let it not be said, when the rubble is counted and the graves are full, that no one knew. We knew. We saw. The theatre was dazzling, yes—but the bombs were louder.