Before October 7, few serious voices in Europe called for recognising a Palestinian state. There was a quiet consensus that doing so would be reckless, given the division, corruption and radicalisation of the current Palestinian leadership. Then, Hamas carried out the most gruesome mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust – and the response in some European capitals has been to reward it with exactly what they wanted, recognition.
Spain, Ireland and Norway – among Europe’s most reflexively anti-Israel governments – recognised Palestine a mere seven months after the massacres. French President Emmanuel Macron floated the idea last month. Some Labour MPs, including foreign affairs committee chair Emily Thornberry, urged the UK to follow suit. Even a group of Conservative MPs has joined the chorus.
Recognising a Palestinian state after October 7 would be a moral and strategic blunder. It would push peace and a real two-state solution further out of reach. It would strengthen Hamas – still the most popular faction among the Palestinians – undermine moderate Palestinian voices and send the grotesque message that the more brutal the violence, the more urgent the international support. It would betray not only Israel, but every peace-minded Palestinian as well as every liberal value Europe claims to uphold. This is not peacebuilding, it is incentivising bloodshed.
The call for recognition rests on a fiction about the core of the conflict: that Palestinians are innocent victims without agency, perpetually denied a state by Israeli intransigence. History says otherwise. Palestinian leaders have rejected every serious offer of statehood, the 1937 Peel Plan, the 1947 UN Partition Plan, Camp David in 2000 and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s offer in 2008. Each time, the answer was no, usually followed by violence.
Is there another national movement that has been offered statehood – repeatedly – only to reject it every time? Palestinian leaders have consistently prioritised fighting the Jewish state over building their own. When Israel, realising it had no peace partner, unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in 2005, Hamas turned the territory into a forward base for terror, not a model for Palestinian sovereignty.
Yet after every rejection, it is Israel that is blamed. This inversion of facts has become the defining pathology of Western diplomacy.
Even if a leader emerged tomorrow willing to sign a deal, who would enforce it? The corrupt and feeble Palestinian Authority remains in power not by legitimacy, but thanks to the IDF. In the past three months alone, Israeli forces have battled hundreds of terrorists in northern West Bank cities theoretically under full PA control. Mahmoud Abbas’s regime simply refuses to govern. If Israeli forces withdrew, Hamas would likely seize the West Bank just as it did Gaza.
Geography makes the stakes existential. Israel is only nine miles wide at its narrowest point. October 7 shattered the illusion that technology and intelligence can substitute for defensible borders. A Hamas-led West Bank would overlook Israel’s main population centres and international airport. Any future attack launched from there would make the Gaza war look like a minor skirmish.
Real peace cannot be conjured by declarations from European capitals – not even from Washington. Only Israel can enable Palestinian sovereignty. But the Israeli hope that a Palestinian state would bring peace has steadily eroded, worn down by the reality that every Israeli concession, withdrawal, and peace offer has been met with violence, not reciprocity. October 7 didn’t merely accelerate that loss of faith, it obliterated it.
Israeli support for Palestinian statehood can only return when there is confidence that such a state will bring peace and security and not more October 7-style massacres. That will be the day when Palestinian leaders stop naming schools and streets after terrorists. When martyr posters no longer line the streets of Ramallah. When children are taught to cherish life rather than seek death. When the national goal is to build a peaceful, prosperous state beside Israel, not to “return” into Israel.
If Europe wants a two-state solution, it must insist one of them is Jewish. That means saying, clearly and publicly, there will be no so-called “right of return” for millions of descendants of refugees into Israel. That demand is incompatible with a two-state solution – unless both states are meant to be Palestinian. Besides, you cannot claim Palestinians are refugees in a country you’ve just recognised as their own. It’s telling that advocates for recognition are silent on this glaring contradiction.
If the UK, France, and others truly want to help build peace, they should focus on fostering these changes: ending incitement in schools and media; dismantling the “pay-for-slay” programme for convicted terrorists; replacing the cult of “resistance” with a culture of coexistence. In short, reforming the official policies of Israel’s so-called peace partner, the “moderate” Palestinian Authority, bankrolled by Western donors often too squeamish to confront it. Instead of rewarding October 7 with counterproductive recognition, No. 10 could follow the EU’s lead and make British taxpayer funding to the PA conditional on reform.
If you can’t do these things, you’re not doing diplomacy. You’re not following the evidence, you’re following a false narrative. One that, if realised, would be paid for in blood.
