Palestinian Statehood and the Winding Road to Palestinian Self-Determination

TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 6 Oct 2025

Richard Falk | Global Justice in the 21st Century – TRANSCEND Media Service

29 Sep 2025 – My responses to a Brazilian journalist to questions about the recent diplomatic surge of recognitions of Palestinian statehood, as provisionally represented by a PLO coalition of political actors, chaired Mahmoud Abbas, and in the 1990s given the supposedly temporary, ambiguous title of the Palestinian Authority with its capital in the West Bank city of Ramallah. This political development resulted from the Oslo diplomacy that allowed the PLO to represent the Palestinian people although within a pro-Israeli partisan framework that empowered the US to serve as intermediary without requiring Israel to freeze settlement activity or to comply with international humanitarian law during ‘the peace process.’ The central expectation of this process was that a Palestinian state would emerge from a complex series of bilateral negotiations, but what occurred was an evident lack of political will on the part of Israel and Washington to produce such an outcome. The whole undertaking was contradicted and discredited by the continuous expansion of unlawful Israeli settlements on the occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza. The Palestinians were advised at the time by the US to withhold their objections to Israeli behavior until the final stages of statehood negotiations were reached (which never happened), and the Palestinian team foolishly heeded the advice, and itself lost credibility for consenting to take part in a diplomatic exercise that did not even acknowledge the Palestinian right of self-determination.

At the outset a certain skepticism seems prudent. It suggests a cautious response to this foundational question: Should this new surge of internationalist enthusiasm for ‘two-statism’ be viewed as a buildup for a replay of the Oslo process or as something new? Underlying conditions are different as  

Israel’s military operations Gaza are now normalized, even in most of the previously complicit liberal democracies of the West and in most influential venues of political discourse as ‘genocide.’ This has resulted in Israel’s delegitimation and emergent identity as a rogue or pariah state that has become the target of hostile civil society initiatives ranging from BDS to rising pressures to impose arms embargoes, suspension of diplomatic relations, and expulsion or suspension from the UN.  It has also produced pushback by the US in the form of sanctioning UN appointees by barring entry and freezing assets, denying visas to PLO members, including the leadership of the Palestinian Authority, and classifying Palestinian NGOs as terrorist organizations. Israel has reacted defiantly to calls for Palestinian statehood and to the boycott of Netanyahu’s speech at the 80^th anniversary session of the General Assembly. To date, France and the US have put forward peace proposals, with some cooperation and encouragement from Arab governments, that end the genocide, but reward Israel by excluding Hamas from any future political role in Gaza, and dubiously presupposing the adequacy of the PA to represent the struggle for Palestinian rights, including the establishment of a functioning state. My responses below are based on a strong conviction that until the Palestinian people are given the choice as to their political representation by way of an internationally monitored free elections in Gaza and the West Bank or through a reliable referendum allowing for the selection or ranking of political representation options, no peace process should be accorded legitimacy by the UN or civil society assessments.

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1. How can the recognition of the State of Palestine by Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Portugal, Belgium, and others help in a plan to officialize the creation of the State of Palestine?

The push toward Palestinian recognition will probably has now extended to at least 157 of the 193 members of the UN, representing a large majority of the world’s peoples. The only major opponents being Israel and the United States, along with s Hungary, Paraguay, and Argentina, autocratic middle powers. The longer-term undertaking of the states bestowing statehood recognition is a two-state solution of the underlying conflict. This objective has been most influentially articulated so far by France, and somewhat separately by the US although it has not yet openly challenged Israel’s refusal to allow the emergence of a Palestinian state in any form. It is based on the belief that the only way to end the conflict and achieve regional stability is by promoting a solution that provides an alternative to Israel’s One-State Plan (Greater Israel) but also by a Euro/Arab packaging of Palestinian statehood to preclude a genuine Palestinian liberation. Israeli one-statism is structured in accord with Israel’s 2018 adoption of a Basic Law institutionalizing Jewish supremist dominance in Israel and the OPT according to an unacknowledged adoption of a settler colonial approach to apartheid control imposed on the subjugated and dehumanized native population of historic Palestine. President Trump’s assertion that he would not allow Israel to annex occupied Palestinian territory may depict a middle ground of permanent Israeli occupation and gradual Israelization without a Palestinian state of any sort coming into existence.

The French-backed solution, now competing with the Trump US proposal along somewhat similar lines, is centered on endorsing the establishment of a Palestinian state following the release of hostages held captive in Gaza since October 7 and the gradual dismantling of Hamas by an International Stabilization Force with an armed Arab administrative presence in Gaza. Palestinian governance of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem would be eventually entrusted to what is generally referred to as a reconstituted Palestinian Authority, originally brought into existence within the framework of Oslo Diplomacy of the 1990s. Mahmoud Abbas, the longtime, quasi-collaborationist President of the Palestinian Authority told the General Assembly speaking online as barred entry to the US, that he favors a demilitarized Palestinian state, the demilitarization and exclusion of Hamas from a governance in role , and opposed the October 7 attack, while indicting Israel for ‘genocide’ in shaping its response. Abbas has not so far insisted that Israel be required to implement the right of return enjoyed by an estimated 8 million Palestinian refugees living in the OPT and neighboring countries.

A handful of states apparently oppose this approach, most unambiguously, Israel, as it is inconsistent with Israel’s firm commitment to a one-state solution, and refusal to accept any form of Palestinian statehood. Israeli state propaganda opposes these recent Global West recognitions of Palestine by its former allies, several earlier complicit in supporting the genocide diplomatically, and some of these governments continuing their material support. Israel condemns these diplomatic moves as somehow ‘rewarding’ Hamas and its allegedly ‘terrorist’ assault of two years ago, but it hard to fathom how Hamas gains from this variation of two-state advocacy that includes the punitive exclusion of Hamas from any future role in the administration of Gaza. In other words, this variant of the two-state approach appears to reward the perpetrator of genocide and punish the victim. In fact, it may reopen the road to political and economic normalization and acceptance within the Arab Middle East.

The seeming majority Palestinian approach rejects both Israeli one statism and the two-statism as delimited by Emanuel Macron as set forth in the New York Declaration, arising from summit on Palestine co-chaired by France and Saudi Arabia, as well as the 21 Point Program for conflict resolution put forward by Trump in consultation with Arab countries. The most independent and trustworthy Palestinian voices are calling for the selection of a new more legitimate mechanism than the PA for the pursuit of national liberation objectives. This would be expected to require mechanisms for a meaningful exercise of the Palestinian right of self-determination by the Palestinian people including those Palestinians and their descendants living in neighboring countries or the OPT as refugees. Authentic Palestinian representation would likely take the form of a fully unified sovereign secular state (presumably renamed and deZionized) encompassing Palestinians and Jews in viable, ethnically neutral governance structures and integrated with guaranteed rights of return for Palestinians living as exiles or in refugee camps and of Jews living in the diaspora. Palestinian statehood could take the form of a viable, fully distinct, equal, and sovereign Palestinian state co-existing with a post-Zionist Israel that embodied the principles of ethnic equality, implying either the revision of Zionist ideology or its complete abandonment, reflecting approval by authenticated Palestinian representatives.

The recognition diplomacy of former supporters of Israel’s response to and characterization of October 7, even though vigorously repudiated by Israel, does not bring the conflict closer to a just and durable outcome. In effect, despite Israel’s apparent rejection, if the Palestinian statehood proposals is ever implemented along these proposed lines would not only reward Israel for genocide, and additionally have the perverse effect of extending the conflict rather than ending it. If ending was the true objective then Israel would be required to reject the practice, policies, and ideology of Zionism as the basis of Israeli governance and to refrain from establishing new settlements on occupied Palestinian territory, if not called upon to remove some or all of the settlements. As of the present, Israel is strongly opposed to the Franco/American approaches as has been made clear in words, and also by its actions, particularly threats  of partial or complete annexation of the West Bank and new provocative expansions of settlements, including a new particularly controversial settlement in E1 where a proposed settlement would bisect occupied the West Bank effectively ending any prospect of a viable Palestinian state.

2. Israel has criticized the recognition of a Palestinian state, claiming that it will strengthen Hamas. Netanyahu has said there will never be a Palestinian state. How do you see this?

Netanyahu signaled by the Doha attack of September 13 seeking to assassinate the Hamas negotiating team that Israel’s priorities remain the extermination of Hamas as a source of resistance, a discrediting of the PA as capable of being ‘a partner of peace,’ and an overall, unshakable commitment to Greater Israel, which implies opposition to any form of Palestine statehood, however limited. As suggested it also implies total extermination of Hamas as the organized center of continuing Palestinian resistance. Israel as now constituted remains currently unwilling to end the genocide, and seeks political rewards as measured by land and the removal of Palestinian residents to offset its political loss of legitimacy. As noted, Israel is now a politically isolated pariah state that is  economically subject to an increasing variety of civil society harassments. The underlying conflict between the two peoples remains frozen with no horizon of durable peace visible to informed eyes.

3. With so many nations recognizing Palestinian state, what will be necessary to make the transition from a symbolic reality to a sovereign territorial reality with recognized borders and governmental authority?

As the foregoing seeks to make clear, this sequence of diplomatic recognitions at this point seems to produce a diplomacy of futility, acceptable to neither side, and lacking the will and capabilities at the UN and elsewhere to overcome the ongoing stalemate created by Israel’s refusal to consent to coexist with a viable, and fully sovereign Palestinian state, or even a willingness to accept a Palestinian state with ghost characteristics. Israel seems poised to prolong the agony pushing Palestinians in Gaza and the West Back to leave or die. In effect, to create a third mass dispossession of the sort that in 1948 and 1967 led to the mass expulsion of Palestinian residents to obtain and preserve a Jewish majority population. Israel to fulfill the apparent goals of the Zionist Project must not only claim and exercise territorial sovereignty over the land and ethnic dominance with an apartheid matrix of control over remaining Palestinian but continuously act to defuse the demographic bomb resulting from Palestinian fertility rates being higher than that of their Jewish oppressors and from the persisting legally based claims of Palestinian refugee communities to implement their long deferred right of return.

The likely outcome of increasing international pressure to end the genocide and settle the conflict by a diplomatic compromise is currently taking the mainstream shape of a two-state outcome has little prospect of realization, given the opposition of both Israel and Palestine (if legitimately represented). If a Palestinian demilitarized statelet should be accepted by a weak and dependent PA leadership, that is, not of Palestinian choosing, it will at best recreate a pre-October 7 set of conditions of de facto Israeli one-statism periodically challenged by resistance violence. It may also lead to creative efforts by Palestinian activists and countries in the Global South to gain enough international backing for a justice-driven solution to produce a new conflict-resolving diplomacy. Two-state advocacy would likely be discredited and soon superseded by Palestinian advocacy and civil society activism that will increase over time pressures within Israel to contemplate ways to restore national legitimacy and overcome the perceptions and practices of being a pariah state. This would be, as was the case in racist South Africa, a transactional adjustment rather that a reevaluation of priorities and identity.

In conclusion, the French-Arab-American led diplomatic approaches should be critically analyzed on grounds of their misleading and concealed allegiances with many of the underlying tenets of Israel and Zionism that amount to a continuing denial of fundamental Palestinian rights. Until Palestinian representation is determined by Palestinians rather than by external political actors, whether the US, the UN, or others. Only when Palestinian international representation is reliably established will it become credible to embark upon a truly genuine effort, with integral Palestinian participation and truly neutral intermediation to devise a durable and desirable solution based on a mutually acceptable governance arrangements and agreed boundaries either of a binational single state or of two coexisting equal sovereign states.

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Prof. Richard Falk is a member of the TRANSCEND Network, of the TRANSCEND Media Service Editorial Committee, Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University, Chair of Global Law, Faculty of Law, at Queen Mary University London, Research Associate the Orfalea Center of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Fellow of the Tellus Institute. He directed the project on Global Climate Change, Human Security, and Democracy at UCSB and formerly served as director the North American group in the World Order Models Project. He also is a member of the editorial board of the magazine The Nation. Between 2008 and 2014, Falk served as UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Occupied Palestine. His book, (Re)Imagining Humane Global Governance (2014), proposes a value-oriented assessment of world order and future trends. His most recent books are Power Shift (2016); Revisiting the Vietnam War (2017); On Nuclear Weapons: Denuclearization, Demilitarization and Disarmament (2019); and On Public Imagination: A Political & Ethical Imperative, ed. with Victor Faessel & Michael Curtin (2019). He is the author or coauthor of other books, including Religion and Humane Global Governance (2001), Explorations at the Edge of Time (1993), Revolutionaries and Functionaries (1988), The Promise of World Order (1988), Indefensible Weapons (with Robert Jay Lifton, 1983), A Study of Future Worlds (1975), and This Endangered Planet (1972). His memoir, Public Intellectual: The Life of a Citizen Pilgrim was published in March 2021 and received an award from Global Policy Institute at Loyala Marymount University as ‘the best book of 2021.’ He has been nominated frequently for the Nobel Peace Prize since 2009.

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