This is what is on offer today for Palestine. A state recognised on an imaginary map in a European capital, while on the ground, the apartheid reality is reinforced with every bomb, every bullet, every checkpoint.
https://x.com/yanisvaroufakis/status/1971930255502856237
BDS is what would have made the difference, turning an empty gesture - the recognition of Palestine - into an ethical, useful, game changer.
Hello, I am Yanis Varoufakis here to discuss the (hugely) belated recognition of the State of Palestine by a number of Western governments – Britain’s, France’s, Canada’s and Australia’s.
If only they had done this many decades ago, maybe Israel’s ethnic cleansing of a people whose existence Israel did not recognise, on a land that Israel was keen to expropriate from these unrecognised people, maybe that ethnic cleansing project would have been halted - maybe it would not have morphed into the genocide that is unfolding with untold cruelty as we speak.
Is it not a good thing that the governments of Britain, France, Canada and Australia were forced by public opinion, by sensational losses in voter support, to recognise the State of Palestine. I suppose it is a good thing.
But, friends, make no mistake. I am very much afraid that Keir Starmer, Emanuel Macron, Mark Carney and Anthony Albanese did not recognise Palestine so as to ensure that it comes into existence as a real, a sovereign state for a people Israel has put on death row but only so that they do not actually do what they can to end the genocide and to make the Palestinian state a possibility.
In a nutshell, these Western governments, after decades of complicity, are suddenly falling over themselves to perform a performative act in a manner that does nothing to bring about that which they proclaim: a functioning Palestinian State.
So: Let us not applaud them. Let us not be fooled by them. Theirs is not an ethical awakening. It is merely the calculated management of a genocide they are doing nothing to stop. It is hypocrisy polished to a fine sheen, designed not to end the suffering in Gaza, but to sanitise their role in perpetuating it.
On the one hand, we observe the grand theatre of great power diplomacy. The press conferences, the solemn declarations, the recognition of a state that exists on paper. Meanwhile, on the ground, the very foundation of such a state – its people and its institutions – are being systematically erased. These governments—the Starmer, the Macron, the Albanese, the Carney administrations—they want you to be distracted by their "brave" and "principled" stand while they remain complicit in the war crimes, in the ethnic cleansing, in the genocide.
And why now? Why, after the tens of thousands dead, after the schools and hospitals turned to rubble, after thousands of wounded children were forced to survive alone, without their families who now lie buried under blocks of cement?
Because global outrage has reached a boiling point that can no longer be contained by their usual pro-Israeli propaganda. Their recognition of Palestine is a pressure valve, designed precisely to defuse that outrage, to save Israel’s legitimacy, safe in the knowledge that Israel will continue, with their tacit support, to block each and every move toward a viable Palestinian state.
They are recognising a Palestinian state while tacitly conniving with Israel's leaders to ensure it never comes into being. How? By actively refusing to take the one set of actions that has a proven historical record of ending oppression and Apartheid: Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions on the perpetrator.
Thankfully that’s not all. Mercifully, something else is going on. While Western leaders perform their diplomatic pantomime, hundreds of people are sailing right now in the Mediterranean Sea. The Global Sumud Flotilla. A flotilla of teachers, journalists, activists, dreamers, parliamentarians, carrying with them the global majority’s commitment that Israel’s Siege on Gaza, that the planned and meticulously implemented genocide of Palestinians will be terminated – that it will not continue in our name – that the impending acts of piracy by the Israeli state will be exposed for what they are: misanthropic violations of minimum ethical standards, of International Law.
Israeli propaganda, echoed by its apologists, claims these brave souls are "choosing to enter a war zone, to violate prohibited security zones." This is a shameless lie. The flotilla's ships are not entering a war zone. They are heading towards a site of genocide on a land that Israel is illegally occupying—a fact confirmed by the International Court of Justice, which in June 2024 ordered Israel to vacate it.
So, I ask you: if Starmer, Macron, Carney and Albanese really wanted to end the genocide, what would they do? They would not be issuing statements. They would be sending a naval vessel to protect the flotilla! They would be enforcing international law. But they will not. Because their recognition is an empty gesture, and actual solidarity requires a break with organised misanthropy and with the arms dealers who fund them and their political campaigns.
This duality, this chasm between Western governments’ words and deeds, is the essence of their hypocrisy. They grant a piece of paper called ‘statehood’ with one hand, while with the other they continue to arm, fund, and diplomatically shield the very power that ensures this statehood remains a cruel fiction.
They remind me of a monument I once saw in Canberra, Australia’s capital. Walking from the High Court to the National Library, you stumble in a unique monument — a monument celebrating a High Court of Australia judgment. On it are inscribed the magnificent words of Sir Gerard Brennan from the Mabo case: “The common law of this country will perpetuate injustice if it were to continue to persist in characterising the indigenous inhabitants of Australian colonies as people too low in the scale of social organisation to be acknowledged as possessing rights and interests in land.”
A magnificent sentiment. A legal revolution. But what followed? Words on a monument. The recognition of native title was granted, but the power structures, the economic dispossession, the systemic inequality—they were largely left intact. The recognition became a shield *against* more substantive justice. This is the playbook of imperialist white settlers. Recognise a right in theory to avoid implementing it in practice.
This is what is on offer today for Palestine. A state recognised on an imaginary map in a European capital, while on the ground, the apartheid reality is reinforced with every bomb, every bullet, every checkpoint.
The key, the only key that unlocks the door to freedom, is not recognition. It is BDS: boycott, divest and sanction. And its goal? Its goal must be to bring about equal political rights from the Jordan to the Mediterranean. Recognition would have mattered at Oslo. It was the leverage that was squandered. Now, in the absence of any peace process, it is merely symbolic. And in its current form, it is worse than symbolic—it is a pacifier.
We must understand the fundamental truth, so elegantly captured by that Mabo judgment but so tragically ignored in its aftermath: “Violent instability is baked into any system where one side has power and rights and the other has none.” You cannot have peace, you cannot have security, for anyone—Israeli or Palestinian—under a system of apartheid. The violence of the occupier begets resistance; the violence of the oppressed is then used to justify further, overwhelming state violence. It is a vicious cycle engineered by the powerful.
So, when these Western leaders herald their recognition as a progressive move, ask them one question: Where are the sanctions? Where is the arms embargo? Where are the trade restrictions? Where is the protection for the flotillas?
Until they answer you convincingly, their words are not just hollow. They are weapons. They are the grease for the machinery of genocide. They are the modern-day equivalent of the colonial administrator who acknowledges the humanity of the native in a London speech, while signing the order to clear their land.
Let us not let them get away with it. See their recognition for what it is: a desperate attempt to save a crumbling system of oppression, not to end it.
Our duty is clear. To amplify the call for BDS. To stand with the flotillas. To demand not words on paper, but justice on the ground.
The Palestinian people do not need their hypocritical recognition. They need their freedom. And freedom only comes when the cost of oppression becomes too high for the oppressor to bear.
posted by Satish Sharma at
09:25
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