King Lear at the UN: The Tragedy of the Recognition of Palestine

When Shakespeare conceived the old King Lear partitioning his throne among his daughters, he did more than write a family tragedy about a father’s ruin: he composed a philosophical treatise on how power, even when it withdraws, continues to project itself. Lear’s abdication, cloaked as a pacifying gesture (and, not by chance, as vanity), did not bring concord: it unleashed catastrophe. 

At the core of the tragedy lies the monarch’s weakness, born of moral blindness, arrogance, and, above all, a radical incapacity to discern the truth hidden in the human heart (Shakespeare’s powerful intuition for naming the inability to see reality as it is): unable to recognize Cordelia’s silent loyalty, he banishes her—from his heart and kingdom—while entrusting confidence and power to his perfidious and scheming daughters, Goneril and Regan, already sharpening their teeth in the throne’s shadow.

The plot, implacably Shakespearean, offers no truce: Goneril and Regan, invested with the inheritance of the realm and predators of paternal vulnerability, turn their father’s magnanimous gesture into the emblem of his own decrepitude. Cordelia, the honest daughter who refused flattery, is banished. The throne fragments. And Lear, humiliated and stripped of his majesty, understands too late that abandoning power does not bring serenity: it invites dissimulation and precipitates dissolution.

Shakespeare’s lesson—that weakness has no defense against its own vocation, ending devoured by itself—echoes through the pages of modern international relations. In his reading of the 1956 Suez crisis in Diplomacy (1994), Henry Kissinger observes that Eisenhower’s decision to force Britain, France, and Israel into withdrawal, instead of consolidating Western unity, conveyed to the Arab world the very same signal of hesitation, division, and weakness that Lear projected to his daughters. Just like the old king who, in abdicating his crown, expected devotion but exposed only fragility, Eisenhower imagined that by humiliating his colonial allies he would win Nasser’s respect. In reality, his gesture only fed the perception of a West divided, weakened, and therefore vulnerable. The kind of message that repels Cordelia and attracts Goneril and Regan.

The outcome, therefore, did not differ from Lear’s: every projection of weakness is equivalent to abdication, even when it comes from the ‘King Lear’ of the international system: humiliated friends, emboldened enemies, and an open field for the penetration of the rival meant precisely to be contained—the Soviet Union. Instead of winning “hearts and minds,” he won doubts, vacuums, and, in the end, new enemies.

In Kissinger’s Shakespearean reading, the more Washington tried to placate Nasser, the more Nasser, like a Goneril of Suez, demanded new tributes and favors, gravitating toward Moscow and raising, with each new display of weakness, the price of his loyalty. Weakness, here as in Lear, does not appease: it excites ambition and multiplies betrayal.

The Suez episode thus illustrates, paradigmatically, how the projection of weakness corrodes the international standing of a power, even when inspired by the best pacifying intentions. The lesson is simple and harsh: weakness is like a perfume carried by the wind, attracting allies’ distrust and rivals’ audacity. It is a scent that lulls the one who emanates it but excites the one who inhales it, seducing only contempt and violence, opportunism and betrayal—never peace.

It is under this Shakespearean prism that we must confront the current question of recognizing a Palestinian state. The Palestinians’ right to sovereignty is undoubtedly legitimate and, in time, inevitable: peace in the Middle East can only rest upon a two-state solution, coexisting side by side, in security and dignity. Yet, unlike Lear and Eisenhower, we must not confuse the legitimate with the timely. Empty legitimation is the enemy of authentic legitimation, and the liturgies of one and the other are not only distinct but mutually exclusive. One serves the lasting peace of peoples; the other serves the vanity and ephemeral opportunism of its promoters. To grant recognition today, without serious negotiations or unequivocal commitments, would be like returning Lear’s scepter to the hands of Goneril and Regan, turning a legitimate gesture of hope into a sure omen of tragedy.

To recognize a Palestinian state today, in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attack of October 7, would amount to rewarding Hamas and its project of violence. It would be to trade the patient work of dialogue for the poisoned shortcut of impunity. Unsurprisingly, Hamas’s leadership, based in Qatar, has read the announcement of recognition as a victory. Last August, while the terrorist group released yet another gruesome video of hostages in Gaza, one of its leaders, Ghazi Hamad, proclaimed, “The initiative by several countries to recognize a Palestinian state is one of the fruits of October 7.”

The message, logically lending itself to this perverse reading of incentives, would therefore be devastating: terror produces statehood, blood consecrates sovereignty, massacre overrides Montevideo. The concessions that politics and diplomacy failed to secure in decades would be obtained, after all, in a single stroke of primitive violence: mass beheadings, mass rapes, mass mutilations, mass immolations, and mass kidnappings—the instruments of elevating terror to the condition of founding political act. 

Negotiating with Israelis would prove, after all, less profitable, less effective, less strategic than slaughtering them. Buried under Gaza’s rubble, Sinwar would, finally, in New York’s pomp, enjoy his posthumous victory.

Such a move would create a dangerous precedent, not only for Israel but for the entire international order, tearing apart the pact that democracies, in their ‘finest hour,’sealed with History itself: the covenant that the beast of terrorism will never be the midwife of sovereignty.

Let us recall that twenty-four years ago, faced with the terrorist attacks of September 11, the United States and its allies did not reward Al-Qaeda with any political dignity. On the contrary, they offered nothing but moral contempt and relentless pursuit. When he was eliminated in Abbottabad, Bin Laden was not presented as a man wronged in his dignity, nor Pakistan as a nation violated in its sovereignty. In 2011, when the body of the mastermind of 9/11 was cast into the depths of the Arabian Sea, we still knew how to make elementary distinctions.

This does not mean, of course, denying Palestinians the right to a state. It means that this right must be exercised under clear and non-negotiable conditions: the unconditional release of all hostages, the total destruction of Hamas, structural reforms in the Palestinian Authority, and, above all, the unequivocal and definitive acceptance of the State of Israel’s existence. Only within this framework does the word “State,” as the realization of a history of possible coexistence and not as a trophy granted to barbarism, regain its dignity.

With regard specifically to Portugal, a threefold repudiation is imperative: for the indignity of the method, the gravity of the substance, and the incoherence of principles.

The method: It was through the Élysée Palace that we learned of Portugal’s official position, a gesture not only diplomatically and institutionally unusual but an embarrassment to national sovereignty. It is not for Paris to speak on Lisbon’s behalf, as if Portugal were a satellite of the Quai d’Orsay, incapable of formulating and asserting its own foreign policy.

The substance: By recognizing Palestine in this context, Portugal inscribes into its diplomatic history the dangerous precedent of confusing political cause with terrorism, thereby granting to October 7—the most barbaric attack on Jews since the Holocaust, before which civilization swore “Never Again”—the dignity of a founding date of a Palestinian state. The blood of innocents cannot be the legitimate currency of international consecration.

Finally, the coherence: Portugal fails to honor its own word. The government had established clear criteria for recognition, and none of these conditions have been met. The hostages remain captive; Hamas remains armed; the State of Israel remains unrecognized; institutional reform of the Palestinian Authority remains undone; free and democratic elections remain unheld; the demilitarization of a Palestinian state remains unguaranteed.

Even so, Lisbon advances, dragged along by Paris, not because the preconditions it imposed upon itself have been fulfilled, but for foreign interests, unexplained and hard to grasp in light of the national interest. Portugal not only allows itself to be relegated to a secondary role by the Élysée, not only legitimizes violence as a founding gesture: it becomes incoherent with itself, tearing up the lines it once drew and corroding, in the eyes of friendly nations, the credibility of its foreign policy, which, in its best tradition, has always been guided by adherence to a clear strategic matrix: transatlantic concertation and European consensus.

The Portuguese government’s decision to recognize the State of Palestine under present circumstances represents an inexplicable rupture with a centuries-old constant of our system of international relations: the dual alliance with the leading Atlantic maritime power (today, the USA) and with the leading continental European power (today, Germany). Instead of remaining faithful to this prudent tradition (aligning our position with that of the USA and Germany), we opt for an alliance of the weak, dictated by Paris, London, and Madrid’s internal calculations. Worse still: we allow our foreign policy to become hostage to foreign interests and to the agenda of the United Nations.

All this gains even greater weight when read in light of the current historical moment, in which we are witnessing an unprecedented regional reconfiguration: the weakening of the forces of darkness—Iran and its proxies—and the strengthening of the forces of Abraham’s light—the Abraham Accords between Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco (joining Egypt and Jordan). The Palestinian question is not merely local or bilateral: it has a regional dimension involving Gaza, the West Bank, Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and possibly even parts of Iraq. The true strategic horizon is precisely this reconfiguration of the Middle East, and the key to its realization does not lie in strengthening Hamas (and Iran) but in expanding the logic of the Abraham Accords, which can never be achieved from a position of weakness in a region built upon the ethos of strength and power. This is the peace we must support and consolidate—the promise and blessing of the Abraham Accords—and not the curse of Khomeini and Sinwar.

To recognize a Palestinian state at this moment, without conditions and just days before the second anniversary of October 7, while dozens of hostages remain trapped in Gaza’s tunnels of terror, would be to grant legitimacy and encouragement to the forces that have always opposed, and will always oppose, peace and coexistence. What is required, on the contrary, is a strategy of firmness, projecting strength and credibility across the entire region, thus paving the way for a true, just, and lasting peace.

To all this must be added the solemn historical obligation engraved upon the West’s moral conscience by the Holocaust: the perpetual and inescapable responsibility to protect the Jewish people from the ever-looming threat of annihilation. The industrial massacre of the Nazi death camps was not only an assault against one people but a crime committed, through the body of one people, against the very idea of humanity. That is why from that terrible night of Auschwitz emerged not only trauma but also a moral law, perpetually in force: “Never Again.” 

Today, however, this moral obligation takes a paradoxical form, insofar as the Jews need our protection less and less, while we need theirs more and more. Israel, risen from the ashes of genocide, has become a sentinel on the frontline against the common—and existential—enemies of human freedom and dignity. It is our own security, ultimately, that is at stake.

At this moment, from a point in the future we cannot yet glimpse, History is already watching us as the stage watches Lear. And it silently sharpens the blade of its severe judgment. To us, free and moral agents, belongs the choice of which side of its implacable pages we wish to appear: as heirs of the weakness that destroys, or as guardians of the firmness that preserves. The choice we make today is not ephemeral, nor does it end in New York: it will be carved, in iron and fire, into the stone of destiny. And its price will be fatally exacted—either with the curse of more innocent blood, or with the blessing of peaceful days and dignified lives. Our choice today is our legacy tomorrow—and there are only two paths: the curse of blood or the blessing of peace.