The Two-State Paradox: Recognizing Palestine Means Recognizing Israel

Darkness in the inner stairways of a hideout in Athens. Two men, one a Palestinian member of the PLO, the other disguised as a German left-wing militant, speak to each other, smoking in the half-light. Without knowing he is actually speaking to a Mossad agent (Avner), the Palestinian (Ali) confesses the essence of his struggle: the destruction of Israel.

“Eventually the Arab states will rise against Israel. They don’t like Palestinians, but they hate the Jews more. We can wait forever. We have a lot of children, and our children will have children. And if we need to, if necessary, we can make the whole planet unsafe for Jews.”

Avner, under the mask of the European left-wing sympathizer, gives him the logical conclusion of his ruthless syllogism: “There is no peace at the end of this.”

This brief dialogue, taken from a scene in Steven Spielberg’s Munich (which recreates the secret operation of Mossad agents sent to avenge the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games), captures and reveals the core of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: not a war over land, but over the absolute negation of the other; the ‘home’ identified with the ‘destruction of Israel.’

And it is precisely in the light of the truth inscribed in this grim dialogue that we must view the current European debate about the recognition of a Palestinian state. At a time when some European states seek to impose a common position in favor of recognizing the State of Palestine, maintaining, with touching simplicity, that the absence of such a state is the root cause of all the deadlocks and evils of the conflict in the Middle East, it is essential to understand the true origin of the evil. We must resist the myths created by those whose ultimate goal is not peace but, under its pretext, the pure and simple denial of the existence of the State of Israel. Such myths, woven under the cloak of generous ideals, find fertile ground in the European left and, not rarely, enjoy the complacency of sectors of the so-called traditional right.

In reality, at the origin of the conflict lies the negation of a state. But not of Palestine: of Israel. The true foundational fault was not the omission of a Palestinian state, but the systematic refusal, on the Arab side, to admit that a sovereign Jewish state could exist, even if confined to a tiny portion of the territory that the Arab world considers part of the sacred “Dar al-Islam” (a geographic speck representing less than two-tenths of 1% of Arab-Muslim territory).

That refusal—before 1967, even before 1948—not only gave rise to the conflict but continues to perpetuate it. Since 1937, with the Peel Commission proposal, the Jews have accepted, one after another, successive offers of territorial partition. Arab leaders rejected them one after another, in the name of an absolute imperative: to prevent the political existence of Jewish otherness.

In 1947, the UN approved Resolution 181, proposing the creation of two states, one Jewish and one Arab (with special status for Jerusalem). The Jews accepted. The Arabs refused and answered with war. The day after Israel’s declaration of independence, seven Arab armies invaded the newborn state. The goal was not to create Palestine; it was to erase Israel from the map.

Two facts suffice to expose, with clinical clarity, the true nature of the refusal: the period between 1949 and 1967 (between the end of the War of Independence and the Six-Day War) and the founding charter of the PLO from 1964 (therefore prior to the Six-Day War and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza). At the end of the 1949 war, initiated by Arab countries (who preferred it over the creation of a Palestinian state), the Gaza Strip was under Egyptian occupation and the West Bank under Jordanian annexation. For eighteen years (a time span that cannot be dismissed as episodic), no Palestinian state was even considered in those territories that today, according to instant experts, are “occupied” and thus “illegal under international law.”

No proclamations, no movements for self-determination, no international appeals in the name of Palestine, no academic outrage about Egyptian or Jordanian “neo-colonialist imperialism.” What is today presented as a historic inalienable right of a people who, according to those same experts, predate time itself, was then nothing more than a complicit silence.

Even more revealing: in 1964, before the existence of “settlements” and “apartheid walls,” the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was created. Its founding charter expressly and unambiguously declares in its original Article 24 that it claims no sovereignty over … the West Bank and the Gaza Strip: “This Organization does not exercise any regional sovereignty over the West Bank in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, on the Gaza Strip or the Himmah Area.”

In other words, the organization created to liberate Palestine began by recognizing, in its very founding act, Egypt’s and Jordan’s sovereignty over the territories supposedly destined for the Palestinian state. In 1964, Palestine, after all, was already duly divided between Egyptians and Jordanians. Liberate what, then? The answer was, and remains, crystal clear: what remained. That is, Israel.

The Arab League summit in Khartoum, Sudan, in September 1967, in response to the Arab defeat in the Six-Day War, crystallized that denial in the doctrine of the “Three Nos”: no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel. Even after another military defeat, the response was the dogmatic reaffirmation of existential refusal. From the 1947 rejection to Khartoum’s “three nos” twenty years later, the problem was not borders or occupation: it was the existence of the other.

This historical pattern of rejection, however, would not end there. In the 1990s, with the Oslo Accords, there was again a concrete proposal for partition and mutual recognition. Once more, Israeli concessions ran up against the systematic refusal of Palestinian leaders unwilling or unable to accept a Jewish state alongside theirs. Refusal was followed by violence: Oslo would degenerate into the terrible wave of suicide bombings and lynchings of Israeli civilians that became known as the Second Intifada.

In 2008, under Ehud Olmert, a new proposal was advanced: practically all of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and creative solutions for the refugee issue. And once again, rejection.

Even more recently, with the Abraham Accords opening unprecedented paths to normalize relations between Israel and several Arab states, Palestinian leaders persisted in rejecting any arrangement that implied recognition of Israel. The October 7, 2023, massacre was more than a tragic accident: it was the brutal, bloody expression of this decades-long refusal.

Bill Clinton himself, a protagonist of this long process, confessed years later, in 2016, during a campaign event for Hillary Clinton’s presidential run, “I killed myself to give the Palestinians a state. I had a deal they turned down that would have given them all of Gaza.” It was not just a personal outburst but the confirmation—from someone at the very heart of the negotiation process—that the refusal was not due to lack of opportunities, but to a principle of rejection: recognition of Israel.

But it was not enough to deny Israel’s geographic, territorial existence. It was necessary to erase its words and founding concepts, replacing them with Arab ones capable of emptying Jewish history. To that end, words themselves were invaded, their meaning distorted, their semantics dressed up, keffiyehs [traditional headscarves symbolizing Palestinian nationalism] wrapped around phrases, concepts turned into fedayyin [Palestinian guerilla fighters]. Language ceased to describe reality and began to fight it. Among the words turned into projectiles, few were as effectively weaponized as the term Nakba.

Originally coined in 1948 by the Syrian historian Constantin Zureiq in his book The Meaning of the Catastrophe (Ma’na an-Nakba), Nakba meant a catastrophe, as a severe accusation of the strategic, political, and moral failure of the Arab world, incapable of defeating the Zionists and facing modern reality: “The defeat of the Arabs in Palestine is not a mere setback—a naksa. It is a catastrophe—nakba—in every sense of the word.” Contrasting the strategic lucidity of Zionism, oriented toward the future and modernity, with Arab immobility, drugged on dreams of a glorious past, Zureiq concludes: “We must admit our mistakes … and recognize the extent of our responsibility for the catastrophe that befell us.”

Nothing, therefore, in Zureiq’s original conception lent itself to the contemporary use of the term Nakba as an instrument of collective absolution, designed to eternalize victimhood and shift blame exclusively onto the other. Where, today, one sees a cry of moral accusation against Israel, Zureiq saw a call for internal reform, modernization, and responsibility. Not by chance, the term remained virtually absent from international discourse until the 1980s, gaining growing visibility only from the 2000s onward.

This chronological delay, combined with the redefinition of its original meaning, suggests that the concept of Nakba did not emerge organically from the trauma of 1948, as one would expect from a founding event. On the contrary, it was gradually recovered, reinterpreted, and inscribed into a new ideological regime of meaning, shaped by the lexicon of postcolonialism, the internationalization of the Palestinian cause, and the increasingly ritualized grammar of human rights in international forums. Nakba ceased to mean the lucidity of the defeated and came to mean the aesthetic of the martyr. In short, the Nakba was ‘Fanonized.’ What in Zureiq was a call for reform is today, after passing through the ideological alchemy of Frantz Fanon, a powerful tool of emotional and political mobilization, which dissolves responsibility and sublimates resentment.

It is no mere accident that the term chosen to crystallize this narrative is precisely ‘catastrophe.’ The word Nakba, repeated as an identity epithet and moral emblem of the Palestinian cause, was not only recovered for its historical value; it was adopted, above all, for its unique symbolic weight. By meaning “catastrophe,” the Nakba establishes a calculated and suggestive symmetry with the Shoah (‘catastrophe,’ precisely), a semantic equivalence that lays the groundwork for a moral equivalence. ‘Catastrophe’ for ‘catastrophe’: Palestine, the new Auschwitz; the Palestinians, the new Jews; the Jews, the new Nazis. The Nakba is the new Shoah.

This symmetry is not innocent: it aims, on the one hand, to empty the moral singularity of the Holocaust, expropriating the Jewish people of the historical memory of a crime without precedent, without equivalent, and without statute of limitations, turning the crime against its own victims; and, on the other, to establish a narrative of absolute suffering that shields the Palestinian cause from any ethical scrutiny or demand for accountability. 

Being victims by definition, everything is permitted to them: they may violate women, abduct the elderly, burn families, strangle babies; the blame will always be the Jews’, once victims of the Shoah and now perpetrators of the Nakba. Palestinians do not claim sovereignty in the classic terms of international law; they claim the privilege of absolute innocence, replacing the objective criteria of sovereignty with a metaphysical status of perpetual victimhood.

This war—of words and concepts—is more effective, but it exposes the true intention behind the issue: it has never been about giving Palestinians a state; it is about preventing Jews from having a state. Strictly speaking, it is about denying the political and sovereign existence of the Jews themselves in the region. And this will persist regardless of what we do, indeed, it will intensify with each concession, with each sign of weakness.

But when we talk about recognizing a state, it is also inevitable to recall the criteria enshrined in the 1933 Montevideo Convention: a permanent population, a defined territory, an effective government, and the capacity for external relations. What state, after all, is Palestine? What entity is this, whose population is divided between disconnected enclaves, under different regimes of control, that has no functional political system nor a unified authority capable of exercising full sovereignty over a territory whose borders remain undefined?

Gaza is governed by a terrorist organization, at war with the Palestinian Authority, based in the West Bank, which itself lacks effective democratic legitimacy since 2005, with no elections for 20 years, presided over by a former KGB agent (“Agent Krotov,” according to the Mitrokhin Archive), and whose doctoral thesis, at Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow, investigates supposed secret links between Zionism and Nazism.

What state is this, then, that does not know where it begins, nor who represents it, nor to whom it is accountable—fragmented between those who accuse Jews of perpetrating a new Holocaust and those who deny there ever was one? To recognize Palestine as a state, under these conditions, is to abdicate the very concept of a state.

Yet more serious than a legal aberration, recognizing the State of Palestine in the current context would be a moral obscenity. Because it would do so in the wake of the pogrom of October 7, 2023, in which Jewish civilians (babies, women, the elderly) were raped, burned alive, executed. And so many remain hostages. To recognize a state in these circumstances would be to convert barbarism into a criterion of sovereignty, as if the slaughter of Jews were now the new way to meet the Montevideo criteria. We would not only be rewarding terrorism and encouraging its replication, but elevating it to the very condition of political foundation. Recognition, in these terms, would cease to be a legal act to become an act of ethical capitulation.

The European insistence on a “two-state solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in current terms constitutes not a compromise between two peoples willing to coexist, but a diplomatic capitulation before the long pedagogy of rejection, terrorism, and antisemitism. Instead of demanding from the Palestinians what any civilized people would demand from themselves—recognition of the other, renunciation of violence, credible and peaceful leadership—European leaders choose comfortable illusion over uncomfortable truth. They think they are buying peace, when they are merely making, once again, a Faustian pact that will be paid with the blood of others. Intoxicated with the alcohol of their own virtue, perhaps they have not paid attention to the skies of Tehran not long ago: the Jews, real victims of a real genocide, no longer accept being sacrificed in the name of universal harmony.

The conflict can only begin to be resolved once its origin is correctly identified. Before recognizing Palestine, Palestine must recognize Israel. But that demand—simple, fair, and elementary—remains the only step its representatives refuse to take (and whose refusal many Westerners, from the comfort of their historical irrelevance, continue to nurture with almost fanatical zeal). As long as that persists, any other recognition will be morally tainted and politically futile. Condemned, therefore, to new failure.

Peace will not come from the obsession with creating a second state where the first is still denied. It will come, as it has before, from the only sober model that honors facts and not fantasies: mutual recognition, as in the Abraham Accords. Recognizing Palestine entails, above all, recognizing Israel.

The paradox is precisely this: recognizing a Palestinian state will inevitably mean recognizing a Jewish state, for peace between them can only be born from that double recognition. That is precisely why, to this day, Arab and Palestinian leaders have never truly wanted a genuine Palestinian state: because in the essence of that recognition necessarily lies the gesture they have always refused: the admission, at last, of Israel’s legitimacy. At the heart of recognizing Palestine inevitably lies the recognition of Israel. The secret of one lies, paradoxically, in the other. To recognize Palestine is nothing other than to recognize Israel. And it is precisely that step that has always been missing.

As on that Greek night, the terrorist and the spy were not speaking only to each other, in a theater of blood and deception: they were unknowingly staging the tragic secret of two peoples trapped in the same labyrinth—and, paradoxically, the path to finally escape it. Avner and Ali, in disagreement, know the same thing: that to recognize Palestine means to recognize Israel. Until that step is taken, opening the only door leading out of this bloody labyrinth, all hidden stairways will lead only to new descents and shadows, to new lies and rancor. And, inevitably, to new dead.