Recognizing Palestine: The Moral Mirage of Western Politics and the Apartheid legacy

While many consider the recognition of an independent Palestinian state by Western nations as a crucial advancement towards peace, the impact on the Palestinian cause is often minimised. This sudden craze from Western nations permits a small symbolic act to eclipse what a majority of the world now recognises as genocide, and buys precious time to allow the continuous suffering, deaths, and displacement of countless Palestinians, predominantly affecting civilians, the majority of whom are women and children.

Instead of holding Israel accountable and pursuing legal action against its leaders, the initiative by France, Saudi Arabia, and most Western nations (excluding the U.S., Germany, and Italy) diverts attention from the crisis to an imaginary future. In a global system founded on the concept of the nation-state, a group of people only holds existence if it is acknowledged as a state. Furthermore, in international law, there is no single authority that can recognize a state’s existence. Each entity considered a ‘subject of international law,’ such as states and international organizations like the UN, has the independence to determine whether to acknowledge another state’s existence. Therefore, this Western initiative appears disconnected from reality, possibly serving to alleviate guilt and create a facade of innocence. These latecomers must first address the gap between Palestine’s virtual existence and the reality of its destruction by Israel. However, aside from descriptive footage across social media and the gory language used to depict the IDF atrocities in Gaza, no significant measures have been taken to challenge the prevailing impunity afforded to Israel, or to scrutinise the symbolic justifications for it.

Whilst “recognition” will afford the Palestinians a legal and diplomatic status in the international system, it will not grant Palestine any new privileges within the UN, nor will it facilitate Palestine’s membership in new transnational organisations. As long as Palestine remains a non-member observer state at the UN, rather than a full member of the United Nations, it will be extremely hard to implement concrete measures across the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) without having to confront Israeli settlers and the IDF—a logistical and diplomatic nightmare.

Should we genuinely celebrate the fact that Western nations have finally chosen to acknowledge a state that has already been recognized by 148 other countries before them? True recognition requires Western nations to confront some of the most troubling aspects of their history and acknowledge the racist, settler-colonial legacy they have permitted to flourish through their silence following the Nakba. Their theatrical performance could easily be characterised as a “Vaudeville’, except that it is neither entertaining nor funny, and delivers nothing but ultimate hypocrisy.

Today, we are featuring a piece from Amel-Ba’al’s Substack, which analyses Canada’s recognition of Palestine, skillfully explaining why it follows the enduring logic of the asymmetrical colonial pact to better bury the Palestinian cause. Meanwhile, Palestine will continue to exist and linger in the minds of those who seek to obliterate its existence…

IMAGE:  Canada Prime Minister Mark Carney is scheduled to attend a high-level segment on Palestine and the implementation of a two-state solution at the United Nations General Assembly on Monday

Amel-Ba’al writes for Canaan48 Substack…

The Civilising Racist Outpost

Canada’s Recognition of Palestine and the Enduring Logic of Colonial Erasure

Canada’s performative recognition of the state of Palestine is the ultimate hypocrisy—a gesture dripping with the unacknowledged guilt of a settler-colonial state. This act is not a break from history but its continuation: a modern diplomatic manoeuvre built upon a foundation of racist and imperial logic laid by its founding architects. To understand the profound cynicism of this recognition, one must return to the words of “Supreme Court Justice” Ivan C. Rand, a key figure in the 1947 Partition of Palestine, who articulated the core belief that has animated Canadian colonial policy for decades: that Palestine was to be an outpost for “the ethical values and civilizing influence of the West.”

This Canadian view, as Rand proudly stated, was a direct mimicry of Theodor Herzl’s 1896 declaration that a Jewish state would serve as a “rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.” Rand’s statement is not a historical relic; it is the key to deciphering Canada’s consistent role. It reveals a worldview that divides humanity into the civilized and the barbaric, the West and the Orient—a binary used to justify the ongoing settler-colonial project on Turtle Island and the Nakba in Palestine. This is the same civilizing mission used to justify the theft of Indigenous lands through the Indian Act, the violent dispossession of territories, and the residential school system designed to “kill the Indian in the child.” It is the same logic that framed the Nakba not as a catastrophic expulsion of a native people but as the noble establishment of a Western “anchorage.”

IMAGE: 1948

Canada’s dirty past is inextricably linked to its role in Palestine. As detailed in analyses of Canada’s early position, its support for Partition was never neutral or pragmatic; it was an ideological commitment to a settler-colonial project it intimately understood. Lester B. Pearson and Rand saw in zionism a kindred spirit: a European-derived movement that would create a friendly “outpost” to buffer against Soviet influence and, more deeply, against the native Arab society they viewed with Orientalist disdain. The indigenous inhabitants of Palestine were, in this calculus, rendered invisible—obstacles to progress, their history and rights blotted out to make way for the march of Western civilization, just as the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island were deemed obstacles to Confederation, colonial expansion, and the formation of an imaginary Canadian national character.

This foundational erasure, practiced domestically and exported abroad, dictated Canada’s subsequent approach to the Palestinian right of return. How could a people deemed uncivilized savages have a right to return to a land now occupied by a civilizing outpost? The Canadian government’s solution was to recast the refugees as a humanitarian problem, a burden to be managed and resettled elsewhere. In internal memos, officials like Jules Léger argued that Arabs must accept that “Israel has come to stay” and that refugees must be resettled in Arab lands, echoing the settler-colonial policy of forced assimilation and displacement of First Nations in Canada. The small 1955 Canadian refugee admission program was not about justice but about setting a precedent for permanent ethnic cleansing, neutralizing the “threat to regional security” posed by the rightful owners of the land living too close to their stolen homes.

IMAGE: Our Palestine, We Will Never Forget You

This philosophy of resettlement over return became Canada’s steadfast policy, perfectly aligning with Israeli interests. While paying lip service to UN Resolution 194, Canadian leaders across party lines—from Pearson’s call for “token repatriation” to Diefenbaker’s unwavering support (a man who, as a member of the pre-statehood Canadian Palestine Committee, was dedicated to establishing a Jewish majority state)—pushed for the dissolution of the Palestinian people into the Arab diaspora. They blamed the victims, with MPs accusing Arab states of “indoctrinating the refugees with hatred,” a rhetoric that mirrors the colonial trope of the “ungrateful native” refusing the gift of civilization—a trope long used against Indigenous communities in Canada resisting their own erasure.

This same Randian logic infected Canada’s role in the Oslo-era “negotiations.” Chaired by Canada precisely because of its pro-Israel bias, the Refugee Working Group became a mechanism to suppress the right of return, dismissed by a Canadian gavel-holder as a “myth.” Canada’s mission was to reduce an inalienable political right to a technical discussion about “compensation regimes” and “living conditions”—to manage the natives rather than grant them justice. This is the modern face of the “civilizing” mission: using the language of humanitarian aid and process to bury a right and uphold a settler-colonial status quo, just as the Canadian settler state has used bureaucratic processes and empty reconciliation rhetoric to avoid addressing Indigenous land rights and sovereignty at home.

Nowhere is this hypocrisy more grotesque than in Canada’s calculated refusal to name the ongoing genocide in Palestine. A state built upon the completed genocide of Indigenous nations—a fact it still will not fully admit, let alone atone for—now positions itself as a sober arbiter of international law, parsing words while children are dismembered and starved by a regime it helped create and arm. This is the ultimate shame: a guilty state of genocide, having finished its bloody work on Turtle Island, now provides diplomatic cover for a new genocide, one whose ideological foundations it helped pour. The bitter irony is cosmic: Canada, a state that has never reconciled with its own mass graves, dispatches its “peacekeeping forces” abroad to sanctimoniously stabilize the world’s “peace”—a peace built upon the very genocidal logic it perfected at home. This is not peacekeeping; it is the maintenance of a violent, colonial order, ensuring the continued silence of the victims and the impunity of the killers, whether in Gaza or Grassy Narrows.

The hypocrisy is further exposed by Canada’s active silencing of dissent and suppression of any narrative that challenges its settler-colonial ally, mirroring the Canadian state’s historical and ongoing suppression of Indigenous resistance and scholarship that exposes its own foundational crimes.

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Today, Canada’s recognition of a Palestinian statelet on the fragments of the 22% of Palestine it helped to dismember is the culmination of this century-long project. It is an attempt to impose a final settlement that permanently extinguishes the right of return, confining the native population to disconnected bantustans while blessing the Israeli occupation state and its apartheid zionist regime that controls everything from the river to the sea and beyond. It is the “civilizing outpost” graciously granting limited autonomy to the natives it has permanently displaced.

Before guilty Canada can utter a single word about Palestine, it must first confront the racist, settler-colonial legacy of its Ivan Rands and its own dirty past as a settler colony on Turtle Island. It must remember its own apartheid, its Indian Act, the lies of treaties—some of which were blank pages—and make meaningful reparations for genocide and land theft. It must repudiate the poisonous idea that its values are a universal gift to be imposed upon others. True solidarity requires not recognition on the terms of the oppressor but an unwavering commitment to dismantling the architecture of apartheid everywhere—from the Jordan River to the Ottawa River—and upholding the right of all Palestinians to return to their homes and the right of all Indigenous peoples to their lands and sovereignty.

Until then, the words of the Canadian state are as empty as the promises made to Chief Sitting Bull, and its “peace” is as violent as the dispossession described by Chief Tecumseh. This recognition is not a step toward justice but the ultimate act of Canadian settler-colonial hypocrisy.

Read more analysis at Canaan48 Substack

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Source: https://21stcenturywire.com/2025/09/22/recognizing-palestine-the-moral-mirage-of-western-politics-and-the-apartheid-legacy/