This past week, Britain, Canada, and Australia, along with several smaller countries, officially recognized the state of Palestine, in the run-up to a United Nations conference devoted to the two-state solution. Yet for all the ceremony and celebration, it’s not clear whether these pronouncements actually matter. Critics have labeled the recognition effort “empty,” “a distraction,” or “even harmful,” and it isn’t hard to see why. The diplomatic declarations do nothing to help Palestinians in Gaza or those menaced by Israeli settler violence in the West Bank. They will not arrest the gradual, de facto annexation of occupied Palestinian areas under the successive governments of Benjamin Netanyahu.
The countries recognizing Palestine have insisted that Hamas should have no role in its governance, but pious pledges do not change the fact that the terrorist group remains the dominant Palestinian power in Gaza—and still holds dozens of Israelis hostage, despite the Ga
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