Symbolic acts won't create a real Palestine

Ten more countries are recognising Palestine as a sovereign state in the course of this week.

- Gwynne Dyer

That brings the total up from 147 to 157. It’s a big deal to an extent because for the first time it includes quite a few big, rich Western countries (France, the UK, Canada and Australia). But it is not unified, and it still controls no territory.

The cascade of recognitions at the UN General Assembly's annual session in New York is pure gesture politics. What drives it is belated sympathy for the Palestinians as they face a disaster even worse than the naqba (catastrophe) that drove most Palestinians out of what is now legally the State of Israel in 1948.

The new nagba got underway last week, with the big Israeli offensive to drive all the surviving Palestinians in the Gaza Strip down to a tiny southwest corner, far too small to accommodate the Strip’s surviving two million people even in the most miserable conditions. There, they will be offered free trips into exile with enough money to start anew, nowhere near their homeland.

The governments of the countries that are now offering token recognition to a purely virtual Palestinian state know very well what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu intends.