This article was originally published in French in the Palestine Chronicle on September 21, 2025. Al-Ahrar Toronto is re-publishing a translation of this piece in light of Prime Minister Carney’s recognition of a Palestinian State on behalf of Canada and the dire consequences this act will have on the Palestinian people and their struggle for liberation.
We affirm that settler-colonial Canada’s recognition of a Palestinian State is a dangerous advance as Canada continues to arm Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people while simultaneously working to disarm the Hamas, the Palestinian vanguard physically defending their people of Gaza from genocide. At the same time, Canada furthers their relationship with the traitorous Palestinian Authority, including the training of PA security forces through Operation PROTEUS.
Canada, France, Australia, and other Western imperialist powers’ recognition of so-called statehood is nothing but an illusion of the “democracy” and “peace” they claim to be seeking. In reality, recognizing a divided Palestine only further legitimizes the Zionist entity and its violent colonial project.
As revolutionary leader and political prisoner serving 54 life sentences, Ibrahim Hamed, writes: “Returning to the liberation of Palestine is a return to achieving cohesion, harmony, and full integration among all Palestinians. It is the return of the soul to the body—after Oslo made us no longer resemble ourselves.”Those of us across Turtle Island must not capitulate to liberal facades and setbacks masked as wins. It is urgent that we condemn Carney’s recognition and not lose sight of total Palestinian liberation.
Al-Ahrar Toronto also extends our deepest solidarities with Tom Martin, the author of this article and former spokesperson of Collectif Palestine Vaincra, and his comrades. CPV was a Toulouse-based Palestinian solidarity organization until the French government dissolved it in February 2025. It is our responsibility to identify and reject state repression within occupied Palestine and across the imperial metropoles as Zionist attacks on the Palestinian struggle continue.
Free, free Palestine!
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This Monday, September 22, 2025, Emmanuel Macron and other heads of state are expected to announce the official recognition of the “State of Palestine” at the United Nations General Assembly.
From the Socialist Party to a large part of the so-called “radical” left, including Alain Finkielkraut, this recognition is widely supported in France. On this occasion, part of the Palestine solidarity movement is reviving the so-called “two-state solution” and calls for peace while Gaza City is under Israeli artillery fire.
But what are we talking about? Does all this meet the anti-colonialist demands we must make on behalf of the Palestinian people, who have been facing a terrible genocide for nearly two years?
What is the “Palestinian State”?
In 1964, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) declared in its charter at the first Palestinian National Council: “Palestine, with its British Mandate-era borders, constitutes an indivisible regional unit.”
Following this, the entire modern Palestinian national movement has championed the liberation of all of Palestine from the sea to the Jordan River, with Al-Quds as its capital. Organizations such as Fatah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) have published countless policy texts defining this strategic perspective, such as The Palestinian Revolution and the Jews of Fatah (1970) and Nothing Is More Precious Than Freedom by George Habash, co-founder of the PFLP.
From the 10-point program of 1974 to the Palestinian declaration of independence in Algiers in 1988, the Fatah leadership embodied by Yasser Arafat took a different path, imposing a diplomatic strategy centered around the defense of the “two-state solution” and the implicit and then explicit recognition of the Zionist state.
In other words, the defense of a Palestinian entity in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, that is, barely 22% of historic Palestine…
This strategy reached its climax with the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, which confirmed the betrayal of the historic positions of the Palestinian national movement, first and foremost the defense of the right of return of Palestinian refugees and the liberation of all of Palestine.
Thirty years later, the results are clear. The Zionist colonization of Palestine continued relentlessly from the sea to the Jordan River. The Palestinian Authority, which was supposed to be the structure to administer this new “state,” did nothing to prevent it; on the contrary, it proved to be the instrument of a comprador bourgeoisie [2] completely subservient to the interests of imperialism and Zionism.
Recognizing the “Palestinian State,” the mirage of the Oslo Accords
As the genocide has continued in the Gaza Strip for almost two years, the slogans of “recognition of the Palestinian state” have been growing in several Western countries, even to the point of being supported by several governments. While at first glance this might appear to have positive symbolic significance, given the radicalization of the current Israeli government, this prospect is nothing more than a tool to re-impose the “two-state solution” strategy.
However, the national and social rights of the Palestinian people, such as the right of return for refugees, would not be strengthened by this recognition. On the contrary, it would only justify and normalize once again the division of Palestine and Zionist colonization.
“Efforts to seek diplomatic recognition of an imaginary Palestinian state on a fraction of historic Palestine are a desperate strategy on the part of a Palestinian leadership that has run out of options, lost its legitimacy, and has become a serious obstacle to the Palestinians’ restoration of their rights,” Palestinian journalist Ali Abunimah recalled in a 2011 Al Jazeera article.
In reality, this recognition is not even a so-called symbolic gesture and serves only to offer a political solution to guarantee the interests and sustainability of Israel, which have been deeply weakened by its genocidal policies.
In this regard, Abdallah Silawi of Boussole Palestine challenged the Palestine solidarity movement, emphasizing that “recognizing a Palestinian microstate and targeting Netanyahu are two strategies that serve to contain our movement, preserve Zionist interests, and maintain Western hegemony.”
“Proposing a ‘Palestinian state’ at this time and in this manner aims to seriously isolate the resistance and undermine its mass popular base. It is a means of forcing surrender upon the Palestinian people, for such capitulation cannot be imposed as long as the resistance movement is able to maintain its position as the sole representative of its will,” declared Palestinian writer and revolutionary Ghassan Kanafani in 1971, in the aftermath of the defeat of Black September. A comment that resonates with the current sequence of events.
France and Saudi Arabia against the Palestinian people
Today, the imperialist-Zionist genocidal operation in Gaza continues but has still not succeeded in forcing complete capitulation from the organizations opposing it throughout the Arab world.
In this context, inter-imperialist contradictions are emerging regarding their short- and medium-term tactical objectives.
On the one hand, the US-Israel bloc believes that Palestinian surrender requires the intensification of the genocidal offensive in Gaza using all means at its disposal. This has the effect of creating a certain isolation from its own allies, as evidenced by the Western reactions that have verbally “denounced” the launch of the ground operation in Gaza City in September 2025.
On the other hand, there is the role of French imperialism and the reactionary Arab regimes, led by Saudi Arabia, which are attempting to impose an alternative path by promoting a diplomatic solution aimed at liquidating the Palestinian cause.
This is how we must understand the sequence opened by the so-called recognition of the Palestinian state and the announcements expected next week. This recognition is not a recognition of the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination on their land. It is simply a recognition of the Palestinian Authority’s exercise of power over 22% of historic Palestine (and in reality, barely 10%).
Furthermore, this project emphasizes the desire to impose the management of the Palestinian territories on a segment of the Palestinian and Arab comprador bourgeoisie, but also to generalize normalization in line with the 2020 Abraham Accords.
In this sense, the United Nations Declaration voted on by 140 countries on September 12 in New York underscores their real intentions: to disarm and isolate Hamas and its allies, to exclude them from any administration of Gaza, with the strategic prospect of a demilitarized micro-territory, economically dependent on the occupier, worthy of a Bantustan [1] that would allow the aspirations of the Palestinian people to be liquidated.
The fact that the United States, Israel, and their allies opposed it only underscores their tactical disagreement over the means to be used to eradicate the Palestinian cause.
In reality, the so-called “two-state solution” aims only to legitimize and guarantee the stability of the Zionist entity and to abandon the national rights of the Palestinian people (primarily the right of return) in exchange for a dismembered Palestinian entity on the remaining besieged islands of the West Bank and Gaza subject to imperialist domination.
In this sense, the Palestinian Authority (as well as its local proxies in France, including the so-called Palestinian ambassador) must be firmly rejected. This “authority” has increased its attacks on the Palestinian people and their organizations in recent months in an effort to support the liquidation project desired by the West.
This obviously involves its security coordination in the West Bank and its support for the largest counterinsurgency offensive in the region in over 20 years (notably through the destruction of refugee camps), but also by canceling the payment of benefits to 1,612 families of Palestinian prisoners and supporting the plan to disarm Palestinian camps in Lebanon.
Faced with the prevailing confusion, we must constantly remember that in a national liberation struggle, there are only two paths: resistance or capitulation. “Recognition of the Palestinian state” is definitively a capitulationist expression that must be unmasked and combated.
Support the liberation of Palestine from the sea to the Jordan river
Rather than demanding recognition of a Bantustan from the Western powers, co-responsible for the occupation of Palestine, we must mobilize to defend the prospect of the total liberation of Palestinian lands from the sea to the Jordan River.
This requires affirming the political centrality of the Palestinian people’s resistance in their struggle against more than 76 years of settler colonization. The victorious struggles of the Algerian and Haitian peoples allow us to understand that this prospect is possible.
In this sense, it is more necessary than ever to participate in the global mobilization aimed at delegitimizing the State of Israel as a colonial project and thus mobilize to isolate it on the international stage. “What they must do is not recognize a Palestinian state, but withdraw their recognition of Israel. This is the only way to achieve an anti-racist and democratic, decolonized outcome,” summarizes Palestinian academic Joseph Massad.
To do this, we must affirm that imperialist states will always be part of the problem and never part of the solution. From the Balfour Declaration of 1917 to the arming of genocide in Gaza today, they have always supported the Zionist state for what it is: the advanced base of their interests in the region.
On the contrary, we must relay and support the Palestinian people’s aspiration for the total liberation of their land, as expressed through more than 100 years of resistance against imperialism and Zionism, and definitively bury the Oslo path and its dire consequences.
Notes
[1] The term “Bantustan” refers to a territorial enclave where discriminated indigenous populations are confined after their land has been seized.
[2] In Marxist terminology, the “comprador” bourgeoisie refers to the bourgeois class that, in colonized countries, benefits from its position as intermediaries in commercial exchanges with foreign dominant powers.
