The government formed in late 2022 by Benjamin Netanyahu, along with Zionist groups even more radical than his own far-right party, is the most extremist in the state’s history. Less than ten months after its formation, this government seized on the opportunity it found in the October 7, 2023, operation in order to wage a genocidal war in the Gaza Strip that surpassed in horror all of Israel’s previous wars.

This occurred under a US president who openly professed his Zionism, while the impact of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood created a climate that prompted most other Western governments to declare their unreserved support for the horrific aggression launched by the Israeli armed forces, under the pretext of endorsing Israel’s right to “self-defense.” These combined circumstances encouraged Israel’s far-right government to perpetrate genocide in the Gaza Strip, destroying it with extreme brutality, and seek to expel its remaining residents, while simultaneously tightening the noose on the West Bank population in preparation for their own expulsion.

Many Western rulers, along with Arab ones, assumed that the Israeli aggression would limit itself to eliminating Hamas’s control over the Gaza Strip, which could thus be handed back over to the Palestinian Authority (PA) based in Ramallah. For this purpose, they relied on Joe Biden’s administration, which supported this scenario. However, a few months into the onslaught, it became clear to them, as it did to Biden himself, that Netanyahu was not prepared to pursue this path. Netanyahu has long boasted about eliminating the prospect of a “Palestinian state,” particularly in consolidating the continued division between the West Bank and Gaza by allowing Qatari funding to Hamas’s rule in Gaza, thus preventing the latter from being beholden to the PA.

With Donald Trump’s return to the White House, and after a delusional bet on his ambition to win the Nobel Peace Prize, these same European and Arab rulers were shocked by his statements calling for the deportation of Gaza’s population and the seizure of the strip to transform it into a beach resort. By contrast, these statements were applauded by Netanyahu and the Zionist far right.

Soon after, the truce that preceded Trump’s re-inauguration turned into a new, ugly chapter of the ongoing genocide through a famine orchestrated by Israel in collusion with Washington, accompanied by the barbaric shooting of Gaza’s residents in full view of the world. This was followed by a new, deadly Israeli offensive aimed at seizing and destroying the strip’s remaining populated areas. These developments led to a growing shift in public opinion in Western countries from sympathy for Israel, which had peaked after October 7, to sympathy for the afflicted civilians of Gaza, especially children.

This shift prompted embarrassed European leaders to seek a symbolic posture to make up for their complicity in the genocidal war in Gaza. This complicity had, indeed, lasted for more than a year, and included their rejection of calls for a ceasefire during several months, and even maintaining all their relations, including military ones, with the Zionist state. They viewed recognition of the so-called State of Palestine, nearly forty years after its proclamation, as a means of making up politically at the lowest cost for their previous support for Israel’s war.

This symbolic position was given more credit by the vehement attack launched against it by Netanyahu, who now fears that his takeover of Gaza could turn into an opportunity to exert pressure on him for the reunification of the strip with the West Bank under a single authority, thus reviving the “Palestinian state” perspective he has long sought to stifle.

Trump’s position will certainly decide the matter. European positions are “not important” in this regard, as Trump said when told that French president Emmanuel Macron announced his decision to recognize the “State of Palestine.” Indeed, only the US position can force Netanyahu to return to the “two-state solution,” which he is so far rejecting, even though it essentially consists in a Palestinian statelet subject to the Zionist occupation state, similar to the current Ramallah-based PA.

What will influence Trump, however, is the position of the Arab Gulf states, which are certainly dearer to the US president’s heart (and his wallet) than Netanyahu and Israel. This is why the French president was keen to involve the Saudi kingdom in leading his efforts at the United Nations, providing the Arab side with an opportunity to participate in lobbying for the “two-state solution,” compensating for their collective reluctance to exert any real pressure to stop the genocide.

As for the “State of Palestine,” they view it as conditional (as in the New York Declaration issued two months ago through the French-Saudi initiative) on restricting political rights to those who accept the current Ramallah PA’s approach, and on it remaining demilitarized beyond whatever armament is necessary to suppress its population.

Indeed, the most Gulf pressure can garner from the Trump administration is for the US president to return to what he at the time called the “Deal of the Century,” a project drafted by his son-in-law Jared Kushner in 2020. This plan provided for the establishment of a “State of Palestine” in three enclaves within the West Bank, with Israel annexing the surrounding lands — most of the so-called Area C resulting from the implementation of the Oslo Accords, including the Jordan Valley. Fifteen Zionist settlements would remain within the enclaves allocated to the “State of Palestine,” under Israeli sovereignty.

In exchange for the lands annexed to the State of Israel, Kushner’s plan called for the Palestinians to be granted two enclaves in the Negev Desert adjacent to the Egyptian border. The entire Gaza Strip was part of the “State of Palestine” in the 2020 plan, but its reoccupation made it possible to extend to it the type of “solution” envisaged for the West Bank, whereby Israel would seize areas of the strip and formally annex them, while Gazan refugees would be confined to one or two enclaves, with some of them displaced to the Negev. Kushner himself recommended such displacement in a talk at Harvard in February 2024.

In 2020, the Ramallah PA categorically rejected the Kushner-Trump plan, as did the Arab League, over its blatant disregard of Palestinian rights and demands. Today some who rejected it may see it as a lesser evil (as opposed to complete expulsion) and thus call for its acceptance. Even if they won the case and the “State of Palestine” were established in ways that Netanyahu could accept (he had welcomed the Kushner-Trump plan in 2020), it would amount to nothing more than a “solution” even worse than what existed before October 7. In other words, it would not “solve” anything and Palestinian resistance in all its forms would certainly continue.

Governments that truly wish to support the Palestinian cause must begin by recognizing the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination — before recognizing a hypothetical state, and without designating the Ramallah PA, which is rejected by most Palestinians, as the model for the state they call for.

Indeed, the Palestinian national consensus found expression in 2006 in a series of demands that included the withdrawal of the Israeli army and settlers from all Palestinian territories occupied in 1967, including East Jerusalem; the dismantling of the apartheid wall; the release of all Palestinian prisoners held by Israel; and the recognition of the right of Palestinian refugees to return and reparation.

Any “state” established without these demands being met would, in the eyes of most Palestinians, be nothing more than a new attempt to liquidate their national cause. It would merely bestow a fake sovereignty on the open-air prison in which Israel confines the Palestinian people in the 1967 territories, within an ever-shrinking geographic area.