Forget symbolic statehood — the world must recognize Israeli apartheid

View of graffiti painted by artists of different backgrounds, supporting the Palestinians, seen painted on the separation wall in the West Bank city of Bethlehem, October 21, 2024. Photo by Wisam Hashlamoun/Flash90

My grandmother is 90 years old. Twice exiled, first by Israel during the Nakba, then by Assad’s regime in Syria, her memory is no longer whole. Of her life today in Sweden, she holds only the last few minutes. Of her long decades, just flashes.

Yet her childhood in Kfar Sabt, a Palestinian village in the Galilee depopulated in 1948, burns bright. She grins, almost mischievously, as she recalls playing in the fields, running around with the other children, and spying on a Jewish farmer whose sudden arrival in the village — and the noisy tractor that came with him — stirred curiosity and suspicion.

I was born a refugee, my grandmother’s family from Kfar Sabt, my grandfather’s family from the nearby village of Lubya. Today, from my home in Ramallah, I wake each morning to the sight of an Israeli flag in the nearby settlement Beit El, a clear reminder of the apartheid regime that dictates every aspect of my life.

The Jewish Israelis who live there cast their votes for a government that determines where I can live, work, and travel, how much water I receive, and which set of rules and laws apply to me, and which do not. Like millions of Palestinians, from the West Bank to Gaza, I’m ruled by a system that sees me only as an obstacle in the way of its expansionist ethnostate.

This is a reality that has become impossible to ignore for millions across the globe, especially during the past two years. Yet in recent months, rather than acknowledging Israeli apartheid or taking meaningful action to stop the atrocities in Gaza, a growing chorus of states have decided to recognize something else: a Palestinian state.

The first breakthrough came in May 2024, when Norway, Spain, and Ireland recognized the State of Palestine, the latter two among the most vocal critics of Israel’s war on Gaza. A second wave is now emerging, led by an initiative from France and the United Kingdom in response to Israel’s plans to prolong the war, soon joined by Australia, Canada, Portugal, and Malta.

Palestine solidarity activists in Oslo’s annual Mayday march, May 1, 2024. (Ryan Rodrick Beiler/ActiveStills)

While indicative of Israel’s growing international isolation, the global political theater of “recognizing a Palestinian state” is impossible to take at face value. With Israel moving forward to annex vast swaths of the West Bank, and amid a genocide in Gaza that has killed more than 60,000 Palestinians, it is absurd to continue to advocate for a two-state solution as a reasonable or practical compromise.

Stranger still is the insistence that it is the only possible answer to what, 77 years after the Nakba, does nothing to address the core issue: an aggressive, militaristic regime that demands national, legal, and economic supremacy for one people over another.

Let us not waste another 30 years of Palestinian lives on the partition paradigm — a colonial “solution” to a colonial problem. Israel has long made clear it will never accept a Palestinian state; clinging to the two-state solution is gaslighting on an extraordinary scale, and it has brought us only despair.

Now, more than ever, symbolic gestures are worse than useless, as they buy time for the regime committing the crimes and drain urgency from the only remedies that matter: ending the genocide, sanctioning the perpetrator, isolating the apartheid system, and insisting without apology on equal rights and the right of return. This is not extremism. It is the bare minimum of justice.

There is already one state, and it is an apartheid state

A “solution” that is neither just nor possible is not a peace plan, but an alibi for inaction that will allow Israel to continue its massacres, accelerate its expansion, and deepen the apartheid regime. Is this really how we punish a regime that has committed a genocide? By offering it complete dominance over its victims while we give them false hope that they might get a state on less than 23 percent of their ancestral homeland?

And where are the Palestinians in all of this? When was the last time we were democratically represented, or even asked what solution we would accept? As in 1947, when the United Nations Partition Plan was drawn without our consent, the latest push for a two-state solution is being driven by European powers with little regard for the people who will live or die by its terms.

Jewish Jerusalemites celebrating the UN decision on the partition of Palestine, riding on top of an armored police car, Jerusalem, 1947, November 30, 1947. (Hans Pinn/GPO)

France makes the arrogance explicit: threatening Israel with recognition of a Palestinian state but insisting it be demilitarized, all while continuing to supply Israel with weapons. I may dream of a world free of lethal weapons, but it is not for an arms dealer to tell the victims of genocide to lay down their arms.

Meanwhile, Israel huffs and puffs, condemning the recognitions as a “prize for terror” and using it as a pretense to enact even more extreme measures. In July, the Knesset passed a resolution supporting the annexation of the West Bank, and settlement expansion continues apace, including the recent approval of the E1 bloc that experts warn would make a contiguous Palestinian state impossible.

Even if by some miracle, Israel eventually withdraws from the West Bank and Gaza, what guarantees the Palestinians in the new state their safety? When has statehood protected anyone from Israeli aggression and expansionism? Lebanon and Syria are both sovereign states with internationally recognized borders, yet they have seen their land occupied and their cities bombed. A Palestinian flag at the UN will not halt settlement growth, dismantle military rule, or end regional warfare.

If countries wish to recognize a Palestinian state, so be it, but they must not pretend that it changes reality. Real change begins with acknowledging the truth: there is already one state here, and it is an apartheid state. From there, countries must act legally, diplomatically, economically until the cost for Israel to maintain apartheid outweighs its benefits. Until my family has a place to call home again, and until hundreds of displaced Palestinian communities can go home.

Zionism has failed, not only because creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine at the expense of Palestinians was always unjust, but because ethnic cleansing and now genocide were always its logical outcomes, atrocities that will leave the Jewish state isolated and reviled. And despite Israel’s best efforts, Zionism has also failed because Palestinians continue to insist on remaining in their homeland.

What endures now is a grotesque system of apartheid, one people enjoying full rights and sovereignty while the natives are slaughtered, divided, and subdued. It may eventually collapse under the weight of its own brutality, but it will not go quietly — clinging to life with the kind of violence we already see unleashed in Gaza today.

Palestinian boy walks through rubble amid ongoing Israeli attacks, in Al-Bureij refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip, July 22, 2025. (Ali Hassan/Flash90)

With recognition comes responsibilities

Recognizing Israel as an apartheid state is the necessary first step toward a future beyond ethnonationalism, rooted in equality, justice, and freedom for all. And it is not symbolic; apartheid is a crime against humanity under international law.

The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court defines it as such, and the 1973 United Nations International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid obligates states to enact legislative, judicial, and administrative measures to prevent and punish it. Just last summer, the International Court of Justice issued a landmark advisory opinion on Israeli apartheid, concluding that Israel’s occupation and annexation of Palestinian territories are in violation of international law and calling for reparations.

Official recognition of Israel’s system as apartheid, even by a handful of states, would place these duties on the table and make continued military and economic support to Israel legally and politically indefensible. It would also open the door for sanctions, the withdrawal of diplomatic representation, and travel bans on officials who uphold the system.

It would also shift public discourse, making the very word “apartheid” unavoidable in mainstream conversation about Israel, and putting pressure on corporations, under threat of boycott, public shaming, or shareholder revolt to reconsider their operations in or with Israel. The precedent exists: in the case of apartheid South Africa, grassroots activism combined with state-level condemnation gradually forced companies to divest, even if many resisted for years.

It would also change how Palestinians are seen internationally. Today, we are labeled “stateless” or citizens of a nominal “State of Palestine” with no real power to protect us, denied the diplomatic and economic tools most nations take for granted. Recognizing Israel as an apartheid regime reframes us as victims of a crime against humanity, entitled to protection, and forces a reckoning with the absurdity of a world where Israelis travel freely while we face endless barriers to study, work, or visit family abroad.

This will not be a magical fix. Israel will fight harder than South Africa to maintain apartheid, as it has become more entrenched, fueled by religious myths, and backed by international support. But recognition would at least put us on the right road, replacing decades of make-believe with a confrontation with reality. Those years could be spent dismantling the system instead of reinforcing illusions.

Kfar Sabt no longer exists. According to Palestine Remembered, only “piles of stone and stone terraces” remain as evidence that a village once stood there. The people are scattered; the land is unused, uninhabited. But Kfar Sabt lives in my grandmother’s mind, in the stories she tells, and in the stories I will keep telling. It lives in the unhealed wound of a people denied return. My homeland stretches from Ramallah to Kfar Sabt, from the Naqab to Lubya.

This is not a call for expulsion or war; we have endured enough of both. It is a call for justice, because only justice can bring peace and secure a different future for all peoples on this land — one where my grandmother’s stories are not just relics of a destroyed world, but seeds of one rebuilt.

Alaa Salama is the Audience Engagement Manager at +972 Magazine.