Our Wednesday News Analysis | Analysis | Performance, Punishment or Policy: What Would Recognizing Palestine Really Mean?

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas waving to a crowd in Ramallah in 2012 after the UN endorsed the recognition of the State of Palestine.Credit: Nasser Shiyoukhi/AP

… ultimately, any policy to build Palestinian statehood beyond words will require Israel to cede control, for Palestinians to truly advance their policymaking, accountability, institution-building, and economic policies of a state.

Palestinians have a significant amount of work to do in terms of governance, leadership, and legal institutions. Without a horizon for sovereignty, who will have the legitimacy – or the motivation – to bother?

Everyone wants Palestinian statehood, except Israel.

Israel won't change on its own.
Recognition must be a big package of policy, one with teeth and bricks alike,
Or it will end up like all the other failures.

Whatever one thinks about the two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians, one thing is clear: The parties won't get there themselves. That's why France and Saudi Arabia are gearing up to try again, by spearheading a process at the United Nations to draw the blueprint for getting it done.

At a UN preparatory session last Friday, representatives from both France and Saudi Arabia promised to put the wheels in motion. They spoke of "Real, irreversible and transformative change." They called to "chart the course for action, not reflection." The Saudi representative, Manal Radwan, said: "This conference is not about words but about action."

A special conference of working groups to be held in mid-June at the UN, Radwan told the General Assembly, will deliver "practical and time-bound outcomes" via "concrete proposals," and each country must "be ready to shoulder long-term responsibilities."

That sounds serious, and similar to the French position: "Our aim remains to mobilize the entire international community so that it actively commits by supporting a resumption of the peace process. ... [we must] reaffirm our commitment to the two-State solution ... by assembling the concrete contributions that all international partners are prepared to provide."...

Read more: Analysis | Performance, Punishment or Policy: What Would Recognizing Palestine Really Mean?

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ISRAEL'S GENOCIDE IN GAZA IS A WAR ON DEMOGRAPHICS

Source: Middle East Eye
https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/israels-genocide-gaza-war-demographics

By Joseph Massad
Published May 23, 2025

Behind the mass killing and expulsion of Palestinians lies a strategic imperative: to restore Jewish demographic dominance across all territory under Israeli colonial control

Palestinians mourn over the bodies of those killed in Israeli air strikes, at al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir el-Balah, central Gaza, on 20 May 2025 (Eyad Baba/AFP)

The ongoing genocide in Gaza, which has killed nearly 54,000 Palestinians, along with various plans to expel the remaining survivors, has one primary goal: to safeguard the Jewish settler-colony of Israel by restoring the lost Jewish demographic majority, which had been achieved through mass killings and expulsions since 1948.

Zionists understood early on that the only chance their settler-colonial project had of survival was through the establishment of a Jewish majority by expelling the Palestinians.

Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist movement, outlined early plans for this in the 1890s, which the Zionist Organisation pursued from the 1920s. Expulsion, however, only became possible after the Zionist military conquest of Palestine.

On the eve of the 1948 war, Palestine had a Jewish population of 608,000 (constituting 30 percent), most of whom had arrived in the country over the previous two decades, alongside 1,364,000 Palestinians.

During the 1948 conquest, Zionist forces killed upwards of 13,000 Palestinians - one percent of the Palestinian population - and expelled around 760,000 Palestinians, or more than 80 percent of those who lived in the area that Israel would later declare a Jewish state.

It was these killings and acts of ethnic cleansing that established Jewish demographic superiority in Israel between 1948 and 1967.

Expulsion

By November 1948, about 165,000 Palestinians remained in Israel, whose Jewish colonial population had risen to 716,000 people, increasing its percentage from 30 to 81 percent almost overnight.

In 1961, the Jewish population had grown to 1,932,000 out of a total population of 2,179,000, raising the Jewish proportion to 89 percent.

Read more: Israel's genocide in Gaza is a war on demographics
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THE WAR WHERE WOMEN’S BODIES LOST THEIR RIGHTS

Source: Mondoweiss
https://mondoweiss.net/2025/05/the-war-where-womens-bodies-lost-their-rights/

By Mariam Khateeb
Published May 19, 2025

The war in Gaza is not only the story of rubble and airstrikes. It is the story of the girl getting her period under bombardment, the mother bleeding in silence and miscarrying on cold floors or giving birth under drones.

Beit Lahia, northern Gaza, February 20, 2025. (Photo: Omar Ashtawy/APA Images)

There is no tent for the body in Gaza.
No safe space where the female body can unfold without fear.
The war strips us bare — not only of our homes and belongings, but of the rituals that make us human: bathing, menstruating, grieving in private.
But even without shelter, our bodies endure.
They remember.
They resist.

In October, I bled for ten days without access to a proper bathroom.

The house we fled to — like most shelters in Gaza — had no privacy. Forty people slept in two rooms. The bathroom had no door, only a torn curtain. I remember waiting for everyone to sleep so I could clean myself with a bottle of water and scraps of cloth. I remember praying I wouldn’t stain the mattress I shared with three cousins. I remember the shame — not of my body, but of being unable to care for it.

In war, the body loses its rights, especially the female body.

The headlines rarely speak of this, of what it means for a girl to get her period under bombardment, of mothers forced to bleed in silence and miscarry on cold floors or give birth under drones. The war in Gaza is not only a story of rubble and airstrikes. It is a story of bodies interrupted, invaded, and denied rest. And yet, somehow, these bodies continue.

As a Palestinian woman and a displaced student now living in Egypt, I carry this bodily memory with me. Not as a metaphor, but as a fact. My body still flinches at loud noises. My digestion falters. My sleep comes in fragments. I know many women — friends, relatives, neighbors — who have developed chronic illnesses during the war, who lost their periods for months, whose breasts dried up while trying to breastfeed in shelters. War enters the body like an illness and stays.

The Gazan body is a map of interruption. It learns early to contract itself — to take up less space, to stay alert, to suppress desire, hunger, bleeding. The public nature of displacement destroys privacy, while the constant fear gnaws at the nervous system. Women who once guarded their modesty now change clothes in front of strangers. Girls stop talking about their cycles. Dignity becomes a burden no one can afford...

Read more: The war where women’s bodies lost their rights