Why Israel Cannot Recognize a Palestinian State

Over the past two weeks, France, the United Kingdom, and Canada have pledged to recognize a Palestinian state during the 80^th session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, September 2025. Portugal, Australia, and no doubt other states among the more than 50 currently not recognizing Palestine are expected to follow France’s lead.

While the reasons and conditions set forth by these states have varied, the common theme has been that recognition, even without an accord between the parties, would advance a two-state solution to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, assuring peace and security for both peoples. This core misunderstanding of the conflict and possible avenues to resolution infected the deeply-flawed “New York Declaration on the Peaceful Settlement of the Question of Palestine and the Implementation of the Two-State Solution,” promulgated in July, 2025 by France and Saudi Arabia on behalf of 19 participating nations, including such friends of Israel as Canada, the United Kingdom, and the European Union, along with the Arab League and a number of non-aligned states.

Israeli leaders and commentators, along with American politicians and other supporters of Israel, have railed against these declarations, noting that such a state would be a reward for Hamas and yield them a diplomatic victory for the October 7 massacre, and that such a state would be terrorist or jihadist enclave, a danger not only to Israel but to Western allies. However compelling, this position misses a still more serious threat

A dimension of this shift in the diplomatic position vis-à-vis Israel that has been overlooked is the danger it represents to Israel’s standing as a member state in the United Nations, its very existence as a recognized sovereign homeland for the Jewish people.

The key issue in the conflict has been the so-called right-of-return for Palestinians displaced from territory conquered by Israel in 1948 and subsequent wars. While the border issue has sometimes dominated discussion due to the growth of settlements in territory claimed by both Israel and the Palestinians and the status of Jerusalem has been contentious, these two stumbling blocks can be addressed with land swaps and a bit of finesse, assuming both sides are ready and able to be creative for the sake of peace.

But the issue of Palestinian refugees is far more difficult: we should recall that when Yasser Arafat arrived in Gaza after the collapse of the talks under President Clinton’s leadership, he told a thrilled crowd that he would never abandon their right-of-return, despite previous indications he would agree to limits on the resettlement of Palestinians in Israel, and that in the face of Israeli and American pressure to limit the return of refugees to compassionate cases of family reunification, he told the negotiators to “go to hell.”

Due to the unique and unfortunately ambiguous language of UN General Assembly Resolution 194 and its pro-Palestinian interpretation by most member states, descendants of the 1948 war enjoy derivative rights, including the right-of-return to the homes their families occupied prior to either their expulsion by Israeli forces or their own flight. For many decades, Israeli leaders have argued that the right-of-return is a nonstarter for any settlement of the conflict, as the return of hundreds of thousands or even millions of Palestinians to Israeli territory would bring an immediate end to the Jewish majority and to Jewish sovereignty.

UNRWA’s mandate, which expanded in 1991 to include refugees of the 1967 Six-Day War, is defined broadly through a series of evolving UN resolutions. The lack of clarity regarding both the initial mandate and subsequent resolutions has allowed UNRWA to register both first-generation refugees and their descendants, baking into UNRWA’s core mission the pro-Palestinian interpretation of Resolution 194. The agency provides relief services in the areas of healthcare and education, to some extent relieving Israel of the burden of supporting a population largely under their military control, and advocates for the rights not only of first-generation refugees but also their descendants.

Tragically, UNRWA’s expansive definition of refugee status and their core operations have reinforced expectations for several generations of Palestinians for returning to sovereign Israeli territory. Resolutions as recent as December, 2023 (“Operations of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East,” A/RES/78/73) again insist on the right of return of all refugees to their familial land, while perversely failing to recognize that these same refugees living under UNRWA’s aegis have created a terrorist enclave that only two months earlier had committed the worst atrocities against the Jewish people since the Holocaust, a horror celebrated extensively across Palestinian territories.

But the United Nations Charter presents another danger, one that taken in concert with the refugee problem and international support for their rights under these UN resolutions and mandates is even more serious: expulsion of Israel from the UN and its replacement with Palestine as the legitimate sovereign over the territory once held as part of Mandatory Palestine.

The example of Taiwan, the Republic of China (ROC) demonstrates the danger Israel faces. In 1971, The United Nations recognized the PRC as sovereign over the territory of mainland China and the PRC launched a campaign that effectively removed Taiwan from the United Nations, insisting upon the current ‘one China’ position of the United Nations. Because Taiwan was a founding member of the United Nations as the recognized representative of China under Chapter II, “Membership,” Article 3 rather than under Article 4, once the PRC was accepted as the representative of China Taiwan was deemed to fail to meet the criteria for membership, as its political claim over territory that was formerly part of a unified China would have amounted to recognition of two Chinas. And with the support of a simple majority of the member states (though a supermajority of voting members in the General Assembly), Taiwan was voted out of existence as a recognized sovereign power.

[While there have been positive shifts in other conflicts, including the establishment of East Timor after the war with Indonesia and the creation of South Sudan as an independent nation formerly part of Sudan, these examples of carving out a new nation from existing sovereign territory are the opposite of the example of Taiwan and, potentially, of Israel and Palestine. Most certainly, the UN Charter should be amended to eliminate the possibility of voting a member state in good standing out of existence without its consent or even the full support of the Security Council.]

The recent convention at the United Nations urging an end to the war and the establishment of a Palestinian state included many hopeful signs: denunciation of the Oct 7 massacre, demands to disarm Hamas, the insistence on a demilitarized State of Palestine, and most importantly, united Arab support for these demands. However, three aspects of the published resolution of the convention should alarm Israeli leaders and supporters of Israel: the convention’s participants reiterated their support for the right-of-return in the context of UN Resolution 194; the Arab states declined to commit to recognition of Israel and to normalizing relations with the Jewish state; and nowhere does the document mention Israel as the eternal home of the Jewish people, nor even mention Jewish historical sites, despite paragraph 31’s insistence on maintaining the status quo for all Muslim and Christian sites. The declaration of support for the implementation of a two-state solution erases the Jewish people from Israel.

Thus, the door has been opened wide for Israel to suffer the fate of Taiwan, that once recognized by the Security Council and supported by a majority of the member states, the State of Palestine could assert its place as the sole representative of the Palestinian people, whether Muslim or Jewish, Christian or Druze or atheist, and appeal to their allies in the General Assembly for recognition as the sole sovereign over Mandatory Palestine — and the chant of anti-Semites the world over, “from the river to the sea,” would become a political reality. ‘One Palestine’, like the ‘One China’ policy, would be the end of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people.

Most certainly, there are stark differences in the experience of Taiwan and the situation of Israel, not least that Israel benefits not only from the UN’s approval of the Partition Plan but that the UN admitted Israel as a member state on May 11, 1948 (General Assembly Resolution 273), recognizing that “Israel is a peace loving State which accepts the obligations contained in the Charter and is able and willing to carry out those obligations,” recalling the language of Article 4 of the UN Charter, a commitment that the Palestinians could not possibly make if they pursued a plan to decertify Israel as a sovereign power. Yet the danger exists, as the UN’s member states have shown repeatedly a willingness to set aside the ideals, principles, and practices of the Organization, not least through the example of Taiwan and most recently in the declaration promulgated by the recent convention on the issue of Palestine.

A Palestinian state might be Israel’s best hope to hold Palestinians accountable for violence against the Jewish state, and in that respect (and for other reasons) I have long argued in favor of Palestinian statehood, but until such time as Israel can ensure that a resolution recognizing Palestine as a sovereign nation within clearly defined borders unequivocally and irrevocably recognizes Israel as the sovereign state of the Jewish people, Israel and its allies cannot recognize a State of Palestine.

As noted above, the implementation of an enduring two-state solution might require a significant revision of the UN Charter to eliminate the possibility of decertifying a member state against the will of its government and people. Indeed, the legitimacy of sovereign powers rests on the consent of the governed, for which reason alone a plan to establish Palestinian sovereignty ‘from the river to the sea’ ought be deemed outrageous, much as the imposition of Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank and Gaza has been considered illegal by most member states, including those signing the recent declaration. Yet the UN Charter does not assess membership as a sovereign power on the basis of the consent of the governed but rather by the commitment of a nation’s leadership to abide by the UN Charter, a lacuna in founding principles that could easily be exploited by current or future Palestinian leadership in the event that Palestine is admitted to the UN as a member state without any real regard for their readiness to abide by the very Charter upon which their statehood would have been established.

Of course, given the clear bias of a majority of the member states and the anti-Semitic leadership of Secretary General Guterres and such UN officials as Francesca Albanese (UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories), whose manifesto accusing Israel of genocide has created a legal foundation not only for charges against Israeli leaders but also for members of the IDF, not to mention emboldening the many crowds chanting “from the river to the sea,” many Israeli leaders and supporters of the Jewish state might welcome expulsion from the UN, though such an outcome would surely be a Pyrrhic victory for ending the war with Hamas.