THE RECOGNITION OF THE PALESTINIAN STATE, IN THE FACE OF GENOCIDE AFTER AUSCHWITZ

 

It is no longer possible to wait, amid countless violations of human rights and international law. The systematic massacres in Gaza, organized by Benjamin Netanyahu's government, cannot be called anything else: they are a televised genocide, calculated and sustained with the active complicity of the Western powers. Day after day, the world witnesses a series of military operations that do not distinguish between Hamas fighters and civilians, turning hospitals, schools, and camps into mass graves, and have exceeded all humanitarian limits. The Gaza Strip had already been an open-air prison for decades, and now it has become a Dantean scene that questions the very foundations of the Western modern project: reason, international law for peace, and human dignity.

Recognition of the Palestinian State is not a mere diplomatic formality. It is a political, ethical, and humanitarian demand. It is an act of disobedience against geopolitical cynicism that privileges only the strategic interests of the United States and Israel over the rights of an entire people condemned to destruction. Not recognizing Palestine, at this moment of extreme horror, is to legitimize ethnic cleansing. It is to remain silent before ethnocide in the name of the “security” of the Israeli state that has confused its sovereignty with militarism and cultural-religious supremacy.

Here, the German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno, in his famous phrase: “writing poetry after Auschwitz is an act of barbarism”, warned that the absolute horrors of the twentieth century force us to radically rethink our ways of expression, thought, and political action. Adorno’s book After Auschwitz is not only a call to memory but a warning against the repetition of extermination under new ideological and technological masks. If the lesson of Auschwitz was that the planned destruction of a people should never again be allowed, then what is happening in Gaza today is a direct affront to that civilizational promise. Recognition of the Palestinian State becomes, in this light, a moral obligation that transcends diplomacy: it is to prevent humanity from abandoning its own conscience.

Edward Said, the famous literary critic and Palestinian activist from Harvard University, remains an irreplaceable voice. In Orientalism and The Question of Palestine, he dismantled colonial discourses that have dehumanized Arab peoples, showing how knowledge of the “other” has been instrumentalized to justify Western domination. Said not only identified Israel's oppression as a colonial settler project, but also revealed how Western culture—from universities to the media—has erased the possibility of Palestinian sovereignty, reducing its people to numbers or dangerous stereotypes.

For Said, the Palestinian struggle is not only for territory but for the right to exist in the world’s imagination, to have voice, history, and future. Recognizing Palestine, then, is to accept its politically full existence in the face of a global apparatus that denies, distorts, and silences it.

The tragedy in Gaza, with thousands of children dying of starvation, represents the failure of the international liberal order. The UN has been unable to act effectively, while the United States vetoes resolutions to halt hostilities. Europe, caught between its historical guilt and its strategic alliance with Israel, entangles itself in shameful contradictions. Israeli neo-imperialism, sustained by the arms industry and diplomatic backing of great powers, has become the model of twenty-first-century ethnocidal power: a “new apartheid” legitimized by rhetoric of fighting terrorism, when what is perpetuated is a regime of structural oppression.

Faced with this situation, recognition of the Palestinian State can no longer be delayed. Isolated gestures are not enough; a global coalition is needed, including countries, universities, and civic organizations committed to global justice. Just as South African apartheid fell under international pressure, Israeli apartheid must also be dismantled by a new wave of globalized solidarity. Hamas must demobilize and disarm, but in return, recognition of the Palestinian State must also be guaranteed. Without this, disarmament will become a pretext for total massacre, just as Ariel Sharon did in 1982 with the massacre of the refugee camps in Sabra and Shatila, a killing that remains unpunished today.

Recognizing Palestine shifts the debate from the military field to international legality, forcing the construction of legitimate, representative institutions committed to humanitarian law. Hamas’s actions and those of any armed faction must be rigorously evaluated but never serve as justification to deny the existence of a people.

French President Emmanuel Macron expressed it clearly in 2024: “There can be no security for Israel without justice for Palestine”. Terrorism is not eliminated by more terror or collective punishments. It is fought with justice, dignity, and sovereignty. Recognizing Palestine is that: preventing the world from failing again in its most basic moral duty, one learned—or should have been learned—after Auschwitz.