Britain, Canada, Australia and Portugal formally announced their recognition of a Palestinian state Sunday, with other European countries expected to follow later today ahead of Tuesday’s opening of the UN General Assembly.

Recognition, couched as a defence of a decades-long pursuit of a “two-state solution” to the Israel/Palestine conflict, are a despicable fraud. Under conditions in which the Zionist regime, backed to the hilt by imperialism, is in the final stages of its genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza, imperialist powers are attempting to wash themselves of the Palestinians’ blood in which they are drenched.

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese issued their statements as the official death toll in Gaza climbed over 65,000.

Everyone knows that this is a gross underestimation of the true number of Palestinians slaughtered by the Israel Defence Force since October 2023, with the true death toll running into the hundreds of thousands. Israel continues its policy of systematic starvation of the enclave, producing a famine, and is forcibly expelling a million people from Gaza City in the north, with no intention of them ever returning.

Last week, a UN special commission found that Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza. It noted that the Zionist regime had committed four of the five acts specified in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention of the Crime of Genocide: killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm, deliberately inflicting conditions of life designed to bring about the destruction of the Palestinians in whole or in part, and imposing measures designed to prevent births.

In the West Bank, fascist settlers have systematically expanded their presence under the protection of Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government. Hundreds of Palestinians have been killed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and settlers over the past two years. A massive settlement approved by the Knesset earlier in the summer will fully cut the West Bank off from East Jerusalem, the intended capital of an independent Palestinian state. As it is, the power of the Palestinian Authority—which is despised and survives only as a direct tool of the imperialist powers—is restricted to Ramallah and a few other isolated pockets of territory.

Blotting out this reality from their statements, the various heads of government touted their announcement as an “historic” step to the establishment of peace in the Middle East. They all avoided the term genocide like the plague.

French President Emmanuel Macron will follow suit later today at a conference co-hosted by France and Saudi Arabia at the United Nations in New York.

The conference is the product of an earlier meeting in July that adopted the New York Declaration, urging support for “tangible, time bound and irreversible” steps towards a two-state solution. On September 12, the UN General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to endorse the statement, with the US and Israel voting against.

Israel could well seize on Britain, Canada, and France’s posturing to justify annexing the entire West Bank. Netanyahu responded to the announcements Monday by insisting, “There will be no Palestinian state west of the Jordan River.” Fascist Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called for annexation of the West Bank as a necessary response.

The declarations of recent days and those still to come this week are a cynical manoeuvre on the part of some European imperialist powers, Canada, and Australia to whitewash their complicity in the Gaza genocide. All of the governments involved have supplied weaponry and other military equipment to Israel throughout its barbaric onslaught on Gaza, while ruthlessly suppressing opposition to the genocide at home.

As for the Arab regimes, led by the despotic Saudi monarchy which drew up the New York Declaration together with France, they have done nothing to stop the slaughter of an entire people by Israel. They are seeking a political cover while they reach an accommodation with the Zionist regime and serve as partners of imperialism in a drive to restructure the entire region by sidelining Iran and strengthening Washington’s hegemony.

The Declaration calls for a ceasefire in Gaza, the deployment of a UN-backed mission to enforce it, an end to illegal settlements on occupied territory and the seizure of land, and a halt to “violence” and “terrorism.” It urges Israel to explicitly recognise its commitment to a two-state solution and proposes that the Palestinian Authority ultimately gain sovereignty over Gaza.

Such proposals, which have been wheeled out now and again by the imperialist powers since the conclusion of the Oslo Accords in the early 1990s, offer nothing to the Palestinian masses confronting extermination at the hands of the IDF with weapons supplied from the US, Germany, and other imperialists. As Britain’s Middle East Minister Hamish Falconer put it Monday, discussing Starmer’s recognition of Palestine, “Recognition will not... mean that humanitarian aid comes in tomorrow.”

The statement released by Carney left no doubt that the imperialist powers calling for Palestinian “statehood” are doing so to cover their backing for the genocidal programme pursued by Netanyahu’s government. It began by making Hamas chiefly responsible, asserting that “the pervasive threat of Hamas terrorism to Israel and its people” represented the main barrier to a two-state solution.

There followed restrained criticisms of “accelerated settlement building” and “actions such as the E1 settlement plan” to divide the West Bank, without reference to how Netanyahu’s fascist government has spearheaded both. Only in the fourth and final point did Carney come to “the Israeli government’s contribution to the humanitarian disaster in Gaza.”

The conclusion of Carney’s statement underlined that even in the event that some form of a Palestinian state were to be established, it would amount to an imperialist-controlled protectorate whose population would be disarmed and left entirely at the mercy of a Zionist regime armed to the teeth. “It is imperative that Hamas release all hostages, fully disarm, and play no role in the future governance of Palestine,” Carney declared. “The Palestinian Authority has provided direct commitments to Canada and the international community on much-needed reforms, including to fundamentally reform its governance, to hold general elections in 2026 in which Hamas can play no part, and to demilitarize the Palestinian state.”

But even the proposal for an imperialist-dictated “Palestinian state” was too much for the US and its Israeli attack dog. Both countries announced they will boycott today’s conference. Netanyahu and his fascist government no longer make any bones about their intention to exterminate the Palestinians, who they have labelled “human animals.” They are working tirelessly to enforce US President Donald Trump’s vision for Gaza as the “riviera of the Middle East,” to be established on the corpses of the Palestinians.

Among the European imperialist powers, Germany and Italy have rejected the recognition of a Palestinian state. German imperialism, which is rearming at breakneck speed to militarily dominate Europe and seize its share of the spoils in a global military redivision of the world, is deeply complicit in Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians.

Berlin has cynically exploited the Holocaust, in which Hitler’s Nazi regime organised the annihilation of 6 million European Jews during World War II, to back another genocide through the supplying of weaponry to Israel and banning of all criticism as “antisemitism.” Speaking early Monday, Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul cynically asserted, “For Germany, recognition of a Palestinian state comes more at the end of the process.”

No amount of diplomatic manoeuvring on the part of the imperialists can bring an end to the Gaza genocide and preserve the rights and very existence of the Palestinian people. What is urgently necessary is the industrial and political mobilisation of the international working class to halt the imperialists’ military and economic support to Israel, secure the uninterrupted supply of aid and medical care to the Palestinians, and put an end to the system of imperialist barbarism that is the root cause of the genocide and war.