Recent announcements by France, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Spain and Portugal unilaterally recognizing a state for the Palestinians are being hailed as acts of courage and conscience. In reality, they expose political cowardice and the collapse of intellectual integrity in the West. The recognition of “Palestine” is not a moral breakthrough; it is a conceptual absurdity and a historical betrayal.
Why? Because human rights are either universal or meaningless. They cannot be weaponized for one group while being denied to countless others. Yet that is precisely what this recognition does: It elevates one national claim above all others—not on the basis of justice, but on political expediency.
Take the Kurds. With more than 30 million people scattered across Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria, they are the largest stateless nation on earth. They have fought, bled and died for independence for more than a century. Where is the recognition of Kurdistan?
Consider the Druze, massacred by Hezbollah and jihadists in Syria, who are living precariously between Lebanon, Syria, Israel and Jordan. Has anyone proposed a state for them?
What of the Assyrians, four million strong, persecuted relentlessly across the Middle East, stripped of land, culture and voice? No international outcry.
The Yazidis, targets of a horrific ISIS genocide in 2014, are still shattered, still vulnerable. No one in any European capital even knows what the Yazidi flag looks like.
The Baha’i, born in Persia and now 8 million strong, were driven into exile by persecution in Iran. Yet there are no international demands for Baha’i sovereignty.
Add to the equation the Circassians, the Sahrawis and a dozen other forgotten nations whose suffering provokes no demonstrations, no boycotts, no thunderous proclamations from Western parliaments. Their blood is too inconvenient.
But Palestine? That is different. Palestine has become the West’s new crusade, its moral stage. Why? Because it offers something no other allegedly “oppressed” people can: the eternal scapegoat.
The reality, however, is even more dishonest. This is not about justice for Palestinians; it is about Europe’s own domestic desperation. The inner affairs of Britain, France, Spain and Portugal are in flames. Their societies are imploding under a cocktail of economic and housing crises, uncontrolled migration, collapsing public safety, social unrest, and the growing influence of radical Islam and the far left. What better way to pacify the restless streets than to throw Israel onto the pyre?
This is the oldest trick in history. When your house is on fire, find a scapegoat. And in Europe, as ever, the scapegoat is the Jew.
The recognition of Palestine is not a diplomatic achievement; it is appeasement, a pacifier tossed to angry mobs waving foreign symbols in foreign tongues.
If your country displays more flags of a country that does not exist than of your own, then something is profoundly wrong with your country. If your newspapers feature Jews on the front page every day, then your moral compass has been deliberately shattered.
Think about it: The war in Gaza is the best thing that could have happened to someone like Russian President Vladimir Putin. Russia’s war in Ukraine has a death toll on a magnitude higher than the combined casualties of the entire Israeli-Palestinian conflict throughout history. Yet the West has shifted its outrage to a spectacle that costs it nothing. Ukrainians are learning, brutally, what the Jews have always known: Their suffering will never be enough to hold the world’s attention when the promise of blaming Israel is on the table.
And so, the lie is maintained: that recognition of Palestine is an act of justice. It is not. It is an act of cowardice, an act of surrender, an act of distraction. It rewards those who failed to destroy Israel by violence with the gift of international legitimacy. It tells every forgotten nation—the Kurds, Druze, Assyrians, Yazidis, Bahaʼi—that their oppression is irrelevant unless it can be pinned on the Jews.
This is the true obscenity.
Human rights are either for everyone or for no one. And today, they are for no one. They have been reduced to a political weapon, stripped of universality, prostituted to the cause of convenience.
The recognition of Palestine is not the end of hypocrisy; it is its triumph. It reveals Western democracies not as defenders of principle but as hollow states too weak to face their own crises, too cynical to admit their own failures and too eager to sacrifice Jews, yet again, to buy temporary calm on the home front.
The question that remains is not whether or not Palestine deserves recognition, but whether the West can still call itself a civilization when its principles are so cheaply sold, its morality so easily corrupted, and scapegoats are so predictably chosen.
Every time that Europe has chosen the Jew as scapegoat, it has eventually destroyed itself. What begins with Jews never ends with Jews. Today, it is Israel; tomorrow, it will be Europe’s own societies, consumed by the very flames they themselves have lit.
And then, there will be no human rights left, even to pretend.
