Aside from how plenty of other governments are recognised while committing horrific acts, this is recognition of Palestine, not Gaza. Even before the displacement and deaths of the last two years, most of Palestine’s population was in the West Bank, and it is not run by Hamas. Hamas won the last election, but it did not get a majority and has not been in government for most Palestinians for almost 20 years
I’ll go with a slightly older example so that it has more settled scholarship: Indonesia during the East Timor genocide. I don’t think anyone stopped recognising Indonesia despite it invading and occupying what is now Timor-Leste, killing tens to hundreds of thousands of a population smaller than Gaza’s, and conducting mass-scale sexual violence
Of course they didn’t. But this is about an initial recognition. This one feels unseemly to me personally.
Not saying it’s wrong in principle. It certainly feels like a “sympathy recognition”, much like Kosovo and indeed Timor Leste itself. But in those cases the putative independent states were not run (even partly) by religious extremists with overtly genocidal intentions.
Still, I will agree that things are not black and white.
Aside from how plenty of other governments are recognised while committing horrific acts, this is recognition of Palestine, not Gaza. Even before the displacement and deaths of the last two years, most of Palestine’s population was in the West Bank, and it is not run by Hamas. Hamas won the last election, but it did not get a majority and has not been in government for most Palestinians for almost 20 years
Citation needed. I can’t think of anything comparable, certainly not since the UN’s founding.
Fair point.
I’ll go with a slightly older example so that it has more settled scholarship: Indonesia during the East Timor genocide. I don’t think anyone stopped recognising Indonesia despite it invading and occupying what is now Timor-Leste, killing tens to hundreds of thousands of a population smaller than Gaza’s, and conducting mass-scale sexual violence
Of course they didn’t. But this is about an initial recognition. This one feels unseemly to me personally.
Not saying it’s wrong in principle. It certainly feels like a “sympathy recognition”, much like Kosovo and indeed Timor Leste itself. But in those cases the putative independent states were not run (even partly) by religious extremists with overtly genocidal intentions.
Still, I will agree that things are not black and white.