# Will Recognition Help Palestine? | Snapshots by Imam Tom Facchine

**Author:** Tom Facchine
**Series:** Imam Tom Live
**Published:** 2025-09-03
**YouTube:** https://youtu.be/9AoJTOhwrFk
**URL:** https://yaqeeninstitute.org/watch/series/imam-tom-live/will-recognition-help-palestine-snapshots-by-imam-tom
**Topics:** History, Politics & Practical Theology

## Description
Many claim to believe. They speak of love for their scripture, loyalty to their prophet, and devotion to God. But belief without obedience is hollow. When revelation challenged comfort, it was ignored. The book was honored in words, but neglected in action. This episode exposes the gap between...

## Transcript
**[0:00]** It looks like that for the first time Palestine might be recognized as an official state. France, Britain and Germany have said that they are willing to recognize Palestine as a state at the UN General Assembly in September of 2025.

**[0:19]** This seems like an important diplomatic shift, but unfortunately there is room to be skeptical. And if you know the history of negotiations between Israel and Palestine, you would have a lot of reason to be skeptical.

**[0:36]** For decades and decades, things like the two-state solution and the so-called peace process have been used to simply delay Palestinian statehood and autonomy and liberation in order to allow the occupation to continue doing what it does, which is to seize land, especially

**[0:52]** in the West Bank, to kill and murder people, especially in the Gaza Strip, and in general to displace and to genocide the people of Palestine. In fact, when it comes to the Oslo Accords, the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993. Edward Said called the Oslo Accords colonization by negotiation.

**[1:11]** The idea was that giving mutual recognition, recognizing Israel's quote-unquote right to exist, which by the way isn't really a thing in international law, but recognizing Israel in the first place as a state in exchange for the recognition of Palestinian territories.

**[1:27]** It was a very controversial move at the time, a move that resulted in a lot of backlash. And I think that in 2025, looking back, we can say that, yeah, it might not have been the best move. That the de facto situation was that even though it seemed like Palestine was starting

**[1:44]** to get some autonomy or some recognition, the reality was that Edward Said was right, the way in which the Oslo Accords took place and every other negotiation since was it created a status quo where Israel was allowed to militarize and to cut up the West Bank especially, and

**[2:00]** to continue to chip away, allowing illegal settlements and then enabling the recognition of those settlements in order to pin Palestinians on smaller and smaller and smaller pieces of land, disconnect them more and more, militarize more and more of the space, and essentially

**[2:18]** make life so difficult that people are willing to leave. And in addition to that, if anybody was against this process, it was really difficult to challenge it because people will just say, oh, you don't like the peace process? What else do you want?

**[2:33]** You want them to go to war? You want them to fight? This is the peace process. Are you against peace? So rhetorically, it was very, very difficult to come and stand up and say, this is not fair. This is actually exactly what Edward Said said. It's colonization by negotiation. You guys are saying that this is a peace process, but in reality, this is a process

**[2:51]** of displacement and further colonial settlement. And if you dig a little bit deeper into the fine details of this promise by France, Britain and Canada, there's a lot of reason to be skeptical. France said, for example, that what they're going to recognize is an unmilitarized Palestine.

**[3:10]** Do you know of a single nation in the world that doesn't have a military or that's not allowed to have a military in order to defend itself? It doesn't really make sense. A Canadian PM said that he would support a pro-Zionist Palestinian state. A Zionist, if you will, Palestinian state that recognizes the right of Israel to exist,

**[3:30]** not just to exist, but to prosper, not live in fear. And when we had previously Dr. Anas Tikriti on one of our programs, he said exactly this point. A state? Well, what type of state? If you bring the evildoers to the negotiation table, they're going to attempt to give you

**[3:45]** the most useless state imaginable, a state like Egypt, a state like Jordan, a Zionist Palestinian state that's going to just do everything that Israel wants it to do. Think a glorified version of the Palestinian Authority under Mahmoud Abbas. And what would happen then is a similar thing that happened with the Oslo Accords.

**[4:03]** If you tried to point out the unjust nature of this agreement or this arrangement, oh, you're against the two-state solution. You're against Palestinian statehood. You're against Palestinian sovereignty. And these are how these things get defended discursively. So we need to make sure that we see through the propaganda and that we understand that

**[4:22]** we want not just any state, that we want dignity. We want freedom. We want actual protection, security, normal things for the people of Palestine. And we have to face the fact that Israel doesn't want that. That's the elephant in the room.

**[4:38]** And there's no solving this issue unless that issue is dealt with.

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