There is an uncomfortable truth that runs through the contemporary rhetoric on the recognition of Palestine: it does not produce any concrete change, but rather risks fuelling new illusions and frustrations. At a time when foreign policy has turned into a media ritual, where every gesture is amplified by social networks and emotional campaigns, reality remains the prisoner of a gigantic collective representation.

We have become accustomed to seeing government leaders, pundits and protesters evoking recognition as a moral turning point, the ultimate answer to the tragedies of conflict. But statehood does not come about by popular acclamation, nor by pressure of public opinion: it demands respect for the objective criteria of international law.

Those who appeal to ‘genocide’ or the need to ‘do something’ forget that the same law invoked also imposes rules for the recognition of a state. Neither emotion, nor the UN majority, nor moral urgency are enough if legal and political prerequisites are lacking. There is no recognition that holds if the survival and defence of Israel is not guaranteed. Recognition is impossible without the disarmament of Hamas. There is no peace without realism.

The real drama of our age is that diplomacy has been reduced to spectacle, with an audience demanding emotion and not rules; the defeat of strategic thinking is accomplished if everything becomes storytelling, flags, hashtags, appeals, indignation. But this only sublimates impotence: peace recedes every time reality dissolves into the play.

The trap of symbolic recognition

Today, the recognition of Palestine has become the litmus test of Western conformity. It is no longer a question of substance, but of public perception and management of one’s image in international fora. With each new crisis, each government seeks its own ‘moral airtime’ by declaring that it wants to recognise Palestine as an act of justice, as if a symbolic act were enough to right historical wrongs, real injustices, and entrenched power imbalances.

Over the weeks, the political and media debate has turned into an incessant chase for those who show themselves to be more sensitive, more ‘close’ to Palestinian suffering, while ignoring the actual reality that takes place between the Mediterranean and the Jordan. The gesture of recognition is not accompanied by a strategy, by guarantees, by precise and verifiable conditions: it is simply the answer to an internal question of meaning, the flag waved to silence oppositions, critical minorities, angry squares. Thus Western foreign policy abdicates its real role and limits itself to chasing the cycle of social indignation and polls.

The legal and political truth remain in the background. Palestine, in international law, does not meet the minimum conditions set by the Montevideo Convention: it lacks certain borders, it lacks a unified leadership, it lacks – above all – a security structure capable of controlling the territory and guaranteeing any form of coexistence. In the meantime, the armed factions maintain firm control of the Gaza Strip, the rivalry between Hamas and the Palestinian National Authority remains a boulder on the road to any institutional evolution, and the public declarations of Hamas leaders – often relaunched by regional television and ignored in European talk shows – are marked by theannihilation of Israel and, in some releases, even hatred towards Christians and the West. These are not words to be underestimated: they are the ideological framework that explains why the issue of borders, coexistence and security is never just a technical question.

Yet, in the Western media and palaces, all this is systematically set aside. The dominant narrative demands simplification, and complexity is delegitimised. Appeals to the rules of international law are branded cynical, Israel’s security reasons are reduced to a pretext. The idea is insinuated that anyone who lingers to demand concrete guarantees – for the survival of both peoples – is morally suspect. The result is that, in the name of an ethical and political pressure that has little strategic purpose, there is a risk of legitimising a permanent division and of offering new opportunities for radicalisation to those who thrive on stalemate and ambiguity.

In the meantime, Western governments capitalise on public emotionalism: recognition serves more to reassure the electorate, placate squares and talk shows, and claim a moral posture, than to build a real peace process. The parties – in Italy in particular, but not only – exasperate their positions for electoral convenience, turning one of the world’s most complex geopolitical issues into propaganda or campaign material. And so, in the media hubbub, all reference to the facts is lost: the gesture of recognition does not change the balance on the ground, it does not move Hamas from its positions, it does not impose concrete steps on anyone either towards peace or towards responsibility.

Reflections of Western attention on the Palestinian people

For the Palestinians, this new ‘international cheer’ is a double-edged sword: it creates expectations, but then only fuels illusion and frustration. It does not change the political framework, it does not shift the centre of gravity of diplomacy. For the Israelis, the risk is to see their own security needs trivialised, resulting in greater defensive closure. In between, international society is content to ‘do something’, but without ever really changing the terms of the issue.

The real tragedy is this: symbolic politics becomes everything and is emptied of all substance. Recognition of Palestine as a media act does not stop conflicts, does not build bridges, does not force Hamas to moderate, does not offer security guarantees to Israel, does not produce any diplomatic breakthrough, nor does it solve the knots of sovereignty and borders. On the contrary, it risks exacerbating divisions, cementing radical narratives, and stifling any real future compromise.

Everyone proclaims, no one resolves. The story is consumed outside the palaces and the newsrooms, while the global debate becomes increasingly distant from the facts and increasingly imprisoned in its own emotional insecurity. The Palestinian issue, thus reduced to a communicative ritual, remains suspended between the desire to do the right thing and the fear of really facing reality. And, as always, the void left by the truth is filled by the frustration of those who hoped for a solution and find themselves, once again, with another shattered illusion.

Arab fractures and new narratives: the loneliness of the Palestinian cause

While the West turns the recognition of Palestine into a show for internal use, something is also moving in the regional arena. The Arab League, after decades of ambiguity, seems to have finally broken the taboo: for the first time, several Arab states – in particular Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Qatar, and other signatories of the recent UN conference – have explicitly asked Hamas to hand over control of Gaza to the Palestinian National Authority and abandon the armed struggle. A clear distance that would have been unthinkable even just five years ago.

This signal must be read with lucidity. If until yesterday the Palestinian cause was the cornerstone of pan-Arab identity, today it risks becoming a bargaining chip in regional security balances, where governments – increasingly authoritarian and concerned about their own stability – no longer tolerate the risk that Hamas represents. The era of automatic solidarity is over: the ‘Palestinian question’ can no longer be wielded as a fig leaf in relations with Israel or as a pretext for Arab squares. Thus, Western recognition of Palestine risks appearing, in the eyes of Arab leaders, as an irrelevant gesture, if it is not accompanied by a real institutional transition between the Palestinian factions.

The paradox is that, at the very moment when international legitimacy finally seems within reach for Palestine, its real representation – the ‘who’, the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ of this statehood – is becoming more fragile than ever. And this is demonstrated by the growing Arab pressure for a solution that cuts out Hamas, a divisive and violent authority, uninstitutional and dangerous for regional balances, to opt for the PNA.

At the same time, international public discussion is also showing its structural crisis. The places that used to be garrisons of analysis, verification and thirdness – such as the UN halls or the great human rights commissions – are now occupied by figures who mistake activism for knowledge, propaganda for investigation. The figure of Francesca Albanese – who is supposed to represent the UN’s thirdness and balance – is only the most glaring example of a degeneration that is now systemic: in international panels, on talk shows, even in universities, ‘supporters’ with the depth of a viral post proliferate, incapable of distinguishing law from politics, statehood from rhetoric.

This new geography of public debate is the real abyss. When emotional pressure replaces rigour, the discussion on international rights becomes a farce. When analyses are reduced to slogans, the risk is to hand over the narrative – and thus the strategy – to the least competent, the loudest, those who thrive on polarisation.

After all, this is the drama of the current season: the Palestinian cause finds itself increasingly alone, surrounded by symbolic accolades, regional leaders who instrumentalise it, and a West that turns everything into a ‘show’. Meanwhile, competent voices are thinning out, leaving the field to influencers of improvised geopolitics.

This is how new illusions are nurtured, diplomatic bridges are burned and the clash between fans is exacerbated, while complexity – the real complexity – is buried under an avalanche of hashtags.

The great media ritual: between emotion and strategic reality

The recognition of Palestine has now become a veritable media ritual. We are faced with a step that, rather than producing concrete effects on the ground, fuels a collective imagination, a great global theatre in which consensus is measured in hashtags, public statements, polls and emotional polarisation. The symbolic force of this gesture – the formal recognition of a Palestinian state by historically cautious Western countries – has a communicative impact that goes far beyond legal or geopolitical substance. It is no coincidence that each announcement is relayed by political leaders, newspapers, opinion makers, activists, all of whom are committed to embedding the news in a narrative that simplifies and radicalises, almost always in favour of their own side.

In this climate, the Palestinian issue is transformed from a historical and political problem into a banner of identity: those who take sides ‘pro-Palestine’ or ‘pro-Israel’ do so more often out of symbolic affiliation than out of real knowledge of history, international law or geopolitical complexity. The public debate, especially in Italy, quickly sinks into stadium cheering and emotional rhetoric: foreign policy bends to the laws of immediate consensus, while the parties exaggerate positions that are only useful for gathering votes or standing out in the media circus.

Public figures such as Francesca Albanese, who has been able to turn her role as UN rapporteur into a personal platform for visibility, leverage this drift. Her public outings – often entrusted to social media or television hosts – tend to downplay the events of 7 October, sometimes slipping into historical ambiguities or statements that reawaken ancient anti-Semitic sentiments in Italian society. Not only: in the general silence, the declarations of Hamas leaders are deliberately ignored, who, from Lebanese TV and social media, openly reiterate political objectives based on the destruction of Israel (and, in a certain rhetoric, also of Christianity). All this disappears in the dominant narrative, where every event is filtered according to the public’s liking or the convenience of the moment.

It is interesting to note how even in third places, once gyms of rigorous analysis, pseudo-fans who know little about the subject but ride on the emotions of the moment have inserted themselves. The Arab League itself, historically united around support for the Palestinian cause, is slowly distancing itself from Hamas, explicitly asking the group to hand over its weapons to the Palestinian National Authority. A step that signals the will, at least in part of the Arab world, to move away from the logic of all-out war and seek a new, more pragmatic and less ideological balance.

The real drama is that emotional mediatisation not only obscures the root causes and possible solutions to the conflict, but also produces a series of new illusions and frustrations. Those who invoke international law often do so without having studied its foundations, confusing symbolic gestures with actual legal steps: the recognition of a state has never been – nor will it ever be – an act ‘tout court’, nor can it disregard the ability to guarantee security, coexistence and respect for the rights of both Palestinians and Israelis. And yet, the binary logic of public discourse reduces everything to a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’, to a liberating gesture which, however, deprived of real conditions, runs the risk of aggravating the very tensions it would like to dissolve.

In this scenario, Israel ‘s right to defend itself is often confused, attacked, or ignored, while the Palestinian cause is projected into a mythical, victimless dimension that does not take into account the responsibilities of those who – like the Hamas leadership – oppose any hypothesis of compromise and base their power on the perpetuation of the conflict. Recognition ‘tout court’ without guarantees of survival for Israel has never existed in the practice of serious diplomacy: history teaches it, politics imposes it, international law confirms it.

The truth, which few want to see, is that this game is now all played out on the terrain of public perception. In Italy, more than anywhere else, the battle for Palestine is fought on TV programmes, in live social broadcasts, in party statements, chasing consensus on the skin of an endless human tragedy. Recognition is spoken of as one would speak of a moral prize, without ever questioning the minimum conditions of statehood, or addressing the uncomfortable but real knot of Israeli security.

In the triumph of emotional storytelling,rational analysis is expelled from the debate. Citizens – often manipulated by public figures who know little about the real history of that world – feel invested with an ethical task that, in fact, does not produce any substantial change. On the contrary, it risks producing new rifts, both abroad and in our society.

Foreign policy – and the history of Palestine proves this in an exemplary manner – is not done ‘by hearsay’, nor can it be reduced to a battle of sentiments or flags. When the media ritual takes the place of reality, diplomacy, law and the very possibility of building peace are sacrificed on the altar of an ephemeral narrative, unable to bear the weight of truth.