The New Zealand government, like many others across the imperialist West, has refused to recognise a Palestinian state. At first glance, this appears to be a diplomatic slight or a moral failure. In truth, it is far deeper, it is the calculated refusal of a settler-colonial state to recognise the legitimacy of another colonised people’s struggle, precisely because doing so would expose the contradictions at the heart of its own existence. But while the refusal is damning, we must also reckon with a more sobering truth that even when states do offer recognition, it is little more than a symbolic gesture – a hollow act that does nothing to halt the bombs, lift the siege, or stop the machinery of genocide grinding on. Recognition without action is a cruel theatre of humanitarian concern, designed to pacify outrage while ensuring business as usual for empire.
Since 1988, over 140 UN member states have recognised the State of Palestine in some form. In 2012, Palestine was granted “non-member observer state” status at the United Nations, a symbolic victory after decades of lobbying. Yet in 2025, Palestinians remain stateless, occupied, and subject to one of the most violent genocides of the modern era. Recognition has not stopped the killing. Recognition has not ended the blockade of Gaza. Recognition has not secured the right of return for refugees. Recognition has not dismantled Israel’s apartheid laws or halted its expansion of illegal settlements.
Instead, recognition has been reduced to a diplomatic fig leaf. Countries such as Ireland, Spain, and Norway have made headlines by announcing recognition of Palestine, but their governments continue to trade with Israel and the corporations profiting from occupation. The European Union as a whole continues to treat Israel as a key trading partner, granting it access to markets and research funds. Even those states who present themselves as “friends of Palestine” refuse to enact the kinds of measures that could meaningfully challenge Israeli power: arms embargoes, sanctions, cutting of diplomatic and economic ties, or the expulsion of ambassadors.
The futility of recognition is that it leaves intact the very structures of global capitalism and imperialism that uphold Israeli apartheid. By recognising Palestine, Western states can signal virtue without challenging their military alliances, their corporations’ profits, or their own complicity in settler-colonial violence. It is not solidarity, it is performance.
New Zealand has consistently followed the lead of larger imperial powers in matters of international recognition. It has recognised Kosovo, South Sudan, and even Ukraine’s sovereignty claims, yet it refuses to recognise Palestine. The reason is not a mystery, recognition of Palestine is not just about international diplomacy, it is about admitting that colonised people have a right to resist and reclaim stolen land.
New Zealand, itself a settler-colonial project built on the dispossession of Māori, has no interest in affirming this principle. To do so would invite uncomfortable parallels with its own history of land theft, broken treaties, and ongoing colonial violence. A government that relies on the fiction of legitimacy over stolen land cannot afford to legitimise Palestinian claims to sovereignty. Recognition would shine too bright a light on the contradictions of Aotearoa’s own foundations.
Successive governments, Labour and National alike, have hidden behind the rhetoric of “supporting a two-state solution,” while refusing to take the step of recognising Palestine as a state. This duplicity serves two purposes. First, it allows New Zealand to maintain its loyalty to the United States, its primary imperial ally. Second, it avoids alienating the business and military interests tied to Israel and its Western backers. New Zealand’s military companies profit from involvement in weapons development; its intelligence networks are linked into the Five Eyes alliance that shields Israeli crimes. Recognition would be a symbolic rebuke to these interests, and so it is avoided.
The refusal of recognition is obscene, but there is a further obscenity – the idea that recognition, even if granted, could matter in the midst of genocide. Since October 2023, Israel has unleashed unrelenting mass killing in Gaza, bombing homes, schools, hospitals, and refugee camps. The death toll has risen into the hundreds of thousands. Famine, displacement, and disease are the daily reality for survivors. International law has been shredded, and yet no state has intervened to stop the massacre.
What would recognition mean in this context? Would a proclamation from New Zealand or any other government bring back the dead, rebuild the rubble, or open the borders for aid? Clearly not. Recognition during genocide is not liberation, rather it is a sickly moral gesture that allows governments to pretend they have done “something” while the killing continues unchecked.
If recognition had any weight, the dozens of states that have recognised Palestine since 1988 would have already transformed the material conditions of occupation. Instead, recognition has been powerless precisely because it was never intended to be power. It is designed to look like solidarity while ensuring nothing fundamental changes.
Recognition without action is worse than nothing, because it obscures the machinery of complicity. States that recognise Palestine while continuing to fund, arm, and trade with Israel are enablers of genocide. The United States sends billions in military aid every year. Germany exports weapons that are used to bomb Palestinian civilians. Britain provides diplomatic cover at the UN. Australia trains alongside Israeli forces. New Zealand, though smaller, is tied into this web through its alliances and intelligence networks.
Every state that claims to support a “peace process” while maintaining ties to Israel is complicit. Every state that recognises Palestine without imposing sanctions or embargoes is complicit. Recognition is not solidarity; solidarity would mean dismantling the political and economic systems that enable occupation. Recognition is not resistance; resistance would mean arming boycott movements, cutting trade, and isolating Israel as a pariah state. Recognition is not liberation; liberation can only come from below, from the struggles of Palestinians themselves, supported by international movements of workers, students, and communities.
The question of recognition cannot be separated from the realities of Aotearoa. This country was built on the dispossession of Māori land, the imposition of foreign law, and the suppression of Indigenous resistance. To this day, Māori face structural violence in housing, health, education, and the justice system. The state that refuses to recognise Palestine is the same state that refuses to honour Te Tiriti o Waitangi in substance.
Solidarity with Palestine in Aotearoa cannot be limited to calls for governmental recognition. It must mean confronting the settler-colonial structures here at home. It must mean standing with Māori struggles for tino rangatiratanga, land back, and sovereignty. The refusal to recognise Palestine is not an aberration, it is consistent with a settler state that denies Indigenous rights everywhere.
If recognition is futile, what then is the path forward? For anarcho-communists, the answer is clear: liberation will not come from the recognition of states but from the destruction of states, empires, and the capitalist system they defend. Palestine will not be free because Ireland or Spain or New Zealand declares it so. Palestine will be free when the people of Palestine, supported by global solidarity movements, dismantle the systems of occupation and apartheid that oppress them.
This requires building movements of boycott, divestment, and sanctions from below. It requires disrupting the flow of weapons, money, and political legitimacy to Israel. It requires solidarity strikes by dock workers refusing to load arms, by students occupying campuses to demand divestment, by communities blockading military shipments. It requires connecting the struggle in Palestine to all struggles against colonialism, racism, and exploitation.
Recognition is empty; direct action is power. Recognition is symbolic; material solidarity is transformative. Recognition keeps faith in governments; liberation requires their overthrow.
The New Zealand government’s refusal to recognise Palestine is a mark of cowardice and complicity. Yet even if it were to grant recognition tomorrow, the futility of such a gesture would remain. Recognition does not stop bombs, lift sieges, or return land. It is a hollow act, designed to placate outrage while preserving empire.
The path to Palestinian liberation does not run through parliaments or ministries. It runs through the streets, the workplaces, the universities, and the fields where ordinary people confront the machinery of imperialism. It runs through the linking of struggles – Māori sovereignty in Aotearoa, Black liberation in the United States, Indigenous resistance in Latin America, and anti-imperialist movements worldwide.
Palestine will not be free when governments say it is a state. Palestine will be free when the people overthrow apartheid, and when the global system that sustains it is brought down. Recognition is not liberation. Liberation is struggle. And it is only through that struggle, everywhere, that the chains of empire can be broken.