Javed Akbar 
If other’s pain fails to touch your soul, then you dare not attach the word “human” with yours. –Charlotte Bronte*
On October 7, 2023 (almost exactly two years to the day), the Palestinian question stormed back onto the stage of world politics with a gravity that could no longer be ignored. For the first time in decades, the rights of the Palestinian people gained renewed legitimacy.
Pressured by the moral outrage of their own citizens, parliaments across continents were cornered—forced to either recognize Palestine or at least declare its establishment as an undeniable necessity. Yet behind these gestures lies a brutal paradox: in Gaza, genocide continues unabated ferociously before the world’s eyes. Hundreds of thousands have been slaughtered or maimed in cold blood. More than two million have been displaced from their bombed out homes and are being starved to death. Rarely has the chasm between lofty proclamations and lived reality yawned so wide.
Recognition of a Palestinian state, while offering no respite to those under bombardment in Gaza or to families dispossessed in the West Bank and Jerusalem, is recognition in name only. It is not progress—it is performance. A symbolic fig leaf designed to cleanse consciences, even as governments continue to arm, trade with, and politically shield zionist Israel.
Without action, recognition mutates into hypocrisy draped in moral vocabulary, soothing the guilty while leaving Palestinians exposed to annihilation.
True recognition begins not with speeches but with protection. A state is not a cartographic line, nor a ceremonial flag raised at the United Nations. A state is its people—their right to safety, dignity, and freedom from extermination.
If the Palestinians are being bombed, starved, and exiled, recognition of a Palestinian state without protection is hollow. Its first test—its only real test—is the immediate cessation of genocide. Anything less reduces recognition to theatre: a palliative for western conscience that masks complicity while perpetuating impunity.
October 2023 marked a rupture. The carefully cultivated narrative of Israel as a democratic state merely “defending itself” crumbled under the images of devastation in Gaza. Mass killings, engineered starvation, and the systematic destruction of hospitals, schools and apartment buildings demolished that illusion and shifted global opinion.
It was not political courage but public conscience that pushed governments into symbolic gestures of recognition. Yet symbolism cannot shield a child from shrapnel, nor can it resurrect a family buried beneath the rubble.
Canada’s recognition of Palestine exemplifies this hollow theatre—polished in rhetoric, vacant in consequence. Ottawa cannot paper over decades of complicity, nor disguise its refusal to confront Israel’s machinery of dispossession and extermination. Canadian leaders have long sermonized about peace and human rights while quietly underwriting oppression. Words that are not backed by accountability are not diplomacy—they are cowardice dressed in diplomatic attire.
Sincerity demands more. End arms sales. Halt military cooperation. Suspend the Canada–Israel Free Trade Agreement. Uphold not just domestic law but binding international rulings: the July 2024 International Court of Justice judgment branding Israel’s occupation unlawful, and the September 2025 UN Commission of Inquiry’s unambiguous confirmation of genocide in Gaza.
These are not symbolic advisories; they are legal imperatives that demand investigation and prosecution of enablers. Yet Canada persists in shielding Israel militarily, economically, and diplomatically—while parading as a champion of human rights and justice.
Canada’s credibility, its very moral claim to justice, now hangs in the balance. To stop short of real accountability—through sanctions, arms embargo, and the rigorous enforcement of international law—is to side with the oppressor. Symbolic gestures will no longer suffice. The choice is stark, the moment unforgiving: act decisively against zionist barbarism, or surrender forever the right to speak of justice.
Javed Akbar can be reached at: mjavedakbar@gmail.com
*18th century British novelist, Charlotte Bronte, who produced some of the greatest classics of English literature.
As the Harper government pushes ahead with imposing the draconian Bill C-51 on Canadians that would grant even more powers to the Canadian S...
The Harper government’s Bill C-51 is a massive assault on the civil and political rights of all Canadians. He is rushing it through parlia...
After spending 13 years in various prisons including 10 years at the notorious torture chamber at Guantanamo Bay undergoing torture, Omar Kh...
Canadians in overwhelming numbers rejected the hateful and Islamophobic policies of Stephen Harper, leader of the Conservative Party, in the...
