“Declaration of delegitimisation”: How the New York conference gave political cover to the siege of Palestinians and suppression of their resistance

The New York Declaration issued following the “International Conference for the Peaceful Settlement of the Palestinian Question and the Implementation of the Two-State Solution” held on 30 July in New York—under joint Saudi French chairmanship and with the participation of several states and entities—comprised 42 points, too many to cover in full within this article. However, what must be stated at the outset is that the declaration effectively represents a move to delegitimise the Palestinian resistance as a whole and serves as an indictment of the Palestinian people and their long-standing struggle—not merely a rejection of Hamas. The declaration explicitly equates Palestinians with Israelis and condemns the Palestinian national struggle by employing terminology such as “terrorism,” “extremism,” and “incitement.” Moreover, it adopts Israeli propaganda in its depiction of the ongoing genocide.

The danger does not lie solely in the stance taken by certain states and entities towards Hamas, but rather in the broader Arab, Islamic, and international framing of the Palestinian struggle as something to be condemned — all in the midst of an ongoing genocide. This contradicts any claim that the declaration paves the way for a two-state solution or offers a real opportunity to halt the atrocities, should Hamas comply and lay down its arms.

The issue with the content of the declaration does not lie in the fact that the states behind it failed to present Hamas with a workable plan — one that would ensure an end to the genocide, prevent displacement, and initiate the immediate lifting of the siege and reconstruction, in exchange for disarmament and the release of what the declaration refers to as “hostages.” Rather, the real problem is that everything being portrayed as positive merely serves as a cover for the only positions truly being solidified and institutionalised in this moment of genocide. This reveals a deeply paradoxical stance: these states have adopted Israeli propaganda and equated the events of 7 October with the ongoing genocide — at a time when the Israeli narrative is being exposed globally like never before, including in traditional centres of support for the Zionist project across Europe, Britain, and the United States. And this exposure extends not only to the current atrocities but also to the entire history of the conflict.

 The declaration adopts terms such as “terrorism,” “extremism,” and “incitement” — concepts that typically serve to condemn the weaker party, which in this case is the Palestinian people. As these terms are broad and undefined within the declaration, they are not directed solely at Hamas, but rather at the very principle of resisting occupation. This effectively places the Palestinian people under pressure, even culturally, by undermining their right to resist — including within the official framework of the Palestinian Authority’s own educational curricula. In this context, Israel’s parallel obligations become meaningless, as seen in Clause 18, which supports efforts to combat incitement across all platforms, particularly in schools. It welcomes the Palestinian Authority’s curriculum reform efforts while merely calling on Israel to do the same.

In this context, the call for Israel to revise its curricula and control its media platforms to prevent incitement is effectively meaningless. Its real purpose is to obscure the labelling of Palestinians’ expression of their rights as “incitement.” Meanwhile, the Palestinian curriculum is already undergoing constant revision, stripping it of national content and distorting generations of students’ understanding of the history of the conflict. These changes are a response to Western and Israeli funding conditions imposed on the Palestinian Authority. Now, the Arab and Islamic states that participated in the conference and signed the declaration have joined Israel and the West in pressuring the Palestinian people to abandon their historical narrative in exchange for financial support to the Authority — which itself continues to suffer under sustained Israeli economic pressure, despite having already adopted the content of the declaration and pre-emptively complied with its demands.

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The broad concepts adopted by the declaration align closely with Israel’s strategy of political elimination of the Palestinian people. Terms such as “incitement” and the endorsement of continuous revisions to Palestinian curricula — ostensibly to eliminate undefined forms of incitement — reflect this approach. There is no clear or objective standard for what constitutes “incitement”, especially given that Palestinian textbooks contain no explicit calls for resistance against the occupation. In this context, the definition of incitement expands unpredictably — potentially encompassing even basic descriptions of the occupation as an occupation. This, in turn, pressures Palestinians to abandon their legitimate historical narrative regarding Zionist colonialism, as well as their deep-rooted historical, cultural, and emotional connection to all of Palestine — including towns and villages now part of what is internationally, and increasingly Arab and Islamically, recognised as Israel. It also includes their right to recount the origins of their Nakba and the founding of the Israeli state.

Arab and Islamic adoption of the concept of “incitement” — at least by the states participating in the conference, including notably Turkey and the Arab League — comes at a time when a genocide is underway, and with an Israeli government that is led by a far-right Kahanist movement occupying key sovereign ministries. The Ministry of National Security is headed by Ben Gvir, and the Ministry of Finance by Smotrich — both of whom openly declare that their ideological project includes completing the map of Israel through the occupation of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and parts of Egypt, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. So, what is being proposed in the midst of genocide? Disarmament, ending incitement, and reforming school curricula! And one must ask: what national content even remains in these curricula to be revised?

The adoption of the term “incitement” in this context closely mirrors the long-standing demand that the Palestinian Authority restructure itself and comply with Western and Arab “reform” conditions. Just as “incitement” remains deliberately undefined — its vagueness allowing it to serve as a tool of endless humiliation and blackmail — so too does the reform agenda function as a mechanism of pressure and control. It is no surprise, then, that Clause 21 reaffirms the need for Palestinians to combat “incitement and hate speech,” while simultaneously urging the Palestinian Authority to pursue a “credible reform agenda.” This follows the previous clause, which welcomes the commitments made by President Abbas in his letter dated 9 June 2025 — including a pledge to seek a peaceful settlement to the Palestinian question, to continue rejecting violence and terrorism, and to ensure that the promised Palestinian state “does not intend to be a militarised state and is prepared to work on security arrangements beneficial to all parties, while maintaining full respect for its sovereignty, so long as it receives international protection.”

But under conditions of overwhelming Israeli superiority, such language can only mean one thing: that the proposed Palestinian state will effectively serve as a security subcontractor for Israel. This recalls what Netanyahu said in 2020 — that he had no objection to Palestinians calling their fragmented, non-sovereign entity an “empire” if they wished. It also echoes Trump’s so-called “peace plan” from his previous term in office. After all, the word “state” itself poses little problem for either Israel or the United States — so long as it comes stripped of content and sovereignty.

If this is the framework being promoted, then the concepts of terrorism, extremism, and incitement are effectively being applied to the entire history of the Palestinian struggle. These terms are now being recycled in an ongoing process of siege and blackmail — even against the Palestinian Authority, which has already complied with all the imposed conditions. This is done without any acknowledgment of Israel’s foundational and ongoing aggression within the Palestinian Authority’s own territory. There are no Hamas weapons in the West Bank, and nothing resembling the events of 7 October has taken place there — yet this Israeli aggression is still treated as equivalent to what is now labelled Palestinian extremism, terrorism, incitement, and hate. That aggression has reached the point of forcibly displacing entire communities — carried out by the Israeli military in camps like Jenin and Tulkarm — alongside continuous settler militia attacks on Palestinian towns, involving land seizure, killings, arson, destruction, and even the deliberate drying out of water springs. It is a slow process of displacement, one of its clearest forms being the use of economic siege.

This position — which treats even a Palestinian’s adherence to their national identity as a form of incitement, and aligns with ongoing Israeli and Western pressure tactics — inevitably strips the events of 7 October of their broader context as part of a struggle against Zionist colonialism. This comes at a time when growing segments of Western opinion reject isolating that moment from its wider historical and political setting. Yet the declaration condemns the 7 October operation in the same breath as it condemns Israeli attacks on Palestinian civilians — all while deliberately avoiding the use of the term “genocide” to describe Israel’s actions. In doing so, it legitimises Israeli aggression against what may be defined as Palestinian military targets and lends credibility to Israeli propaganda about the objectives of its war — ignoring entirely the fact that Palestinian resistance is deeply rooted in the broader fabric of Palestinian society.

The attempt to equate the events of 7 October with Israeli aggression — particularly through the repetition of Israeli narratives regarding the killing of civilians and the taking of “hostages” as framed in the declaration — not only isolates 7 October from its broader context, but also amounts to a shocking disregard for the scale of genocide and destruction committed by Israel since. Regardless of one’s position on the 7 October operation — whether it stems from a principled opposition to armed resistance, criticism of Hamas’s calculations, or outright hostility toward the movement — it is simply indefensible to remain fixated on that single moment after everything that has followed. How can the 7 October operation possibly be equated with the mass atrocities and genocidal assault that ensued?

Even when the declaration affirms the importance of UNRWA’s role (Clause 14), it does so by welcoming “its ongoing efforts to implement the recommendations of the Colonna Report.” That report was itself a response to Israel’s accusations against UNRWA, claiming that some of its staff were affiliated with Hamas. This sets a dangerous precedent — legitimising the condemnation of any institution if one of its employees engages in acts of resistance or joins an organisation banned by Israel. It is part of the broader campaign to delegitimise all forms of resistance to occupation and to tighten the siege on the Palestinian people. But one must ask: are the Arab and Islamic states that signed this declaration also prepared to call for Israel’s delegitimisation and demand it be stripped of its heavy and nuclear weaponry after committing acts of genocide — especially when this same declaration equates victim and oppressor? And will they condemn the entirety of Israel, now governed by an explicitly Kahanist movement whose genocidal ideology targets not only Palestinians but Arabs as a whole?

In two consecutive clauses (32 and 33), the declaration draws a troubling equivalence between settlers and Palestinian resistance when addressing “restrictive measures.” It mentions “violent extremist settlers and entities and individuals supporting illegal settlements” — as though there is no objection to settlers who are not explicitly violent extremists, despite the fact that they remain part of the settler-colonial project. This raises serious questions: is the declaration attempting to distinguish between “legal” and “illegal” settlements? Or is it describing all settlements as illegal — as per international law? Even more problematically, the declaration immediately follows this with a clause calling for “targeted measures, in accordance with international law, against entities and individuals who act against the principle of a peaceful settlement to the question of Palestine, through violence or terrorism, in violation of international law.” In doing so, it effectively equates a violent settler with a Palestinian — the native, expelled person — who resists that settler by force. Why, then, do these states not propose restrictive measures against the Israeli government itself, whose most senior ministers are violent settlers?

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This declaration, of which we have examined only some of its contents, is more than just a reflection of Arab and Islamic impotence or global dysfunction in the face of the Palestinian people’s century-long tragedy — and the ongoing genocide that has now continued for nearly two years. It is, in effect, an endorsement of the Israeli position on the entire question of Palestine. The declaration’s emphasis on the need for Hamas to hand over its weapons to the Palestinian Authority is therefore not aimed at stopping the genocide — as some might charitably or fearfully suggest, hoping for any possible resolution in light of the power imbalance — but rather fully consistent with the declaration’s overall objective: to delegitimise Palestinian resistance in its entirety. Within this same framework, we find the calls for elections — now implicitly conditional upon excluding anyone who does not align with this anti-resistance agenda — as well as the building of security forces, and even the normalisation of ties.

This declaration is more akin to an immediate reward for Israel — even surpassing, in that sense, the historical pattern of rewarding Israel after its massacres. One need only recall the Arab Peace Initiative adopted at the Arab League summit in Fez, Morocco, in September 1982, following Israel’s invasion of Lebanon; or the Arab Initiative endorsed at the Beirut summit in March 2002, after Israel’s re-invasion of Area A in the West Bank and its siege of Yasser Arafat at the Muqata in Ramallah. What distinguishes this latest declaration is that it outlines a series of normalisation measures prior to any resolution of the Palestinian question. This is clear in clauses such as 37, which supports peace efforts on the Syrian and Lebanese tracks; 38, which calls for laying the groundwork for a “Day of Peace” through trade, infrastructure, and energy cooperation; and 39, which discusses the formation of a regional security framework.

Those promoting this conference and its accompanying declaration may claim that the language used was a necessary compromise, given the inclusion of states like Britain, France, and the European Union. But in reality, it brought these actors together around concepts that closely mirror Israeli discourse. From this angle, the declaration represents a clear victory for Israel — laying the groundwork for legitimising the siege of the Palestinian people and dismantling their ability to resist, even on cultural and educational fronts, far beyond any specific stance toward Hamas. And as is often the case, Israel will take from such declarations whatever serves its interests, demand more of what it likes, and disregard whatever it finds unfavourable.

The Arab and Islamic states that didn’t try to stop the genocide against the Palestinian people — despite the principle of the “Responsibility to Protect,” which was endorsed by all UN member states at the 2005 World Summit; despite the rulings of the International Court of Justice in January 2024; despite the UN Security Council resolutions of March 2024; and despite the outcomes of the Arab-Islamic summits held consecutively in Riyadh in November 2023 and 2024 — and that have now adopted Israeli conditions in this declaration, will certainly not be able to prevent Israel from continuing its genocide and forced displacement once Hamas has surrendered its weapons. Let alone take the greater step of establishing a truly meaningful and sovereign Palestinian state. In this context, it is worth recalling the Sharm El-Sheikh Conference, held in Egypt under joint Egyptian American leadership in March 1996, under the banner of the “Summit of the Peacemakers.” That conference, held during a moment of great momentum for the so-called peace process, sought to condemn Palestinian resistance — and yet, even then, it failed to deliver anything tangible for the Palestinians through such condemnation.

Translated from Arabi 21, 5 August 2025

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