The day before global leaders convened this week in New York City for the 80th Session of the United Nations General Assembly, the governments of the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia joined the vast majority of the world’s nations in recognizing Palestine as a state. At the start of the U.N. session on Monday, France and Luxembourg added their nations to the list.

Both the French and British heads of state said that they decided to recognize Palestine in order to pursue peace. “The time for peace has come because we’re just a few moments away from no longer being able to seize peace,” said French President Emmanuel Macron on Monday before the U.N. A day earlier, U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer said in a recorded speech, “In the face of growing horror in the Middle East, we are acting to keep alive the possibility of peace.”

What Macron and Starmer failed to mention, however, is that they — and many of their fellow nations now pushing for Palestinian statehood — continue to supply weapons and military support to Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is leading an intensification of Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza and an expansion of settlements and annexations of Palestinian land in the West Bank, responded with defiance to the statehood calls of Western nations: “There will not be a Palestinian state west of the Jordan.”

Last week, a U.N. human rights commission concluded that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza. The commission’s chair, Navi Pillay, said the international community is under the “legal obligation to use all means that are reasonably available to them to stop the genocide in Gaza.”

Yet the nations whose leaders are calling for peace keep the flow of armaments moving.

“The absence of action to stop it amounts to complicity,” Pillay said.

Who Recognizes Palestine as a State but Still Arms Israel?

Currently 157 of the 193 U.N. member states recognize a Palestinian state. The U.K., France, Canada, Luxembourg, and Australia have recently recognized Palestinian statehood but continue to send arms and military equipment to Israel.

In September 2024, following widespread pressure and protests, the U.K. government enacted a partial arms embargo, halting export licenses on some weapons to Israel out of concern they were being used by the Israeli military to commit human rights violations. The embargo was limited to only 30 of the total 300 export licenses to Israel, but the U.K. pledged to no longer send F-35 fighter jet parts directly to Israel. F-35 jets have been used to drop bombs in Gaza, including operations that have killed civilians in so-called........

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