From Turtle Island to Palestine, recognition is a settler manoeuvre, not liberation.
In lieu of our upcoming Kanafani Study Group read Meenakshi’s text on the politics of recognition drawing from Kanafani and Coulthard first published on her substack.
“The recognition of the state of Palestine is my enemy.”
With this declaration on a recent instagram post, Palestinian writer and activist Majed Abusalama cuts through the triumphant headlines that followed recent announcements by European and settler colonial states about their willingness to “recognize” Palestine. Abusalama continues: “It is not a gesture of solidarity – it is a political maneuver that legitimizes Zionism atop the ruins of my grandparents’ homes from which they were ethnically cleansed in 1948.”
These words are a reminder that recognition, especially when bestowed by the very powers complicit in colonization and genocide, is rarely what it seems. They also bring into sharp focus Glen Coulthard’s critique of the “politics of recognition” in Red Skin, White Masks and Ghassan Kanafani’s prescient essay The Spectre of the Palestinian State. Together, these thinkers expose recognition as a colonial strategy—a manoeuvre that masks domination in the language of solidarity, a gesture that risks becoming a ghostly substitute for liberation.
The Politics of Recognition
Coulthard’s argument is devastating in its simplicity: in settler colonial contexts, recognition is never neutral. When Indigenous peoples are “recognized” by colonial states, this recognition almost always reinforces, rather than unsettles, the sovereignty of the settler state. It appears as a benevolent concession but functions as a technology of power. Recognition is a strategy to absorb dissent, transform uncompromising struggles into manageable demands, and secure the legitimacy of the very state that continues to dispossess.
For Coulthard, the problem is not recognition per se, but recognition on colonial terms. When the state decides who counts as a people, what form their rights may take, and under what conditions they are acknowledged, recognition becomes a weapon of containment. It creates what he warns could become “a new kind of authoritarianism” cloaked in emancipatory language: gestures that sound like liberation but in practice reaffirm the dominance of settler infrastructures.
Seen this way, the sudden enthusiasm of certain Western governments for “recognizing” Palestine does not mark a rupture with colonial power—it marks its reassertion. Recognition here is not about Palestinian self-determination instead it is about the state’s performance of benevolence. Palestine appears not as a sovereign people engaged in decades of resistance, but as an object whose legitimacy depends on the sanction of those who armed, financed, and diplomatically shielded Israel’s settler colonial project.
Kanafani’s Spectre
Ghassan Kanafani anticipated this trap long before the language of “recognition politics” entered scholarly debate. In his 1971 essay The Spectre of the Palestinian State, Kanafani dissected proposals for a truncated Palestinian entity brokered by imperial powers. He warned that such a state would not embody liberation but serve as a ghostly apparition designed to pacify the Palestinian struggle.
For Kanafani, a “spectral” Palestine would be carved out not to undo occupation or dispossession, but to manage the problem of Palestinian resistance. It would offer administrative symbols of statehood while leaving intact the broader structures of Zionist colonialism and Western imperial influence in the region.
Kanafani’s words resonate uncannily with today’s rhetoric of recognition. A state recognized on colonial terms—restricted in sovereignty, dependent on aid, fragmented from its diaspora, and stripped of the right of return—would not fulfill the Palestinian demand for decolonization. It would, instead, risk fragmenting the liberation movement itself, domesticating radical demands for justice into a diplomatic theater controlled by external powers.
Coulthard and Kanafani, though writing in different contexts, converge on the same point: recognition granted by colonial powers is never an act of solidarity. It is an act of management. It does not dismantle domination; it reorganizes it.
Recognition as Settler Performance
That states like Canada, Australia, and various European nations now speak the language of recognizing Palestine should strike us as deeply ironic. These are polities built on the ruins of Indigenous nations, structured by histories of genocide, land theft, and racial violence. Their sudden willingness to “acknowledge” Palestine is not the emergence of conscience—it is settler performance.
Canada, for instance, contemplates recognizing Palestine even as it continues to deny full recognition of Indigenous sovereignty within its own borders. The United States, still the largest funder of Israeli militarism, maintains itself as the ultimate arbiter of what counts as legitimate Palestinian governance. Europe, having armed and abetted Israel for decades, now seeks to rehabilitate its image by declaring recognition as if it were a moral gift.
Here Coulthard’s warning against “emancipatory verbiage” is instructive. Recognition becomes a mask: a performance of benevolence that conceals ongoing complicity. It is easier to declare Palestine recognized than to halt arms exports, suspend military aid, or hold Israel accountable for war crimes. It is easier to grant a symbolic gesture than to dismantle the colonial infrastructures that produce the very need for recognition.
Abusalama’s Refusal
This is why Abusalama’s words resonate so powerfully: “The recognition of the state of Palestine is my enemy.” His refusal insists that recognition is not neutral, not harmless, not automatically aligned with Palestinian liberation. On the contrary, recognition on colonial terms risks legitimizing Zionism atop the ruins of erased villages, converting Palestinian dispossession into the ground on which a compromised state might be built.
Abusalama’s stance underscores what Coulthard and Kanafani make clear: recognition that does not return land, dismantle occupation, or guarantee the right of return is not recognition at all. It is the enemy because it threatens to transform a struggle for liberation into a diplomatic bargain. It risks freezing Palestinian existence in a form acceptable to colonial powers while erasing the radical possibilities of true decolonization.
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Beyond Recognition
The danger of recognition politics is not only that it fails to deliver justice but that it risks foreclosing the imagination of what justice could mean. By centering recognition, the colonial state positions itself as the sole authority capable of granting legitimacy. The colonized become petitioners, dependent on gestures bestowed from above. The struggle becomes one of asking to be seen rather than demanding to be free.
But as Coulthard argues, recognition that reproduces colonial relations cannot be the basis of liberation. And as Kanafani reminds us, a state conjured under colonial arrangements is but a spectre. The task, then, is to refuse recognition when it comes as a settler maneuver, to reject symbolic gestures that mask complicity, and to insist on material dismantling of colonial power: ending the siege of Gaza, halting settlement expansion, cutting off military aid, and securing the right of return.
This refusal is not nihilistic. It is generative. By refusing recognition on colonial terms, Palestinians and their allies insist on a politics that exceeds the settler imagination. They assert that Palestine exists not because a Western state declares it so, but because Palestinians have lived, resisted, and struggled for over seventy-five years.
Conclusion: Recognition or Freedom?
Coulthard’s Red Skin, White Masks, Kanafani’s Spectre of the Palestinian State, and Abusalama’s refusal converge on a single lesson: recognition without dismantling domination is not liberation. It is management, performance, and in Abusalama’s searing phrase, it is the enemy.
The question, then, is not whether Palestine is recognized but whether the structures of power that deny Palestinian freedom are dismantled. Until colonial powers end their complicity in occupation, cease their flow of weapons, and reckon with their own genocidal histories, their gestures of recognition will remain what they have always been: masks that conceal domination, spectres that haunt liberation, and tricks that repeat the oldest settler ruse.
To mistake these for freedom would be, in Kanafani’s words, to embrace a ghost. To resist them is to insist, as Coulthard urges, on a politics that builds beyond recognition and towards justice, sovereignty, and decolonization.