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This is a guest essay by Adam Hummel, a writer in Toronto.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
On September 21, 2025, Canada recognized a state that does not govern itself, cannot hold an election, and was at that moment partly ruled by a group Canada lists as a terrorist entity.
Prime Minister Mark Carney called his recognition of “Palestine” a “step toward peace.”
Nine months on, it is fair to ask what it actually stepped toward.
Begin with what the recognition was supposed to buy, because Carney did not simply recognize “Palestine.” He recognized it on “conditions.” The Palestinian Authority would reform its governance. It would hold general elections in 2026 in which Hamas could play no part. It would demilitarize.
And in the quieter briefings around the announcement, two more conditions surfaced, the ones that matter most to anyone who has actually read a Palestinian textbook or a Palestinian Authority budget: The Authority would scrub its school curriculum of the material that teaches children to hate and murder Jews and glorify martyrs. It would end the payments it makes to the families of people imprisoned for killing Israelis, the policy the world has learned to call “Pay for Slay.”
These were not decorative requests. They go to the centre of why a Palestinian state has never functioned: a leadership that has not faced its public in 20 years, an education system that manufactures the next war, and a salary structure that pays better the more Jews you kill.
Carney attached his recognition to fixing exactly these things. He told us recognition was “predicated on” them. Predicated — what a lovely word. It means the recognition was supposed to depend on something. Perhaps he would even apply some pressure to making sure those things happened. Surely, rushing recognition through at a time when a war is raging while innocent hostages are held in terror merits … something?
So let’s check the something.
Anything?
On the curriculum, an Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education review of the 2025 to 2026 Palestinian Authority textbooks (the very textbooks published in the month Canada recognized “Palestine”) found that they continue to incite antisemitism and violence, glorify terrorism, reject the two-state solution, and erase Israel from the map.
On the payments, the European Parliament was asking in March 2026 whether the Martyrs’ Fund had genuinely ended or had simply been rerouted through renamed welfare channels, with a draft Palestinian constitution poised to write the whole thing into the founding law of the state Canada had just blessed.
On the elections, the most concrete promise of all, the Palestinian Authority’s own deputy foreign minister said within two weeks of recognition that there would be no vote while the war continued — not a delay, but a condition on the condition.
None of it was met. Not one item on the list. Imagine our surprise.
Now, a generous reader will object that these things take time, that you cannot rebuild a polity in a season, and that’s true. But, it is also completely beside the point, because the real tell is not that the conditions went unmet. The tell is what Canada did about it, which was nothing.
There is no monitoring mechanism. There are no published benchmarks. There is no progress report. Hell, there is not even a condemnatory tweet from Carney asking the Palestinians, “What’s going on?”
The letter from Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas (whose term was scheduled to end in 2009 but never actually did) that supposedly contained all these binding commitments was never released. It was withheld, we were told, “out of respect for international diplomatic relations,” which is a diplomat’s way of saying: “Don’t look in here.”
No funding was paused.
On the contrary, the money flowed toward the Palestinian Authority, not away from it: ten million dollars for reform and capacity building, tens of millions more in development assistance, all of it travelling in the opposite direction from any pressure.
The one lever Canada actually reserved, the upgrade of the Palestinian mission in Ottawa to a real embassy and the exchange of ambassadors, simply sits there, untouched, while Britain went ahead and upgraded its own Palestinian mission to full embassy status in January 2026.
Canada’s mission in Ramallah remains what it has been since the 1990s Oslo Accords, a representative office. No embassy. No ambassador. Recognition in the abstract, and the old furniture everywhere you actually look.
If you want to know what a government truly believes, do not read its announcements. Read its readouts, the dry little summaries it issues after a phone call, where no one expects anyone to be paying attention. I read the one from May 7, 2026, the most recent word from Carney on the country he recognized:
Today, the Prime Minister, Mark Carney, spoke with the President of the State of Palestine, Mahmoud Abbas.
The Prime Minister expressed Canada’s deep concern over the continued humanitarian crisis in Gaza and reaffirmed its opposition to Israeli settlement expansion and settler violence in the West Bank. He emphasised that unilateral actions undermine prospects for a lasting peace.
Prime Minister Carney underscored Canada’s unwavering support for a negotiated two-state solution — an independent, viable, and sovereign Palestinian state living side by side with the State of Israel in peace and security.
The Prime Minister welcomed the measures taken by the Palestinian Authority to strengthen accountability, governance, and democratic institutions, in which Hamas can play no part. He conveyed Canada’s support and the importance of further reforms.
Canada will continue to promote peace and stability in the region, and work closely with partners toward this goal. The two leaders will remain in contact.
Carney expresses Canada’s “deep concern.” Good, one might think. Concern about the textbooks, perhaps, or the unheld election, or the salaries for murderers? No. The deep concern is over the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and over Israeli settlement expansion and settler violence in the West Bank.
The concern, every gram of it, is pointed at Israel. And the Palestinian Authority, the party that broke every promise on which the recognition was predicated? Carney “welcomed the measures taken” by it to strengthen accountability and governance.
Welcomed. The measures.
Which measures he does not say, because there are none.
Read that statement twice and the architecture of the whole exercise reveals itself. The conditions were never instruments of pressure. They were anaesthetic, administered to a domestic audience that needed to be told — again, and I cannot stress this enough, while Israeli hostages were still held in Palestinian tunnels — the recognition was responsible and reciprocal, so that it could be neither.
Nine months later the patient cannot recall they were ever promised anything.
And then, last month, the installment you could not invent if you tried: On June 12, 2026, from Paris, Canadian Foreign Minister Anita Anand announced another hundred million dollars for the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza, bringing Canada’s total past half a billion since the war began.
Read the press release for what Canada asks in return.
It calls on Israel to open the crossings. It announces a fresh round of Canadian sanctions, the fifth, on Israelis tied to settler violence. It launches an “International Peace Fund for Israelis and Palestinians” with Britain and Australia last month.
And of the Palestinian Authority, the government Canada recognized and conditioned and then praised, it asks precisely nothing. The lone sentence pointed anywhere near the Palestinian side is a boilerplate line about disarming Hamas, a group the Palestinian Authority does not command and will never confront:
“We continue to call for the disarmament of Hamas, for all parties to uphold their obligations under international law and for the immediate and unimpeded flow of humanitarian aid.”
Half a billion dollars and nine months in, the one party in this story from whom Canada still expects something in writing is Israel. In the war against the Jews, the Palestinians are never given their own agency. They are always just expected to respond to Israel.
Why?
What did recognition accomplish, then?
Be concrete, because the gesture demanded that we not be. It did not open a window for a two-state solution; the window, if it exists, is exactly where it was. It did not feed a single person in Gaza. It certainly did not free a hostage. (In fact, it emboldened Hamas at the time by giving them a massive diplomatic win while they were still at war with Israel after having attempted a genocide of Israelis on October 7th.)
It did not move the Palestinian Authority one centimeter toward the reforms that were its entire stated price. It did not even produce an embassy or an ambassador, the most basic furniture of recognizing a country, the things you do in an afternoon when you mean it.
It accomplished precisely one measurable thing: It placed Israel, alone, in the dock of world opinion on a single coordinated September day — flanked by Britain, Australia, and France — while the body being recognized was asked for nothing it would ever have to deliver.
That was the output.
When you subtract everything the act did not do, the residue is neither peace nor Palestinian statehood. The residue is a verdict against Israel, issued in the costume of diplomacy.
This is what the record shows the act to have been, judged the only honest way an act can be judged, by what it produced rather than by what it announced: A thing that helps no one it claims to help, demands nothing of the party it names, and reserves its censure for a third party, just is not a peace process. It is a performance, and we were the audience. The reviews (and perhaps the uproar from the Jewish community at the time) were the point.
O Palestine!
Recognized in a morning, abandoned by the afternoon, useful for exactly as long as the cameras stayed on. They have moved on now. So, it seems, has our Prime Minister and his government.
The state that he insisted needed to be conjured immediately, nine months ago, for no apparent reason, is still not a state, the children are still reading the same books, the families are still collecting pensions for seeking Jewish blood, and the only party that paid anything for the ceremony was the one that was never invited to it — the Jewish state.
This is not just true of Canada, it’s true of the West. The West neither imposes obligations on Palestinians nor holds them accountable for their actions. For the West (and the Arabs), the Palestinians are merely a cudgel with which to beat Israel.
Palestine text books haven't changed since they were Jordanian textbooks the Israelis examined after the Six Day War....they were hate filled then and they are hate filled now.