Not a Gift, But an Inheritance: How Europe’s Recognition of Palestine Erases Jewish History

In the spring of 2024, several European nations—among them Ireland, Spain, Norway, and symbolically, the UK and France—issued formal recognitions of a Palestinian state. Framed as acts of moral courage and solidarity with a stateless people, these recognitions were greeted with applause by global progressives and dismay by many in Israel.

But beneath the headlines lies a deeper and more troubling irony: the very powers that once carved the modern Middle East into artificial shapes for imperial convenience now presume to redraw the moral map as well. France and Britain—co-architects of the post-Ottoman dismemberment of the region—now recast themselves as agents of historical justice. The cartographers of empire have become the cartographers of conscience.

It is worth recalling what these powers actually did. The Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, negotiated in secret between British and French diplomats, divided the Levant into zones of influence with almost no regard for tribal, ethnic, or religious continuity. At San Remo in 1920, and through the League of Nations Mandates that followed, these imperial powers institutionalized their control—not to promote Arab self-determination, but to preserve their colonial dominance.

The British Mandate for Palestine was not an act of generosity. It was a strategic compromise—between imperial ambition and Jewish aspiration—cloaked in vague legal language and enforced by British arms. Jews were promised a “national home,” but not a state. And when Arab resistance mounted, the British retreated. In 1939, with the Holocaust imminent, the White Paper closed the gates of Palestine to Jewish refugees. After the war, British naval forces turned away Holocaust survivors seeking entry into their ancestral homeland.

In short: the European powers now clamoring for Palestinian recognition were not bystanders to statelessness. They were its authors. Their recognitions today are not acts of justice—they are acts of absolution.

But the deeper issue is not merely political. It is philosophical and civilizational. These recognitions reflect a persistent European misreading of Zionism itself.

For many European leaders and intellectuals, Israel is seen not as the return of an indigenous people to their ancestral land, but as a belated moral concession to a genocide. In this framing, Israel is not the product of Jewish perseverance but the consequence of Christian guilt. A homeland “given” to the Jews—not reclaimed by them.

This view is not only historically false; it is morally incoherent.

As Yoram Hazony has argued, Zionism was not born in the ashes of Auschwitz. It was forged in the furnaces of European antisemitism long before the gas chambers of Treblinka. Theodor Herzl’s political Zionism emerged in the 1890s in response to the Dreyfus Affair—not the Holocaust. Herzl recognized that Jewish assimilation into European society was a dangerous illusion. That only national sovereignty could guarantee Jewish survival and dignity.

The return to Zion began long before the Final Solution. Jewish pioneers—halutzim—drained malarial swamps, planted trees, revived the Hebrew language, and built homes in Jaffa and Petach Tikvah. The Zionist movement was not a reparation. It was a resurrection.

Even when European guilt finally emerged, it was highly selective. In the years leading up to and following the Holocaust, many of today’s most vocal critics of Israel refused to rescue Jews and then refused to welcome them. And now they presume to define the terms of Jewish legitimacy.

The logic is perverse: if Israel was a favor, it can be revoked once the Jews are perceived to be too assertive, too tribal, too willing to defend themselves. European support for Israel was never truly about affirming Jewish indigeneity. It was about managing shame. That shame has now curdled into resentment.

Micah Goodman, in Catch-67, describes the Israeli-Palestinian conflict not as a binary of good and evil, but as a clash of two partially valid narratives. But what Europe increasingly offers is not nuance—it is inversion. The Palestinian cause becomes a vehicle for Europe to cleanse its conscience. Not by helping Palestinians—but by recasting Jews as colonial aggressors.

Recognition of Palestine becomes not an act of peacemaking, but an act of narrative warfare. It is not about establishing Palestinian sovereignty. It is about undermining Jewish sovereignty.

To understand how dangerous this is, one must understand how Zionism understands itself.

Rav Avraham Yitzchak HaKohen Kook, the spiritual father of religious Zionism, taught that the Land of Israel is not an external possession of the Jewish people—it is an extension of their spiritual identity. “The holiness of the land,” he wrote, “is not derived from the commandments; the commandments are derived from the holiness of the land.” Zionism is not only nationalism. It is covenant. It is redemption unfolding.

But this is a language foreign to post-Christian Europe. In the secular West, religion is private and nationalism is suspect. The fusion of the two—central to Jewish history and theology—is not merely misunderstood. It is offensive. Thus, Europe sees Israel not as a covenantal polity but as a strange, militarized outpost in a post-national age.

Einat Wilf, a former Knesset member and leading Zionist thinker, has noted the cost of this blindness. “Jews are treated as foreigners in their own land,” she writes, “while Palestinians are embraced as natives, regardless of the actual history.” Zionism’s failure, she argues, is not in strategy or strength, but in storytelling. “We have allowed others to narrate us out of our homeland.”

But the problem is not only external. As Rav Yehuda Amital—Holocaust survivor, IDF commander, and founder of Yeshivat Har Etzion—once observed: “We began to act as if we had received a gift, and not an inheritance.” That shift in consciousness—from inheritance to gift—is spiritually devastating. It produces a generation unsure of its claim, hesitant in its identity, and overly dependent on international approval.

This is precisely the spiritual posture that Europe now exploits. If Israel exists only because of the Holocaust, it must continually prove its moral worth. But if Israel exists because it is the rightful home of the Jewish people—promised, preserved, and prayed for—then no recognition can grant it legitimacy, and no condemnation can take it away.

Palestinians deserve dignity. They deserve a future. But it must not come at the cost of Jewish history. And it must not erase the fact that Palestinian statehood has been offered multiple times—at least five: in 1937, 1947, during Oslo in the 1990s, at Camp David in 2000, and again in 2008. Each time, the Jews said yes. Each time, Palestinian leadership said no. Statelessness is not only imposed. It has also been chosen.

And so it is bitterly ironic that in 2025, it is Europe—the same Europe that once sliced up the region to serve empire—that now claims the moral authority to redraw the map again. Not to heal old wounds, but to preserve its relevance. Not to make peace, but to narrate history anew. The cartographers of conquest have returned to revise the atlas—this time with hashtags and press releases.

But we were not waiting for Europe's permission in 1917. We were not waiting in 1948. And we are not waiting now.

We do not exist because Europe recognized us.
We exist because God remembered us.

Zionism was not a gift.
It was our inheritance.
And we have come home.