Can we re-anchor Palestinian statehood on global agenda?

For as long as the Palestinian question has existed, Pakistan has stood along where many other nations stand: on the side of a people who were displaced, and denied the right to live freely in their own homeland. Our position is not unique. It is part of a wider consensus - shared by countries across the Muslim world, the Global South, and by millions of ordinary people everywhere - that the Palestinians deserve a sovereign state based on the pre?1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital.

But if we are honest, the world has failed Palestine. Good intentions do not translate into meaningful action on their own. They require genuine and selfless efforts. Whereas the situation is: the UN resolutions have gathered dust; peace initiatives have collapsed; the powerful have looked away; and the powerless have been left to carry the burden of history alone. The question now is not whether the Palestinians deserve a state - that debate was settled long ago. The real question is who will help create the political momentum toward it.

To answer that, we must revisit how Palestine reached this point. The story begins with dispossession. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 promised a homeland to one people while ignoring the rights of another. The Nakba of 1948 turned that promise into catastrophe, uprooting more than 700,000 Palestinians from their homes. What followed was not a temporary conflict but a long and brutal process of occupation, expansion and demographic engineering. Today, Israel's political leadership openly rejects the idea of a Palestinian state.

The international community has tried - at least on paper - to correct this injustice. UN resolutions affirm the illegality of occupation and the right of Palestinians to self?determination. Yet these resolutions remain unimplemented because the global system bends under the weight of power politics. The Abraham Accords, hailed as a breakthrough, bypassed the Palestinians entirely. They normalised relations without demanding any movement on occupation or human rights. Instead of opening a door to peace, they signalled that Palestine could be sidelined.

Meanwhile, the humanitarian crisis has crossed every imaginable threshold. Gaza is no longer merely under blockade - it is under a full?scale war that has flattened entire neighbourhoods, wiped out families and turned a densely populated strip into a landscape of rubble. Hospitals, schools, refugee camps and UN shelters have all come under fire. In the West Bank, Palestinians face a different but equally suffocating reality: expanding settlements; armed settler violence; military raids; and a system of checkpoints that controls every aspect of daily life. From Gaza to the West Bank and the scattered pockets of Palestinian presence in Jerusalem, the message has been the same - displacement, dispossession and erasure of a people's political and physical space.

In this bleak landscape, the question is whether Pakistan can play any meaningful role. The answer lies in its diplomatic history, where it has repeatedly shown an ability to mediate quietly between states with far greater power and far deeper hostilities - most recently during the US-Iran standoff. That episode demonstrated that Pakistan can function as a stabilising channel when major powers are locked in confrontation. Applied to Palestine, this capacity can be redirected toward building structured diplomatic momentum. Pakistan can work with states that share its position - including Turkey, Malaysia, Indonesia, Qatar, South Africa and several Arab governments - to push for a return to internationally recognised parameters for a Palestinian state.

Pakistan cannot impose outcomes, but it can contribute to a process that moves the question of Palestinian statehood out of symbolic politics and back into the domain of international law. Crucially, Pakistan can underline that the Palestinian question is no longer a contained regional dispute; its echoes now shape wider geopolitical instability, as seen in the recent escalation involving Iran, the US and Israel. The strike on Iran is not an isolated event but part of a broader strategic pattern in which the unresolved Palestinian question continues to fuel confrontation. The ongoing destruction in Gaza and the pressure on the West Bank align with a longstanding strategic vision aimed at securing maximum territorial control - a vision often described as the 'Greater Israel' project.

Up till now, the world has witnessed massive protests demanding justice for Palestine, yet these demonstrations have achieved little beyond temporary ceasefires. They have not altered the behaviour of the Israeli leadership or slowed its military operations. Israel continues to strike Palestinians and the states that support them, keeping the region in a constant state of instability.

In this environment, a viable Palestinian state is not only a matter of justice; it is essential for long term regional stability. Pakistan cannot deliver this outcome alone, but it can help ensure that the demand for a lawful, negotiated solution remains on the global agenda. Allowing the conflict to drift while conditions on the ground become irreversible will only deepen instability - an outcome the region can no longer afford.