On July 24, 2025, French President Emmanuel Macron announced that France would unilaterally recognize Palestine. While Arab countries, Turkey, Australia, and traditionally antisemitic European countries like Ireland, Norway, and Spain previously announced the same, France becomes the first member of the G7 to cast aside the peace process to seek to impose a solution; the United Kingdom and Canada quickly followed suit.
The likelihood of an independent Palestine in the immediate future remains a long shot.
The likelihood of an independent Palestine in the immediate future remains a long shot. While Macron and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer seek to appease domestic constituencies, the Palestinians are perhaps the least prepared candidates for independence. Any independent Palestinian state would descend into civil war as Palestinian factions compete to capture lucrative state institutions and resources while other countries—Turkey, Iran, Jordan, and Egypt—pick proxies to further their own interests.
The pro-Palestinian virtue signaling, however, may open the floodgates to new states across the Middle East. After all, if land disputes and uncertain governance and capacity are no obstacles to independence, why should other claimants not benefit from the same precedent?
The two most obvious beneficiaries are Somaliland and South Arabia. Like Palestine, Somaliland was a British colonial territory, albeit a protectorate rather than a mandate. In the late nineteenth century, the British helped Somaliland set its borders by treaty with the French Somaliland (now Djibouti), Italian Somaliland (now Somalia), and Ethiopia.
Somaliland exists with little or no international assistance and yet is still turnkey-ready for formal statehood.
Briefly independent in 1960 and recognized by all five members of the United Nations Security Council and 25 other countries including Israel, Somaliland chose instead to enter a union with Italian Somaliland. The joint effort at a larger Somalia failed, however, and Somali dictator Siad Barre sought to eradicate Somaliland’s population in what became known as the Isaaq genocide. Somaliland survived though and, as Somalia descended into state failure in 1991, re-asserted its independence. While no other country recognized Somaliland, it has governed itself as an independent state ever since, with its own currency and democratically elected president and parliament. Industry booms in Somaliland and it is today the most stable, democratic state in the Horn of Africa. Somaliland exists with little or no international assistance and yet is still turnkey-ready for formal statehood.
South Arabia—better known as South Yemen—is also ready for independence. Like Somaliland, it has a previous episode of independence. While the Houthi onslaught has mired Yemen in a decade-long civil war, the former South Yemen is largely stable and secure. The Southern Forces largely respect the former boundary between North and South Yemen. To recognize South Arabia, as locals prefer to call themselves, based on the name of their region before its forcible incorporation into Yemen, would be to consolidate its security. That South Arabia’s tribes are historically closer to counterparts in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates than to North Yemen only reinforces the case for independence.
With more than 40 million people, [Kurds] are correct to call themselves the largest people without a nation.
Kurdistan may be a more complicated case, but Kurds have greater claim to statehood than the Palestinians. While Palestinian identity is less than a century old, Kurdish identity dates to the pre-Islamic era; Kurds trace their roots to the Median Empire. With more than 40 million people, they are correct to call themselves the largest people without a nation. While the Kurds, like the Palestinian Authority, have no set consensus borders, the unilateral recognition of Palestine without set borders as a precondition sets the stage for a future partition of Turkey, Iraq, and Syria.
Decades of Turkish repression have largely ended any Kurdish sense of belonging inside Turkey. Ankara fears a plebiscite about the Kurdish future because it knows Kurds would vote for independence, and fight if necessary. Iraq and Syria are easier cases as, border disputes aside, the Kurds have a history of self-governance in both states.
Palestinian independence will also spark calls for independence by Syria’s besieged Alawis and Druze. The cascade of calls for independence following the West’s unilateral recognition of Palestine will be felt all the way to China, where it will reinvigorate Uyghur calls for the independence of East Turkestan. Tigray, Oromia, and other Ethiopian states will also likely reassert their demands. Ethiopia’s fall will be for the twenty-first century what the collapse of Yugoslavia was in the twentieth century.
Many peoples deserve independence. The irony of myopic focus on Palestinians is that, of all the aspirants in the broader Middle East, they are perhaps the least deserving. Somaliland and South Yemen would thrive. So, too, would Kurdistan if it could tackle internal corruption and divisions. Tigray and Oromia will have to fight, as will the Uyghurs, against dictatorships determined to eradicate them. Ultimately, Turkey and Ethiopia will partition—the only question is when.
Get ready for an entirely new Middle East. The ramifications of Palestinian independence will change the region as much as, if not more than, the Sykes-Picot Agreement more than a century ago.
