Will Palestine Recognition Revitalize Separatist Movements in Scotland, Quebec, and Murrawarri? – On September 21, 2025, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia formally recognized the State of Palestine, creating out of whole cloth a country that never existed and has based its entire liberation struggle both upon a fiction and on a legitimization of terrorism.

The three countries’ unilateral recognition undermines diplomacy by absolving the Palestinians of commitments tied to the Palestinian Authority’s creation, including recognition of Israel, forsaking terrorism, and committing to negotiating borders.

London, Ottawa, and Canberra have now done as much to encourage terrorism as did Al Qaeda founder Usama Bin Laden.

That Prime Ministers Keir Starmer, Anthony Albanese, and Mark Carney reward Hamas and accept its narrative of genocide, but ignore a far bloodier conflict in Sudan, also hints at the latent antisemitism, if not racism, that permeates progressive thought.

What Israel Could Do in Response

Backed into a corner, Israel has no choice but to fight back. To accept a Palestinian state now is to rehabilitate Hamas and allow an Iranian beachhead. On some level, each leader understands this; they do not care.

Israel, accordingly, should not only defeat Hamas militarily but also call out the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia at their own game.

Each of the three has separatist movements: Scotland has sought separation from the United Kingdom. Canada has faced a decades-long Quebecois separatist movement.

Australia, which popularized the “indigenous land statement” that have since become popular across Canada and on American university campuses, has spawned a number of separatist movements as long-suppressed aboriginal groups each demand their own homeland on the continent that the United Kingdom wholly colonized under the guise of forming Australia.

Today, Australia is the only colonial regime that occupies an entire continent.

What Action Could Look Like

To frame the hypocrisy of British, Canadian, and Australian actions, Israel should formally recognize Scotland, Quebec, and the Murrawarri Republic that the Murrawarri people along the Culgoa River in northern New South Wales declared in 2013, or perhaps work with the indigenous people in Tasmania who likewise seek their freedom.

Previously, Scotland and Quebec put their ambitions to a vote; some independence activists in both countries may not acquiesce to the legitimacy of previous referendums, as they occurred with the organization or under the control of “settler-colonialists” in London and Ottawa.

Some Scots and Quebecois or, in the future, Welsh or Albertans might come forward seeking arms and finances to advance their own movement. In the past, no country would come close to such action, but the cheap British, Canadian, and Australian virtue signaling opened the floodgates.

Those days are over. After all, if Russia subsidized Scotland and saw it through separatism, then Moscow could knock offline every British submarine base and the nuclear deterrent they enable. London might complain, but they should expect even the State of Palestine, which they now embrace, to vote against the unity of the United Kingdom.

Israel’s encouragement of Quebec separatism, meanwhile, would cost it little and, even if done non-violently, would permanently stain Canada’s moral authority. To support Alberta would likely be to buy Israel an ally, given that province’s resistance to the fashionable nonsense that now consumes Ottawa.

No Western country has more to lose than Australia, however, given how Albanese has both primed his citizenry to self-flagellate and feel guilty about their own nationality. The People’s Republic of China has nothing to lose and everything to gain should it catalyze the multiple separatist movements that Australia now sweeps under the rug.

Too often, Western leaders live in a bubble. They believe in their own exceptionalism and are blind to their own hypocrisy as they virtue signal to appease their own political constituencies. They fail to recognize that the ideologies that underwrite terrorist groups are not easily appeased and will gladly take their fight into their own heartlands. Just as Ukraine fights for Western civilization, liberalism, and democracy on the eastern frontier of Europe, Israel does in the Middle East. That Western powers seek appeasement rather than solidarity is a mistake that guarantees further war and bloodshed for decades to come.

About the Author: Dr. Michael Rubin

Michael Rubin is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and director of policy analysis at the Middle East Forum. The opinions and views expressed are his own. A former Pentagon official, Dr. Rubin has lived in post-revolution Iran, Yemen, and both pre- and postwar Iraq. He also spent time with the Taliban before 9/11. For more than a decade, he taught classes at sea about the Horn of Africa and Middle East conflicts, culture, and terrorism, to deployed US Navy and Marine units. The views expressed are the author’s own.

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