The British Parliament’s overwhelming vote to recognize a “State of Palestine” may indeed be a sign of “where the wind is blowing,” as the British ambassador to Tel Aviv has commented – a reflection of the significant erosion of public support for Israel’s regime of occupation and denial of Palestinian rights. But it should not be seen in black and white.

If it is the first step toward recognizing the irrefutable right of the Palestinian people to self determination, then it would be a positive contribution to establishing a just and sustainable peace in accordance with international law.

But, if it is, as implied, solely meant to resuscitate the comatose version of the “two state solution” which, as dictated by Israel, omits basic Palestinian rights, then it would be yet another act of British complicity in bestowing legitimacy on Israel’s unjust order.

Israel’s denial of Palestinian rights and ongoing colonization of the occupied Palestinian territory, including in East Jerusalem, after all, will turn the putative two-state solution into a Palestinian Bantustan in an “apartheid state” of Israel, as Secretary of State John Kerry has warned.

The Palestinian right to self determination, according to the United Nations, includes, aside from national sovereignty, “the inalienable right of the Palestinians to return to their homes and property from which they have been displaced and uprooted.”

The overwhelming majority of Palestinian civil society has stated in the historic 2005 call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (B.D.S.) against Israel that exercising Palestinian self determination requires ending Israel’s 1967 occupation and colonization, “recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality,” and the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and lands from which they were forcibly displaced in 1948.

Israel has fiercely rejected full equality, in law and policies, for its Palestinian citizens because that would undermine, de facto and de jure, its continuation as an exclusionary Jewish state. But even the U.S. Department of State has criticized Israel for maintaining a system of “institutional, legal and societal discrimination” against its Palestinian citizens.

Palestinians expect world governments, especially the British, with its direct responsibility in creating the question of Palestine, to recognize, first and foremost, our right to have equal rights to all other nations and all other human beings.

We want what Archbishop Desmond Tutu describes as “the full menu of rights.”