There are now two questions, sometimes unhelpfully conflated, about Palestine: can it be a sovereign nation state, and should it be a sovereign nation state? The answer to both is yes.
Recognising the state of Palestine is not like trying to recognise some fantasy entity such as “Ruritaniana”. It is not a made-up construct.
There is some talk that it is, and that it cannot be a country under international law as set out by the Montevideo Convention of 1933. Aside from the fact that this concerned the group of nations that became the Organization of American States and was particular to that hemisphere, it has never been signed by the UK or many other nations.
It is now being cited by distinguished lawyers as a reason not to recognise the state of Palestine because Palestine doesn’t satisfy some or all of the Convention: namely, a permanent population; a defined territory; a government; and the capacity to enter into relations with other states.
It should seem to any reasonable person that the present Palestinian Authority, which is still nominally responsible for Gaza, even with Hamas in de facto control until lately, satisfies the criteria. It doesn’t have a stable population in Gaza at the moment, but only because the Israelis keep moving it around to a shifting “place of safety” that really doesn’t exist. Within the borders of Gaza, the population is, aside from mortality due to war and famine, stable in the sense that it is trapped.
Second, “a defined territory”. Well, that’s satisfied as well. It is the Israeli-occupied territories of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. There are lots of disputes about those territories, not least among Israelis who wish to annex or colonise some or all of Palestine. There is also the undeniable ambition of Hamas and some individual Palestinians to establish their country “from the river to the sea” and extinguish Israel and the people within it.
There’s no point denying that – just as there are people in many other places who want to destroy their neighbouring countries and peoples. Some Israelis want to eradicate Palestine in the way President Putin wants to absorb Ukraine into Russia, but both those countries enjoy wide international recognition.
The borders of Palestine today are actually quite clear. No international border is immutable; otherwise, Ireland and Italy would not exist, and much of the southern United States would be French. They are negotiable, in the wider cause of peace, but they are there, in Palestine, on maps.
Third, “a government”. Obviously, there is now no government in Gaza because of war, but there is a Palestinian Authority with a head of government, President Abbas, and a capital, Ramallah. A state that is partly occupied or has a secessionist rebel administration set up can still be internationally recognised. Hamas is not going to be recognised as a sovereign regime.
Last, the capacity to enter into relations with other states. Already 147 nations recognise the state of Palestine, and it has observer representation at the United Nations. Palestine is similar to territories such as Kosovo, Somaliland and Taiwan in this kind of legal limbo, but widespread international recognition tends to be part of a judgment about whether such states are, or have the right to be, truly sovereign and independent.
So the state of Palestine can exist, and it can be viable. As to whether Palestine should exist because of the threat to Israel, that is actually a more valid question than the legalistic arguments about a dusty convention set up by the Organization of American States.
The point of recognition is that it leads to an agreed two-state solution, and that is one where Israel is satisfied that Palestine is not an existential threat, which means Hamas and, far more important, the Hamas mindset is not in the equation.
A peaceful and stable Palestinian state is the answer to the problems of the region, not the cause of them. It is the unsatisfied national aspiration of the Palestinian people that is the cause of the friction on that side of the conflict, just as Israeli expansionism, the illegal settler incursions into the West Bank, and the calls for mass exodus of Palestinians are the threat on the other side.
A sovereign Palestine can peacefully co-exist with Israel, and vice versa. It seems fanciful today, even naive, but the logic is inescapable. The alternative is more or less permanent war and terror across the entire region.
