The biggest story out of the recent United Nations summit in Manhattan was the recognition of Palestinian statehood by a number of Western countries, including Canada, the UK, France, and Australia. This recognition was achieved in spite of Hamas remaining unbowed in its quest to destroy Israel and while Israeli hostages remained shackled in dank tunnels under civilian structures, or, in some cases, within the homes of ordinary Gazan civilians.
Realistically, this diplomatic recognition represents little more than a rhetorical device. A Palestinian state is not happening anytime soon, nor should it. Instead, this move was meant less for the Palestinians in Gaza and more for domestic constituencies, both leftist and Islamist. Those two poles of an increasingly tight alliance are major support structures and powerful voting blocs in each of these nations, primarily for the parties currently in charge—Labour in the UK, the Liberals in Canada, Macron’s coalition in France, and Labor in Australia. The proponents of this recognition, as well as the governments doing it, argue that the only path to regional peace is a two-state solution, yet nothing could be further from the truth. Palestinian statehood would never work so long as the Palestinians desire the rights that come with national sovereignty but not its concomitant responsibilities.
This combination of rights and duties has long been a part of the theoretical and practical discourse about nation-states and sovereignty, recognizable in the earliest treaties between polities and fleshed out in detail during through the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries. Over those formative centuries for Western civilization, a wide variety of important and lasting concepts relating to the rights and responsibilities of nation-states were codified in philosophical treatises, theological pamphlets, and international treaties. Writers and thinkers including Jean Bodin, Francisco de Vitoria, Thomas Hobbes, and, most famously, Hugo Grotius made legal, religious, and theoretical arguments for the duties of states to other states. These duties included mutual respect for international boundaries, the need to exercise internal control and avoid non-state violence spilling across borders, responsibility for the actions of one’s own citizenry, respect for the internal politics of other nations, non-interference with neutral trade, appropriate conduct in warfare, proper treatment of envoys and diplomats, and the honoring of promises and treaties. These concepts found perhaps their most well-known and influential practical application in the 1648 Peace of Westphalia.
That series of mutual diplomatic agreements ended the horrific combat of the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648), which tore Europe asunder in an orgy of religious and political conflict. In these treaties, the nation-states and empires of continental Europe agreed to many of the basic terms previously detailed by the aforementioned thinkers, including respect for religious differences and mutual recognition of territorial integrity. This peace did not end all war—each of the signatories would go on to violate their agreements in due course—yet it set in stone a set of duties that sovereign recognition conferred. If you fast-forward to the present day, the basic outlines delineated back then have not much changed. The 1945 United Nations Charter, signed almost 300 years after the Peace of Westphalia, bound all member states and, crucially, all potential future member states, to certain responsibilities of statehood. These include settling disputes peacefully, refraining from the threat or use of force against the territorial or political independence of any state, and respect for universal human rights and fundamental freedoms.
This is what statehood means: not just a list of rights that come with recognition, but also responsibilities to one’s citizens, neighbors, and the international community writ large. And this is exactly why Palestine fails the statehood test: Palestinian society, from its leaders down to its activists, repudiates each and every one of these duties. They demand the rights of statehood, yet deny its responsibilities.
The very foundation of the Palestinian national movement, going back to the immediate aftermath of the Arab Revolt during the First World War, was predicated on ethnically cleansing the area’s native Jewish population. The ur-representative of the Palestinian cause, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Amin al-Husseini, dedicated his life to this effort. In spite of the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which provided for a Jewish homeland in the Levant, and the growing and successful Jewish population, the Arab population of the British Mandate never came to terms with the land’s supposed binational destiny. Al-Husseini even allied with the Nazi regime, visiting Hitler in Berlin, to do his part in eradicating the Jews of the world by focusing on the millions in his neck of the woods. Palestinian Arabs never accepted partition, even after the UN ratified it and most of the area of the Mandate became Jordan, a fully Arab state. Their wars of annihilation fought against the Jews of Israel were consistent, repeated, and, thankfully, all failures.
But that did not end the movement for Palestinian statehood’s attempts to destroy Israel and its Jewish population. Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization was dedicated to inflicting murderous violence on Israeli civilians, sparking multiple wars and killing thousands. Even after the Oslo peace process began in the early 1990s and the PLO morphed into the Palestinian Authority, the violence continued while the aim of gaining control of all the land held by Israel never abated. The PA continues its pay-for-slay program, where the families of antisemitic terrorist murderers are paid a stipend for that evil action. The terrorists have not been removed from power, but rather legitimized by the international community.
Each and every statehood proposal, from 1947 to 2008, has been rejected by the Palestinians. There would have been a Palestinian Arab state on a great deal of the land had they accepted partition 80 years ago. That wasn’t enough. This is because they do not want to share the land with Israel, pure and simple. “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” is not a paean to the idea of a two-state solution. It is a call to create one single state, free of Jews, that runs from the Jordan River in the east to the Mediterranean Sea in the west.
This narrative is a perfect demonstration of the problem with the idea of Palestinian statehood and their inability to accept the longstanding duties of nations. They clearly do not respect mutual borders. They covet and actively attempt—over and over again—to conquer Israel. They do not respect the internal politics or rights of their potential neighbor, Israel. They do not have the desire or ability to stem the tide of international terrorism emanating from their territory—oftentimes, they are directly responsible for it. They perpetrate an absurd refugee scam in which Palestinians living in other nations, even born in other nations, are permanent refugees with the purported ‘right to return,’ not to a Palestinian state, but to the areas in modern Israel where their ancestors lived before partition. This is the only such population in the world that claims such a ‘right’, but it conflicts with the national duty to repatriate one’s people to within one’s own borders.
The fictional state of Palestine does not satisfy any of the duties of statehood. It never could, unless the entire basis of the national movement is explicitly repudiated. The leaders of this virulently antisemitic and violent movement are not interested in the responsibilities of nationhood, but in claiming its concomitant rights and using them to attack Israel. The Palestinian national project has never been about creating a Palestinian state that would succeed for the Palestinian people. Instead, it is entirely about unmaking a state: Israel. Until Palestinian leadership and society exchange their destructive ideology for a productive one, they should not be rewarded with acceptance into the family of nations. But that would undermine the whole point of the exercise, as destroying Israel is far more important than the creation of a safe and sustainable Palestinian state.