T. Belman. Ahrens suggests that the recognition of Palestine by by 136 states may reach critical mass if France joined them. This may lead to a UNSC resolution of recognition without being stopped by a US veto. He argues;
“But when France, the Security Council and almost the entire world recognizes Palestine, Israel could find it harder to maintain that its approval is needed for Palestinian statehood. The family of nations will have made its near-unanimous decision.”
All such recognition ignores the Motevideo Convention signed in 1933 by all states which stipulates the requirements of statehood:
“The state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications: a ) a permanent population; b ) a defined territory; c ) government; and d) capacity to enter into relations with the other states.”
Whether you are a state or not does not depend on whether you are recognized as one but whether you fulfill these qualifications.
Although one might argue that Palestine has all these qualities, one would not be correct.
On April 29, 2012, just after the UN recognized Palestine as a non-member state, Amichai Cohen wrote a legal analysis of U.N. Recognition of a Palestinian State in which he wrote,
“Regarding the last condition-the ability to conduct foreign relations-the accepted interpretation of this condition is that it was intended to prevent a situation in which units that are operating within the framework of a federal regime or that are subject to any kind of agreement that prevents them from conducting foreign relations, would be recognized as independent states.”
Palestine fails because it is bound by the Oslo Accords not to conduct foreign relations. In addition it is not enough for the UN to define the territory but Palestine can only exist on territory it controls, ie Area A.
France would be neither the first European state nor the first permanent UN Security Council member to do so. Does that mean Israel can ignore Fabius’s ultimatum?
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas waves to the crowd during celebrations for their successful bid to win nonmember state status at the UN in Ramallah, Sunday, Dec. 2, 2012 (photo credit: Nasser Shiyoukhi/AP Photo)Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas waves to the crowd in Ramallah during celebrations for his successful bid to win nonmember state status for Palestine at the UN, Sunday, Dec. 2, 2012 (photo credit: Nasser Shiyoukhi/AP Photo)WRITERSRaphael
There are two ways to look at the French threat to unilaterally recognize a Palestinian state if the stalemate in the peace process persists.
We’ll get to the “it’s a serious challenge for Israel” folks lower down. But those who aren’t overly perturbed by the Paris ultimatum say: So what? Paris is free to convene an international conference to try to break the deadlock and get the two sides to make the concessions necessary for a peace deal. Since this outcome seems unlikely — or more accurately, utterly unrealistic — France can go ahead and recognize a “State of Palestine.” Such a move will be condemned in Jerusalem as unhelpful on the path to peace and celebrated in Ramallah as a great victory against the occupation. But declarations and recognitions change nothing on the ground.
A sovereign Palestinian state was not born in 1988, when Yasser Arafat proclaimed independence, or in 2012, when 139 states voted to grant “Palestine” nonmember observer state status at the United Nations, or in 2015, when the Palestinian flag was raised at UN headquarters in New York.
So French recognition of Palestinian statehood would be merely that: words on a piece of paper, and perhaps a solemn declaration by President Francois Hollande and another stately but ultimately meaningless photo op for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.
Indeed, if no other country gets there in the interim, France would become the 137th state to recognize Palestine. In other words, more than 70 percent of the world’s countries have already done so. (The latest state to join the club was Saint Lucia, a tiny island nation in the Eastern Caribbean, which made the move last September.)
France would not even be the first Western European state to recognize Palestine. Parliaments in Britain, Spain, Belgium, Greece and elsewhere have already called on their respective governments to recognize Palestine. Sweden did just that in 2014, and the world did not tilt off its axis.
In fact, not much has moved since, either in the peace process or in European-Palestinian relations — besides the fact that, a month after the recognition, the king of Sweden congratulated the people of the “State of Palestine” on their “National Day” in a letter, marking the first time a European monarch officially hailed the Palestinians’ unilateral declaration of independence in 1988.
Now some might argue that Stockholm is not Paris — France, after all, is a nuclear power holding a permanent seat in the UN Security Council. But so are Russia and China, which have both long recognized a Palestinian state.
Much more significant than a French recognition of Palestine would be a Security Council resolution calling for an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank. While that would still not immediately change anything on the ground, it would create a new legal framework for future negotiations, and probably not in Jerusalem’s favor.
But even if four permanent members of the council voted in favor, such a resolution could be vetoed by the United States. It is currently hard to assess whether the US administration would support or oppose a Palestinian statehood bid at the United Nations. That might depend on the resolution’s wording, on timing, and on a whole host of other factors, but it has always been the US position that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict needs to be resolved by the two sides, rather than unilaterally via the UN.
And this is where members of the “take this French ultimatum seriously” camp chime in. They argue that French recognition of a Palestinian state could make it easier for an American president to refuse to step in with a UN veto. The more respectable members of the international community recognize Palestine, and argue that they are doing so in an effort to reinvigorate the peace process, the harder it gets for Washington to continue to stall such efforts at the UN.
Furthermore, those concerned by Paris’s proposal posit that while one more state recognizing Palestine changes nothing on the ground, a heavyweight such as France doing so helps create a critical mass that Israel will at some point be unable to withstand.
A solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can only come as the result of bilateral negotiations, officials in Jerusalem repeat tirelessly whenever confronted with the specter of unilateral steps. But when France, the Security Council and almost the entire world recognizes Palestine, Israel could find it harder to maintain that its approval is needed for Palestinian statehood. The family of nations will have made its near-unanimous decision.
Recognitions, declarations and resolutions do not have the power to create a truly independent State of Palestine. But they can move the diplomatic goalposts.
If Paris moves ahead as promised, seeking to convene an international conference this summer, aiming to prompt substantive peace talks, subsequently drawing near-inevitable bleak conclusions, and then recognizing Palestine, we could learn fairly soon whether this weekend marked the beginning of a significant diplomatic shift.
Israeli ministers lined up on Friday and Saturday to announce that Israel would not negotiate under the threat of an ultimatum, and also to argue that the French approach — promising the Palestinians recognition if talks made no progress — only ensured continued Palestinian obduracy. Still, one Foreign Ministry official was also quoted by Reuters as saying that Israel would “examine and respond” to an invitation to France’s planned conference.
As of Saturday night, Netanyahu was silent. Perhaps he too was weighing whether he could afford to brush off the French, or whether French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius’s late January snowball might mark the start of a diplomatic avalanche.
Raphael Ahren is the diplomatic correspondent at The Times of Israel.
@ woolymammoth:
Correct you are.
We, Jews, as a rule much rather talk ourselves into stupor on our way to the train cattle wagons, than organize to destroy internal and external enemies.
In at least two consecutive Wars we managed barely to get to “cease fires” against Hezbollah and Hamas….
The Judenrat – Capos system, persecution even torture and “administrative detentions” if not worse, against Jews by purportedly “our own”, both here and elsewhere, have been neither new or stopped after the Holocaust.
We methodically elect, time and time again anyone that is clearly inimical to all that is Jewish and then we feign surprise when homes, villages, farms, schools, religious Heritage Sites are assaulted, destroyed by the renegades we elect.
As of late it has been disclosed the for 18 years the US and the Brutish have been spying on operational details of the… military. If anyone wants me to believe that such phenomenal sequel would start on its own, w/o internal help that is, and last 17 years w/o the Mossad even winking, I have a great lot of land in planet Mongo for sale cheap.
It is a given that no real leaders will come to the fore from the “combina” developed by the Peresite gangs.
And just as much, I do not see outsiders to that ghastly pile of renegades, preparing to fight the rot either.
@ SHmuel HaLevi 2: It makes sense, but are Israelis willing to make the necessary sacrifices to implement the kind of change you have been consistently advocating? Because it seems as if the entire Israeli Syatem from The Knesset to The Supreme Court will do whatever is necessary to prevent any such change or changes. Or is just mere “talk” designed to make you feel better, because I see no movement towards these goals, sort of like Glick and Wise’s talk of ending the “occupation” and inviting the Arab residents of Judea and Samaria to apply for full Israeli Citizenship.
I ask you, SHmuel.
SHmuel HaLevi 2 Said:
I had a bug diagnosed by the MDs as ” something going around” or ” every body has it” flue.
Yamit82 is still hiding in the Chisos Mts. , but otherwise quite fine.
According to the genealogist the HaLevi male line goes back some 2,000 yrs or more. So possibly you are your own Grandpa.
@ honeybee:
Whahahahah Well… Not really. Archie was a great production and acting result and presented a view of a sector of the US society I really liked. And I am not related to Lear.
Long time I do not hear from you. I also miss Yamit. Is he OK?
babushka Said:
True dat !!!!!!
France collaborated with the Nazis and enthusiastically delivered French Jews to the Gestapo, The snails are therefore merely behaving true to form, which is to state that they are uncivilized invertebrates. The relevant question is: “Why does Israel recognize the French State?” Which benefit is accrued by pretending that France is not depraved?
@ SHmuel HaLevi 2:
I was watching a genealogy program on PBS the other night. It see that Norman Lear’s family changed their sur name from HaLevi to Lear when they immigrated to the USA,
So, does that make you Archie Bunker’s cousin?
Long articulations reciting the relative merits of worthless or obsolete documents that nobody today gives a hoop about will not advance our national interests over land ancestrally ours. One would have hoped that by now that such nonsense would be over, but it is not so. Re incorporation to our domain of those ancestral Jewish lands is our core right.
It is outright obscene, gruesome to send our soldiers to die to re take what is ours after being attacked by the Islamic hordes and then “negotiating away” the young Jewish soldiers blood in exchange for Nobel prices.
That monstrous era supported by thousands of “victims of peace” must be terminated with prejudice.
Now!
1. “Upon Israel’s taking control of the area in 1967, the 1907 Hague Rules on Land Warfare and the Fourth Geneva Convention (1949) were not considered applicable to the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) territory, as the Kingdom of Jordan, prior to 1967, was never the prior legal sovereign, and in any event has since renounced any claim to sovereign rights via-a-vis the territory.
2. Israel, as administering power pending a negotiated final determination as to the fate of the territory, nevertheless chose to implement the humanitarian provisions of the Geneva convention and other norms of international humanitarian law in order to ensure the basic day-to-day rights of the local population as well as Israel’s own rights to protect its forces and to utilize those parts of land that were not under local private ownership.
3. Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, prohibiting the mass transfer of population into occupied territory as practiced by Germany during the second world war, was neither relevant nor was ever intended
to apply to Israelis choosing to reside in Judea and Samaria.
4. Accordingly, claims by the UN, European capitals, organizations and individuals that Israeli settlement activity is in violation of international law therefore have no legal basis whatsoever.
5. Similarly, the oft-used term “occupied Palestinian territories” is totally inaccurate and false. The territories are neither occupied nor Palestinian. No legal instrument has ever determined that the Palestinians have sovereignty or that the territories belong to them.
6. The territories of Judea and Samaria remain in dispute between Israel and the Palestinians, subject only to the outcome of permanent status negotiations between them.
7. The legality of the presence of Israel’s communities in the area stems from the historic, indigenous and legal rights of the Jewish people to settle in the area, granted pursuant to valid and binding international legal instruments recognized and accepted by the international community. These rights cannot be denied or placed in question.
8. The Palestinian leadership, in the still valid 1995 Interim Agreement (Oslo 2), agreed to, and accepted Israel’s continued presence in Judea and Samaria pending the outcome of the permanent status negotiations, without any restriction on either side regarding planning, zoning or construction of homes and communities. Hence, claims that Israel’s presence in the area is illegal have no basis.
9. The Palestinian leadership undertook in the Oslo Accords, to settle all outstanding issues, including borders, settlements, security, Jerusalem and refugees, by negotiation only and not through unilateral measures. The Palestinian call for a freeze on settlement activity as a precondition for returning to negotiation is a violation of the agreements.
10. Any attempt, through the UN or otherwise, to unilaterally change the status of the territory would violate Palestinian commitments set out in the Oslo Accords and prejudice the integrity and continued validity of the various agreements with Israel, thereby opening up the situation to possible reciprocal unilateral action by Israel.”
The above is the writing of Alan Baker legal expert and former Israeli ambassador.