The Vatican has just concluded a treaty to recognize “Palestine” as an independent state. Nonetheless, under governing international law, primarily the 1934 Convention on the Rights and Duties of States (aka the Montevideo Convention), “Palestine” will still remain outside the community of separately sovereign states. This exclusion will be proper, moreover, despite the United Nations’ earlier action on November 29, 2012. On that day, a General Assembly resolution had merely upgraded the Palestinian Authority (PA) to the substantially limited status of a “Nonmember Observer State.”
There is more. Jurisprudential limitations of the Vatican treaty on “Palestine” are evident “beyond a reasonable doubt.” The authoritative criteria of statehood are long-standing, fixed, explicit, and readily identifiable. More precisely, under plainly recognizable legal rules, a state must possess the following very specific qualifications: (1) a permanent population; (2) a defined territory; (3) a government; and (4) the capacity to enter into relations with other states.
In essence, the existence of a state is always independent of recognition by other states, or by any other such quasi-state entities as the Vatican. As a more practical matter, however, whenever the PA finally decides to declare statehood, Montevideo standards of creation will be widely disregarded. Much as the government of Israel, seeking to challenge a manifestly contrived PA declaration, will cite correctly to relevant Oslo Agreement violations, the PA will then counter-argue, by fiat, that its own authority to declare an independent state is “peremptory.” Here, the PA will add with conspicuous bravado that the overriding rights of statehood simply trump its peace accord with Israel.
Undoubtedly, the PA will cite confidently to the (1) non-treaty quality of the Oslo Agreements (treaties are defined at the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties), and to (2) certain allegedly basic and immutable human rights under international law that concern “self?determination” and “national liberation.”
For years, Israel has not troubled itself too intently with any of the expressly juridical aspects of “Palestine.” Most Israelis, after all, were never entirely convinced that Palestinian statehood could somehow become a genuinely critical issue. Prime Minister Netanyahu seems to have conceded the eventual creation of “Palestine,” but only on the seemingly prudent condition of Palestinian “demilitarization.” While this contingent condition or caveat may initially sound reassuring, it actually represents little more than an easily disregarded legal fiction.
The Palestinian Authority is surely aware of this fact. No new state, it will understand, is ever under any binding obligation to remain “demilitarized.” This exception holds whatever else it may have previously agreed to in its pre-state diplomacy and negotiations.
Over the years, a number of cases in United States federal courts had rejected the idea that the PLO, as “parent” of the PA, is in any way recognizable as the legitimate core of an independent Palestinian state. Earlier, perhaps, capable Israeli lawyers and policymakers might have been able to refer to such American case law in compelling support of an argument against Palestinian statehood, but not today. However grudgingly, after Oslo, after so many years of incremental Israeli recognition of PLO/PA authority as legitimate, Israel will likely have to accept a still implacable “Palestine” as a “partner in peace.”
Under the Montevideo Convention, all states are legally equal, enjoy the same rights, and have equal capacity in their exercise. The moment that the PA should proceed to declare a state of “Palestine,” however impermissibly, the new country will effectively become thejuridical equal of Israel. And when Israelis then begin to object strenuously to inevitable irredentist claims for more territory ? territory within “Occupied Palestine,” as the PA still describes Israel ? the world will listen more attentively to the Palestinians. They will, after all, now seemingly be equal to Israelis under pertinent international law.
It is too late to change all this. In part, at least, the advancing drift to legal symmetry between Israel and “Palestine” is the direct result of persistently concessionary policies fashioned in Jerusalem. But Israel can still learn some important and potentially remediating lessons from its myriad Oslo mistakes.
Above all, Jerusalem must begin to argue vigorously against European Union guidelines, insisting that Palestine’s borders never be based upon pre-1967 lines. In the February 10, 2013 words of Israeli legal expert, Ambassador Alan Baker: “The legality of the presence of Israel’s communities in the area (Judea and Samaria) 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.”
Accordingly, Jerusalem should finally affirm that Israeli settlement activity is entirely consistent with international law, and also that those jailed Palestinian terrorists who have murdered Israeli civilians will never be released as any so-called “good will gesture.” There is, in short, no defensible reason for Jerusalem to continue its participation in an asymmetrically suicidal diplomacy. Promisingly, in this connection, the new coalition under Prime Minister Netanyahu is apt to acknowledge this conclusion, and to more vigorously contest any propagandistic Palestinian manipulations of the International Criminal Court.
Before a Palestinian state can be correctly declared, it will first have to satisfy all codified and customary criteria of governing international law. Neither the Vatican nor the European Union can permissibly justify any “end run” around this corpus of binding rules. Jurisprudentially, at least, the creation of “Palestine” can never be based upon a fully concocted hodgepodge of irrelevant and dangerous political arguments.
Beres is professor of Political Science at Purdue, was educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971). He is the author of many books, scholarly monographs, and journal articles dealing with international law. His tenth book, Israel’s Nuclear Strategy: Surviving amid Chaos, will be published later this year.
yamit82 Said:
Oh that’s right, you’re not from Texas.
honeybee Said:
honeybee Said:
Liquor is not advisable in any weather. But I said dunk not drunk 😛
yamit82 Said:
Liquor is not advisable in HOT weather.
It’s over a 100 degrees here today and I could use a good dunk
@ yamit82:
5 free chances to dunk you in the village pond.
@ honeybee:
In this case my comment not even modified but spam filtered out and it’s over 24 hrs and still not appeared…. I think it weas a good comment and informative but can only conclude that it is pointed at me and not the comment. 🙂
What did you bet?
@ yamit82:
Don’t give up on the Pundit & Ted. I am making a small fortune taking bets on how many time times a day [ Texas time] your ” modified”.
The Pope called Mahmoud Abbas “an angel of peace”. His first son was named ‘storm clouds’, his second was named after Arafat, his third son’s name is ‘striker’ (from ‘to strike’) after Tariq ibn-Ziyad, who conquered Spain for the Moors.
He is Sunni, and the reason for his choice in naming his first son comes from this in the Quran: “Have you not seen how God makes the clouds move gently, then joins them together, then makes them into a stack, and then you see the rain come out of it…….And He sends down hail from mountains (clouds) in the sky, and He strikes with it whomever He wills, and turns it from whomever He wills. The vivid flash of its lightning nearly blinds the sight.”(Quran, 24:43)
For more on why Mahmoud Abbas named his children that way, and why he is head of PA, see
Clearly Popes are not as well educated as they should be.
@ bernard ross:
Thanks Bernard it’s been about 5 hrs since I posted my comment. If Belman were concerned he would have put at least a fraction of the effort in retrieval as I did in composing it. If Belman were interested in my comments he would insure they don’t get Botted in the firs place. I won’t chase him for a comment. I can post it elsewhere with a wider and greater readership If I choose and for the past months I have done just that. 🙂
@ yamit82:
I found that you can use the back button in the Browser and retrieve the copy on the page before it was posted and lost and then paste it into an email to Ted and he will post it.
@ yamit82:
“sometimes a cigar is just a cigar”
il papa is scrambling to save his investments which might end up in “palestine” As a reward another christian head will be chopped off by his pets in the ME
All of which will be ignored by those touting law.
COMMENT WAS BOTTED in your spma dumpster pls retrieve and post.
Topaz Said:
Tend to agree with you I’m sick of all the whining and comiserating about why they don’t love us, like us , support us etc…. The momnet the Jews of israel come to the realization that we are alone against them we are likely to do what is necessary… I’m not saying that there are not gentiles who really for good reasons care what happens to us but they are not likely to go to the wall for us or risk their positions, finances and lives for the jews or Israel.. In the end we can only count on ourselves and for those who believe our G-d. Eric Hoffer summed it up after the 6 day war: ““If Israel survives it will be solely because of Jewish efforts. And Jewish resources.” Israel as a state was only 20 years old when Hoffer wrote this. He could not assume that Israel would endure forever because it had just finished its teenage years. Now heading deeper into retirement age, Israel is hardly more secure in its place in the world. I assume Israel will always exist because I do not know a world without it, nor will I entertain any other reality, despite the noise of anti-Semitism. We have our own country: Israel. Israel has its own army. Israel has powerful allies. Jews worldwide are committed to Israel’s enduring existence.”
Alone Again
Isolation
That is why isolation will be. That it is why it must be. It is the greatest of blessings, and the foolish Jew of little faith sees it only as a curse. Foolish Jew, Jew of Exile, whose soul and mind has been destroyed by that Exile, who has turned from a Jew of faith into one of trembling before the man of dust
Unless. Unless we become the Jews we were meant to be. The Jews of chosenness. Of might and faith. Unless we ignore both the money and the honey of the United States and their empty threats and condemnation. Condemnation? It is dandruff to be brushed away before moving on to do the will of G-d. In any event, there is no choice. The United States will turn on Israel, slowly and subtly. The difference is that if we turn from the Gentile first, we will have the Almighty as the immediate staff and our comfort. If not, we will have neither the Gentile nor, for a terrible stage, the Almighty.
By Rabbi Meir Kahane
Then
And
Now
What do any of these arguments matter!!! ENOUGH!! The Jewish people need to STATE unilaterally that the state of Israel includes all of Israel and that includes Samaria and Judea; AND that the Jewish people have the ABSOLUTE right to Israel and all its holy places
The WORLD LEADERS do not give a good-god-damn about legality or truth or anything else; History has proven that the overriding vision is that “one Jew is one Jew too many”. When will the Jewish people finally get that message, what will it take?
As for the Vatican, what is different now is that the time is once again opportune for Jewish-genocide, for claims to Israel’s holy sites. Supremacy of God’s favour becomes possible ONLY with the elimination of the Jew as witness. The means to achieve this supremacy is the Unholy Trinity; that is, the joining of the clergy, the military, and political power in a common goal of world supremacy, if not, domination.
To whom are these writers directing their arguments. What other nation continually justifies, if at all, their right to their existence and their land and their holy sites, asks for acceptance of this right from the rest of the world. P.S. NOTE that Britain, one of the chief critics of Israel rights fought a war in the Falklands, to retain control of a piece of land a half world away. Britain did NOT ask ANY OTHER NATION OR ORGANIZATION for permission.