Recognising Palestine would not breach international law

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.

- SEAN O'GRADY

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.