The governments of Ireland, Spain, and Norway want to recognize a non-existent Palestinian state, just as other, predominantly Muslim states have done since the United Nations elevated the status of the Palestinians to that of a quasi-state in 1988. But this status does not actually make the territory a state. Point three of the Montevideo Convention, one of the relevant lists of criteria for statehood under international law, emphasizes, “The political existence of the state is independent of recognition by the other states.”
In other respects, too, the Palestinians do not fulfill the criteria for statehood. The population of the Palestinian territories consists of very different, mutually disunited Arab tribes, clans, and immigrant groups that emerged from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. They settled in and around the nascent Jewish state when proximity to the Jewish enterprises became lucrative. For decades, efforts have been made to declare this heterogeneous population a kind of nation, with a common culture, history, and goals, united by the narrative of the so-called Nakba, said to designate their expulsion and persecution by Israel.
The decisive factor, however, is that the majority of these people do not want a Palestinian state. If they really wanted it, they could have founded it long ago, given the worldwide support and Israel’s willingness to compromise. Or they could have at least laid the foundations for such statehood: the economy, the structures, and the everyday institutions of coexistence on which statehood is based. None of this has happened. The Israeli occupation of the territories is to blame, claim the worldwide supporters of this fantasy state. But Palestinians have lived in Gaza since 2005, more than 18 years, without any Israeli troops or settlers, and yet they made no efforts to establish a state or to prepare for it.
The reasons why the Palestinians do not want their own state are as heterogeneous
as they are themselves. This state was conceived along the lines of UN Resolution 181 (II) in 1947. It was to exist alongside a Jewish state “in peace and security” and—in another, mostly forgotten paragraph—must allow a Jewish minority to live “in security” on its territory, a precaution taken by the UN to protect the Jewish settlers in Arab-dominated territories like the Gaza Strip (abandoned by Israelis in 2005) and Judea and Samaria (usually now called the West Bank). Jewish presence in the territories of the envisaged Arab state is by no means contrary to international law, as claimed in the European media and by European politicians, especially of the Left. On the contrary, the presence of Jews is required by international law, as “close Jewish settlement” in the entire British Mandate territory of Palestine was the actual purpose of the Mandate—granted in 1922 by the League of Nations and confirmed in 1947 by the UN Founding Assembly as applicable international law.
The coexistence with a Jewish state demanded by the UN is one of the reasons why
religious-fundamentalist Palestinians do not want their own state according to the UN model: they would then have to make do with a part of the territory that, in their view, belongs to them ‘from the river to the sea.’ According to Islamic law, once conquered, Muslim land, including the entire territory of the Ottoman Empire, is forever Muslim; thus the state of Israel (or any other non-Muslim state) cannot be other than illegal in their eyes. In 1947, when the idea of an Arab state in a peaceful neighborhood with Israel—a state recognised according to Western criteria—was included in UN Resolution 181, there was not yet a worldwide movement of Islamic fundamentalism. In the meantime, the character of the Islamic group of states has changed dramatically: encouraged by the weakness of the West, and having grown in terms of people and countries, many of these are increasingly militant, irreconcilable, and ready for war.
Many Palestinians reject a Palestinian state for another reason: because it would be corrupt and inefficient. They would prefer to live as full citizens in the state of Israel, upon whose solvency, humanity, and rule of law they could depend. There are no guarantees of inner security in the corrupt crony networks of President Mahmoud Abbas or any similar puppet.
The Palestinian Authority led by Abbas—intended to create the necessary conditions for statehood according to the Western model, in preparation for the establishment of a state—by no means fulfills the condition of a state authority or state power, as required by the “three-element doctrine.” This is the doctrine, according to the German legal scholar Georg Jellinek who devised it, upon which Western state law is based: clear state territory, clearly defined state people, and a state authority in possession of a monopoly on the use of force. After a withdrawal of Israeli troops from the West bank, the Palestinian Authority would certainly collapse. It would suffer the same fate as has been previously seen in Gaza: it would be overthrown and eliminated by a fundamentalist movement like Hamas.
In 2006, during the last parliamentary elections in the Palestinian territories to date, Hamas won the most votes. As a result, it took over Gaza, whence the Israeli army withdrew in 2005. Hamas then consolidated their hold on power in a bloody civil war and cruelly liquidated all the PLO officials they could. In the West Bank, only the presence of Israeli troops has secured the power of the corrupt Palestinian Authority, which is hated by the population and which, according to estimates by its opponents, wastes and embezzles 70-80% of Western aid money.
Under such circumstances, a Palestinian State is difficult to imagine, unless the West would like to see either another Hamas state (and the wars emanating from it) or Israeli troops and settlers remaining to protect the alleged state authority. Moreover, the other criteria of statehood according to Western standards are also not fulfilled by the Palestinians. There is neither agreement on the borders of the state territory nor the minimum internal solidarity required for a people to cohere together as citizens of the same state. The only cohesion between these groups and clans is a shared hatred of the West and a common intention to extract as many billions in aid money from the despised and frightened Western states as possible. The Arab religious fighters and terrorists of all stripes immigrating to these states provide the violence needed to create the necessary level of fear that will persuade governments and the electorate to continue financing the corrupt business.
On all issues beyond this, the positions of the Arab groups, the so-called Palestinian people, diverge to the point of incompatibility. A state under the presence of Israeli troops or other foreign forces of order would not be tolerated by radical Palestinians. Nor would they demilitarize and disarm their militias. If this should be a condition of their statehood, they would do everything imaginable (smuggling, secret weapons production, etc.) to achieve the actual purpose of a state as they see it, which is jihad—as we have seen in Gaza. That is why they emphasize their independence, as Hamas did in its laudatory statement on the recognition of the non-existent state by the governments of Ireland, Norway, and Spain.
Behind the appealing word ‘independence’ lies, above all, the right to arm oneself. A demilitarized Palestinian state, as demanded by the West, makes no sense according to devout, Quran-abiding Muslims. This is because jihad—struggle, including armed struggle—is both the real fulfillment of a man’s life (as the 1988 Covenant of Hamas declares) and the real purpose of an Islamic state. In his book Crowds and Power, Elias Canetti unapologetically called Islam a “religion of war.” In Islam, the state is conceived as a fighting institution, not as a protective, distributive, and charitable organization, as in the Western conception. As proof, consider the use of Western aid money. The aid is not, as Western politicians hope and claim to their tax-paying voters, used to benefit the needy or for meaningful projects to build state infrastructure, but primarily to maintain reactionary tribalist structures, secretly procure weapons, and finance terror. The idea of being able to establish a demilitarized Palestinian state reveals the deep, hopeless misunderstanding between the Western and Islamic sphere when it comes to the establishment of a Palestinian state.
In any case, there is no mention of independence when it comes to the billions in Western aid payments on whose continued inflow this state would naturally depend. First of all, if such a state were founded, the Palestinians would lose their refugee status, on which their current billions in aid payments (primarily from the largely corrupt UNRWA and the European Union) are based. Aid would then likely be declared differently and come from other sources (e.g., from Iran, supported by the billions currently flowing from China for Iranian crude oil). Various powers could have an interest in exerting influence on the strategically important territory of the Palestinians. Even then, their state would remain a so-called ‘failing state,’ characterized by internal conflicts and armed actions against its neighbors. Where state structures do not function, there are lawless areas for criminal gangs and terrorist networks.
The question is why European governments insist on creating another state of this kind. In this case, it would most likely be a terrorist state similar to the Hamas regime in Gaza, which not only keeps its own population in poverty and ignorance and invests international aid money in rocket building and global terrorist activities, but also seeks to trigger a new regional war at some point. Does the West really need such a state?
