How Western Leaders Twist International Law to Invent a Palestinian State (Daled Amos) ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Tuesday, August 12, 2025

How Western Leaders Twist International Law to Invent a Palestinian State (Daled Amos)

By Daled Amos

As if to illustrate the saying "fools rush in..." Australia announced this week that it will join France, Great Britain, and Canada in recognizing a Palestinian state during the UN General Assembly’s annual session next month:

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of Australia said on Monday that the move was “part of a coordinated global effort building momentum for a two-state solution.”

He said Australia’s recognition would be “predicated” on “detailed and significant” commitments he had received from the Palestinian Authority’s leader, Mahmoud Abbas, to demilitarize, hold general elections and ensure that Hamas plays no role in a future Palestinian state.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese

Like the others, Albanese also claimed that he had the commitment and support of Abbas to make this work, or--in the case of Great Britain's prime minister--an outright ultimatum to Israel:

* Australia's Albanese claims to have commitments from Abbas to demilitarize, hold general elections, and ensure that Hamas plays no role in a future Palestinian state. (As if Abbas has the wherewithal to remove Hamas from the equation in Gaza.)

* Canada's Carney conditions recognition on Palestinian political reform, Hamas’s exclusion from Palestinian elections, and a demilitarized state. (But who is he expecting to guarantee that Hamas has no further role in Gaza--let alone in the West Bank, where Hamas has significant influence?)

* France's Macron promises recognition, with a mere reminder to Abbas of his commitments to reform. (Not surprisingly, Secretary of State Rubio revealed last Friday that “Talks with Hamas fell apart on the day Macron made the unilateral decision that he’s going to recognize the Palestinian state.")

* Great Britain's Starmer frames the recognition of a Palestinian state as an outright threat--against Israel. He claims he will withdraw that recognition if Israel takes “substantive steps” to remedy Gaza’s “appalling situation,” agrees to a cease-fire, and commits to peace. (He demands none of these things of Hamas.)

Recently, international lawyer Natasha Hausdorff critiqued Starmer's decision in an interview with Patrick Christy on GBNews Online. She debunked Starmer's claim that Palestinian Arabs have an "inalienable right" to a state. It is a criticism that applies to Starmer's buddies as well:

You cannot will a state into existence. And it's important to state that Keir Starmer is wrong, absolutely wrong on the international law when he talks about a supposed "inalienable right" of the Palestinians to a state. There is no such thing. If there was a right to statehood under international law, the Kurds would have a state. There'd be many hundreds more states.

In a second interview, Hausdorff addressed two legal problems that are less often discussed. First of all, granting a state to the Palestinian Arabs is, by its very nature, an attack on Israel's sovereignty. Both Gaza and "Yehuda & Shomron" were initially part of the British Mandate. Their conquest by Egypt and Jordan was not accepted as legal by the international community. (Keep in mind that the off-handed way Starmer and others suggest acknowledging a Palestinian state leaves the status of East Jerusalem--and by extension the Kotel--in doubt.)

She adds:

[I]t would also fly completely in the face of the Oslo accords, which the United Kingdom endorsed, as did many other international players. [It] provided very clearly that after certain territory was given to the Palestinian authority to have an autonomy given by Israel, that any change to borders or any change to the status of the territory would only arise from a bilateral negotiated final status settlement. That piece of paper that the UK endorsed is simply being torn up as a result of these proposals for recognition. And it leaves us with a very difficult position where Israel's not going to be in a position to trust any agreement it enters with international backing and international guarantees if it can be so readily thrown out of the window.

Hausdorff is not alone in pointing out how the decision to recognize a Palestinian state violates international law. The British jurist Malcolm Shaw KC points out that the 1933 Montevideo Convention on Rights and Duties of States identifies the four basic requirements for statehood:

o A permanent population.
o  A defined territory.
o  A government.
o  The capacity to enter into relations with other states.

Of these four requirements, the proposed Palestinian state only meets the first requirement. In their rush to recognize a state, world leaders are ignoring the failure of 3 basic conditions necessary for a sovereign state. Shaw notes:

o  “its territorial extent is undetermined”
o  “there is no effective single government authority over the whole of the territory”
o  “the capacity of the [Palestinian Authority] to conduct formal legal relations with other entities, including States, is hampered by the terms of the Oslo Accords, which [are] still binding upon the parties.”

The Executive Council of Australian Jewry put it another way, noting that these leaders are advocating the recognition of “an entity with no agreed borders, no single government in effective control of its territory, and no demonstrated capacity to live in peace with its neighbors.”

One can understand how Great Britain and France cannot help themselves. Not so long ago, they were significant colonial powers that saw the Middle East as their playground. But one would have thought that Canada and Australia, with their history, would understand the folly of playing games with other people's states.

But who knows, maybe this call for recognition is a con?

Maybe these politicians calling for a state actually understand that their calls for a Palestinian state are filled with legal hot air--and are patting themselves on the back on how they are cleverly mollifying their citizens. But in the process, they are encouraging Hamas terrorists and delaying the very resolution of this war they loudly claim to be working for.