Comment by Propelloni | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Propelloni | Hacker News Reader

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No, I can't because that's not what I said.

But I can expand on what I meant. What we currently have does not fulfil the common criteria for statehood [1]. Oslo-II was supposed to clear those status questions, but I guess that went down the drain a few years ago.

Palestine is currently not meeting the Montevideo criteria, therefore recognising it as a state is incoherent. It makes Belgium's government itself appear confused about what a state is and what is not, making it a mistake for Belgium to recognise Palestine as a state. Obviously it would be in good company, over a 100 states already have recognised Palestine over the last few decades, yet, unfathomably, Israel descended further into its apartheid regime. Alas, I guess most people are not as much of a stickler as I am if it comes to definitions of terms outside of math.

Of course you can say "to hell with the Montevideo criteria, it's just a convention", but then the Wikipedia article has an apt quote by the Swiss delegation, too:

"neither a political unit needs to be recognized to become a state, nor does a state have the obligation to recognize another one. At the same time, neither recognition is enough to create a state, nor does its absence abolish it."

HTH

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montevideo_Convention

So statehood has been recognised in cases where the Montevideo criteria were not fully met, Taiwan, Bosnia during its war, and others. That shows the criteria are a useful theoretical framework, but in practice they’re more convention than law, and states can (and do) recognise for political and humanitarian reasons.

In Palestine’s case, the irony is that the very reason it doesn’t meet some criteria is because Israel prevents it, through military occupation, settlement expansion, and now what many legal scholars and human rights bodies describe as apartheid and ethnic cleansing. Saying Palestine must “wait” to meet the criteria is effectively to accept and legitimise the conditions that make meeting them impossible. Does Israel meet the criteria, is another question? I would say not. Should it be disbanded given that?

It’s true recognition of Palestine is unusual, but it is far from incoherent, it has precedent, and the alternative is complicity in decades of systematic dispossession. Recognition isn’t a distortion of statehood, it’s an act of accountability when the usual path to sovereignty has been violently blocked and the alternatives are to allow the Palestinians to be murdered and displaced.

> Palestine is currently not meeting the Montevideo criteria

Yes, not that it necessarily matters (for reasons I’ll get to later), it does, and while you don't present any argument for your claim that it does not, I suspect that rests on inverting the Montevideo conventions explicit statement on territory acquired by force.

> Of course you can say "to hell with the Montevideo criteria, it's just a convention"

More to the point, it is a convention binding some countries (of which Belgium is not one) to one extreme pole on the question theory of statehood, and it should not be surprising that other nations have views ranging from the opposing pole through a range of positions which balance the considerations of the two poles, informed by various pragmatic and legal factors, including some which were not not norms of international law at the time of the Convention, like the right of self-determination under the UN Charter.

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