On Recognition
Martin Luther King, Jr. in his letter from Birmingham jail expressed a frustration which rings true to Palestinians and advocates of their cause:
I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a ‘more convenient season.’
Over time, King was pressed and even eclipsed by more radical Black activism. That should not obscure the radicalism of his public life (which has been exsanguinated for the sake of an easy redemptive story: enemy of the state becomes conscience of the nation). King’s militant nonviolence has been caricatured as servile pacifism which the state preaches to victims of its violence.
Like the ‘white moderate’, the international system prioritises order over justice. More accurately, it demands minimum public order as a precondition for the promotion of human dignity. Whether one considers that a feature or a flaw, it is a fact that cannot be wished away.
Statehood as Order and Dignity
The decades-long campaign for recognition of a Palestinian state on the 1967-occupied territory meets the international system, however flawed, where it is. Its selling point is simple: an independent Palestinian state is the most attainable way, if not the only way, to restore integrity and dignity to the Palestinian people while maintaining a minimum standard of order. One need not buy that premise to understand the sell.
While Palestinian statehood is conceptually no more radical a project than Black equal citizenship in America, there is radicalism in the confrontation with power necessary to achieve it. The statehood project comprises three related but distinct elements: (1) inviting states to recognise the State of Palestine on the 1967-occupied territory, (2) encouraging states to enhance diplomatic relations with the Palestine Liberation Organization, as the State of Palestine’s UN-recognised provisional government, and (3) continuing to pursue membership of the United Nations, which the United States has blocked through its Security Council veto. I consider each element valuable in its own right and synergetic to the overall project. That they will not yield actual, immediate independence does not, in my view, render them merely symbolic.
I concede that the statehood project and its constituent elements feel wrong for the historical moment. Recognition of a ‘virtual’ State of Palestine seems a contemptibly inadequate response to the everyday Palestinian condition of dispossession, exile and subjugation, let alone to Israel’s current destruction of Gaza and its people. Moreover, unity of purpose is required to overcome the Palestinian people’s fragmentation and the statehood project has never been a unifier. Rather, the milestones on the road to statehood – the ten-point programme, the declaration of independence and the false dawn of the Oslo process – also denote major ruptures within the Palestinian national movement. These ruptures have given rise to political factions and popular movements which have challenged and sought to bypass or supplant the PLO. And like politicians invoking King to shame the victims of state violence into passivity, Palestinians suspect and resent that the revival of Western interest in recognising a Palestinian state is grounded more in a desire to ‘save Israel from itself’ than any genuine and durable concern for the Palestinians themselves.
But this last point is nothing new. The Palestinians long ago reached their ‘regrettable conclusion’ about the West and its allies, the Arab reactionaries. The statehood project had stalled because the West had concluded that the condition of the Palestinian people did not threaten world public order – more accurately, that Israel and its Arab allies could durably suppress Palestinian national aspirations. It should not have taken the events of the past year to shatter that belief, renew attention to the Palestine question, and revive interest in recognition. Alas, here we are. We as Palestinians do not have the luxury of allowing disaffection to cloud our judgment.
In that spirit, there are important reasons why the Palestinian national movement should continue pursuing recognition of statehood on the 1967-occupied territory. I will confine myself to two such reasons.
The Precarity of Palestinian Presence on 1967-Occupied Territory
First, the Palestinian governmental presence on the 1967-occupied territory is precarious. Whatever one thinks of the Palestinian Authority, its existence and its assessed governance capabilities have featured heavily in the statehood conversation. Its demise would change that calculus and would once more reshape the institutional Palestinian national movement. Recognition shores up the national movement in anticipation of this eventuality.
Our history instructs. As I have argued at length elsewhere, the events of 1982 were an inflection point for the Palestinian national project in that it made the pursuit of recognition indispensable, indeed existential. 1982 was the tail end of the decolonisation era, during which national liberation movements (NLMs) attained limited status (legal personality or subjectivity) in the international system. Before 1982, the PLO bore many of the recognised attributes of a national liberation movement, including presence in a bordering independent state – Lebanon – from which it would carry out limited armed activities. The PLO also existed as a capable if flawed ‘state within a state’ for Palestinians in Lebanon. Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and the PLO’s resulting withdrawal swept away both identities. Tunisia offered the PLO exile on the condition that the organisation not plan any armed activities there. These events forcibly reconfigured the PLO from a national liberation movement to a government-in-exile.
This change forced the PLO conclusively to limit its ambitions to a Palestinian state on the 1967-occupied territory because national liberation movements and governments-in-exile obtain recognition and legal status from different sources. National liberation movements derive their legal status from the determination of states, often expressed through international organisations, that an NLM represents a people vested with the right of self-determination. It was generally accepted in the decolonisation era (although perhaps not a general principle of law) that self-determination would be exercised within colonial administrative boundaries, which would become international borders upon independence. With the PLO’s representative status settled in 1974, it could remain noncommittal regarding the extent of its territorial claim for as long as it colourably existed as an NLM.
But a government-in-exile derives its legitimacy from the decision of states to recognise its territorial claim over that of the state which exercises control over that territory. A government-in-exile must thus identify the territory to which it is the rightful claimant in a way that an NLM, insulated by the perceived sanctity of colonial boundaries, need not. With an Israeli government grounded in Revisionist Zionism laying claim to Greater Israel, the PLO could not afford to maintain a territorial claim regarded, rightly or wrongly, as equally irredentist. The PLO’s claim to the 1967-occupied territory served as a bulwark of sorts against Israeli territorial maximalism until the Oslo process breached that bulwark with concepts like settlement ‘blocs’. These concepts remained part of the Western consensus for peacemaking even as settlement expansion and the growth of the settler population demanded ever-greater Palestinian territorial concessions. Recognition of a Palestinian state on the 1967-occupied territory without reservation or precondition helps to free the Palestinian national movement from this Oslo trap.
Gaza’s Destruction Needs to Be An Inflection Point
The destruction of Gaza is forcing the West (save the United States) to reckon with Israel’s bellicosity and its cruelty towards the Palestinians with a modicum of intellectual honesty. Israel has responded by lashing out petulantly at the international system: observe its UN ambassador’s response to Israel’s inclusion on the UN’s list of parties that commit grave violations affecting children in situations of armed conflict. Israel has also tightened the screws on the Palestinian Authority, its whipping boy in times of duress. Expect this to increase as more states recognise the State of Palestine in light of the International Court of Justice’s advisory opinion that Israel’s presence in the 1967-occupied territory (including its settlements and settlers) is unlawful, as states and international organisations may take measures to deny recognition of the Israeli presence as lawful, and as the International Criminal Court (ICC) proceedings relating to the situation in Palestine move forward.
Israel has been well-served by the Oslo process and the Palestinian Authority’s schizophrenic existence as occupation subcontractor and would-be liberator. Few Palestinians would deny that the vestiges of the Palestinian Authority and the Oslo Accords which created it are obstacles to liberation. Without understating the further precarity it will bring to Palestinians in the West Bank, the Authority’s demise should not be feared and must not be allowed to interrupt a legal and diplomatic programme that is bearing fruit. To the objection that the Palestinian Authority, the PLO and the State of Palestine operate as alter egos, recall that recognition goes to the state – the State of Palestine on the 1967-occupied territory – and not its government; indeed many states as a policy matter do not accord recognition to governments.
Recognition of statehood offers a measure of continuity through the disruptions that lie ahead. History again instructs: the West justified its continued recognition of the Baltic states during their Soviet occupation and annexation based partly on the continued operation of their diplomatic missions. The PLO-led State of Palestine may be dysfunctional; so was the Estonian government-in-exile. While the West may disavow this precedent, it takes an institutional Palestinian national movement to hoist the West by its own petard in legal and diplomatic forums, just as it must be held in the Gaza genocide case to its legal claims in the Rohingya genocide case.
Statehood as a National Cause
Second, the institutional Palestinian national movement has focused on establishing a Palestinian state since the 1974 ten-point programme. On that basis the PLO gained recognition as the representative of the Palestinian people, acquired legal existence in the international order, achieved broad recognition of the State of Palestine in the global South, and upgraded Palestine’s status within the United Nations to non-member state. The PLO is one of precious few Palestinian institutions to have survived a century’s worth of dispossession and exile, and while it survives only just, it alone has the privilege to represent the Palestinian people in international affairs.
That privilege – known to international law as the jus repraesentationis omnimodae – is inextricably linked with the PLO’s vision of Palestinian statehood. In my view, the PLO has exercised that privilege effectively in recent times. It devised the strategy behind the recent ICJ advisory opinion, which will be the wellspring of further legal and diplomatic activity. In the event of the PLO’s demise, that privilege of international representation would not simply pass to another Palestinian entity, and certainly would not pass to a representative committed to a vision of Palestinian independence perceived as maximalist or incompatible with Israel’s existence. Those who would repudiate recognition of a Palestinian state as a goal of the national movement, thereby calling into question the PLO’s raison d’être and the value of its international representation of the Palestinian people, thus bear a high burden of proof.
Recognition as a Radical Expression of Agency
Western states see in Israel chaos agents with designs on every inch of Mandatory Palestine. Those that have newly recognised a Palestinian state – Ireland, Norway, Slovenia and Spain – and those still flirting with the idea (e.g., Malta and Belgium) see recognition principally as a way of restoring a measure of order and only secondarily as providing Palestinians with a measure of dignity. Slovenia, for instance, characterised its recognition of Palestine as ‘a strong message to all the moderate forces who are now losing power in this long and brutal conflict.’ But this realpolitik should not obscure that recognition has been a goal of the Palestinian national movement for 50 years and remains an ambitious project, dare I say radical. Most of the West’s ‘white moderates’ are still waiting for a ‘more convenient season’: the communiqué of the most recent G7 summit calls for recognition of a Palestinian state ‘at the appropriate time’. But the Palestinians have the capacity to force their hand. In its technocratic and legal sense, recognition means perfecting the Palestinian people’s title to the 1967-occupied territory. But properly leveraged, the recognition campaign also repudiates the notion that Palestinian aspirations are entirely malleable, subject to the vicissitudes of Israeli and American policy and the resulting ‘facts on the ground’. It is a defiant, even radical, expression of Palestinian agency.
Justice movements operate on multiple levels, each level with its own strategies and discourse. Reconciling those strategies and discourses internally is difficult; movements may come undone in the process. The challenge lies in marshalling global solidarity with the Palestinian people towards action without enervating that movement. Recognition of a Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza, if conceived of as a return to the territorial status quo resulting from the nakba, hardly fits a zeitgeist that demands a radically reimagined, post-Zionist future for Palestinians and Israelis which is restitutive of the nakba. But the Revisionist and Messianic Zionists who govern Israel are hurling Palestinians and Israelis towards that radically-reimagined future regardless. While recognition is a worthwhile and necessary appeal to public order, justice will still have its day. The Palestinians and all who stand in solidarity with them, regardless of ideology, have a role to play in delivering it.
