International law seems to stump Joly
Pretending Palestine exists won’t make it so
Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly joined the chorus of elite voices calling for an independent Palestinian state on Friday. On the heels of Canada’s abstention from a vote earlier in the day on Palestinian membership in the United Nations, she tweeted, “Canada is prepared to recognize the State of Palestine at the time most favorable to a lasting peace, not at the last step along the path.”
Joly, who holds not one but two law degrees, may want to thumb through her old international law textbook before she fires off her next tweet endorsing the creation of a would-be state. As it stands, the balkanized Palestinian territories are nowhere close to meeting the legal prerequisites of statehood.
Customary international law, codified more than 90 years ago in the Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, lays out four essential features of the state as a legal entity: (a) a permanent population; (b) a defined territory and borders; (c) a sovereign government capable of creating and enforcing laws; and (d) the power to enter into diplomatic relations with other states. The socalled “State of Palestine” fails to meet at least three of these criteria.
For starters, there is no clear consensus on what the borders of a hypothetical “State of Palestine” would be. A viable Palestinian state would not, as activists would have you believe, occupy all the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, obliterating Israel from the map in the process. And, while parties have previously used pre-six-day War (1967) borders as a baseline for negotiations, there is still substantial disagreement over the appropriate lines of demarcation between Israel and a future Palestinian state.
The past seven months have only made this issue more vexing. Once the fighting has stopped, Israel will likely (and understandably) be seeking more territory via “land swaps” to create a buffer against future surprise attacks in the vein of Oct. 7 — at its narrowest point from the Mediterranean Sea to the 1967 demarcation line, it is just nine miles wide.
With Israeli-palestinian relations now at an all-time low, it’s difficult to envision these thorny land disagreements being resolved any time soon.
Heck, it took Canada and Denmark, two of the world’s most nonconfrontational countries, 50 years to squash their beef over Hans Island. So, for the foreseeable future, “Palestine” will almost invariably lack a defined territory and recognized borders.
Nor does Palestine have anything even close to a functional government. It, in fact, has two failed ones: its constituent parts, Gaza and the West Bank, have each
been governed (poorly) by separate parties since 2006. While Hamas desperately clings to life in Gaza, rival party Fatah just as desperately clings to relevancy in the West Bank. The Mahmoud Abbas-led West Bank governing party has been in free fall since Oct. 7 and now finds itself polling more than 20 points behind Hamas on its own home turf. Abbas, who hasn’t stood in a competitive election since 2005, held just an eight per cent approval rating among West Bank Palestinians as of March. Abbas has effectively ruled by decree since the Palestinian Legislative Council was suspended in 2007.
This brings us to the final criterion of the power to engage in diplomacy with other states. At this point, it’s not even clear who has the authority to represent the Palestinian people in the international arena. Hamas, the most popular party in both Gaza and the West Bank, has been designated a terrorist organization in eight countries, including Canada, plus the European Union. Minister Joly herself has stated that Hamas “(does) not represent the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people” and has “no future in Gaza.” Although it should be noted that, contrary to Joly’s assertion, seven-in-10 Palestinians approve of the Oct. 7 attacks.
Does Joly expect Fatah, which is backed by fewer than two-in-10 Palestinians and hasn’t run a slate of candidates in nearly two decades, to conduct diplomacy with Israel and other states in the region on behalf of the entire population? Odds are that she hasn’t thought about the massive stumbling block the current vacuum of power presents for a future State of Palestine.
“Palestine” is, as it stands, a porous-bordered, noncontiguous hodgepodge, split governance-wise between two mutually suspicious parties united only by their antipathy toward Israel. It is less a sovereign state than a half-baked idea drawn on a cocktail napkin.
While Mélanie Joly is joining the faddish call for Palestinian Statehood, she must know deep down that the Palestinian territories look nothing like a state and likely won’t any time soon. Her performative virtue signalling only further harms her credibility as Canada’s top diplomat.
SEVEN-IN-10 PALESTINIANS APPROVE OF THE OCT. 7 ATTACKS.