Palestine and the Responsibilities of Statehood

The Palestinians want the rights of statehood, but none of the responsibilities.

My latest essay over at Providence delves into the recent push for Palestinian statehood and explores why it should fail on its own merits. Since ancient times, states have been recognized not only to have rights, but also to incur responsibilities to other states. Theorists through the early modern period and beyond described these duties in detail, and they have been ratified in treaties and agreements, including the UN Charter, ever since. I argue that the Palestinian national movement abdicates or repudiates all of these responsibilities and should thus be disqualified from achieving statehood.

Below is an excerpt, but you can read the whole thing here.

This combination of rights and duties has long been a part of the theoretical and practical discourse about nation-states and sovereignty, recognizable in the earliest treaties between polities and fleshed out in detail during through the 15^th, 16^th, and 17^th centuries. Over those formative centuries for Western civilization, a wide variety of important and lasting concepts relating to the rights and responsibilities of nation-states were codified in philosophical treatises, theological pamphlets, and international treaties. Writers and thinkers including Jean Bodin, Francisco de Vitoria, Thomas Hobbes, and, most famously, Hugo Grotius made legal, religious, and theoretical arguments for the duties of states to other states. These duties included mutual respect for international boundaries, the need to exercise internal control and avoid non-state violence spilling across borders, responsibility for the actions of one’s own citizenry, respect for the internal politics of other nations, non-interference with neutral trade, appropriate conduct in warfare, proper treatment of envoys and diplomats, and the honoring of promises and treaties. These concepts found perhaps their most well-known and influential practical application in the 1648 Peace of Westphalia.

That series of mutual diplomatic agreements ended the horrific combat of the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648), which tore Europe asunder in an orgy of religious and political conflict. In these treaties, the nation-states and empires of continental Europe agreed to many of the basic terms previously detailed by the aforementioned thinkers, including respect for religious differences and mutual recognition of territorial integrity. This peace did not end all war—each of the signatories would go on to violate their agreements in due course—yet it set in stone a set of duties that sovereign recognition conferred. If you fast-forward to the present day, the basic outlines delineated back then have not much changed. The 1945 United Nations Charter, signed almost 300 years after the Peace of Westphalia, bound all member states and, crucially, all potential future member states, to certain responsibilities of statehood. These include settling disputes peacefully, refraining from the threat or use of force against the territorial or political independence of any state, and respect for universal human rights and fundamental freedoms.

This is what statehood means: not just a list of rights that come with recognition, but also responsibilities to one’s citizens, neighbors, and the international community writ large. And this is exactly why Palestine fails the statehood test: Palestinian society, from its leaders down to its activists, repudiates each and every one of these duties. They demand the rights of statehood, yet deny its responsibilities.