If the UN says so, is Palestine a state?

The ambiguous meanings of Palestinian UN membership

There will be a vote this afternoon at the UN General Assembly on Palestine’s status: whether it should be a member of the UN.  Some, incorrectly, see membership as UN ‘recognition’ of Palestine.  It’s not that.  Only states can recognise other states (and that story will be told in another post).  UN membership is just that and no more although politically it’s unsurprising that membership of the UN is seen as a kind of endorsement of a country’s status as an accepted member of the international community.  So it’s important.  The significance of today’s vote is more political than legal.

Palestine will not become a member of the UN today even if this afternoon’s vote shows a thumping majority in favour, as it likely will.  The reason is that while the General Assembly can recommend a state for membership, it cannot decide it.  That decision lies, as too many decisions do, in the hands of the UN Security Council, so any membership for Palestine would have to be agreed by the US, which of course instead opposes it.  It vetoed a resolution on Palestinian membership at the UN Security Council last month.  Needless to say, Israel opposes Palestinian membership.

I was involved in a past attempt to increase Palestine’s status at the UN when I was a diplomat for the Brits at the UN.  As the Middle East expert in the UK Mission, it was my job to negotiate with the Palestinians and the Arab Group, their primary supporters, on behalf of the EU, for in those happier days the UK was not only a member of the EU but was also at that time the ‘Presidency’, so we spoke for the whole EU.  Therefore, not only was I negotiating with the Palestinians but also with the EU member states in order to ensure that what I was saying represented the collective EU view.  It was a kind of three-way negotiation, all the time with the Americans and Israelis yelling at us.  It was really fun, and some of those involved in the negotiation, such as the Egyptian and Palestinian representatives, became friends.  It was also my first private inkling that I was on the wrong side of the table, but more of that in later posts. 

When the GA resolution improving Palestine’s status was eventually passed at the end of the negotiation, the Palestinian mission held a party to celebrate.  There was a cake baked with the number of the resolution inscribed in icing on the top.  The Palestinian permanent representative, Nasser al-Kidwa, gave me the knife to cut the first slice.  It was an honour and one of my favourite memories of my otherwise very compromised time as a diplomat at the UN. But I have since wondered whether that moment, and that resolution, signified anything that actually mattered - in fact, to liberation itself.

Palestine’s current status at the UN is odd.  It’s a ‘non-member observer state’, a status it shares with the Holy See.  Palestine has a physical seat in the gorgeous General Aseembly hall, but it’s at the side not in the main seating area.  Today’s resolution would move them to the part where all the member states sit, where Palestine would take its place between Palau and Panama.  Palestine is allowed to participate and vote in certain decisions of the GA, but not others.  Today’s resolution would give them more such rights.  But even if it passes Palestine won’t have full voting rights at the UN, which are enjoyed only by full member states.  So far, so technocratic.  It’s the politics of all this that are interesting.

The PLO, who remain the international representatives of the Palestinian people, has long seen UN membership as part of their campaign to become a state, but it’s also a strategy to build up international support and increase the pressure for Israel to be held to international standards if, for instance, it is formally recognised as being in illegal occupation of the state of Palestine and, of course, ultimately to end that occupation.

I have to say that while I passionately support Palestinian liberation from occupation and oppression, I have questions about this strategy (similarly, I wonder at the PLO’s right to say it truly represents the Palestinian people, when the last legislative elections to the Palestinian Authority took place in 2006 – and were won by…Hamas). 

Palestine is now recognised by 142 of 193 UN member states, some of whom have recognised them in just the last few days (another way in which Israel’s conduct in Gaza has undermined Israel’s international position).   The PLO has invested a lot of energy into this campaign over decades.  At the UN, there is a stack of resolutions demanding the end of occupation of Palestinian territories (not, unfortunately, ‘the’ territories but just ‘territories’ and therein lies another tale).  That stack must be several feet high by now.  Every year, a long series of resolutions are passed at the UN General Assembly reaffirming the UN’s support for Palestinian rights.  There is even a division of the UN Secretariat solely devoted to Palestinian rights.  Palestine is one of the most chewed over and debated issues at the UN.

But all this diplomacy and heaps of resolutions have not granted the Palestinians one square inch of territory.  Today’s vote will not do so either, and neither will it end Israel’s bloody assault on Gaza.  Israel is impervious to this pressure, its intransigence bolstered by US support, often expressed by the American veto at the Security Council.  And, it bears saying, the one country that can end the occupation and make a Palestinian state a reality is of course Israel.  This is the hard truth that all this diplomatic activity rather obscures.  At the end of the day, it matters less that 142 states have recognised Palestine, there is only one that truly counts. 

Incidentally, this is what I told the President of Catalonia when Independent Diplomat advised Catalonia on its own struggle for self-determination: the one place that matters most to your independence is Madrid.  Unsurprisingly, the pro-independence Catalans, who included the President, didn’t want to hear this advice – since Madrid was adamantly opposed - instead hoping that international support (which was pretty insignificant, and far less than the Palestinians enjoy) would boost their chances of becoming a state. 

Kosovo, whose self-determination I was also involved in as an adviser to its Prime Minister (in the days before Independent Diplomat), faces a different problem.  It is a functioning sovereign state with control over its own territory (well, most of it), but it is not recognised by all UN member states and nor is it a member of the UN.  And that is because it is not recognised by Serbia.  So it is a functioning self-governing (and democratic) state but doesn’t have international status, the inverse more-or-less of Palestine’s situation.  Which is better?  The answer is obvious.  (Self-determination, both personal and national, will be a continuing theme of this blog.)

Of course, international pressure matters.  It matters if the UK recognises Palestine, as the British foreign secretary has hinted it might (a rather muted and transient message in contrast to the louder and continual signal of the UK’s supply of arms to Israel).  But even if the UN were to grant Palestine full membership, it wouldn’t mean that Palestine was actually a functional state with sovereign control of its own territory.  It wouldn’t stop Israeli settlers from stealing ever more Palestinian land.  None of that is in the UN’s gift.  It is in Israel’s.

Footnote: Mark Leon Goldberg’s substack post on the vote is good.  Mark is a very insightful commentator on UN matters.