Statehood? Or Statehood Denial?

Elizabeth Samson is a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute and an attorney specializing in International Law and Constitutional Law and she has writtn on Palestinian Statehood and International Law for the inFocus Quarterly, Fall 2011 issue.

One short extract:

...The Palestinian Authority has explicitly stated its plans to use the UN declaration as a tool to make further claims against the Jewish state. As PA President Mahmoud Abbas explained in a May 16, 2011 op-ed in The New York Times, UN recognition of Palestinian statehood "would pave the way for the internationalisation of the conflict as a legal matter, not only a political one. It would also pave the way for us to pursue claims against Israel at the United Nations, human rights treaty bodies and the International Court of Justice."

Further clarifying the PA's plan, in an interview printed in the Qatari newspaper Al Watan at the end of August and just weeks away from his bid at statehood, Abbas said, "when Palestine gains international recognition of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders, it will be a country under occupation, thus our reference will be the United Nations (UN), and we will discuss our issues there according to article four of the Geneva convention."
In short, the PA plans to use UN recognition to evade sitting down and negotiating a settlement to the decades-long conflict with Israel. Recognition will simply be another tool in the Palestinian arsenal used to delegitimize Israel in the international arena.

Think about that.

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