‘Inalienable’? How badly must Palestinians act to forfeit ambitions of statehood?

Statehood should be earned, and demonstrated, before ultimately being accepted by others

Words are the munitions of modern diplomacy, and Sir Keir Starmer’s proclamation last week that “statehood is the inalienable right of the Palestinian people” transformed a shop-worn slogan into the official position of His Majesty’s Government. The quasi-sacred adjective “inalienable”, promptly echoed by David Lammy, implies that recognising a Palestinian state must never be questioned, as though the principle were chiselled on tablets from Sinai. In moral philosophy the term properly pertains to life and liberty; yet in Starmer and Lammy’s lexicon it now attaches to Palestinian statehood, irrespective of history or deed. Sovereignty, in their telling, has become a birth-right, insulated from conduct, capability, or consent.

After the barbarities unleashed from Gaza on 7th October – rape, mutilation, the burning of families alive – and a half-century of hijackings, intifadas and suicide bombs, one might expect the Palestinian demand for sovereignty to lie in the dock, awaiting condemnation. Instead, Sir Keir elevates it to the sanctuary of the “inalienable”, as though a trail of shattered buses and nursery schools were proof of moral entitlement. Violence that would delegitimise any other national cause is here transmuted into a credential, the victims’ blood serving not as an indictment but as a sacrament sealing the claim.

Strip away the halo and the claim evaporates. The Montevideo Convention of 1933 is the nearest thing international law has to a test of statehood. It lists four concrete conditions: a permanent population, a defined territory, an effective government, and the capacity to conduct foreign relations. You can add some practical pillars: sovereignty, a monopoly on force within those borders, and recognition – the diplomatic oxygen without which a putative state suffocates. Nowhere, you will notice, does the list cite gang rape, or the kidnapping, starving and torturing of civilians from infants to pensioners. Statehood, therefore, should be earned, and demonstrated, before ultimately being accepted by others.

Measure the Palestinian national movement against that yardstick and the deficiencies glare. Territory is split between Gaza and the West Bank; governance is sundered between Hamas and Fatah; neither faction commands a coherent monopoly on violence. Diplomatic agencies do indeed exist abroad: our news anchors have become all too accustomed to the dramatic rhetorical bullying of the PLO’s representative to the UK, who frequently but erroneously claims the title ‘ambassador’. But fake embassies cannot substitute for a functioning tax system at home, nor a proper and unified system of government. Above all, no movement in modern history has rejected more pathways to independence: Peel in 1937, the UN partition of 1947, graduated offers in 2000, 2001, and 2008. Each was dismissed because it required peaceful co-existence with a Jewish neighbour. In the hard calculus of statecraft, repeated refusal should forfeit the prize.

Set that record beside three less fashionable causes. Iraqi Kurdistan administers courts, borders and elections, and fought alongside the West against Islamic State. Taiwan meets every Montevideo test and adds an exemplary liberal democracy, yet is ostracised to mollify Beijing. Tibet lost its autonomy only by military conquest and has pursued non-violent redress ever since. None of these entities enjoys more than partial recognition, and none is graced by our puffed-up foreign policy with the adjective “inalienable”. Their virtues, perversely, invite caution rather than indulgence.

Label Palestinian statehood “inalienable” and every reasonable and basic condition placed upon it, from renouncing terrorism to accepting Israel’s existence and building accountable institutions, metamorphoses into oppression. The inversion is complete: refusal to make peace becomes proof of virtue, while those who accept reality are punished for their moderation.

Consider, too, a geographical curiosity. A majority of Jordanians are Palestinian by descent, and roughly three-quarters of the original British Mandate of Palestine lies east of the Jordan River, incorporated into the Hashemite Kingdom in the 1920s. Yet Palestinian spokesmen do not demand a square mile of Amman. The self-determination they declare inalienable somehow skips the territory where there are no Jews to be fought against. The sole map that agitates them is the one that erases Israel. That dissonance, studiously ignored in Western chancelleries, exposes the politics beneath the prose.

None of this denies that Palestinian Arabs possess legitimate grievances or that Israelis have committed errors. It is, rather, a call for linguistic and objective honesty. Statehood is a hard-won legal status requiring institutions, borders, and a willingness to live peaceably beside neighbours. Meanwhile, peoples who have met every criterion yet lack fashionable advocates – Kurds, Taiwanese, Tibetans – deserve, at minimum, intellectual honesty about their claims.

In reality, decades of factional strife, recurrent wars and chronic dependency force the sharper question of whether a Palestinian state created now is viable or desirable at all. No mechanism yet devised can weld those territories into a contiguous polity, still less one able to finance itself, control its borders or guarantee that a power struggle will not erupt the day after independence is declared. To recognise such an entity in advance of demonstrable capacity would be to award sovereignty on credit, hoping governance can be purchased retrospectively with Western money and Israeli indulgence. That experiment has been tried in miniature since Oslo; the ledger shows mounting debt, not diminishing risk.

Britain, whose diplomats helped mint both the Mandate and the modern UN system, should know the difference between natural rights and negotiable statuses. If we cherish the first, we must be exacting about the second. Otherwise, the rhetoric of liberty is brandished as a cudgel to batter established borders, and real nations paying in blood for the virtues we preach will ask whether words, and alliances, mean anything at all.