Recognize multiple Palestinian states

This is in response to a New York Times op-ed by Turki al-Faisal, Veto a State, Lose an Ally.

The impasse over UN recognition of a Palestinian State demonstrates the delusional lack of imagination of the main players in this tragedy.

The key delusion is the determination of almost everyone to insist on there being only one Palestinian state. Naturally, Israel wants there to be a single negotiating partner with which it can make peace. That is not going to happen for generations, if ever. The Palestinians do not have the capacity to control their own people, or the means to acquire that control anytime soon, especially if they remain in their present state of dispersed impotence. The divide between Fatah and Hamas should demonstrate that. Even Israel can barely control its own people, if they really do at all.

Israel needs to break out of its rut and pre-empt recognition by doing it first, but not recognition of a single Palestinian state with some kind of well-defined borders. It, and the world, need to recognize Hebron, Nablus, Jenin, Ramallah, Bethlehem, Jericho, and Gaza as separate and mutually independent city states, each with its own small territory corresponding to the territories now under partial Palestinian authority. Each will be responsible for controlling its own people, and peace can be negotiated with each of them separately, or not. That negotiation would include expanding the territory under the control of each as it demonstrates its ability to control the people there. Some day the city-states might federate or unite into one Palestinian state, but they need to evolve toward that and that can't happen unless they get past the city level.

Once Gaza is recognized as an independent state, Israel needs to formally declare war on it. That would invoke the Westphalian law of nations and provide legitimacy for its embargo of it, and the status of neutral shipping. The people of the region need to accept that law of nations, under which every nation has absolute liability for every warlike act committed from its territory. They are not going to learn to control their people unless or until there are grave consequences for failing to do so.

Declaring war would not mean Israel would invade or conquer Gaza. It already did that and has now withdrawn from it. The problem is that was a war and was never declared as such, which would invoke the standards of the law of nations. Formally declaring war defines the roles of all parties.

It is time to re-establish the ancient law of nations and recognize as nation-states only those which effectively restrain any warlike acts of people operating from their territory, and that their territories only extend to the territory over which they do exercise such control.

Such control depends on acceptance of legal authority by almost all its citizens. Any people who are not socialized into a single society that adheres to law because it is right, and not just as long as they don't get caught, is not a society and having a few of them call themselves a national government doesn't make it so. A state, to be a state, has to be composed of people who buy in to a common rule of law. There is no way to make international agreements work if any significant number of a country's citizens don't voluntarily support them. It is impossible to control people who are determined not to conform.

Palestine has never been a coherent society of the kind that could make a nation-state work. We can hope they will be some day, but for the time being they are not a society and cannot be a proper nation-state. Friends of the Palestinian people need to focus on creating the conditions under which they can emerge into such a society, and that begins with the family level, then proceeds to the village level, the city level, and finally to extended territories with borders too long to have every meter of them patrolled. That will take time, but it is past time to begin, and Israel has the strongest interest in promoting such development.