The United Nations is expected to pass a resolution on Thursday to admit the PLO as a non-member state and recognize the “right of the Palestinian people to self-determination and to independence in their State of Palestine on the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967,” even though its regulations require a state to have a functioning government within borders under international agreement.
The Palestinian Authority, the administrative body of the PLO, also does not satisfy U.N. requirements that it have a functioning government over the presumed borders. PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas has ruled from the PA capital of Ramallah more than two years beyond the prescribed date for new presidential elections, and the legislature has not functioned for years following the Hamas parliamentary victory in the first and only parliamentary elections.
Ismail Haniyeh runs Gaza under Hamas, a terrorist organization that is outlawed by the United States, among other countries.
In addition, the requirements for a state require that the entity have a “permanent population,” but a large percentage, if not majority, of Palestinian Authority Arabs are “refugees” who claim their home is within Israel as defined by the Temporary Armistice Lines that the United Nations recognized in 1949 after the Arab world failed to annihilate the new re-established State of Israel.
Those borders existed until the Six-Day War in 1967, when the U.N. passed a resolution calling for Israel to withdraw from “territories” that never were defined.
Commentary Magazine notes that another requirement for a state is that it have the “capacity to enter into relations with the other states,” which it cannot do because of the political and military division between Gaza and Ramallah. The two were estranged in a militia war in 2007.
The resolution is to be passed on the anniversary of what the Palestinian Authority and the Arab world call the “Day of Catastrophe,” when the U.N. formally recognized Israel.
The resolution in the General Assembly would give the PA nonmember observer status, a position that until now is held only by the Vatican, which has its own government and has defined borders.
The resolution will “accord to Palestine Non-member Observer State status in the United Nations, without prejudice to the acquired rights, privileges and role of the Palestine Liberation Organization in the United Nations as the representative of the Palestinian people, in accordance with the relevant resolutions and practice.”
The PLO is not a government and actually is the umbrella organization that overrules the Palestinian Authority.
The resolution also “reaffirms the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination and to independence in their State of Palestine on the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967.”
The borders are explicitly not defined because the resolution adds that the “peace process" needs to resume in order to reach “a just, lasting and comprehensive peace settlement between the Palestinian and Israeli sides that resolves all outstanding core issues, namely the Palestine refugees, Jerusalem, settlements, borders, security and water.”
The Arabs actually were granted a “Palestinian” state in the 1947 Partition Plan, which granted them far more land than later was allocated to Jordan after the Armistice Agreement in 1949 marking the conclusions of the war.
The PLO belatedly accepted the Partition Plan borders 40 years later even though it was no longer relevant.
Commentary wrote, "Under the Montevideo Convention (1933), a state “should possess the following qualifications”: a defined territory, a government, capacity to enter into relations with the other states, and a permanent population.”