The ‘Impressed’ Sovereignty Of The State Of Palestine: Role Of United Nations And Palestinian Diaspora – Analysis

The State of Palestine exists in a limbo between as aspirational Westphalian security-state and a colony of all masters but itself. 

The destitution of its territorial integrity is by no means the only hindrance to is challenged statehood. Confined to checkered miles stretch of landed encampments, of what can only be considered ghettoes under siege, Palestine resembles no less than a post-apocalyptical reality whereupon a government only kept on life support by foreign aid and UN sponsors is left to its less-than democratic legitimacy to run an apparatus of less-than standard public policy. The Palestinian “para-state” operates on de facto control over the population (Khalidi, 2010: pg.140) under a complicated yet defiantly monolithically organization of the Palestine National Authority, which for the West Bank is completely overrun by the Palestine Liberation Organization (hereafter, PLO), whereas the Hamas holds the terror regime over the Gaza Strip. 

The historic Palestine refers to the lands of the fertile crescent extending between the dead sea and the Mediterranean, bearing long historic and religious significance in Abrahamic traditions. A mandate under British imperial rule as delegated under the erstwhile League of Nations in 1922, under the Balfour Declaration. British double policy to please both Arabian inhabitants as well as Zionists culminated into the UN proposed partitioning of Palestine into two independent States – Arab Palestine and a Jewish Israel, with Jerusalem internationalized [Resolution 181 (II) of 1947]. The Arab-Israeli War of 1948 saw the triumphant Israeli military expanding its territorial borders to 77 percent of the territory of mandate Palestine, including the larger part of Jerusalem. Over half of the Palestinian Arab population fled or were expelled, forced to become refugees in their own land. In the 1967 war, victorious Israel further occupied the  remaining Palestinian controlled centers of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including all of East Jerusalem. Thus, Israeli military and militia holds effective control over all Palestinian lands. which was subsequently annexed by Israel. The 1973 Yom Kippur War was followed by Security Council Resolution 338, which under inter alia called for peace negotiations between the parties concerned. 

To find a unified platform for united leadership and to bring together the disarray of the Palestinian community leadership following the wars, in 1974 the General Assembly reaffirmed the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people to self-determination, national independence, sovereignty, and to return back to their homeland. The following year, the General Assembly established the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People to confer onto the Palestine Liberation Organization the observer status in the Assembly and in UN conferences. Whereas its status in the United Nations has held constant both domestic as well as diplomatic sovereignty of the State of Palestine has suffered since its inception. 

Though a divvied-up state in a two-state solution, its sovereign status was not in jeopardy (as far as post-colonial autonomy goes) however the subsequent Israel-Palestine conflicts have only gone so far as to diminish it autonomy, territoriality as well as discretion in governance. Herein, Palestine, at least in legal standing at the United Nations Organization and its affiliate international institutions, is a state entity of equal rights and representative powers despite not having had effective control over its own territory. The strips and stipes of walled ghettoes that form the State of Palestine are so often and with institutional regularity violated by Israeli armed forces that exclusivity of territory is lacking, if not absent for the Palestinian state. The grave matter of foreign actors presents in and around what can only be described as an array of disfigured and dis-juncture(d) lands that forms a maze separating Palestinian citizens. 

As the Fatah and Hamas fall out in the post-2011 general elections, as the geographically confined popularity within the Gaza Strip marking a clear break in the civil authorities of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The break down of the unifying function of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, thereby ceasing its legal identity, threw open a constitutional crisis. The Palestinian identity is highlighted by activism, shared by its diaspora overseas, enacts sovereign powers to even its figurehead government in sovereign exercise, while at the same time drawing benefits from international bodies in aid of an innocent civilian population, beset by Israeli securitization and undemocratic representations.   

Therefore, PLO sources its sovereignty from two chief elements, (1) international sanction, and (2) and diasporic activism.   

The approval of the PLO vests upon the UNGA Resolutions 3236 (XXIX) – “The Question of Palestine” and 3237(XXIX) “Observer Status of the Palestine Liberation Organization.” While the former reasserted the “inalienable” right of the Palestinian people for self-determination: national independence, right to a homeland and “sovereignty,” in effect declaring a nation onto itself by ‘international mandate’ rather than by organic domestic process of outcomes. The latter went further to affirm the Palestine Liberation Organization to be the sole legitimate authority of the Palestinian national identity. So swiftly the non-state, non-elected PLO gained equal rank in the community of states, entitled to its observer status. While due elections had followed, the absence of elections since 2011, places greater emphasis on the top-down imposition of an organization that has been transformed into a state. International recognition over national determination has located the PLO in control of the Palestinian sovereignty. 

Palestine’s exercise of sovereignty despite its meager means and arguably hollowed governance structures is a product of international recognition over domestic legitimacy diasporic activism by its proactive nationals abroad. The readily humanitarian nature of the Israel-Palestine conflicts, and by definition of a post-war era pacifist discourse that would sympathize with the less ardent and organized Palestinian people over the systemic occupation by Israeli forces and government makes Palestine a public-friendly and humanitarian cause of appeal across the world, thereby according a degree of support to the PLO, that it may lack back at home. It has therefore been the non-state ‘diasporic entrepreneurship’ of Palestinians abroad that has mobilized support for homeland-based political actors and for the PLO. In respect, thus the PLO too has fundamentally charged diplomacy through its diasporic accounts rather than more statist means. This is the sustenance of the ‘insider’-‘outsider’ nexus that operates in the case of Palestine despite failure to territorialize the nation. 

Whilst a realist motto would fail Palestine as a state in its incapacities, a social constructivist line of justification would find this peculiar source of power and control to be a ready means of sovereignty exercise. Thus, even as the change in nomenclature from PLO to the State of Palestine under UNGA Resolution A/RES43/177, the PLO has remained the officiated government of Palestine. Even as Humas won the plurality in 2011 Palestinian elections, it had been the grasp of the PLO over Palestinian institutions that resulted in the break between east and west Palestine. Despite its less-than-impressive record, the retention and exercise of sovereignty by the PLO has been the peculiar operation of sovereignty in Palestine. Thus, Palestine posits an impressed sovereignty, where the government, essentially the PLO – a non-democratic, a non-popular and non-effective apparatus continues to represent a diverse group of Palestinian nationals. While Palestine would fail a classic realist proposition in getting characterized as a sovereign entity, social constructivism may provide a more appropriate answer to this understanding. The research article is not an ethical piece, but takes up the State of Palestine as a sui generis case study relevant in affirming a case for both Wilson’s ‘A Relativistic View of Sovereignty’ (1934), and Clapham’s ‘Degrees of Statehood’ (1998) in affirming a relativistic view to sovereignty, as a practice that is particular to individual states in the asymmetric international order. 

• The findings in this article are part of the author’s 2024 undergraduate dissertation for B.A. Honors (Political Science) from the Postgraduate and Research Department of Political Science, St. Xavier’s College (Autonomous) and acknowledges the guidance of his supervisor, Prof. Dr. Jhumpa Mukherjee, for this writing.