So statehood has been recognised in cases where the Montevideo criteria were not fully met, Taiwan, Bosnia during its war, and others. That shows the criteria a

So statehood has been recognised in cases where the Montevideo criteria were not fully met, Taiwan, Bosnia during its war, and others. That shows the criteria are a useful theoretical framework, but in practice they’re more convention than law, and states can (and do) recognise for political and humanitarian reasons. In Palestine’s case, the irony is that the very reason it doesn’t meet some criteria is because Israel prevents it, through military occupation, settlement expansion, and now what many legal scholars and human rights bodies describe as apartheid and ethnic cleansing. Saying Palestine must “wait” to meet the criteria is effectively to accept and legitimise the conditions that make meeting them impossible. Does Israel meet the criteria, is another question? I would say not. Should it be disbanded given that? It’s true recognition of Palestine is unusual, but it is far from incoherent, it has precedent, and the alternative is complicity in decades of systematic dispossession. Recognition isn’t a distortion of statehood, it’s an act of accountability when the usual path to sovereignty has been violently blocked and the alternatives are to allow the Palestinians to be murdered and displaced.