 So, good afternoon. I'm very pleased to welcome you to this IEA webinar. My name is Barry Kulfer and I'm the director of research here at the Institute of International and European Affairs in Dublin. We're delighted to be joined today by Dr Alonso Gramendi-Dunkelberg. Dr Gramendi-Dunkelberg is a lecturer in international relations at King's College London's Department of War Studies. And Alonso is going to speak to us today on the topic of a tale of two statehoods, histories of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the lands of a coloniality. Dr Alonso Gramendi-Dunkelberg is, as I've said, a lecturer at King's College and he specializes in the history of international law from a post-colonial and global south centered approach. He's a contributing editor at the International Law Blog of Pinoyuris, which some of you may know and I can highly commend, and he's written widely on this topic. Alonso is going to speak for about 15 minutes or so and then we'll go to the Q&A with your audience as ever. This subject is always important but obviously given the enormous suffering, violence, human tragedy visited upon the peoples of Palestine and Israel in recent months especially, as well as the people living and volunteering there, it makes this discussion all the more important and relevant and urgent. As ever you're going to be able to join the discussion using the Q&A function on Zoom, which you should see in your screen, please send in your questions throughout the session as they occur to you and we'll come to them as soon as we can once Alonso has finished his presentation. A reminder that today's presentation and Q&A are both on the record as ever and you can join the discussion on Twitter using the handle at IIEA. Without further ado, it's my great pleasure to hand over to Alonso and the floor is yours for the next 20 minutes or so. Thank you so much Barry and to the IIEA for having me here and for allowing me to share my views on this topic. I'm very thankful. I have prepared some remarks, I'll read them, I'll say them and then we can have a conversation you know after that in terms of the Q&A and all. I'm very happy to be here and I think the first thing that I want to do is sort of set the stage and tell you this tale of two states, Israel and Palestine and how they came to be and how their story has come to be seen. I hope that in sharing this story I will be able to show also the history of international law and how it has impacted how states interact in international relations. So let me start with the most obvious here. Let me start with the first of firsts. When I talk of two states this might be surprising in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I am an international lawyer as I am sure many in the audience are too. What is and what is not a state is one of the most basic pieces of knowledge one can learn in law school. A state is an entity that has a government that rules over a population in a defined territory with the capacity to engage other states in international relations. This is, we have always been told, very simple. The United Kingdom is a state, Ireland is a state, Israel is a state, but Palestine is not. This is, we are told, also known. It's a fact. It's actually one of the key examples used by the late James Crawford, perhaps the foremost authority on theories of state creation and a former We Will Professor of International Law at Cambridge to explain what is not a state. Palestine, we are told, does not have an established government because it has a Palestinian authority. It does not have control over a defined territory because it is occupied and it does not have capacity to engage with other states because the US, United Kingdom, Israel, NATO, most of NATO do not recognize it. So how can this be a payload through states? Well, as a lawyer myself, I also believe that the law can be a very dry and boring subject sometimes trapped by its own assumptions about this very neutral body, very perfect system of rules always consistent with itself. And I reject this. I do not think that international law is a system of rules that makes perfect sense. On the contrary, I think international law is the denouement of its own history. It's how we got here to this international law that explains what it means to be a state. And so what I'm going to tell you today is also not just a tale of Israel and Palestine, but a tale of international law, its story, its history, and how it's seen in the context of Israel-Palestine. So without further ado, let me start then with the state. Once upon a time, there was a state called the Ottoman Empire. It was recognized by its peers, but only just. It was seen as civilized enough, quote unquote, to sign some kind of treaties with European powers, but not all kinds of treaties and not in equal terms. It was a state that existed at the edges of what Europeans called the civilized world. In the late 1910s, this empire lost a war to the UK, France, Russia, World War One. And as a result of that war, it was divided in several parts. The idea, the victors of the war argued, was to enable quote self-determination for the peoples that lived in these multinational empires. And so the Ottoman Empire was divided into several parts. We now know them as Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, and yes, Palestine. But when this happened, when this division started, the so-called civilized world was not ready to incorporate all of these territories into the society of civilized nations. So when they drafted the Covenant of the League of Nations to administer this breakup and to administer the newfound peace after World War One, Article 22 stated that there was a caveat in the breaking of these empires. Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations said, quote, those colonies and territories which are inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world should be placed under the supervision of a European mandatory who would be responsible for the well-being and development of these peoples in the form of a quote, sacred trust of civilization. In other words, the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire were going to be placed under the control of the United Kingdom and France. Now, given the colonialist goggles with which international law and the Covenant of the League of Nations was a part of international law, given the way in which it was seen through these colonialist goggles, the conclusion that these racialized communities were not yet able to stand, that's the term that they used, not yet able to stand on their own, meant that they were seen as lesser, as less civilized than European states that needed to supervise them. These entities were not technically the same kind of states. And yet, there was something different about them, because unlike the mandates that they created in Africa as a result of the end of World War I, Europe had actually recognized these territories as part of a state. In Africa, it hadn't. These territories were never seen as a state. That is a story for a different time that I'm happy to discuss maybe in Q&A, but the Ottoman Empire, unlike these other countries in Africa and other parts of Asia, had been recognized as a state. This is why Article 22 noted that these regions would be quote, provisionally recognized as independent nations. So what does this mean for the purposes of this new thing that was created called Palestine? The simple transition from imperial province to mandate raised one very simple question for the international lawyers of that time. What happened to the Ottoman sovereignty? Where did it go? So international lawyers of the 1920s launched on almost the holy quest to find where this lost Ottoman sovereignty ended up. Of course, international law was clear on one thing. These mandates were not the same as colonies. The whole point of a colony is that the colonial power owns and controls the colony, and therefore is a repository of any sovereign power in the air. In the case of the former Ottoman lands, this was not the case. The UK and France were not in position of sovereignty. They did not want it and they did not claim it. So if not a colony, then where was this sovereignty? Was it maybe in the League of Nations? No. The legal instruments that created the mandates in the League of Nations never actually say that they translated any sovereignty to the League. So in the absence of a more rational and positivistic explanation to where this sovereignty went, European lawyers of this time concluded that sovereignty had to be in a state of abeyance. Like we cannot find it. It's somewhere we just don't know where it is. Maybe they said sovereignty is not relevant to this new kind of thing that we've created that we're going to call a mandate. So Ottoman sovereignty was lost and could not be found until such time as the peoples of Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, and yes, Palestine were, let's say, worthy in European eyes to stand on their own to use the wording of the covenant of the League of Nations. But to our understanding of sovereignty, this is kind of silly. Sovereignty did not need to be missing. It did not need to be unfound or lost. There was a third option, a third theory if you will, of state creation or sovereignty, that the colonialist and racist goggles of the time did not allow 1920s lawyers to see. It is in fact a very simple one. It is very foundational to us and let's say to the 20th century that Arab sovereignty lied with Arab people. All 1920s European lawyers had to do to solve one of the most arduous legal debates of their time was to conceive of Arab people as people and conclude that Ottoman sovereignty remained with Arab people after partition and that the mandates were therefore sovereign. The sovereignty was just suspended, sort of like what happens in a protectorate. To be exercised by the European mandatory UK and France until the conditions were lifted. They were declared independent and they became sovereign independent states. So in this reading, this different reading of 1920s international law, mandatory Syria, mandatory Iraq, mandatory Lebanon, mandatory Jordan, and yes, mandatory Palestine were states. They were just states that were not independent. And that is a category that sounds strange to our 21st century years, but not necessarily to a society in the 1920s that not that far away had dealt with the German Empire, the Holy Roman Empire, Austria, Hungary. So this idea of mandates as states, as non-independent states, makes a lot of sense if you start looking at the mandates. Take for example the mandate of Iraq. Mandatory Iraq had a king, Faisal I. The mandate was established through the sign of a treaty with the UK. The treaty specifically stated that it was signed, quote, without prejudice to Iraq's national sovereignty. Syria and Lebanon had constitutions. Both constitutions said that they were states. All mandates had passports, nationality laws, they signed treaties, they appeared before courts. They were simply not independent, but they were states. This is why most Arab mandatory states attained independence within 10 to 20 years. Well, all of them except Palestine. Palestine was placed under British control, and the British had promised the Jewish communities in Europe that they would be granted a national home in Palestine. This presented the British with a problem. Under the covenant of the League of Nations, Palestine, the Arab mandatory state, had a right to independence, but the British had an interest in keeping it under British control until this Jewish national home could be established. These two commitments, I wanted to be clear, did not need to be contradictory. Palestine, as an eventually independent state, could be the national home for Jewish people. This was not, however, how the Jewish communities understood that concept of the national home, the British promise. They wanted an exclusively Jewish state instead, and this became a very big problem. It would be very complicated. Under the League of Nations, Britain had an obligation to secure Palestine and independence, and Palestine was not a Jewish state. If the national home meant a Jewish exclusive country where European Jewish refugees could constitute their own state to the exclusion of Arabs as in not coexisting with them, then Britain would not be able to fulfill its quote, sacred trust of civilization with the Palestinian people. And eventually it wasn't able to to the point where in 1947 it outsourced the problem to the UN after World War II. And the UN, considering, of course, the tragedy and horror of the Holocaust, proposed to divide the territory into one Jewish state and one Arab state, with a shared capital in Jerusalem. But despite what we often hear, this never actually happened. On May 14, 1948, the day the British ended their mandate, the Jewish communities declared independence of their own states, not complying with the 1948 borders, not complying with the partition plan, not creating a separate status for Jerusalem or a customs union with Palestine. They created their own different state. So the more popular version of the story is straightforward. Until 1948, Palestine existed as a semi-colonized mandate, not a state, and after 1948, only one state emerged out of this land, Israel, and Israel assumed its place among the quote, civilized nations of the world. And the other, Palestine, rejected partition and state a non-sovereign, ungoverned, uncivilized place, subject to appropriation by other more powerful countries. But this is the colonial view. This is the view that looks at the mandates and says, yeah, this this is what was being done, and that's how things work, and that's it. This colonial view, if you look at the entire context of the period, if you look at what everyone was was saying, not just those that were advancing these plans, this colonial view might be popular, but it is also wrong. Palestine was a state since the division of Ottoman lands in 1922. I know this is not common to say or hear, but that's what the documents tell us. It was a state under mandatory limitations, but it was and continues to be a state. In fact, when James Crawford himself studied the creation of Israel, he did not think that Palestine was a state, but he did conclude that Israel did not come into existence as the successor of the Palestinian mandate, but as a successful secessionist movement that ascended from mandatory Palestine. So my position is legally sounds. It is just not very disseminated. We are encouraged to think that Israel is the established, the well-established state in Palestine or just the Palestinians are stateless divided non-state actors waiting for the day when they can join the international community and when they can be able to stand on the road. This is of course, despite the fact that 140 states, 70% of UN membership already recognize Palestine as a state. And this is where the supposed peace process comes in. We are told that the future of Palestinian-Israeli relations needs to be decided through negotiations because Israel may stake claim to areas within Palestine. I don't agree with this in the sense that I don't think that Israel has any rights to lands in Palestine, because Israel is not the result of inheriting Palestinian land. It is a secessionist entity and cannot have claim to areas within Palestine without Palestinian consent. If there is a negotiation, it is to discuss that, that the state of Palestine has a right to seed its own land, but not because there is an up in Ethiopia right from Israel. But again, I digress. The main principle is that land for peace. Israel will offer Palestinian statehood, a statehood it already has, in exchange for peace. The problem is that when we discuss statehood from the perspective of Palestine now in the peace process, this statehood is different. When you read the documents, this new statehood for Palestine is burdened. It is unequal. For Israel to recognize Palestine, Palestine needs to be demilitarized. It must resign to the right of return. It has to be subject to security and economic control of Israel and its past. And when you look at what happened with international law at the time, this way of creating states is not unique. The instances of burdened memberships have been the bread and butter of international law for centuries. Creating states or perhaps more accurately deciding who gets the West's seal of approval is a project that goes back centuries and is inescapably tied to the racial hierarchies and racist structures that built the edifice we now call international law. This is what the standard of civilization was all about. And so take for example the case of Abyssinia, Ethiopia, which was at the time of the League of Nations unquestionably a state, independent state, but it entered the league as the site of crisis in need of intervention. The main charge against Abyssinia was slavery, that there was a record innocence of slavery in its territory. Of course, this was rather rich. The crisis of slavery in the 1920s was not an internal Ethiopian problem. It was a global problem. Just consider the Belgian conflict. But while European states were able to be forgiven for these transcriptions, Abyssinia was rapidly qualified as a failed state. It had not been able to attain the proper civilized status within the standard of civilization. So in the end, Abyssinia's tenure as a full member of the League of Nations ended with fascist Italy's invasion in 1934. Italy actually, its castle's belly was premised on the fact that Abyssinia had not achieved the required standards of statehood for League membership. So its own statehood was put into question by the aggressor state, by Italy. So it is into this kind of state creation mechanism that a, quote, future Palestinian state would be unequally integrated into through a peace process. This is actually very clear when you look at the documents, particularly the peace to prosperity, the so-called Trump administration's vision for Israeli Palestinian peace. This is the latest peace proposal that has been laid in the table. According to this proposal, upon signing, the state official will maintain overriding security responsibility for the state of Palestine with the aspiration that the Palestinians will be responsible for as much of their internal security as possible subject to the provisions of this vision. The plan then sets out criteria for Palestinian quote, security performance, stating that as the state of Palestine meets and maintains the security criteria, the state of Israel's involvement in security within the state of Palestine will be reduced. In fact, the plan implies that it is incorporating Palestine into the standard of civilization. It says, quote, once the state of Israel determines that the state of Palestine has demonstrated both a clear intention and a sustained capacity to fight terrorism, a pilot program will be initiated in an area of the West Bank portion of the state of Palestine, designated by the state of Israel to determine if the state of Palestine is able to meet the security criteria. So essentially, this isn't sovereignty. This is yet another kind of like suspension of sovereignty and being placed under the control of another state. Similarly, the plan specifically notes that the region cannot absorb another quote failed state that is not committed to human rights and the rule of law. So it envisions a series of internal reforms to turn Palestine into a quote productive and non-threatening member of the international community. This plan, therefore, will have Palestine established quote, transparent, independent and credit worthy financial institutions capable of engaging in international markets transactions in the same manner as financial institutions in Western democracies. And Palestine will also have a legal system to protect investment and to address market-based commercial exploitation. Palestine will develop property and contract rights, capital markets, pro-growth tax structure, and a low tariff scheme with reduced trade barriers by quote opening the West Bank. This is another sacred trust of civilization that will lead to Palestine's unequal integration and burden membership into the international community. This is not the same as a Palestinian state. Moreover, the plan sets out the specific security and economic conditions under which Palestine will obtain full sovereignty and at the same time sets out the conditions through which it will never achieve them. There is nothing in the plan to keep Israel from designating this purported version of a Palestinian state as a failed state unwilling or unable to fight terrorism and therefore subjected to unrestrained use of force. In other words, to conclude, the history of the of Palestinian statehood is a history of duration. It is a history often read through a colonialist filter where Palestine's recognition as an independent nation in 1922 is erased by a specific reading of international law, a non-legal corruption of international law, the colonialist and racist goggles I was describing. It is a reading that wants us to see only one depository of rights in the territory of historic Palestine, meaning Israel. And where Palestinians are subjected to the kind of inhumane starvation obliteration and colonization we are witnessing in Gaza today and also in the West Bank. But if we just take another look, if this time we remove the extra legal colonialist corruption of what the relevant laws were saying at the time, if we look at the entire context that everyone involved, not just the manditors, then maybe we will finally be able to get to the West, sorry, maybe we will be able to get the West to see the Palestinian people as people and recognize their already existing state without preconditions. So hopefully this tale of two cities will eventually find its happily ever after. But that starts through the recognition of Palestinian statehood, not these other semi-statehoods burdened on an equal that are being offered. Thank you very much for your time and for your attention.