Very nice analysis. But the premise is flawed. The “right” to self determination is a post Works War I fallacy. Societies don’t have “selves”, individual people do. Societies don’t have rights, individual people do. Self-determination only exists in Republics whose people can freely choose and change their leaders. The people of Syria don’t enjoy self-determination just because they are tyrannized by another Syrian, instead of by a Swede or a Canadian. When a whole lot of them tried to exercise their right to self determination by removing Assad, they were slaughtered. Is that self determination?? Will the people of Saudi Arabia get to self determine who their next ruler will be? Of course not. But since he is a Saudi, their rights are inviolate?? Of course not. The genesis of this problem was accepting that the idea of rights appertains to nations, instead of only to their people. Once that fatal premise was accepted, myriad political philosophy dead ends naturally followed, inevitably leading to the kinds of pretzel logic you identified here. What matters is not the nonexistent rights of nations, but the inalienable rights of every individual. When that is the first premise, everything else becomes much clearer. Will a state of Palestine be a good thing? If its citizens will have all the human rights - true religious freedom, freedom of speech, and of the press, and to sell their property to non Muslims, and the associate with whoever they want - sure. If not, not. Right now, you know what the answer is, and it has nothing to do with the ridiculous Wilsonian idea of self determination.
Yigal- You’re raising an important point, and you are correct that human rights were originally understood as pertaining only to individuals. However, there are some cases where it seems like this solely individual understanding of rights didn’t quite work out and rights were expanded from ‘people’ to ‘peoples’. I’m not qualified to write a full history of how the notion of collective rights developed, and certainly not just off the cuff, so I won’t try here. But in any case, it’s absolutely clear that for better or worse a concept of collective rights has been accepted into international law. See for example the ICCPR (covenant on civil and political rights, signed by most countries) which begins by stating specifically that ‘peoples’ have rights, not just individual people. Obviously there are problems with this, which you raise, but in this post I am trying just to work within the accepted framework of international law as it stands now.
I understand. But no matter how many countries agree to a given proposition, if is false, their agreeing to it can’t make it true. The fundamental problem here is that the “accepted framework of International law as it stands now” is fatally flawed and mired in wishful thinking. It cannot support any rational solutions to real world problems.
I have reservations about the framework of collective rights too. That said, all law is a necessarily flawed human invention that also evolves and changes. Right now self-determination is for better or worse accepted in international law and so it’s a valid argument to make at the International Court of Justice. In turn the ICJ can issue rulings based on it that may have real world legal and political consequences. There would be no sense in Israel arguing at the ICJ that self-determination of peoples shouldn’t be a right, that would be just like going to traffic court and saying that the judge should throw out my speeding ticket because the city council set the limit too low. I at least believe that an argument like what I tried to outline in this post can be heard in the current framework of international law, that’s all.
I have often said they should have a state and be treated like a state. So attacking without provocation would not be terrorism or freedom fighting, but an act of war.
Very nice analysis. But the premise is flawed. The “right” to self determination is a post Works War I fallacy. Societies don’t have “selves”, individual people do. Societies don’t have rights, individual people do. Self-determination only exists in Republics whose people can freely choose and change their leaders. The people of Syria don’t enjoy self-determination just because they are tyrannized by another Syrian, instead of by a Swede or a Canadian. When a whole lot of them tried to exercise their right to self determination by removing Assad, they were slaughtered. Is that self determination?? Will the people of Saudi Arabia get to self determine who their next ruler will be? Of course not. But since he is a Saudi, their rights are inviolate?? Of course not. The genesis of this problem was accepting that the idea of rights appertains to nations, instead of only to their people. Once that fatal premise was accepted, myriad political philosophy dead ends naturally followed, inevitably leading to the kinds of pretzel logic you identified here. What matters is not the nonexistent rights of nations, but the inalienable rights of every individual. When that is the first premise, everything else becomes much clearer. Will a state of Palestine be a good thing? If its citizens will have all the human rights - true religious freedom, freedom of speech, and of the press, and to sell their property to non Muslims, and the associate with whoever they want - sure. If not, not. Right now, you know what the answer is, and it has nothing to do with the ridiculous Wilsonian idea of self determination.
Yigal- You’re raising an important point, and you are correct that human rights were originally understood as pertaining only to individuals. However, there are some cases where it seems like this solely individual understanding of rights didn’t quite work out and rights were expanded from ‘people’ to ‘peoples’. I’m not qualified to write a full history of how the notion of collective rights developed, and certainly not just off the cuff, so I won’t try here. But in any case, it’s absolutely clear that for better or worse a concept of collective rights has been accepted into international law. See for example the ICCPR (covenant on civil and political rights, signed by most countries) which begins by stating specifically that ‘peoples’ have rights, not just individual people. Obviously there are problems with this, which you raise, but in this post I am trying just to work within the accepted framework of international law as it stands now.
I understand. But no matter how many countries agree to a given proposition, if is false, their agreeing to it can’t make it true. The fundamental problem here is that the “accepted framework of International law as it stands now” is fatally flawed and mired in wishful thinking. It cannot support any rational solutions to real world problems.
I have reservations about the framework of collective rights too. That said, all law is a necessarily flawed human invention that also evolves and changes. Right now self-determination is for better or worse accepted in international law and so it’s a valid argument to make at the International Court of Justice. In turn the ICJ can issue rulings based on it that may have real world legal and political consequences. There would be no sense in Israel arguing at the ICJ that self-determination of peoples shouldn’t be a right, that would be just like going to traffic court and saying that the judge should throw out my speeding ticket because the city council set the limit too low. I at least believe that an argument like what I tried to outline in this post can be heard in the current framework of international law, that’s all.
I have often said they should have a state and be treated like a state. So attacking without provocation would not be terrorism or freedom fighting, but an act of war.
My only comment is I believe that was to at least some extent the thinking behind the withdrawal from Gaza, and we see how that's worked out.