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8 Miskolc J. Int'l L. 1 (2011)

handle is hein.journals/miskolc8 and id is 1 raw text is: William R. Slomanson':
Palestinian Statehood: A Secessionist Dialogue
Introduction
No one has previously invoked a secessionist dialogue apropos Palestine.2 It is the
prototypical geo-political hotspot, and the object of next year's presumptive Palestinian National
Authority's announced declaration of de facto Statehood.' But given the long-term moniker
Occupied Territories, one must acknowledge the increasingly thin line between Israeli
occupation and its defacto sovereignty.
One thing that Palestinians and Israelis have in common would be their belief that Israel
is not a mother State. But Israel's resumption of West Bank and East Jerusalem Jewish settlement
construction-in violation Geneva IV-exemplifies Israel's complete (de facto) sovereignty.
The 2008 secessions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia from Georgia, and Kosovo from
Serbia, may spark yet another skirmish-in this instance, how the US could denounce Palestinian
Statehood, while embracing Kosovo's secession as legitimate. Per the unwittingly allied Russian
and American rhetoric, all three of these 2008 secessions were: (a) legitimate, (b) unique, and (c)
not precedent for any other separatist claim to Statehood. Nonetheless, I will demonstrate why
the secessions of Kosovo, South Ossetia, and Abkhazia were not legitimate under Customary
International Law.'
Palestine's presumptive 2011 unilateral declaration of Statehood, on the other hand, will
present a comparatively more defensible claim to legitimacy. Of course, no one would predict
that Israel will accept such a declaration of Statehood.' That is another topic for another day. Yet,
1 William R. Slomanson is Professor of Law at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law (San Diego); Visiting Professor,
Pristina University (Kosovo). The author thanks Christian Albut (TJSL 2011) for transcribing the initial speech
version of this article.
2 The scholarly collection in E. Playfair (ed.), International Law and the Administration of Occupied Tenitories: Two Decades
of Israeli Occupation of the West Bank and Gaga Stnt (Oxford, Eng: Clarendon Press, 1992) is perhaps the leading
treatment of this subject, even today. Its many excellent analyses did not then (almost twenty years ago) consider the
claim-made in this article-that one may apply a secessionist analysis to a location that has been effectively subject
to almost complete Israeli sovereignty since the region's 1967 wars.
3D. Diker & P. Inbari, Peace Process: Prime Minister Salam Fayyad's Two-Year Path to Palestinian Statehood: Implications for
the Palestinian Authority and Israel, MESI (Middle East Strategic Information Blog, Oct. 22, 2009), available online, at:
<http://mesi.org.uk/VTiewBlog.aspx?Articleld=73>.
4 But see: Mikulas Fabry, Recognition of Kosovo, Ahkhaia and South Ossetia: What are the Implications Jor Nagorno-
Karabakh?, available online at: <http://www.umich.edu/~iinet/asp/Docs/FabrvyMichiganpresentation.pdf> (Jan. 30,
2009) & The Kosovo Precedent-Directly Applicable to Abkhazia and South Ossetia, 3 Caucasian Rev. Int'lAffairs
108 (2009), available online at: <http://cria-online.org/6_11.html>.
5 This argument appears in Legitimacy of the Kosovo, South Ossetia, and Abkhazia Secessions: Violations in
Search of a Rule, 6 MiskolcJ. Int'lLaw 1 (iiskolc, Hungary: 2009), reprinted in 3 Ukrainian Yearbook Int' Law
(Kiev: 2010).
6 This is a likely impetus for the Obama Administration's launch of its August 2010 initiative, inviting Palestinian
President Abbas and Israel's Prime Minister Netanyahu for face-to-face negotiations-with a predictable view
toward avoiding the entrenchment which will be spawned by the continuing failure of external efforts to negotiate a

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Miskolc Journal of International Law
VOLUME 8. (2011) No. 1. PP. 1- 16.

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