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t the 2015 meeting of the UN General Assembly, the flags of Palestine and
the Holy See, both nonmember observer states, were raised outside UN
headquarters. The General Assembly approved this symbolic gesture at the
request of Palestine, as part of an offensive to seek approval from vari ous interna-
tional bodies to gain broader recognition as a state. Previously, in 2012, reflecting
the frustration of the majority of UN members as well as the Palestinian people, the
United Nations General Assembly voted to upgrade the Palestinian Authority’s sta-
tus from nonmember observer entity to nonmember observer state— a recognition
of de facto sovereign statehood. In 2015, Palestine won admission to the International
Criminal Court and delivered accusations of Israeli war crimes to the court. But
when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in the heat of the 2015 election campaign,
admitted that he would never agree to a Palestinian state, a member of the Palestine
Liberation Or ga ni za tion’s top decision- making body replied, “We will continue a dip-
lomatic intifada. We have no other choice.”
Why is achieving statehood so essential to Palestine’s agenda? In the practice
of international politics and in thinking about international relations, the state is
central. Much of the history traced in Chapter 2 was the history of how the stateThe STaTe