Israel’s Legitimacy Isn’t Debatable Under International Law

Adapted from Israel on Trial: Examining the History, the Evidence, and the Law by Roy K. Altman. Copyright © 2026 by Roy K. Altman. Reprinted with permission of Advantage Books.

At Camp David in 2000, Yasser Arafat told Dennis Ross, President Bill Clinton’s chief Middle East negotiator, that no Jewish Temple had ever stood in the Land of Israel. Ross, taken aback, warned Arafat not to say frivolous things to the president of the United States. At the time, claims like this—that Jews might be colonists in their own ancestral homeland—lived only on the wildest fringes of Western discourse and were regularly dismissed as absurd. But just two decades later, in the aftermath of Hamas’s October 7 attack, these once-fringe assertions have moved into the mainstream, shaping campus protests, driving media narratives, and animating our public discourse with divisive falsehoods.

We see this transition most prominently in a set of increasingly influential claims about Israel’s origins and legitimacy—claims that, because of how loudly they’re asserted and how often they’re repeated, now frame the way many Americans understand the Jewish State’s history. Before we can take these claims seriously, though, we must test them against the same legal and historical standards that we apply to other contested issues in our society. And it’s when we apply this level of scrutiny—based on reason and common sense, not bias or prejudice or emotion—that these claims begin to crumble. The fact is that, despite the intensity of the debate surrounding it, Israel’s status as a state is neither unusual nor legally ambiguous in the modern international system.

Relatively speaking, the modern State of Israel is a rather old country. When the UN accepted it as a member state on May 11, 1949, Israel became just the fifty-ninth country in the world. Today, the UN counts 193 member states, which means that Israel is older than two-thirds (134 of 193) of the world’s countries. Even so, Israel is the only country whose existence is constantly being questioned and debated.

From Iran’s Supreme Leader to the Massachusetts Teachers Association and Baptist preacher Alex Awad, the claim that Israel is “an illegitimate state” is one of the most widely accepted assertions I’ve heard in the two-plus years since Hamas’s October 7 invasion of southern Israel. But it immediately falls apart when we apply the relevant legal factors to the undisputed historical facts.

Let’s start with the framework. In assessing a people’s claim to statehood, international law asks four questions: Does the nascent state have a permanent population? Does it have a defined territory? Is it governed by a single effective government? And does it have the capacity to conduct foreign relations?

This test comes to us from a treaty signed in 1933 in Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay. Although the resultant Montevideo Convention was ratified by only nineteen states, its provisions have been widely accepted as international law and are generally thought to apply even to countries that didn’t sign it. The upshot is that a nation doesn’t become a state simply by declaring its statehood. Anthropologists and linguists have identified more than seven thousand different ethnic groups around the world today. But there are only 193 nation-states represented at the UN, which means that more than 98 percent of the world’s ethnic groups don’t have their own state.

This comes up all the time in my discussions with young college students who wonder whether it isn’t just a bit unfair that Palestinians don’t have a state of their own. Of course, that isn’t exactly right. They do have their own state: It’s called Jordan, which the British split off from the rest of Mandate Palestine as what was supposed to be a new Arab Palestinian state in the 1920s. But here’s the thing: Even if Jordan weren’t a Palestinian state, the absence of a Palestinian state wouldn’t be any more unfair than the absence of a Kurdish state or a Uyghur state or a Tibetan state—among many others. To become a state, in short, a nation must satisfy the four Montevideo factors by showing that it has a permanent population, a defined territory, an effective government, and the capacity to conduct foreign relations.

Israel meets all four of these factors today: It has a permanent population of Israelis; it has internationally defined borders (even though it may have some disputes with its neighbors about where exactly those borders lie); it has a single effective government; and it has a functioning ministry of foreign affairs. And this was all equally true back in 1948, when the Jewish State was founded.

First, Israel in 1948 had a permanent population: the Jews and Arabs who were living in the land the UN carved out for the Jewish State. On November 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly voted 33–13 to recognize the Land of Israel as the ancestral home of the Jewish people and to ratify their ancient claim to the land. This was once seen as so uncontroversial that it remains one of those rare early examples of East-West consensus during the Cold War, as both the United States and the Soviet Union voted to recognize Israel’s foundation.

On May 11, 1949, after Israel’s successful War of Independence, the UN voted (37–12) to accept Israel as its fifty-ninth member state. These UN resolutions also mapped out the territory of the nascent Jewish State, thus satisfying the second Montevideo factor.

Third, Israel in 1948 had an effective central government, headed by an executive committee—which itself was led by the chairman of that committee, David Ben-Gurion, who would become the country’s first prime minister. The new country also had an independent court system, capped by a supreme court, and a legislature, which still governs the country today.

Fourth, Israel in 1948 had an entire infrastructure dedicated to the conduct of foreign relations, which included a foreign ministry headed by Moshe Sharett, a signatory to Israel’s Declaration of Independence.

Having thus satisfied all four elements of the legal test that governs the creation of nation-states under international law, Israel was unquestionably a legitimate state when it came into being in 1948. For what it’s worth, the so-called “State of Palestine,” which has been recognized by more than 140 countries around the world—including, in 2025, by several Western European states—fails the Montevideo test.

Even assuming that the new “state” would be composed of a permanent population and that it has the capacity to conduct foreign relations, it has no defined borders. Indeed, many of the states now recognizing “Palestine’s” existence seem to concede that it has no defined borders, since they’ve been uniformly unwilling to say what the new “state’s” borders would be. And they’re wise to refrain from offering any such opinion because the Palestinian people, according to every poll that has been conducted on this issue, would roundly reject any proposed border that allows for the existence of a Jewish State on any borders—a maximalist Arab demand that goes back to 1937 and which no European country would seriously countenance.

Rather than be embarrassed by having the Palestinians themselves reject the borders of the proposed “State of Palestine,” then, the recognizing countries have simply elided the issue by refusing to set any borders at all for the new state. But a borderless state isn’t a valid state under the second element of Montevideo. Even if the new “State of Palestine” did have a defined territory, though, it would still fail the third element of Montevideo because it would have no single effective government.

Hamas—a U.S.-designated terrorist group—won the only election the Palestinians have held in this century, back in 2006. After that election, the ruling Palestinian Authority refused to relinquish control of the government in Ramallah, which governs the Palestinians in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank). Unhappy with this result, Hamas unleashed a violent purge against the Palestinian Authority’s representatives in Gaza, publicly executing hundreds of Palestinian Authority officials and installing itself as the sole governing authority in Gaza, which it ruled without elections or dissent until Israel ousted it from power after October 7. There are also hundreds of thousands of Jews living in Judea and Samaria today who are governed by the Israeli government, not the Palestinian Authority. There are thus three governments in the so-called Palestinian territories—not one—and none has effective control over the whole population.

The Palestinian Authority is unpopular, corrupt, and weak, and polls show that it would lose any Palestinian election, which is why no such election has been held in Judea and Samaria since 2006. And the Israeli government, which maintains some control over parts of Judea and Samaria and Gaza, is obviously not the government proponents of a Palestinian state would like to see in charge. But that just leaves Hamas, which all the recent recognizing powers—including the Arab Gulf states, such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Bahrain, and especially the European states—have declared can never be permitted to govern the Palestinians.

So, again, we have an elected political movement (Hamas), which none of the major powers would accept, and a corrupt, unelected authority the Palestinians themselves reject. Since the new “state” thus has no effective government—indeed, since no one can agree what its government would be—the “State of Palestine” fails the third Montevideo factor.

Here, then, is a snapshot of the distorted state of public discourse in the West today: Israel is called illegitimate even though it meets (and has met since its founding) all the factors international law sets out for the creation of legitimate nation-states, while the new “State of Palestine” is recognized as legitimate even though it fails many of these same factors.

What’s ultimately at stake in this debate is not simply Israel’s standing in the global community but the coherence of the international system itself. If seemingly well-informed observers can dismiss a nation’s statehood despite its compliance with the widely accepted legal criteria, then legitimacy becomes untethered from law and vulnerable, instead, to something much less stable and far more pernicious: political fashion, ideological caprice, majoritarian sentiment. Any such transition—on this and other international-law issues—would then reverberate across borders, inviting challenges to the legitimacy of states far beyond the Middle East. A world that discards baseline legal standards dismantles the international order and forfeits any pretense to moral credibility.

Roy K. Altman serves as a United States District Judge for the Southern District of Florida.

*The views expressed in this article are the author’s alone and are not those of the federal judiciary.*