No they are members of the "PA", formally the PLO who you may remember from such hits as "black september", "bombing the olympics", they have an offshoot killing hundreds of thousands of people in Syria.

They recently announced in Arabic that they will keep paying pensions to people who kill Jews, for any reason. If those people died killing Jews, their family members. Oh and in English they denied it [1]. Obviously western press is reporting only ONE of those statements [2].

Remember them? You know, they are generally described as the Palestinian faction who wants peace.

Oh, and they're billionnaires (well, the leaders are), which they weren't before getting their government positions.

[1] for example: https://jewishinsider.com/2025/02/pas-abbas-payments-to-terr...

[2] Just look at Google news: https://www.google.com/search?q=We+Will+Not+Stop+The+Payment... (note where the Reuters and Aljazeera links go)

> Palestine is currently not meeting the Montevideo criteria

Yes, not that it necessarily matters (for reasons I’ll get to later), it does, and while you don't present any argument for your claim that it does not, I suspect that rests on inverting the Montevideo conventions explicit statement on territory acquired by force.

> Of course you can say "to hell with the Montevideo criteria, it's just a convention"

More to the point, it is a convention binding some countries (of which Belgium is not one) to one extreme pole on the question theory of statehood, and it should not be surprising that other nations have views ranging from the opposing pole through a range of positions which balance the considerations of the two poles, informed by various pragmatic and legal factors, including some which were not not norms of international law at the time of the Convention, like the right of self-determination under the UN Charter.

So statehood has been recognised in cases where the Montevideo criteria were not fully met, Taiwan, Bosnia during its war, and others. That shows the criteria are a useful theoretical framework, but in practice they’re more convention than law, and states can (and do) recognise for political and humanitarian reasons.

In Palestine’s case, the irony is that the very reason it doesn’t meet some criteria is because Israel prevents it, through military occupation, settlement expansion, and now what many legal scholars and human rights bodies describe as apartheid and ethnic cleansing. Saying Palestine must “wait” to meet the criteria is effectively to accept and legitimise the conditions that make meeting them impossible. Does Israel meet the criteria, is another question? I would say not. Should it be disbanded given that?

It’s true recognition of Palestine is unusual, but it is far from incoherent, it has precedent, and the alternative is complicity in decades of systematic dispossession. Recognition isn’t a distortion of statehood, it’s an act of accountability when the usual path to sovereignty has been violently blocked and the alternatives are to allow the Palestinians to be murdered and displaced.