Renaming the Article Reviewing the discussion at Wikipedia Articles for deletion State of Palestine and the related threads on this page it appears that there has been a lot of heat and very little light shed on the rationale for the deletion and redirect to this article The editors simply expressed their own personal opinions on the question without citing any verifiable information from a WP RS source While some states are bound by conventions there are no universally binding legal criteria for statehood in international law The decision is usually left to the political branch and the courts follow their lead For example an Israeli District Court ruled that the Palestinian Authority fulfilled all of the usual requirements for a State and was immune from liability for normal acts of state in the Israeli Courts The Supreme Court overturned the decision explaining that it was ultimately a political question that fell within the auspices of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs see Palestinian Sovereignty Only In Court The legal rights and obligations for wrongful acts of a State always commence immediately with legal recognition by one or more States That has always been the case regardless of the conflicting legal theories or political doctrines involved see Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts at the UN Treaty Organization website and The Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States In that regard I believe that every UN organ has invoked the doctrine of non recognition concerning the situations Israel has created that make non recognition by other States obligatory in terms of international law and the Charter see The doctrine s of non recognition theoretical underpinnings and policy implications in dealing with de facto regimes by Enrico Milano Quite a few editors mentioned important sounding principles of international law but most of them seem to be completely clueless about the actual application of those terms For example recognition of a State does not imply that the governing regime is a legitimate one but recognition of a Government does It also implies that the thing the regime is governing is a State Only states and international organizations possessing an international personality like the UN have the capacity to conclude treaties That certainly applies with respect to the self government agreement between Israel and the PLO The ICJ briefly mentioned that fact in their advisory opinion and noted that the train had already left the station on the question of Palestinian recognition The Constitutive Doctrine holds that a State or Government does not exist for the purposes of international law until it is recognized by an existing State Sir Hersh Lauterpacht summed it up by explaining that a State is and becomes an International Person through recognition only and exclusively See D Constitutive Theory in International Law Reports By E Lauterpacht C J Greenwood page 400 107 countries have recognized the State of Palestine so Wikipedia editors can t find any cover in this doctrine to support deletion of a State of Palestine article The situation with the Declarative Doctrine is no different It is contained in the Montevideo Convention It asserts that the existence of a State does not depend upon recognition by other States Entities can go about their lawful business including defending their own territory and survival until such time as the matter of recognition gets sorted out In some cases that happens retroactively decades after the fact For example the United States did not acknowledge the Soviet Union until 1933 Then it granted retroactive recognition in order to pursue State related claims under the Litninov Assignment In the interim it had continued to recognize Alexander Kerensky as the head of a Provisional government His regime had collapsed and Kerensky had moved to Paris where he was employed as a sovereign newspaper editor See The Litninov Assignment Nationalization and Retroactive Recognition International Law Reports By E Lauterpacht page 177 In a similar case Great Britain did not rec