Palestine's United Nations Membership and Overcoming the American Veto

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Abstract

The issue of membership in the United Nations, which requires a recommendation from the Security Council followed by a decision from the General Assembly, continues to raise numerous legal and political questions due to the use of the veto to obstruct any enrollment, as evidenced by the Palestinian experience on two significant occasions in 2011 and 2024. This study aims to provide recommendations on the legal and procedural avenues through which Palestine can achieve full membership in the United Nations. To this end, our methodology relied on a review of the existing literature using the Systematic Literature Review (SLR) method, which addressed the matter of Palestine's participation in the United Nations, encompassing 51 research papers from the Google Scholar and Scopus databases.

After examining the existing literature, it became evident that these studies addressed the issue of Palestine's affiliation in the United Nations by focusing on the veto power in the Security Council, without expanding the research to explore other legal matters or procedures. This has led our research to concentrate on the ambiguity surrounding the legal basis on which the subject of enrollment is categorized as subject to the veto. The research recommends that the General Assembly should submit a request to the International Court of Justice to classify issues related to membership in the United Nations as procedural matters rather than substantive ones.