Article 1 of the Montevideo Convention merely codified the existing customary international law when laying down the four criteria required for a state to be constituted.

The law is sometimes an ass – but not when it comes to recognizing whether an entity is a state or not.

Clearly if you want to call yourself a state you need to control land, have a permanent population, a ruling government and an ability to make and honour commitments. This is not rocket science.

The UN, FIFA and UNESCO ignore this long and well established law at their peril.

What will they say when Kurdistan and the myriad other liberation movements world wide apply to join these organizations and use “Palestine” as a precedent?

Ignoring the law by purportedly recognizing something that does not exist is a recipe for total disaster.

FIFA looks stupid as it ignores its own rules for membership – but expects those who play the code to observe the rules it lays down for the conduct of the game and to penalize those who breach those rules.

FIFA may have changed some of its more stupid errors on the website – but cannot hope to restore any measure of credibility by maintaining the fiction it still does in calling “Palestine” a “country”

The political fall out for the UN and UNESCO engaging in this stupidity will in my opinion be far more serious and will threaten world peace and stability.

The name of the country is Israel. If you cannot conduct a civil discourse you cannot expect a response from me..

Regrettably when Israel disengaged completely from Gaza in 2005 removing its army and all 8000 Jews who had lived there for up to 40 years, Gaza’s population – in an act of free choice – elected the terrorist organization of Hamas to rule their lives – an organization sworn to wipe Israel and its 6.25 million Jewish population off the map..

The Gazan Arabs voted then knowing full well who they were voting for. It doesn’t look as if they will be given a second chance to correct their very bad choice. This is par for the course for terrorist regimes

Gaza could have been a paradise and the first step on the road to a Palestinian State. Instead the population took great delight in trashing everything of value left behind by the departing Jews.

Hamas blew it choosing to continue to fire thousands of mortars and missiles indiscriminately into Israeli population centers on an almost daily basis bringing Israeli responses as it sought to defend its population. Suffering was the shared result for both Israelis and Gazans

Have you any sympathy for Israeli kids who were subjected to such bombings and the trauma they suffered?

Rather than making insulting remarks directed at myself, you would be well advised to heed my message.

Identify one child in Gaza who is starving. There appears to be massive amounts of cash available to smuggle in missiles, mortars and explosives but not enough to bring in enough food to feed the children you say are starving?. What about the hundreds of trucks that go into Gaza from Israel every day? What do you think they carry?

Like FIFA you live in a dream world.

Forget the false propaganda and sloganeering that features FIFA”s approach – and your approach – to resolving a conflict that has now raged unresolved for more than 130 years because of Arab intransigence as I pointed out in detail my earlier reply above to John.

You may not like my expose of FIFA but I believe it is accurate in every detail. FIFA’s devious conduct prolongs rather than helps to end the conflict,

If you think otherwise then please state your reasons.

At the moment it isn’t – and has not been despite FIFA misleadingly and deceptively proclaiming it to be a country on its web site and still continuing with that deception after it has been brought to FIFA’s attention..

I can assure you that not only FIFA has been engaged in such reprehensible conduct. FIFA however carries tremendous clout and has the capacity to greatly influence public opinion. Its conduct has been appalling on this issue.

What you think will happen in the future is unlikely to occur for the reasons I point out in detail in my article – unless you believe in consigning international law to the garbage bin..

Palestine could have been a country in 1937, 1947, at any time between 1948-1967, 2001 and 2008. Its leaders failed to take up the challenge at each of these critical time lines. Believing they will do so in the future and live in peace alongside the Jewish State of Israel must be viewed with a great deal of scepticism.

How do you sleep at night? When thousands of Gazan children are starving in the world’s largest open air prison? When thousands more are banned from seeing their families by the road blocks put in place by Apartheid Israel?

I really do hope you don’t have any children, as the world should not have more people like you in it.