The positive developments since the 2005 Handbook have all been at the legal level, as state policies have changed at a painfully slow pace, and only in response to clear and unambiguous legal obligation. The momentous vote by the UNGA on 29 November 2012, recognizing Palestine as a non-member State, has been followed by individual states granting diplomatic recognition to Palestine and creating bilateral diplomatic relationships with the Palestinian authority. Today, 135 of the 193 member states of the UN have recognized Palestine as a state represented by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) at the international level.9 However, the state recognition at the UNGA remains only formal recognition; the real test of meaningful statehood will be based on steps taken on a bilateral level between the PLO/PA and individual states. This is so for a number of reasons. First, the request for recognition came from a PA whose authority to represent the ‘Palestinian people’ is both weak and long-since expired—weak because it represents no more than the 30% or so of the Palestinian population who reside in the Occupied Territories and not the entire diaspora Palestinian population, and expired because the current PA administration’s mandate ended in January 2009 when new elections were to have been called for a new leadership, but have not been held. Second, although recognition is formally with the PLO, which does represent the entire Palestinian population worldwide, it has been made on the basis of Palestine as an “independent, sovereign, democratic, contiguous and viable State of Palestine […] on the basis of the pre-1967 borders.”10 The so-called ‘two-state solution’ on the basis of the 1967 borders fails to address the legitimate rights of millions of Palestinian refugee in the Arab world but also scattered worldwide, including the displaced and stateless within the borders of Israel and East Jerusalem whose status has become more precarious and vulnerable with the expansion of right-wing parties and settler movements in Israel. The statehood recognition also does not address how territorial integrity, sovereignty and viability of a Palestinian state in the 1967 borders is to be achieved in a prolonged occupation with Israeli settlement expansion and Palestinian dispossession continuing indefinitely. Third, UN recognition cannot address how territorial integrity and democracy are to be achieved for Palestinians when the PA itself is divided, with separate Fatah administration in the West Bank and Hamas administration in Gaza. Fourth, and finally, statehood recognition that calls for these criteria to be met for Palestine but not for Israel is a non-starter, when power resides with a non-democratic Israeli state that remains committed to an apartheid vision of a greater Israel with superior rights to Jews and no rights for Palestinians-- whether within or outside the 1967 borders. This leads to the heart of the issue for Palestinian refugees: their status as Palestinian nationals, and, as an entire population, their presumptive rights to citizenship within both Israel and Palestine wherever they now reside. Palestinian nationality is 9 Permanent Observer Mission of the State of Palestine to the United Nations, “Diplomatic Relations,” accessed February 4, 2015, http://palestineun.org/about-palestine/diplomatic-relations/. 10 UN General Assembly, “Resolution 67/19 - Status of Palestine in the United Nations,” December 4, 2012, UN Doc. A/RES/67/19, http://unispal.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/0/19862D03C564FA2C85257ACB 004EE69B. Introduction xv