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Notes -
From the point of view of the part of the modern left that generally favours secessionist movements, a big part of the answer is that they favour secessionist movements that appear to enjoy supermajority support among the inhabitants the seceding territory, or actually do enjoy a bare majority confirmed in a referendum. The progressive position on Scottish, Catalan, or Quebecois succession is that it is an appropriate matter for a referendum in Scotland/Catalunya/Quebec. In general, the view of progressives outside those places is that a "yes" vote is not per se a progressive cause, although holding a referendum that the British/Spanish/Canadian government doesn't want is one. In the case of secession of the West Bank and Gaza from being de facto part of Israel (i.e. a two-State solution), no such referendum is necessary because the result would be obvious.
"From the river to the sea" is a claim that the Israeli Jews are settler colonialists and not part of the "legitimate" population of the territory and that therefore a referendum that included them would be illegitimate - pre-GFA Sinn Fein took the same view about the Protestants in Northern Ireland, and supporters of Ukraine have made the argument about Russians who moved to Crimea post-invasion. This viewpoint used to be fashionable when the left was more sympathetic to ethno-nationalism, but in the current year nobody claims to support a United Ireland without a referendum, and the people chanting "from the river to the sea" are either confused about what this means or rabid anti-Semites.
Under this framework, the Confederate secession was illegitimate because the democratic consent of the inhabitants of the seceding territory was never secured. 40% of the Confederate population (including majorities in LA/MS/SC) were slaves or disenfranchised free blacks. And white support for secession was never close-enough to unanimous to argue that a 40% minority didn't need to be consulted.
Note that the democratic theory of secession is mostly relevant to cases where there are not large numbers of human beings being mistreated. The strongest argument for the existence of a Palestinian state is of the same type as the argument for the existence of Israel - that there are several million people whose fundamental rights will not be respected if they are ruled by people who hate them. The strongest argument against Confederate secession is the same as well - that the practical impact of the secession would be to violate the rights of human beings by enslaving them.
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