"A brilliant and bracing analysis of the Palestine question and settler colonialism... a vital lens into movement lawyering on the international plane." -Vasuki Nesiah, New York University, founding member of Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL)
Justice in the Question of Palestine is often framed as a question of law. Yet none of the Israel-Palestinian conflict's most vexing challenges have been resolved by judicial intervention. Occupation law has failed to stem Israel's settlement enterprise. Laws of war have permitted killing and destruction during Israel's military offensives in the Gaza Strip. The Oslo Accord's two-state solution is now dead letter.
Justice for Someoffers a new approach to understanding the Palestinian struggle for freedom, told through the power and control of international law. Focusing on key junctures-from the Balfour Declaration in 1917 to present-day wars in Gaza-Noura Erakat shows how the strategic deployment of law has shaped current conditions. Over the past century, the law has done more to advance Israel's interests than the Palestinians'. But, Erakat argues, this outcome was never inevitable.
Law is politics, and its meaning and application depend on the political intervention of states and people alike. Within the law, change is possible. International law can serve the cause of freedom when it is mobilized in support of a political movement. Presenting the promise and risk of international law, Justice for Somecalls for renewed action and attention to the Question of Palestine.
"Careful and captivating... This book asks that the Palestinian liberation struggle and Jewish-Israeli society each reckon with the impossibility of a two-state future, reimagining what their interests are-and what they could become." -Amanda McCaffrey, Jewish Currents
Autorentext
Noura Erakat is a human rights attorney and assistant professor at George Mason University. She has served as legal counsel to the U.S. House of Representatives and as a legal advocate for Palestinian refugee rights at the United Nations. Noura's research interests include human rights and humanitarian, refugee, and national security law. She is a frequent commentator, with recent appearances on CBS News, CNN, Fox News, and NPR, among others, and her writings have been widely published in the national media and academic journals.
Klappentext
Justice in the Question of Palestine is often framed as a question of law. Yet none of the Israel-Palestinian conflict's most vexing challenges have been resolved by judicial intervention. Occupation law has failed to stem Israel's settlement enterprise. Laws of war have permitted killing and destruction during Israel's military offensives in the Gaza Strip. The Oslo Accord's two-state solution is now dead letter.
Justice for Some offers a new approach to understanding the Palestinian struggle for freedom, told through the power and control of international law. Focusing on key junctures-from the Balfour Declaration in 1917 to present-day wars in Gaza-Noura Erakat shows how the strategic deployment of law has shaped current conditions. Over the past century, the law has done more to advance Israel's interests than the Palestinians'. But, Erakat argues, this outcome was never inevitable.
Law is politics, and its meaning and application depend on the political intervention of states and people alike. Within the law, change is possible. International law can serve the cause of freedom when it is mobilized in support of a political movement. Presenting the promise and risk of international law, Justice for Some calls for renewed action and attention to the Question of Palestine.
Inhalt
The introduction lays out the book's primary question: if international law has not refereed and resolved the Palestinian-Israel conflict, then what role is it playing, and what are the potential benefits and risks that its invocation poses for the Palestinian struggle for freedom? Using UN General Assembly Resolution 2334 as a pedagogical tool, the introduction provides an analytical framework for understanding the meaning and utility of international law. It demonstrates that powerful states can use international law as a tool of domination but that the law's susceptibility to strategic deployment through legal work also imbues it with the potential to advance progressive causes. This opening discussion argues that international law is politics and that in order for it to serve an emancipatory function it must be wielded in the sophisticated service of a political program that challenges the geopolitical structure sustaining an oppressive status quo.
This chapter examines the origins of the Palestinian struggle as a quest for self-determination and freedom from settler-colonial domination. It argues that the British decision to suppress the self-determination of Palestinians in order to facilitate the self-determination of a settler population constituted a sovereign exception that justified the juridical erasure of Palestinians as a political community. The League of Nations Mandate system thereafter enshrined British policy as international law, suspending Palestinians in a state of exception. The closest that Palestinians came to realizing their self-determination during this period was during their revolt against the geopolitical structure that rendered them nonexistent in the language of law. Chapter 1 traces these legacies through the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Israel's acceptance into the United Nations, and Israel's racialized martial law regime that justified the exceptional and distinct treatment of Palestinian citizens of Israel under the pretext of emergency.
Chapter Two examines how occupation law as established by international agreements has failed to regulate Israel's settlement enterprise. At the close of the 1967 War, Israel argued that a sovereign void in the West Bank and Gaza meant that these territories were neither occupied nor not occupied; they were sui generis, a legal concept bestowing on them unique distinction. This sui generis framework legalized Israel's presence in the territories and allowed it to steadily take Palestinian lands, remove Palestinian inhabitants, and avoid disrupting Israel's Jewish demographic majority. Israel also ensured that UN Security Council Resolution 242 did not mandate its withdrawal from the territories, deploying it instead to legitimate its takings. Aggressive U.S. intervention has facilitated Israel's interpretative model and helped normalize it as part of a tenable political framework. Together, this legal and political machinery has enabled Israel to incrementally annex Palestinian lands without serious political or legal consequence.
The 1973 War recalibrated the balance of power in the Middle East and planted the seeds for the first regional peace conference. This shift altered the Palestinian Liberation Organization's strategic thinking and produced an internal chasm that pitted a pragmatist front that supported accepting a truncated state in the West Bank and Gaza, against a rejectionist front that sought to pursue national liberation under the banner of revolution. The PLO would pursue a program of liberation diplomacy at the United Nations in an effort to cement its juridical status and create more leverage to enter into negotiations. Chapter 3 traces the PLO's entry into the United Nations and the apex of its legal advocacy, when it helped to create…