What is it about?

This paper seeks to show how Israel has deployed Occupation Law in strategic ways to incrementally take the land of Palestine without its people. It argues that Israel has used UN Security Council Resolution 242 to retroactively legitimate those colonial takings in a political framework shaped by U.S. intervention. In themselves, the constituent pieces of the argument are not new and they have been extensively discussed in legal, political science, and historical literature. Rather than consider them as the sum of their parts, this paper attempts to view the issues that have been kept distinct and separate within disciplinary silos as a mutually reinforcing whole, demonstrating that the United States’ political position made an otherwise bankrupt legal argument effective and showing how the Security Council’s deliberations gave Israel ample room for maneuver in spite of the drafting parties’ original intent. In examining the relationship between law and political power, the article points to the ways in which the balance of power bears upon the meaning and significance of law in international conflict. Thus, the failure of Occupation Law to regulate the occupation of the Palestinian Territories ultimately reflects the outcome of a political, not a legal, contest: Israel’s legal argumentation that the territories are merely under its administration would have no value were it not for the power politics that shape international relations in the region.

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Why is it important?

2017 marks 50 years of military occupation defies the temporary and emergency nature of the regime. More importantly, the prolonged nature of the occupation reveals that it is a pretext for an incremental land grab under the legitimating veneer of law. This article helps explain how Israel strategically deployed international law in order to achieve its territorial ambitions and provides rather than upend its settler-colonial expansion.

Perspectives

This article is based on a chapter in my forthcoming book, Justice for Some: Law as Politics in the Question of Palestine to be published by Stanford University Press. The book seeks to examine how the imbrication of law and politics has formatively impacted the Question of Palestine and informs its ongoing struggle for freedom. Specifically, how has the relationship between law and politics both stunted and advanced the Palestinian struggle and what does Palestine, as a case study, tell us about the emancipatory potential of law as a tool.

Noura Erakat
George Mason University

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: Taking the Land without the People: The 1967 Story as Told by the Law, Journal of Palestine Studies, November 2017, University of California Press,
DOI: 10.1525/jps.2017.47.1.18.
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