Few, if any, issues in global politics are as infused with the language of legality as the question of Palestine. The purported demands of international law and ‘the international community’ are alternately invoked at every opportunity, with the unspoken implication that law provides an authoritative mechanism for ‘resolving’ the conflict in Palestine. And yet in no area does law appear so profoundly irrelevant to developments on the ground, where history unravels itself through brute force, political coercion, and ideological hegemony above all else.
This contradiction is central to Noura Erakat’s new book, Justice for Some, which provides a compelling account of the relationship between international law and the question of Palestine, charting how the law has historically operated as a site of both subjugation and opportunity for the Palestinian liberation movement.
At the heart of Erakat’s account is the proposition that law, and international law in particular, suffers from a kind of inherent indeterminacy: its rules, norms, and customs are rarely if ever determinative of a unique outcome. Instead, they acquire meaning only through interpretation, adjudication, and application to a particular case. This in turn means that the law can be “framed, deployed, interpreted, or suspended to produce a particular effect” by actors of all kinds. Far from being an independent, unassailable normative system which operates to provide clear legal ‘solutions’ to the question of Palestine, international law emerges instead as an indeterminate terrain of political struggle: a contradictory mosaic of competing attempts to define the terms of the conflict, to challenge interpretations of its nature, and to propose (or impose) different avenues for its resolution.
