Through 2024, a group of scholars based in Melbourne engaged in a reading group on international law and Palestine, convened by Haris Jamil, Michael Bader and Adil Hasan Khan. The group met at the Indigenous Law and Justice Hub at Melbourne Law School and benefitted from the support of the Laureate Program in Global Corporations and International Law.
The reading list is below and may be a useful resource for anyone researching, teaching or writing about international law’s impacts, iniquities and incapacities in Palestine.
The reading group examined the different histories and configurations of the emergence of, (attempted) erasures of, and persistence of, the question of Palestine in, and for, international law. Inter alia it explored: the politics, histories and constitutive effects of different international legal concepts; the tactical and/or strategic possibilities and limits of mobilising different laws and institutions in liberatory struggles; the complicities of, and potentiality to exercise global solidarities in and through, different institutions (including Universities); and the obligations and ethos of international legal scholarship, and legal scholars, in the face of genocide. The readings included international institutional reports, legal scholarship, international adjudicatory jurisprudence, historical scholarship, and postcolonial literature — with a specific focus on the work of Palestinian jurists, scholars and activists.
For a roundtable TWAILR: Dialogue between some of the convenors and participants reflecting on this reading group, see here.
1. Context and Law/Politics
Noura Erakat, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine (Stanford University Press 2019) Chapter 1: ‘Colonial Erasures’.
Background reading:
The Balfour Declaration (2 November 1917).
Additional reading:
Ussama Makdisi, Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab Word (University of California Press 2021).
2. Imperialism and the Attempted ‘Erasure of the Question of Palestine’
Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 (Metropolitan Books 2020) Introduction and Conclusion.
Background readings:
Camp David Accords (1978) Preamble.
The Abraham Accords Declaration (2020).
Additional reading:
Ghassan Kanafani, ‘The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine’ (Committee for a Democratic Palestine, New York 1972).
3. Nakba: Legal Concepts and Settler Colonial Social Formations
Rabea Eghbariah, ‘Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept’ (2024) 124 Columbia Law Review 887-992.
Background reading:
United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181(II) (29 November 1947), A.
Additional reading:
Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’ (2006) 8 Journal of Genocide Research 387-409.
4. Apartheid and Racializing Citizenship
Lana Tatour, ‘The Nation-State Law: Negotiating Liberal Settler Colonialism’ (2021) 4 Critical Times 577-587.
Background reading:
UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (Richard Falk and Virginia Tilley), ‘Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid’ (United Nations, Beirut 2017) 27-50.
Additional readings:
Shira Robinson, Citizen Strangers: Palestinians and the Birth of Israel’s Liberal Settler State (Stanford University Press 2013) Introduction and Conclusion.
Noura Erakat and John Reynolds, ‘Understanding Apartheid’ (Jewish Currents, 1 November 2022).
5. International Criminal Law and Its Limits
Noura Erakat and John Reynolds, ‘We Charge Apartheid? Palestine and the International Criminal Court’ (TWAILR: Reflections, 20 April 2021).
Background reading:
Statement of ICC Prosecutor Karim A.A. Khan KC: Applications for arrest warrants in the situation in the State of Palestine (International Criminal Court, 20 May 2024).
Additional readings:
Victor Kattan, ‘Palestinian Scholarship and the International Criminal Court’s Blind Spot’ (TWAILR: Reflections, 20 February 2020).
Abdelghany Sahed, ‘Reading the ICC Prosecutor’s statements on Palestine from the Global South’ (TWAILR: Reflections, 24 May 2024).
6. Occupation
Darryl Li, ‘Occupation Law and One-State Reality’ (Jadaliyya, 2 August 2011).
Background reading:
Public sitting held on Monday, 26 February 2024, at 10 a.m., at the Peace Palace, President Salam presiding, on the Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem (Request for advisory opinion submitted by the General Assembly of the United Nations) (Verbatim record 2024/13, 26 February 2024) Oral Pleading by Ralph Wilde.
Additional readings:
Ralph Wilde, ‘Legal Opinion: Is the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Gaza ‘legal’ or ‘illegal’ in international law?’ (University College London, 29 November 2022) Sections 3-6.
Ata Hindi, ‘The United Nations General Assembly Request to the International Court of Justice for an Advisory Opinion: (Some) Reflections’ (OpinioJuris, 20 January 2023).
7. Refugees, Right of Return, and ‘the Camp-Communes’
Shahd Hammouri, ‘A Forgotten Detail: The Right of Return was a Condition of the Establishment of the State of Israel’ (OpinioJuris, 3 March 2024).
Francesca Albanese, UNRWA and Palestine Refugee Rights: New Assaults, New Challenges (Institute for Palestinian Studies, 2018) Chapter 4: ‘Dismantling UNRWA’.
Nasser Abourahme, ‘Revolution after Revolution: The Commune as Line of Flight in Palestinian Anticolonialism’ (2021) 4 Critical Times 445-75.
Background reading:
Special Unit on Palestinian Rights, Committee on the Exercise of Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, ‘The Right of Return of Palestinian People’ (ST/SG/SER.F/2., United Nations, 1978).
Additional reading:
Mutaz M. Qafisheh, Rama Sahtout, Francesca Albanese and Lex Takkenberg ‘The Lex Specialis Regime Pertinent to Palestinian Refugees’ (April 2023) 23 Global Jurist 43-74.
8. Self-Determination, State Form and Beyond
Joseph Massad, ‘Against Self-Determination’ (2018) 9 Humanity 161-191.
Background reading:
The Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements (Oslo I) (13 September 1993).
Additional readings:
Edward Said, ‘The Morning After’ (vol. 15, London Review of Books, 21 October 1993).
Adom Getachew, Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton University Press 2019) Chapter 3: ‘From Principle to Right: The Anticolonial Reinvention of Self-Determination’.
Jordana Silverstein, Anxious Histories: Narrating the Holocaust in the Jewish Communities at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century (Berghahn Books 2015) ‘Introduction: Holocaust Historiography, Anxiety and the Formulations of a Diasporic Jewishness’.
9. Genocide I: Institutions and Imaginaries
Noura Erakat and John Reynolds, ‘South Africa’s Genocide Case is a Devastating Indictment of Israel’s War on Gaza’ (Jacobin, 11 January 2024).
Vasuki Nesiah, ‘Concerning Genocide’ (Workshop at Centre for Law and Social Change, City, University of London 10 April 2024).
Background reading:
Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel), ICJ Order of 26 January 2024 and Order of 28 March 2024, Declaration of Judge Charlesworth.
Additional reading:
Grietje Baars, ‘The ICJ is a Lie’ (Freedom, 28 January 2024).
10. Genocide II: The Making of this Genocide
Nimer Sultany, ‘A Threshold Crossed: On Genocidal Intent and the Duty to Prevent Genocide in Palestine’ (Journal of Genocide Research, Published Online: 9 May 2024).
Background reading:
Francesca Albanese, ‘Anatomy of a Genocide: Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967’ (Human Rights Council, 55th session, 26 February-5 April 2024).
Additional readings:
Jessica Whyte, ‘A “Tragic Humanitarian Crisis”: Israel’s Weaponization of Starvation and the Question of Intent’ (Journal of Genocide Research, Published Online: 17 April 2024).
Ntina Tzouvala, ‘Genocide and Political Economy: Reconstructing the Relationship’ (LPE Project, 24 June 2024).
‘Words cannot capture’: The UN Special Rapporteur’s Report on food, starvation and genocide in Gaza’ (TWAILR Extra: 14 October 2024).
11. Complicities I: Enabling Genocide
Sara Dehm, ‘Australian universities and the “plausible” genocide in Gaza: What are the legal and ethical risks and responsibilities?’ (ABC, 27 March 2024).
Darryl Li, ‘Imperialism’s Shell Game’ (LPE Project, 29 April 2024).
Background reading:
Alleged Breaches of Certain International Obligations in respect of the Occupied Palestinian Territory (Nicaragua v. Germany) – Request for the indication of provisional measures, Dissenting Opinion of Judge ad hoc Al-Khasawneh (ICJ, 30 April 2024).
Additional reading:
Jinan Bastaki, ‘The “Capacity to Influence”, State Responsibility, and the Obligation to Prevent Genocide’ (OpinioJuris, 30 March 2024).
12. Complicities II: Universities and Academic Freedom
Steven Salaita, ‘The Inhumanity of Academic Freedom’ (TWAILR: Extra, 2 November 2020).
Palestinian Feminist Collective, ‘A Feminist Praxis for Academic Freedom in the Context of Genocide in Gaza’ (Mondoweiss, 11 April 2024).
Maya Wind, ‘Israeli University’s Area Key Part of its Apartheid Regime’ (Jacobin, 27 February 2024).
Background reading:
United Nations Press Releases, ‘UN Experts Deeply Concerned over ‘Scholasticide’ in Gaza’ (OHCHR, 18 April 2024).
Additional readings:
Maya Wind, Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom (Verso Books 2024).
Lana Tatour, ‘Censoring Palestine: Human Rights, Academic Freedom and the IHRA’ (Australian Journal of Human Rights, 2024).
Jairo I. Fúnez-Flores, ‘The Coloniality of Academic Freedom and the Palestine Exception’ (Middle East Critique, 2024)
Committee on Academic Freedom, ‘Nadera Shaloub-Kevorkian’ (Middle East Studies Association, 2024).
13. Complicities III: The Corporate Form
Shahd Hammouri and Wesam Ahmad, ‘Reflections on the Binding Treaty process: War economies & Voices from the Global South’ (Business and Human Rights Resource Centre Blog, 15 September 2023).
Grietje Baars, The Corporation, Law and Capitalism (Brill 2019) 115-119.
Background readings:
The Mavrommatis Palestine Concessions (Greece v. Britain) (PCIJ, 1924).
Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC), ‘Act Now Against these Companies Profiting from the Genocide of the Palestinian People’ (BDS: Freedom, Justice and Equality, 5 January 2024).
United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories Occupied Since 1967, Call for input: Human rights impact of business enterprises in the occupied Palestinian territory.
Additional readings:
Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State (1896) Chapter III: ‘The Jewish Company’.
Lydia de Leeuw and Max Lamb, ‘Making a Killing?: State and Corporate Commercial Ties to Genocide in Gaza – and What Governments and Companies Must Do to Prevent’ (SOMO, 16 April 2024).
Paul Gregoire, ‘Boycott Elbit Systems: An Interview with Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Australia’ (Sydney Criminal Lawyers, 24 March 2022).
14. Complicities IV: Travelling Technologies and Ethnonationalism
Anthony Lowenstein, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World (Verso 2023) Introduction.
Zainab Ramahi, ‘Kashmir and Palestine Share the Struggle for Self-determination against Colonial Occupation’ (Mondoweiss, 8 August 2019).
Background reading:
Report of the independent international fact-finding mission to investigate the implications of the Israeli settlements on the civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights of the Palestinian people throughout the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem (Human Rights Council, A/HRC/22/63, 7 February 2013).
Additional readings:
Azad Essa, Hostile Homelands: The New Alliance Between India and Israel (Pluto Press 2023) Chapter 5.
Goldie Osuri and Ather Zia, ‘Kashmir and Palestine: Archives of coloniality and solidarity’ (2020) 27 Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 249-266.
15. Interregnum: Partitions and the International Laws of Decolonization
Azad Essa, Hostile Homelands: The New Alliance Between India and Israel (Pluto Press 2023) Chapter 1.
Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton University Press, 2009) Chapter 3.
Background reading:
United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181 (II) (29 November 1947).
Additional readings:
Victor Kattan, ‘The Persistence of Partition: Boundary Making, Imperialism and International Law’ 94 Political Geography, April 2022.
Catriona Drew, Population Transfer: The Untold Story of the International Law of Self-Determination (Doctoral Thesis, LSE, 2005) Chapter 4.
Recording of IILAH Discussion Panel — ‘Examining the ICJ’s Advisory Opinion on the Legality of Israel’s Occupation of Palestinian Territory’ (IILAH Podcast, 31 July 2024) (Ntina Tzouvala Presentation).
16. Complicities V: Global Zionism: Drawing Color Lines
Noura Erakat, Darryl Li and John Reynolds, ‘Race, Palestine, and International Law’ (2023) 117 AJIL Unbound 77-81.
Background reading:
United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379 (10 November 1975).
Additional readings:
Joseph Massad, ‘The Ends of Zionism: Racism and the Palestinian Struggle’, (2003) 5 Journal of Postcolonial Studies 440.
Darryl Li, ‘On Law and Racial Capitalism in Palestine’ (LPE Project, 15 June 2021).
Recording of TWAILR Webinar – ‘Palestine, Race and International Law’ (TWAILR, 11 April 2024).
Ella Shohat, ‘Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of its Jewish Victims,’ (1988) 19/20 Social Text, 1-35
Daniel Boyarin, The No-State Solution: A Jewish Manifesto (Yale University Press, 2023), Introduction.
Hannah Arendt, ‘Zionism Reconsidered’ in Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (eds.) The Jewish Writings (Schocken 2007) 343-74.
Adam Y. Stern, ‘On Zionism and the Concept of Deferral’, (2003) 5 Critical Times 20-49.
17. Solidarities I: Materialities
Andreas Malm, ‘The Destruction of Palestine is the Destruction of the Earth’ (Verso Blog Post, 8 April 2024).
Background reading:
‘No Traces of Life: Israel’s Ecocide in Gaza 2023-2024’ (Forensic Architecture, 2024)
Additional readings:
Irus Braverman, Settling Nature: The Conservation Regime in Palestine-Israel (University of Minnesota Press 2023) Introduction.
Recording of IILAH Discussion Panel – ‘Examining the ICJ’s Advisory Opinion on the Legality of Israel’s Occupation of Palestinian Territory’ (IILAH Website, 31 July 2024) (Julia Dehm Presentation).
18. Solidarities II: Third World(s) and their Institutions
Nahed Samour, ‘Palestine at Bandung: The Longwinded Start of a Reimagined International Law’ in Luis Eslava, Michael Fakhri and Vasuki Nesiah (eds), Bandung, Global History, and International Law: Critical Pasts and Pending Futures (Cambridge University Press 2017) 595-615.
Ardi Imseis, The United Nations and the Question of Palestine: Rule by Law and the Structure of International Legal Subalternity (Cambridge University Press 2023) Introduction.
Background reading:
Final Communiqué of the Asian-African conference of Bandung (24 April 1955).
Additional readings:
Christopher Gevers, ‘“Tell no Lies, Claim no Easy Victories”: South Africa at the ICJ, Again’ (2024) 12 London Review of International Law 290-292.
John Reynolds, ‘Genocide Trade-Offs’ (LPE Project Blog, 30 July 2024).
19. Solidarities III: Third World International Legal Scholars
Noura Erakat, John Reynolds, Samera Esmeir, Richard Falk, Ardi Imseis, Usha Natarajan, Vasuki Nesiah, Munir Nuseibah, and Diala Shamas, ‘Roundtable: Locating Palestine in Third World Approaches to International Law’ (2023) 52 Journal of Palestine Studies 100-114.
Background reading:
‘Open letter to the Assembly of State Parties regarding the ICC Office of the Prosecutor’s engagement with the Situation in Palestine’ (TWAILR, 6 December 2023).
Additional readings:
John Reynolds, ‘Disrupting Civility: Amateur Intellectuals, International Lawyers and TWAIL as Praxis’ (2016) 37, 11 Third World Quarterly 2098-2118.
Ata Hindi, ‘International Law is Dead’ (TWAILR Extra, 20 November 2023).
Lylla Younes, ‘Trial by Fire: Can International Law Written by the World’s Colonial Powers Help Free Palestine?’ (Lux Magazine, 12 October 2024).
20. Solidarities IV: Movements and Alliances
Mohammed El-Kurd, ‘The Right to Speak for Ourselves’ (The Nation, 27 November 2023).
Robin D.G. Kelley, ‘From the River to the Sea to Every Mountain Top: Solidarity as Worldmaking’ (2019) 48 Journal of Palestine Studies 69.
Background reading:
General Assembly Resolution 32/40 B, 2 December 1977.
Additional reading:
Suzannah Henty and Gary Foley (eds.), Indigenous Solidarity: Testimony and Narratives (28 Magazine 2021) Part II: ‘Testimonies and Reflections on Solidarity and Decolonization’.
21. Resistance I: Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS)
Jeena Shah, ‘Decolonizing Sanctions: The Emancipatory Potential of Sanctions in “Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions”’ (Columbia Human Rights Law Review, 8 October 2024).
Background reading:
Palestinian Campaign for the Cultural and Academic Boycott of Israel (PACBI), ‘PACBI Guidelines for the International Cultural Boycott of Israel’ (16 July 2014).
Additional readings:
Lee Jones, Societies Under Siege: How Economic Sanctions (Do Not) Work (OUP, 2015) Chapter 2.
Nick Riemer, Boycott Theory and the Struggle for Palestine: Universities and the Struggle for Palestine (Rowman and Littlefield 2023) Introduction.
22. Resistance II: Representing Violence – Atrocity Weaponization and the Juridicalization of Resistance
Nahed Samour and Ntina Tzouvala, ‘Self-defense in Israel and Palestine: Unsuspending Disbelief’ (Conflict Law Centre Blog, 27 November 2023)
Shahd Hammouri, ‘The Palestinian people have the right of resistance by all means consistent with the principles of the UN Charter’ (Law for Palestine, 8 October 2023).
Background readings:
Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in Occupied Palestinian Territory (Advisory Opinion), 9 July 2004, Paras. 138-142.
Legal Consequences Arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem (Advisory Opinion), 19 July 2024, Declaration of Judge Charlesworth.
Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949 and Relating to the Protection of Victims of Non-International Armed Conflicts (Protocol II), December 1978.
Additional readings:
Naomi Klein, ‘How Israel has made trauma a weapon of War’ (The Guardian, 5 October 2024).
Talal Asad, ‘Reflections on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict’ (Humanity Journal (blog), 21 March 2024).
Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon, The Human Right to Dominate (Oxford University Press 2015) Introduction.
‘Gaza: How the Media Manufactures Consent with Hamza Yusuf’ (Thinking Muslim Podcast, 19 October 2024).
Joseph R. Slaughter, ‘Hijacking Human Rights: Neoliberalism, the New Historiography, and the End of the Third World’ (2018) 40 Human Rights Quarterly 735-775.
Shiri Pasternak, Grounded Authority: The Algoquins of Barrier Lake Against the State (University of Minnesota Press 2017) Introduction.
23. Resistance III: Conducting Armed Resistance – Decolonization, Practicing Concrete Enmity, and the Ethics of Shahada
Bassem Saad, ‘Palestine’s Martyrdom Upends the World of Law’ (Protean Magazine, 27 January 2024).
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (Grove Press, 1963) Chapter I (‘On Violence’).
Background readings:
Yasser Arafat, ‘Address to the UN General Assembly’, United Nations General Assembly Twenty-Ninth Session, 13 November 1974.
Agreement on Withdrawal of Palestinian Forces from West Beirut (21 August 1982).
Additional readings:
Leila Khaled, ‘Where there is repression, there is resistance’ (Peoples Dispatches, 27 October 2023).
Abdaljawad Omar, ‘Hopeful Pathologies in the War for Palestine: A Reply to Adam Shatz’ (Mondoweiss, 8 November 2023).
Samera Esmeir, ‘The Palestinians and the Struggle of the Dispossessed’ (OpenDemocracy, 14 May 2021).
Tariq Ali, ‘Uprising in Palestine’ (New Left Review, 7 October 2023).
Ali Shariati, ‘A Discussion of Shahid’ (ICIT Digital Library, 15 September 2005).
Talal Asad, On Suicide Bombing (Columbia University Press 2007) Chapter 2.
Darryl Li, The Universal Enemy: Jihad, Empire and the Challenge of Solidarity (Stanford University Press, 2019) Introduction.
