Our tribute to the Palestinian scholars who have enriched our understanding of the failures of international law in response to decades of Palestinian struggle to realise their right to self-determination, and how this has made possible the catastrophic present.
Sumedha Choudhury, Julia Dehm, André Dao, Haris Jamil, Richard Joyce, Adil Hasan Khan, Tanvee Nandan, Dianne Otto & Saika Sabir
TWAILR: Dialogues #17/2025
We are members of a larger group of scholars linked with Melbourne Law School (MLS) who, between May and December 2024, met together almost weekly to discuss readings on International Law and the Question of Palestine. The group was convened by Haris Jamil, Michael Bader (both PhD candidates) and Adil Hasan Khan (Senior Researcher with the Laureate Program in Global Corporations and International Law (LPGCIL)). We were generously hosted by the Indigenous Law and Justice Hub at MLS for our meetings and we also benefitted from the support of the LPGCIL as well as from the many contributions to our discussions from participants and visitors. The extensive list of readings we worked our way through is available at the LPGCIL website here, and on the TWAILR site here.
At the end of 2024, we organised a roundtable discussion to express our indebtedness to the Palestinian scholars we had read together. This idea was inspired by ‘Roundtable: Locating Palestine in Third World Approaches to International Law’ (in the Journal of Palestine Studies) which we read in our 19th session. The following is an abridged version of that discussion.
Which reading(s) did you find most valuable and/or generative?
Adil: Perhaps the most significant reading for me was Rabea Eghbariah’s ‘Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept’ that had only recently been published by the Columbia Law Review when we read it in the 3rd session back in June 2024. This article prompted the formation of the reading group itself – guiding how we eventually designed the reading group sessions and their thematic organisation. It is an incredibly generous piece of scholarship, with each footnote gifting the reader with a veritable literature review. It also carefully revealed to us the stakes (and significance) of critically engaging with the techniques and politics of international legal doctrine (a lesson continued by Noura Erakat and John Reynolds, Shahd Hammouri, Nahed Samour and Ntina Tzouvala, amongst others).
Alongside Noura Erakat’s Justice For Some: Law and the Question of Palestine (session 1) and Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 (session 2), Rabea’s article also brought home for me (a) how little I knew about the basics of international law and the question of Palestine – even though I have ostensibly been a Third World international lawyer for over a decade; and (b) how simple this purportedly ‘multifaceted and complex story’ actually is. It became clear that this has not simply been the tactical success of settler-colonialism in making appear as ‘complicated’ what is a textbook case of settler-colonialism. We also learned how this narrative of complexity, that prevents/permits many from making the effort of actually engaging with the basic scholarship on the topic, is itself premised upon the assumption of not trusting the testimonies of Palestinian scholars narrating their own colonisation, dispossession and expulsion for more than one hundred years. One of the lessons we imbibed from this was the significance of taking seriously the work of legal conceptualisation done by those communities engaged in the struggle itself (e.g. Nakba as a legal concept) – which amongst other things, disrupts the logic and practice of abstraction in legal conceptualisation. The second very practical lesson was to try and ensure that we prioritise reading Palestinian scholars/activists in all the sessions that followed.
Julia: Reading these texts and especially the process of discussing them collectively really deepened my understanding of the question of Palestine and its relation to international law. Rabea Eghbariah’s ‘Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept’ (session 3) has stayed with me as it’s an incredibly generative text to think with, even for readers who might not agree with its central argument. Like Adil, I found the underlying insistence on the right of Palestinians to narrate their own experience, very powerful, and this resonated with other pieces we read throughout the year, especially Mohammed El-Kurd, ‘The Right to Speak for Ourselves’ (session 20) and of course, Edward Said, ‘Permission to Narrate’. The controversy surrounding the publication of Eghbariah’s piece, which was first intended to be published in the Harvard Law Review, but withdrawn after the board voted not to publish it, before being published in the Columbia Law Review, also speaks to the politicisation of scholarship and knowledge production during the ongoing genocide in Gaza. As such the article, and the controversy around its publication, also speak to questions that we kept coming back to in the reading group regarding what it means to be a politically engaged scholar, when and why academic work is seen as a threat by those in power and why such work matters.
Sumedha: Rabia Eghbariah’s (session 3) piece helped me reflect more profoundly on my engagement with international law, which was a recurrent dilemma discussed throughout our reading group sessions. His framing of Nakba as a legal concept is quite a practical approach to engaging with international law, where the emphasis is on placing the perspective of those resisting at the forefront rather than that of the oppressor. I also found Nasser Abourahme’s ‘Revolution after Revolution—The Commune as a Line of Flight in Palestinian Anticolonialism’ (session 7) one of the most productive articles for examining the Palestine question. Abourahme argues that to understand the question of Palestine, one must also study spaces such as the Palestinian refugee camps and what kind of relations they generate. Unlike much existing scholarship that seeks solutions within the current state system, Abourahme advocates for shifting focus away from the state as the central object. He explores ‘alternative temporalities’ present in revolutions—the everyday and ordinary experiences—and emphasises the need to understand revolutions beyond the binary of victory and defeat.
Di: What really struck me about Rabea Eghbariah’s (session 3) critique of international criminal law was the way that the law fragments, and thereby diminishes, human experience of atrocity and thwarts legal comprehension of actual harm. When international lawyers worry about ‘fragmentation’ of the law, this is not what they have in mind. Eghbariah argues that the Nakba suffered by the Palestinian people is a continuing offensive of ‘catastrophic transformations imposed by force’, including expulsions, ethnic cleansing, massacres (including in refugee camps), dispossession, demolitions, apartheid, military occupation, annexation of territory, genocidal violence, settler colonialism, demographic engineering, denial of the right of return, starvation and so on. He proposes recognition of a new international crime of Nakba which would acknowledge the compounding of (currently recognised) specific crimes over time, and thus address the manifold and intertwined injustices involved. Other examples he cites of Nakba as an ever-present condition, rather than a specific instance of atrocity, include India’s occupation of Kashmir and the denial of Sahrawi self-determination. The article brought home to me in a very immediate way that fragmentation is actually a strategy of international law which serves empire and erases individual and collective responsibility – an insight ignored by those who complain about international law’s fragmentation as if it was an aberration rather than part of the structure.
Tanvee: I also found Nasser Abourahme’s ‘Revolution after Revolution—The Commune as a Line of Flight in Palestinian Anticolonialism’ (session 7) probably the most evocative of the readings. The refugee camps and communes of Abourahme’s description are not spaces of retreat but ‘political spaces’ and ‘sites of struggle’. This piece engages with the tension present in the camp itself, between the camp as a ‘site of insurrection, and a means to an end’ and as a ‘site of autonomy, or an end in itself’. It is in reading through that tension that I could identify my own discomfort with how resistance is often framed in popular imagination – this piece encouraged me to think of resistance not as a temporary state (a means to an end) but as a permanent site, an end in itself, one that keeps us moving forward in the fight towards liberation, a bulwark against ‘defeated despair’.
Richard: The texts which had the biggest impact on me were the ones we began the reading group with in the first two sessions: Noura Erakat’s Justice for Some and Ussama Makdisi’s Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab Word (read alongside the Balfour Declaration (1917)) in session 1, and Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (read alongside the Camp David Accords (1978) and the Abraham Accords (2020) in session 2). These texts challenged me, as I tried to make sense of the current catastrophe and how international law might respond, to be attentive to the role international law played over more than a century in structuring Israel’s longstanding occupation of Palestinian territory and the current genocide in Gaza. Erakat’s work was particularly instructive for me as a model for how to simultaneously critique international law’s role while recognising its (limited) potential to contribute towards a politics of justice. Makdisi and Khalidi’s work helped me to appreciate the nature of the European colonial origins of the present conflict, and most significantly the role European antisemitism played in the Zionist movement in the latter part of the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries. These texts demonstrated how the present terms of debate are predicated precisely on not knowing or acknowledging this history. They also set the scene for the various more specific texts which followed in the reading group.
André: It’s difficult to single out any one reading, or even one set of readings. Every week I found my understanding – of Palestine, of international law, of the world – shifting, or being renewed, and very often being transformed. One particularly important example of that were the readings that expanded my understanding of Palestinians’ possible and desired futures. Before this reading group, I guess a ‘two state solution’ was an unexamined horizon of possibility in my mind. But reading Nasser Abourahme’s ‘Revolution after Revolution’ (session 7) on the commune, or Joseph Massad’s incisive critique ‘Against Self-Determination’ (session 8), I learnt to question not only the ‘two state solution’ but also to remember a political horizon beyond the state. As Talal Asad writes in his ‘Reflections on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict’ (session 22) – an inquiry into language and its essential connection to a particular way of life, to the moral question of how a life should be lived – ‘The state can teach you how to impose your suffering on other human beings but it cannot teach you how to befriend them’.
What difference did it make to read these texts together, as a group?
Haris: Though there are some texts in the reading list that I found quite absorbing in their own right, I could appreciate them better because we (as members of this reading group) read each text in conversation with other texts. And it is the dialogue between them that was incredibly stimulating, generative and inspiring to me. So, I found Lylla Younes’ deceptively straightforward and compelling question – Can international law written by the world’s colonial powers help free Palestine? (session 19) – responded to in almost all the texts we read. Among others, I found it present in Bassem Saad’s gripping argument that ‘Palestinian resistance and martyrdom upends the world of human law’ (session 23). Politically conscious and skilfully crafted assertions, such as Saad’s, were extremely productive for me as they did not sidestep the anxieties, frustrations and hopelessness that our engagement with international law and institutions has produced, particularly over the past fourteen months. So, when the Gaza filmmaker, journalist and activist Bisan Owda wrote that ‘The ICJ is a lie!! There is no justice for us in the world’ (quoted in Baars; session nine), I felt she captured the sentiments of several other authors we read and, perhaps, all of us who have persistently engaged with this question in the reading group. With the benefit of hindsight, I can say that this reading group provided an invaluable space to express our feelings of despair, and crucially, I think we were able to forge a practice of productively thinking together about the question of Palestine, the violent, bloody world we inhabit and ethos of resistance.
Julia: Being part of this reading group over the course of the year has reminded about how important it is for me to be part of a ‘scholarly community’ based on shared values and shared political commitments. In particular, I valued how this reading group generated an academic community that was grounded in care for each other but also provided a basis for shared political struggle, including by attending the weekly pro-Palestinian street rallies in Melbourne together, co-ordinating open letters, organising public events or other forms of activism. This sense of care and community was crucial, especially during a period when many of us felt quite alienated from some of our colleagues who chose to ignore and stay silent about the ongoing genocide.
Saika: I believe I speak for all of us when I say that this reading group has helped us create a strong scholarly community. For me, the importance of a scholarly community has been highlighted in the context of Palestinian solidarity, especially in shaping knowledge, discourse, and advocacy around the Palestinian struggle for justice, rights, and self-determination. The group has not only provided participants with a platform for intellectual engagement and cross-cultural dialogue, but also a platform for advocacy. We have together engaged with the work of a worldwide scholarly community and activists who are dedicated to the Palestinian cause, thereby joining the international solidarity movement for Palestine. Our scholarly efforts, even if modest, have contributed to bridging the gap between academic research and tangible political change.
Richard: Reading these texts together was incredibly valuable as a scholarly method of responding to the experience of watching a live-streamed genocide on our phones in the context of governmental, media and institutional gaslighting. The responsibility to oppose genocide is universal, and while its forms vary, one certainty is the scholar’s responsibility to learn and understand. This reading group provided a setting in which that responsibility could be lived out, and for that I am extremely grateful to the convenors and other participants.
André: Richard’s point about governmental, media and especially institutional gaslighting is a really crucial one. Under those conditions, as a junior scholar, I am not sure I would have been able to take up my responsibility to learn and understand on my own. In particular, I appreciated reading and discussing the politics and legality of armed resistance as a scholarly community – I am thinking here of texts we read towards the very end of the reading group, Bassem Saad’s ‘Palestine’s Matyrdom Upends the World of Law’ (session 23), Abdaljawad Omar’s ‘Hopeful pathologies in the war for Palestine’ (session 23), and Shahd Hammouri’s ‘The Palestinian People have the right of resistance by all means consistent with the principles of the UN Charter’ (session 22). It seems to me that we could only approach those questions, and the questions they raised about violence, as a community who had been meeting regularly and who shared a commitment to Palestinian freedom and to each other, both politically and intellectually. In that respect, the choice to have us meet in person, as much as possible, was a significant one – not least because we met in the university, rather than outside of it. In our own small way, we were insisting that far from being ‘unscholarly’ or ‘divisive’ or ‘risky’, that these are precisely the kinds of conversations that should be taking place in the university.
Adil: For me the embodied effect of the practice of reading and discussing these texts, in the company of/in relation with numerous other colleagues, over a period of more than twenty-three weeks (during which this genocide in Gaza continued relentlessly) has been to move towards transforming the experience of the horror of witnessing (this genocide) into the activity of bearing witness to the horrors of settler-colonialism (and to the determined resistance against it and courageous advocacy for the liberation of Palestine). In the absence of such a practice regularly undertaken with others I would have probably ended up either becoming numb to these relentless horrors, or in the grip of an incapacitating despair. (I am sure this will resonate with all those who have attended the weekly protests in different cities and/or were part of the various University anti-genocide student encampments). It is by recognising – through Steven Salaita, Samera Esmeir, Joseph Massad and Bassam Saad – that this campaign of global gaslighting all around us now, that demands that we do not trust our very ‘lying eyes’ (a staple horror trope!) when it comes to this ongoing genocide, has been a signature technique of the settler-colonial regime aimed at desperately trying to close/erase the ‘question of Palestine’.
Given that we were confronting the failures of international law at almost every turn, how did this affect your view of the worth of engaging with international law at all?
Tanvee: One of the main things I have struggled with, and brought up a few times in our reading group, is my frustration with law generally and with international law particularly. I don’t find it convincing that the law is going to ‘liberate’ us, and international law even less so, which in my lifetime and understanding has always been a cudgel to support existing power relations rather than dismantle them. Many of the readings, written by legal scholars, engaging with legal institutions and imaginaries, fall back into the trap of looking towards international law as some sort of solution. To me, international law is meaningless, not only in its origins but in its continued existence. We talk about the ICC arrest warrants as if they mean something, as if it is within the realm of possibility that Netanyahu would find himself in a country that will arrest him, or that an arrest would lead to any kind of meaningful ‘justice’. I would never argue that legal frameworks cannot be part of the strategies adopted for liberation, as others have pointed out in our reading group. Engaging law as a strategy or tactic, among many other strategies and tactics, should not be dismissed, but I suppose that my point of departure is in believing in the law as an end in itself or as a forum in which justice can meaningfully be realised. To me, this genocide and the continued occupation have shown once again that international law has no meaning except in favour of the continuation of existing global disparities and we would be better served by focusing our minds and our energies on revolution instead.
Julia: It is clear that international law, by itself, will never liberate Palestine. In engaging with questions of tactics and strategies in the readings (see especially Noura Erakat and John Reynolds, ‘We Charge Apartheid? Palestine and the International Criminal Court’, (session 5)) I have found it helpful to have at the forefront of my mind that Palestinian civil society groups have formulated a strategic objective to politically, economically and culturally isolate Israel though the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign. This broader context helps us situate law and law and legal struggle as a key tactic that can – at times – contribute to realising this broader strategic goal that has been formulated by Palestinian social movements. I found really instructive one of Noura Erakat’s reflections after the initial ICJ provisional measures ruling, where she argued that the power of the ICJ ruling depends on what we do with it. That is, to ask ourselves, how we as scholars and activists can mobilise specific international legal victories to achieve concrete effects? While the ICJ provisional measures ruling was an important legal victory, it only leads to tangible change if we mobilise it, for example by using it pressure a country to impose sanctions on Israel, or persuade a company to divest from Israeli businesses, or encourage a trade union to refuse to load a weapons shipment.
Adil: The limits and possibilities of deploying an imperial international law in a struggle to ‘upend’ structures of imperial settler-colonialism was an ever-present question in both the readings and all our discussions. In many ways this of course has been the ever-present question for Third World Approaches to International Law from the very outset. Over the past year or so, with both the high-profile invocations of international legal institutions in response to the genocide in Gaza, as well as their high-profile ineffectiveness, this question has been pointedly posed by non-lawyer comrades and colleagues to the Third World international lawyers in the room (a frequent occurrence in our reading group). Is even a ‘tactical’ engagement with this imperial international law (following Erakat and Reynolds (session 5)) getting in the way of the practical work of resisting settler-colonialism today?
For me, the Palestinian legal scholars that we read provided a constant reminder to remain attentive to demands and terrain of ‘lawfare’ – or the weaponisation and counter-weaponisation of law and legal institutions at various levels, in both the global projects of settler-colonisation of Palestine and the movements engaging in resistance against it. This warfare by other means also very much takes place in conditions of gross inequality. It also makes it unrealistic to draw such clear lines of distinction between the work of political protest movements and those engaged in ‘tactical’ litigation (as well as legally representing protesters regularly being criminalised). In this context, international law will never by itself liberate Palestine. However, it is still the responsibility of Third World international legal scholars to struggle to prevent international law and international legal institutions from enabling the settler-colonial project to realise its aim of eliminating ‘the question of Palestine’.
Di: I have been struck by the multitude of ways that Palestinians themselves have turned to international law to support their liberation since 1948. The countless General Assembly resolutions calling, inter alia, for an end to the occupation and realisation of the right to self-determination, the Advisory Opinions sought from the ICJ, the efforts aimed at gaining full UN membership and formal recognition of Palestinian statehood, the appointment of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, the achievement of UNESCO membership, ratification of the Rome Statute, establishing the jurisdiction of the ICC in the territories occupied by Israel (Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem), and so on. This puts a particular responsibility on those of us with international law expertise and knowledge to find ways to ensure that these efforts are not silenced or side-lined but given meaning and power. This will never be achieved by blind faith in the law, but by finding ways to fundamentally disrupt the way things have usually been done by valuing and making space for subaltern voices – and for that we need to understand ourselves and our work as part of a broader movement seeking emancipatory and life-sustaining goals, including Palestinian self-determination and freedom.
André: In a way, this reading group actually reinforced my sense of international law as a particularly powerful and authoritative way of producing a certain reality. To read Edward Said’s ‘The Morning After’ (session 8), his reflections on the Oslo Accords, was to understand just how much of today’s situation – including the genocide and the apartheid regime – was set in motion by an international agreement and its attendant legal imaginary. Indeed, I found it enormously helpful that each week, alongside scholarly interventions, we also read the key legal documents, including the Balfour Declaration, the Camp David Accords and the Abraham Accords (sessions 1&2). And in those documents, it became very clear how the liberal legal imagination has co-produced – alongside military power, global media networks and so on – the ‘question of Palestine’ over the last 100 years. To put it another way, it is by peering through the bars of the liberal legal order – constantly constructed and reinforced by the documents we were reading – that so many have been able to view Israeli mass killings of Palestinians as somehow justifiable. What is strange – and what I do not yet know how to properly think through – is that at the same time, it is the perpetrators of the mass killings, and their most vociferous defenders, who are willing to tear down the liberal legal order.
Haris: In times like this, when imaginative faculty is unable to process anything but what is happening in Palestine and Lebanon, it was heartening to read and discuss how different scholars and activists, particularly Palestinians, grappled with the contradictions of engaging with liberal international law while declaring that they had no faith in liberal justice. Importantly, these are questions of everyday life – practical questions with practical significance. So, to me, it was insightful to see how some texts exposed the limits and meaninglessness of fighting and even winning legal battles, whereas some other texts walked us through the streets of hopelessness to the streets of resistance. Grietje Baars and Noura Erakat resonated in their calls that the battle for a free Palestine ‘will not be won in the courts but in the streets’, and that ‘we need to continue to disrupt and agitate until Palestine is free’ (session 9). And then there were texts that helped me bypass the anxieties of winning or losing our battles in the street. In offering a captivating response to the question – ‘What is a revolution that neither overthrows a state order nor institutes a lasting one of its own?’ – Nasser Abourahme walked me through the streets to the camps (session 7). His breathtaking account helped me dislodge the thinking that simply presents the Palestinian struggle as a story of ‘failure and defeat’. I do not want to signal that a single political project unites all the texts we read in this reading group. Perhaps some authors we read would maintain a courteous critical distance from each other. Nor do I want to suppress my own friendly disagreements with some texts. But what I found most generative was how most of the readings – individually and collectively – offer and pursue different modes of thinking about internationalism, resistance and law by keeping the question of Palestine at the centre. Or, in other words, how they assert and prefigure alternative visions of the world in which Palestine is free.
In our conversations, we returned many times to the question of rethinking our teaching and scholarship in international law. What do you think now about this question?
Richard: Traditional modes of teaching law in a common law tradition almost invariably involve engaging with the most recent decisions of the most authoritative judicial institutions, together with key legislative (or in international law, treaty) developments in the field. Teaching international law has traditionally involved using recent examples to illustrate its promises, operation, limits and possibilities. To me, this is because (a) students can engage with the materials in class if they are able to make connections from their knowledge outside the classroom and (b) a student who leaves my classes should be able to accurately frame a contemporary situation in legal terms and apply the law to it as a matter of basic competence. In the past two years, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s response to the events of 7 October 2023 have generated key interventions by state-actors and institutions using international law. Moreover, the question of Palestine is an important concentration of many central themes in international law – especially when taught in a settler colony like Australia – from a historical (colonialism, League of Nations mandates), conceptual (terra nullius, borders, statehood, human rights, occupation, apartheid, genocide) and institutional (UN, ICJ, ICC) dimension. It would therefore, in my view, be a dereliction of professional scholarly responsibility to teach international law in 2024, 2025, and beyond, without reference to the question of Palestine, and in particular the recent provisional measures decisions and Advisory Opinion of the ICJ on the legality of Israel’s policies and practices in the occupied territory. Covering that material ought not to be controversial, but it is. Among other things, the reading group provided a rigorous scholarly framework for understanding those recent developments to help me discharge the responsibility to my students that teaching this material involves.
Julia: I am not currently teaching so I haven’t really engaged with these pedagogical questions about how we teach Palestine in international legal courses. However, I am really struck by the tension between the pedagogical care and academic rigour with which so many people in this group and other colleagues are engaging with these questions while, simultaneously, the way universities and university managers are approaching any discussions about Palestine is driven not by considerations of academic rigour but by concerns about risk management, including reputational risk and risks of adverse publicity or of losing funders. And thus ultimately, the question of how we teach about Palestine and Gaza in international law courses isn’t simply a question about pedagogy, but a political question about how we collectively organise to defend our right to speak about and teach crucial questions in our classroom and not be silenced or intimidated.
Adil: I now believe it is a part of my responsibilities as a teacher of international law to bear witness, through my lecturing, teaching and writing, to the resistance against the form of settler-colonialism that keeps the ‘question of Palestine’ open in the world today. Alongside this transformation of my understanding of the demands now made of me by this activity of teaching international law – readings like Steven Salaita, ‘The Inhumanity of Academic Freedom’ and Maya Wind, ‘Israeli University’s Area Key Part of its Apartheid Regime’ (session 12) have provided me with a better appreciation of the state of the institution of the ‘Northern’ University today. These are sites of concrete enmity. Hence, they are also key sites of practicing solidarity with allies, and care for one’s community in struggle (e.g. students seeking to hold the University to account for institutional racism against indigenous scholars, and students seeking to end a university’s complicity with the ongoing genocide in Gaza). Simply denying this and repeating abstracted calls for civility and institutional responsibility, is to take no responsibility at all.
Sumedha: My conception of international law has changed significantly. My training as an international lawyer, trying to think, read and write in a critical genre, was to follow what (critical) international law scholars typically do: first identify the issue, followed by identifying gaps in international law in responding to that issue, and then either provide some solution or, at least end on an optimistic note about how international law is still very important despite all its problems. The reading group made me realise that I was participating in a disciplinary tradition that emphasised that international law is essential, despite its problems, and warned of the dangers of nihilism towards the subject. In this tradition, the responsibility lies on us as international lawyers to protect the standing of the discipline. Thus, whenever a scholar argues that international law is useless, they are criticised for being reckless, or accused of misinterpreting the law, or dismissed as not a ‘true’ international lawyer. Behind these claims, is an anxiety concerning the ‘protection’ of the discipline, as though failing to reject these criticisms would put international law at risk. Engaging in this reading group has made it quite clear that international law is not under threat. In fact, over the years, it has played a significant role in shaping and (re)shaping the question of Palestine.
Haris: As someone who pursues to embody a Third World tradition of international law, I found Samera Esmeir’s observations about the ‘general absence’ of Palestine from TWAIL scholarship thought-provoking (session 19). As we discussed in the reading group, the gradual shrinking of the Palestine question in third world scholarship over the years is a pertinent point of introspection. There are several threads, but one way to think about it is to pay attention to the meaning and significance of ‘decolonisation’ – and to the refusal to think of decolonisation, as Esmeir puts it, ‘in the most concrete and material of ways’ or as interlinked with anti-colonial struggle. Ata Hindi makes a similar point when he says that for many, including some TWAIL scholars – ‘decolonisation is “cool” until theory becomes practice’ (session 19). Of course, things have slightly changed, particularly since October 2023 – but this is primarily because of the live-streaming of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians, which even Western liberal scholars are now finding difficult to defend, and the effort of some TWAIL scholars, particularly Palestinians, and platforms like TWAILR. Importantly, now we can see more clearly what Palestinian scholars have been speaking, writing and appealing for years. Indeed, who we think with matters. This is something that is different from how I looked at the TWAIL movement and thought about my responsibilities as a third world scholar, before participating in this reading group.
The reading group also brought to the fore questions about how we struggle at and against universities.
Julia: While there are critically important questions about what we teach and what we research, the discussion in the reading group also focused on political questions about how we work, the politics of refusal including the need to publicly affirm support for the ongoing BDS campaign (session 21). I think living and working in Australia, we have long been aware of the complicities of universities in settler-colonialism and genocide. My university, La Trobe, is named after a Charles La Trobe, a key figure in the dispossession and genocide of Aboriginal peoples in what is today the state of Victoria, prompting calls to change the name. The University of Melbourne has recently published a scholarly work which examines the university’s colonial and eugenics history and complicity in scientific racism as well as how members of the university community were implicated in and/or benefited from frontier massacres, the stealing of land, wealth and labour. Despite this knowledge, over the past fourteen months it has really shaken me to realise just how completely committed to and invested universities continue to be in maintaining their complicity with genocide including through partnerships with weapons manufacturers and with Israeli academic institutions and the violent and repressive lengths universities are prepared to go to maintain these relationships, against the overwhelming wishes of students and staff.
Saika: Particularly valuable for me were the discussions and readings on ‘Complicities: Universities and Academic Freedom’ (session 12). I say this with an awareness of our positionality as academics, especially considering our affiliation with the University of Melbourne. Lana Tatour has rightly argued that academic freedom is a core principle of higher education. Hence, it is extremely important to link academic freedom to the principles of human freedom protected under international law. However, we have seen that Australian Universities, instead of using academic freedom to encourage forms of inquiry that enable a robust understanding of ‘principles of freedom, justice, human dignity, and solidarity’ have leveraged this concept to suppress legitimate protests and voices advocating for Palestine. This and other readings have been instrumental in helping me understand the politics of academic freedom and the importance of forging connections with the struggles of minority academic voices in institutions around the world. I must also mention Steven Salaita’s ‘The Inhumanity of Academic Freedom,’ where he talks about how universities have invoked academic freedom for ‘transforming humans into instruments of bureaucracy’ rather than engaging in a meaningful (radical) political dialogue. The role of universities in relation to the ongoing genocide in Palestine and Lebanon, as well as wider struggles against settler-colonial occupation and aggression, is complex and deeply connected to ethical, academic, and social responsibilities. I believe that, as institutions that claim to uphold academic freedom, they should not be allowed to disconnect from the real-world implications of the violence and suffering experienced by minority voices
Some final thoughts.
Julia: The last fourteen months have made clear to me the impossibility of evacuating the field of legal struggle – law remains a crucial site of engagement and as lawyers, with training and expertise in this field, we have an obligation to trying to use law – when we can – to minimise suffering and work towards liberation. I have really admired the courage of so many Palestinian legal scholars – Noura Erakat, Shahd Hammouri, Ata Hindi, Nimer Sultany and many others – who have been persistently and powerfully speaking publicly against the violence of genocide, occupation and apartheid, as well as the work of so many UN special rapporteurs – especially Francesca Albanese, Michael Fakhiri, Balakrishnan Rajagopal – and lawyers, such as the South African ICJ legal team who are fighting within and through law. In contrast, the approach I have found most indefensible is what Adil calls ‘critique as cover’ where a critical orientation of international law is deployed by scholars as justification to avoid doing to saying or doing anything about the ongoing genocide.
André: I have found it useful to go back to Jean-Paul Sartre’s explanation of the Russell-Sartre Tribunal, a civilian/peoples tribunal set up to ‘try’ the US for war crimes committed in US-Vietnam War. Sartre’s first point was to say that one is either for or against imperialism: you have to take sides. And then, if one is against imperialism, then one does not morally or legally condemn it – instead, the task, intellectually, is to reveal how it works, and politically, to either completely disengage from imperialism or oppose it, including through armed struggle. But Sartre’s second point was that it can be useful to judge a society by the moral and legal standards that it sets up for itself. And that was the point of the Russell-Sartre Tribunal, which turned to international law and spoke of war crimes. As Sartre put it: ‘Our tribunal today merely proposes to apply to capitalist imperialism its own laws’. I’ve found that a useful formulation to think about my responsibility for deploying my own ‘expertise’ as an international lawyer – as Julia says, to say and do nothing is indefensible. Applying international society’s own laws against it is one way to say and do something. The complication, of course, is, as I mentioned earlier, the fact that Israel and its enablers have been vociferously denouncing the liberal legal order, such that it is difficult to say whether these are any longer their ‘own’ laws. What I’ve appreciated about this reading group is that we have not shied away from such complications – indeed, we’ve dived headlong into them – but also insisted that such difficulties cannot be used as cover.
Sumedha: I have realised that as international law scholars committed to the liberation of Palestinians, our focus should not be on figuring out whether international law is good or bad. Instead, we need to shift our attention to the techniques of how states employ international law in a way that maintains the status quo and explore ways through which we can counter the resulting web of liberal internationalism in order to achieve the liberation of Palestinians and all people living under colonial, hegemonic and fascist regimes.
Tanvee: For me, this reading group has been a space where one can breathe freely for a moment in a world where it otherwise seems like we are expected to hold our breath and our voices as indescribably horrific things happen around us. Since at least October 2023, it has felt like I exist within a dystopian reality where I am expected to keep up a farce that my work matters, that this university matters, that international law matters, even as bodies and faces of dead children zoom hourly into our lives. This reading group has been a respite, a community of people who feel equally disturbed by the horrors unfolding in front of us, one of the few spaces where I didn’t have to act like everything is all right. The fight we are part of is not one that ends today, tomorrow or perhaps anywhere in the near future, but perhaps some of the best things we have are here in this space together: a community of people who care about each other and about making the world a better place.
I can’t say that I see any promise in international law, as Audre Lorde has said ‘the master’s tool will never dismantle the master’s house’. Even as I continue to work within the law and make sense of it, I look forward not to a world bound by law but one unbound by it, where liberation isn’t something we tether to legality and deny through illegality. I am grateful to have had such a welcoming space in this reading group to express my anger and my frustration with the state of the world and have it be received with grace and compassion.
Saika: I am deeply grateful to all my friends and colleagues for their efforts in running this reading group. I have thoroughly enjoyed being part of this group and engaging with the intellectual and theoretical frameworks necessary to understand the impacts of colonialism, racism, and imperialism on Indigenous populations. This group has also provided a safe space and a valuable platform for us to express our frustration and disappointment with the liberal legal regime and the justice system. Given the ongoing genocidal and settler-colonial violence faced by Palestinians in Gaza and beyond, we must continue to foster such academic spaces to challenge the oppressive narratives, ideologies, and policies that perpetuate violence.
Di: The solidarity I felt by participating in this reading group was profound. There were many moments when I wished I was not ‘retired’, as it gave me the opportunity to deeply reflect on my contributions to international law teaching and research. Despite my many commitments to joining with others to challenge exclusionary and life-destroying structures and tropes in international law, I had not devoted serious attention to the question of Palestine. The reading group helped me understand more about how this can happen and reminded me again about how crucial our connections with those who share our commitments are.
Haris: I want to emphasise how grateful I am to this reading group for carefully drawing the connections and dialogue between the texts we read that helped us carefully think about the persistent suffering of Palestinians at the hands of imperialist forces and our responsibilities as international law scholars. And, it was possible only because of the ‘communal activity’ of reading together in this group. I think I could understand and appreciate the texts better only because of what we were able to create in this reading group – a form of relationship crafted around caring, debating and thinking together. Co-convening and participating in this reading group was a privilege.
Richard: I too am grateful to the authors of the texts we have read, and the convenors and participants in the reading group for helping to clarify the limits and stakes of our work. The reading group has helped me focus on the fact that whatever ‘developments’ in international law have been prompted by the recent institutional responses to the conduct of the Israeli state and military, they have come at the cost of the immense suffering of the Palestinian people. While those using law to struggle for justice for Palestinians deserve our admiration, respect and support, the law is not to be ‘celebrated’ as such. Indeed, for long-time critics of international law, it is important to note that the legal position has not moved significantly. Rather, the situation to which the law and its institutions are responding has become more extreme. At the same time, we need to recognise the simultaneous development of a rival, reactionary international law – promoted most vigorously by the main suppliers of arms to Israel: the United States, Germany and Britain – in which what we have all borne witness to is not a genocide but rather the legitimate exercise of military force in response to terrorism. What world does such a law create? To paraphrase philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, the logic of genocide is also the logic of suicide. From Gaza to climate change, the question remains: can we imagine, and work towards, an international law which contains at its core a basic commitment to the continuation of life on earth?