Erakat, Noura and Li, Darryl and Reynolds, John (2023) Race, Palestine, and International Law. AJIL Unbound, 117. pp. 77-81. ISSN 2398-7723

Download (114kB)

Abstract

In 1922, the League of Nations inscribed the goal of establishing a settler colony in Palestine for the Jewish people—in denial of the national self-determination of the Indigenous Arab population—in public international law. The Palestine Mandate juridically erased the national status of the Palestinian people by: (1) framing the Arabs as incapable of self-rule; (2) heightening the significance of establishing a Jewish national home; and (3) distinguishing Palestine from the other Class A mandates for possessing religious significance that exceeded the interests of any single national group. A century later, the still-unresolved “question” of Palestine remains central to struggles for anti-racism and anti-colonialism in international law. This essay revisits two flashpoints in the tangled history of Palestine and international law, where questions of race and racism have been central: first, ongoing debates over the regime and crime of apartheid; and second, the now-repudiated UN General Assembly Resolution 3379, recognizing Zionism as a form of racism and racial discrimination. Both stories demonstrate the importance of understanding race and colonialism as conjoined concepts, neither of which can be properly understood in isolation from the other.

Item Type:	Article
Keywords:	Colonialism; Criminal law; International law Palestinian people; Racial discrimination; Racism; Zionism;
Academic Unit:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Law
Item ID:	18906
Identification Number:	https://doi.org/10.1017/aju.2023.9
Depositing User:	John Reynolds
Date Deposited:	19 Sep 2024 07:56
Journal or Publication Title:	AJIL Unbound
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Refereed:	Yes
URI:	Publisher
Use Licence:	This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

Repository Staff Only(login required)

Item control page

Downloads

Origin of downloads