Making Endless War: The Vietnam and Arab-Israeli Conflicts in the History of International Law by Brian Cuddy & Victor Kattan

Author:Brian Cuddy & Victor Kattan [Cuddy, Brian & Kattan, Victor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Israel & Palestine, HIS019000 HISTORY / Middle East / Israel & Palestine, History, Middle East, General, HIS027070 HISTORY / Wars & Conflicts / Vietnam War, International relations, Wars & Conflicts, International, LAW051000 LAW / International, Political Science, POL011000 POLITICAL SCIENCE / International Relations / General, Law, Vietnam War
ISBN: 9780472075874
Google: LJSSzwEACAAJ
Amazon: 047207587X
Goodreads: 69707501
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Published: 2023-08-17T00:00:00+00:00

International Law and the Undoing of Palestine

In his 2006 self-elegy, In the Presence of Absence, the Palestinian national poet Mahmoud Darwish asks, “What does it mean for a Palestinian to be a poet and what does it mean for a poet to be Palestinian?” He answers, “In the first instance: it is to be the product of history, to exist in language. In the second: to be a victim of history and triumph through language.” For Darwish “both are one and the same and cannot be divided or entwined.”25 Darwish, as a former member of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Page 150 →Liberation Organisation and a drafter of some of its most eloquent statements, did not simply express his own predicament as a poet; rather he articulated the historical and existential conditions of the modern Palestinian experience. Darwish’s questions and answers formed the conceptual and political backbone of the Palestinian understanding of both their existential situation and their political vocation.

In the period prior to the Diplomatic Conference, the revolutionary Palestinian project had to range itself against existing institutions, vocabularies, and practices that failed and diminished the Palestinian people. Historically, Palestinians were reluctant to use the language of international law, but they were often compelled to participate in its operations. They feared that the ways in which they were written in and out of international legal texts precluded from the outset the very possibility of achieving their political aspirations. As early as the British Mandate period, Palestinians, as Natasha Wheatley notes, remained “aloof from the very name ascribed to them” in the League of Nations Mandate’s terms of reference.26 Wheatley cites a 1930 petition to the League of Nations in which the Arab Executive Committee, representing Palestine’s Arab population, attempted to show that “His Majesty’s Government had violated the rights of the Arabs which were recognized even by the Mandate,” while at the same time stating that the petition “should not be considered as an expression on the part of the Executive Committee of their acceptance of the Mandate.”27 Acutely aware of the discursive and geopolitical limitations that shaped its speaking position, the Executive Committee sought to hold the Mandate authority responsible to its own terms of reference without accepting the juridical categorizations it ascribed to the Palestinian people. In other words, it made a concession to the overpowering regulative force of the Mandate but rejected its constitutive force and refused to be conscripted by it. For the Palestinians, the Mandate was not the “sacred trust of civilization” it claimed to be; rather it was an outright instrument of British colonial rule.

In 1972, Fayez Sayegh, a former member of the Executive Committee of the PLO, compiled an inventory of what he called “the international infringements on the rights of Palestinian people and the international aggression on its dignity and existence over fifty years.”28 Sayegh noted that each of these occurred in November: on November 3, 1917, Britain issued the Balfour declaration, which was later incorporated into the text of the British Mandate in Palestine.

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