Justice for Some Quotes

“In light of the currently minimal protest at top diplomatic and multilateral levels, Israel, together with the United States, will continue to define its military practices as the new normal in asymmetric warfare. Israeli and U.S. military operations, legal jurisprudence, and scholarly interventions will add to the state practice and opinio juris constitutive of customary law. This means that as customary law on irregular combat continues to crystallize, Gaza's besieged population, and Palestinians generally will continue to bear the devastating consequences of its experimentation.”
― Noura Erakat, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine

“The political imperative to use the Mandate for Palestine as a means to resolve the Jewish refugee crisis overrode the questions of law.”
― Noura Erakat, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine

“Herzl considered Argentina, Uganda, and El Arish in the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula as possible sites of settlement.”
― Noura Erakat, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine

“International Law Is Derivative of a Colonial Order”
― Noura Erakat, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine

“The rule of law is not synonymous with justice”
― Noura Erakat, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine

“When Herzl approached Cecil Rhodes, the British businessman who infamously settled the south African territory named after him, Rhodesia, he wrote: You are being invited to help make history. . . . It doesn’t involve Africa, but a piece of Asia Minor; not Englishmen, but Jews. How, then, do I happen to turn to you since this is an out-of-the-way-matter for you? How indeed? Because it is something colonial.24”
― Noura Erakat, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine

“Herzl became convinced that Jewish assimilation in Europe had failed after witnessing how violently the Dreyfus Affair unfolded in France.17 This led him to argue that only an independent state for Jews could guarantee them freedom from institutionalized violence, both political and physical.”
― Noura Erakat, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine

“While the Enlightenment’s universal pronouncement of humans as bearers of reason opened the doors for Jews to pursue assimilation, it also conditioned their acceptance by European societies on the erasure of their difference. The process of assimilation was thus an effort to de-Orientalize the Jews, understood to have Asiatic origins. This discourse expressed revulsion at “Jewish poverty . . . their dark, disorderly ghettos,” and their Yiddish language, which was “too under-developed to support high-powered thoughts.”15 Essentially, the Enlightenment removed both Christian and Jewish polemics from the debate about the status of Jews in European society, only to reformulate that status in Orientalist terms.16”
― Noura Erakat, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine

“He was convinced that Jews would never successfully assimilate into Europe or be accepted as European. Indeed, it would seem that European Enlightenment ideals agreed with him.”
― Noura Erakat, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine

“Worse, Palestinian commitment to bilateral negotiations with Israel brokered by the United States implicitly enables Israel’s settlement expansion. It also sustains a false parity between Israel and Palestinians that lessens the potential for applying more coercive pressure upon Israel.”
― Noura Erakat, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine

“the Obama administration increased U.S. military aid to Israel from US$3 billion annually to $3.8 billion annually for a ten-year period. It did not condition this aid on Israel’s compliance with occupation law.”
― Noura Erakat, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine

“This is significant because the facts on the ground indicate that the two-state solution has been long dead and that Israel is overseeing a singular regime based on racial and ethnic discrimination characterized by spatial and political separation, or apartheid, an international crime against humanity.”
― Noura Erakat, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine

“While the question of whether force is defensive or not is a legal one, political exigencies, rather than judicial adjudication, usually settle that question. The UN Security Council is the ultimate arbiter of that inquiry, and its five permanent members have the authority to single-handedly oppose the will of the international community in order to protect themselves as well as their closest allies.”
― Noura Erakat, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine

“Form: Anarchy Characterizes the International System Even if relatively weaker international actors can sometimes shape the meaning of the law, the structure of the international system—with its lack of a reliable enforcement model and characterized by a material inequality among states—makes it nearly impossible to punish a powerful state and/or command its behavior in the face of a geopolitical conflict.”
― Noura Erakat, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine

“Israel has insisted that the lack of a sovereign in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 1967 means that those territories cannot be considered occupied, as a matter of law. In this view, the body of international law known as occupation law, which includes a prohibition on civilian settlement in militarily occupied lands, does not strictly regulate Israel’s administration of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.”
― Noura Erakat, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine

“As this book will show, for example, the Palestine Liberation Organization’s legal work during the 1970s successfully altered the international status of Palestinians from a nondescript polity to a juridical people inscribed in international legal instruments and institutions.”
― Noura Erakat, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine

“The Bush administration sought to evade external regulation of its treatment of the detainees so that it could, in the name of national security, hold them indefinitely, without charge or trial, and subject them to what amounted to torture for the purpose of extracting information.”
― Noura Erakat, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine

“The ways in which powerful states, for example, have deployed international law to achieve their policy objectives demonstrate as much. The most vivid examples in recent history include the Bush administration’s legal argument that neither international humanitarian law nor U.S. constitutional law applied to the treatment of foreign detainees at the Guantanamo Bay military prison.”
― Noura Erakat, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine

“International law can be accurately and fairly described as a derivative of a colonial order, and therefore structurally detrimental to former colonies, peoples still under colonial domination, and individuals who lack nationality or who, like refugees, have been forcibly removed from their state and can no longer invoke its protection.31 It is inaccurate, however, to conclude that this law serves the interests only of the powerful and, then, only as a tool of oppression.”
― Noura Erakat, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine

“The first seeds of international law were thus planted during a violent conquest to afford that conquest a veneer of objective legality.”
― Noura Erakat, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine

“Positioned as universal in appeal and application, international law is the codification of exclusively European traditions.”
― Noura Erakat, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine

“The history of international law’s development makes that law primarily a tool for powerful states.23 International law as it exists today began in Europe among states that were colonial powers.”
― Noura Erakat, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine

“Content: International Law Is Derivative of a Colonial Order”
― Noura Erakat, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine

“The other is the fact that the international system lacks a global sovereign, thereby politicizing enforcement by leaving it to the discretion of states to decide when, how, and whom, to punish. Together, these critiques, regarding the content and the form of international law respectively, suggest that international law can be used as a tool against the least powerful international actors but is toothless when it comes to regulating the behavior of the most powerful ones, specifically in regard to geopolitical conflicts.”
― Noura Erakat, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine

“There are at least two reasons to be skeptical that international law has the capacity to overcome geopolitical realities and advance the Palestinian struggle for freedom. One is the sordid origin of international law as a derivative of a colonial order and therefore as a body of law that reifies, rather than unsettles, an asymmetry of rights and duties among international actors.”
― Noura Erakat, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine

“Against the Law The casual observer may attribute injustice to a failure of law or to its nonexistence and thus prescribe more law, better law, and/or stricter adherence to law as the requisite corrective. The law’s malleability, however, undermines any such promise and should make us wary of legal prescriptions. Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa, for example, were both based on meticulous adherence to self-referential legalistic regimes yet were unequivocally oppressive. The rule of law is not synonymous with justice.”
― Noura Erakat, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine

“Do Jews have a right to self-determination in a territory in which they did not reside but settled? Are Palestinians a nation with the right to self-determination, or are they merely a heterogeneous polity of Arabs eligible for minority rights?”
― Noura Erakat, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine

“Zionist militias established Israel by force, without regard to the Partition Plan’s stipulated borders.17 The United Nations accepted Israel as a member despite that state’s violation of the nondiscrimination clauses of the Partition Plan and of the UN’s own condition that Israel permit the return of forcibly displaced Palestinian refugees.18”
― Noura Erakat, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine

“Great Britain remained committed to establishing a Jewish national home in Palestine despite its legal duties as the Mandatory Power to shepherd local Arab peoples to independence.14”
― Noura Erakat, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine

“irrelevant. Since the First World War, serious legal controversies, including the disputes over the settlements, have characterized the question of Palestine.”
― Noura Erakat, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine