8/27/2021 The 1948 Arab-Israeli Conflict and International Law - International Law - Oxford Bibliographies https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199796953/obo-9780199796953-0226.xml?rskey=FTqtzt&result=1&q=erakat+&print#firstMatch 1/21 The 1948 Arab-Israeli Conflict and International Law Noura Erakat LAST MODIFIED: 25 AUGUST 2021 DOI: 10.1093/OBO/9780199796953-0226 Introduction International law’s indeterminacy and its capacity to be shaped by what Duncan Kennedy describes as “legal work,” or the intervention of the legal worker to shape many available parts, (i.e., evidence, primary documents, testimony) into an argument makes certain that there is no singular account of a conflict in international law. Despite the myriad legal arguments presented in jurisprudence, scholarship, and advocacy, not a single one of them is the “truth” to the exclusion of all others as the law itself represents a terrain of battle rather than a science to be discovered or verified. This could not be truer in the case of the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict. The conflict itself refers to the establishment of Israel, self-defined as a Jewish state, in Mandate Palestine, where a native, and numerical majority, Arab population sought to be self-determined. Perhaps the worst way to pursue this scholarly inquiry is to begin in the 1948 War between Israel and six Arab armies. Doing so effectively erases the three decades of British colonial oversight in its capacity as the Mandatory power that facilitated the settler-colonization of Palestine, the supplanting of nascent Palestinian sovereignty with Jewish-Zionist settler-sovereignty, and, ultimately, the country’s transformation into the modern state of Israel. While I begin this inquiry roughly during the First World War, which ended with the defeat of the Ottoman Empire and its dominion over Palestine since 1299, there is room to begin much earlier especially in regard to the development of legal regimes regulating nationality and citizenship as well as land to understand their mutations over the course of the Palestine Mandate between 1922 and 1948. Similarly, it would be a mistake to end this inquiry upon Israel’s establishment, and then begin again during the 1967 War and the subsequent occupation of Arab lands, as do most legal accounts. The intervening decades between the two wars serve as an analytical bridge to understand the continuities in law between Britain’s colonial oversight of Palestine, Israel’s racialized governance of Palestinian natives who remained, and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, which together provide a more holistic picture of an ongoing settler-colonial regime of land usurpation, native removal, and settler replacement. This bibliography aims to provide historical context as well as reflect some of the debates within the historiography and legal literature. It includes a mix of primary sources, legal analysis, and historical accounts that together should help shape a robust research project. Palestinian Nationalism and the Quest for Self-Determination At the turn of the 20th century, the majority of the world’s population existed under imperial dominion. The calls for national independence from imperial rule steadily increased in direct correlation to the crystallization of national identities, what Anderson 2016 has argued are “imagined communities.” The subjects of the Ottoman empire, which stretched from North Africa across southeastern Europe, through the Levant and as far east as the Persian Gulf, were no exception to this trend as Antonius 2015 details beginning in the early 19th century. (See also Balfour Declaration). Initially, Arab Palestinians considered themselves part of Greater Syria, a geopolitical imaginary that included modern day Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and the northernmost part of Palestine and, as Thompson 2009 shows, struggled for self- determination on those terms. Palestinian national identity congealed in dialectical relationship to regional developments, resistance movements, and colonial interventions, most notably the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement that carved the former Ottoman Empire into French and British spheres of influence. The Agreement imposed upon peoples of the Middle East arbitrary borders without regard to ethnic and religious distinctions nor to the will of local populations. The Zionist movement (see Zionism) which sought to establish a Jewish national home in Palestine, similarly influenced the development of Palestinian national identity as explored by Khalidi 2009 and Porath 2016. Tucker 1998, Seikaly 2015, and Doumani 2007 offer refreshing approaches to understanding Palestinian national identity on their own terms. Qafisheh 2009 provides a thorough breakdown of Palestinian citizenship and nationality in law under Ottoman and then British rule while Banko 2016 documents the evolution of Palestinian citizenship during the British Mandate.