Palestinian Self-Determination and the Legality of Israel’s Occupation

The Palestinian people have been denied the exercise of their legal

right to self-determination through the more than

century-long violent colonial racist effort

to establish a nation state exclusively for the Jewish

people in the land of mandatory Palestine.

When this began after the First World War, the Jewish population of that

land was eleven percent.

Forcibly implementing Zionism in this demographic context

has necessarily involved the extermination or

forced displacement of some of the non-Jewish Palestinian

population,

the exercise of domination over and subjugation,

dispossession, and immiseration of remaining

non-Jewish Palestinians, the emigration to that land of

Jewish people regardless of any direct personal link,

and the denial of Palestinian refugees the right to return,

all operating through a racist distinction privileging Jewish

people over non-Jewish Palestinian people.

This has necessitated serious violations of all the

fundamental jus cogens and erga omnes norms of international

law.

The right of self-determination, the prohibitions on aggression,

genocide, crimes against humanity, racial

discrimination, apartheid, and torture, and the core

protections of IHL.

Today, I will address first violations of

international

law arising out of the regime of racial domination,

apartheid perpetrated against the Palestinian people

across the entire land of historic Palestine,

and then second, the existential

illegality of Israel's occupation of the Palestinian Gaza

Strip and West Bank, including East Jerusalem since nineteen

sixty-seven. First, the occupation must end.

Israel must renounce its claim to sovereignty over the Palestinian

territory.

All settlers must be removed

immediately.

This is required to end the illegality to discharge the positive

obligation to enable immediate Palestinian self-administration

and because Israel lacks any legal entitlement to exercise

authority.

Second, in the absence of the occupation ending,

necessarily everything Israel does in the Palestinian

territory lacks a valid international legal basis

and is therefore subject to the Namibia exception

invalid,

not only those things violating the law regulating the conduct

of the occupation.

Those norms entitle and require Israel to do certain things.

But this doesn't alter the more fundamental position from the law on

the use of force and self-determination that Israel lacks

any valid authority to do anything,

and whatever it does is illegal, even if compliant

with or pursuant to the conduct regulatory

rules.

I will close by quoting Palestinian academic and

poet Refaat Alareer from his final poem

posted thirty-six days before he was killed by

Israel in Gaza on the sixth of December twenty

twenty-three. "If

I must die,

you must live

to tell my story.

If I must die,

let it bring hope.

Let it be a story."

Thank you for your attention.