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The new prominence of law in public discourse appears at first as a triumph of the European Enlightenments' rule of law project. It offers the prospect of creating a robust framework for holding the powerful to account through legal censure. Moreover, the idea of universal values that are guaranteed by, and in law (as argued for by Mikhail Gorbachev at the end of the Cold War) has the enchanting appeal of replacing ideological conflict and armed confrontation with a unified legal world order. The end of the cold war was to bring a peace dividend through conflict resolution. In this paper I will argue that international law's indeterminacy provides the ground not for universal agreement but for partisan conflict. The assertion of legal right frequently fuels the conflict that it is intended to resolve. In this paper I will reflect on the manner in which the Palestinian-Israeli conflict contains important lessons for those who seek to enthrone law in the place of politics. From an early stage the conflict has been stamped by contending legal claims. Whereas the Mandate of the League of Nations and the Partition resolution of the United Nations were seen as confirmation of the legal rights of Jews; Palestinians constructed both instruments as illegal and inconsistent with international law. In every area of the conflict; self-determination, the rights of immigrants and refugees, the justification for armed conflict international law became a terrain of confrontation. As a consequence both Jewish nationalism and Palestinian nationalism claim a monopoly of law that denies legitimacy to the other and as a consequence renders compromise problematic. Both parties see law as guaranteeing them justice and the claims and counter-claims await international recognition. In the recent period law has been deployed to justify and oppose the Gaza war. The subsequent Goldstone Report commissioned by the UN Human Rights Council on the war has become a site of legal tension. Thus the laws' apparent dominance is highly contradictory in nourishing a festering sense of justice. Whereas politics provides grounds for negotiations, the insistence on legal rights bolsters intransigence. Within public discourse the assumed stability and consistency of legal principles leaves no room for compromise. Indeed this view of law can justify another round of fighting. I will suggest that the decline of politics and the rise of law can produce a form of legal fundamentalism that leads not peaceful solutions but to intensification of conflict. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Muslim communities in European countries are portrayed as vulnerable to terrorism due to their exclusion from society on social and ethnic grounds. European Anti-terrorism strategy and legislation often focuses on sanitizing such communities through integration. However, in the 1960's and 1970's European countries had a quite different approach to western youth influenced by Marxist and anarchism( Bader-Meinhof, Red Brigades etc) to use violence. These youth were not seen as representatives of communities but as rebels against them. This paper will argue that the Orientalist approach to western Muslim communities reinforces existing inequalities in the attempt to locate sources of violence within problematic notions of ethnicity and religion rather within politics. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Palestine is much referred to in legal discourses but little identified. For nine decades Palestine has been designated as a Mandate by the League of Nations, partitioned by the United Nations and identified as occupied territory by the International Court of Justice. None the less Palestine remains contested as the elliptical formations of the Oslo, the roadmap and Annapolis signify. This paper seeks to track the manner in which the mimetic ambiguity of the legal discourse contributes to and resolves the compromising of Palestine. The argument will challenge the dominant Palestinian legal narrative (e.g. Cattan). This has placed much faith in an idealist account of law, although dressed in positivist clothes. It has assumed a close relationship between Palestinian political objectives and international legal values. As a result legal discourse has been understood as a finished product rather than as work in progress. Palestinian accounts in particular have drawn on a binary divide that counter poses just anti-colonialism to colonial injustice. This assumption about law's relationship to colonialism is problematic (e.g. Fitzpatrick) and leaves unchallenged the marginalization of Palestine and Palestinians. I will suggest it is not in rejecting the ambiguity of law's articulation that this process can be reversed but, rather in embracing it. It is ambiguity that offers the space for cosmopolitan readings (e.g. Fine). It is through such readings that we can begin to disentangle law from colonialism's hold and perhaps place Palestine on the map. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Colonial occupations produce societies where legal institutions which have an ambivalent role due their tenuous jurisdiction. In the case of Palestine the last four decades of occupation have enmeshed Israeli legal institutions and norms with Palestinian ones compromising the legitimacy of the latter. Israeli legal institutions and doctrine undermine Palestinian's efforts to establish the rule of law. Thus it is to the Israeli courts that challenges to the wall are necessary directed. Despite its established illegality under the international law, Israeli effective control leaves Palestinians little choice than to mount challenges to it within the more limited contexts and on grounds arguable within Israeli law. At the same time despite the creation of the Palestinian Authority and the withdrawal and redeployment of Israeli forces from some part of the West Bank - up until 2001 - the Israeli military maintains a system of military courts. Through this system about 10,000 indictments are brought each year and they have jurisdiction over "administrative detention." In 2005-6 some 2700 Palestinians were detained without trial under this procedure. This indicates the porous character of Palestinian jurisdiction which saps its legitimacy. The argument in this paper is that thee studies emphasis the technical aspects of law and legal method. It encourages a positivist mode of thinking in which the isolation of law from actual (occupied colonial) society is encouraged. Law and Society in a Palestinian context can only begin from the engagement with law in the social environment of occupation. The paper will engage with the work of Said (1978, 1993), Mitchell (1988. 2002), Cohn (1998) Benton (2002), Massad (2006). ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Palestinian Basic law has to be placed in its colonial/postcolonial context as it is the product of a series of international processes. The Palestinian National Authority (PNA) constitutes a sui generis legal order exhibiting state-like features although subject to international instruments, the Oslo Agreements and the Roadmap and the legal framework created by the Israeli occupation. As in other colonial situations the legal system has been inherited from imperial powers. As a result the legal order is highly contested and its legitimacy compromised. The experience of the development of the Basic Law, however, offers a rich example of the dilemmas that face Palestine as a transitional society. The Basic law emerged out of a combined process of work by the Palestine Legislative Council and civil society organizations, including the Birzeit Institute of Law. Drafting the Basic law constituted a foundational legal experience for Palestine. The participation of the Islamist organization, Hamas within the (PNA) provides another aspect of international influence via the Muslim Brotherhood and intrenational Islamist discourses generally. A study of the social, political and international influences will offer a revealing inquiry into the production of a text which attempts to narrate the both the entanglement with colonialism and the attempt to become free from it. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]