Partitioning Palestine: Legal Fundamentalism in the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict

Law has always lain at the heart of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Israel's founders sought to create a Jewish homeland by international law, an aim deemed illegal by Palestinians. A century of competing legal claims hang over contemporary Palestinians and Israelis. Both peoples mobilize their narrative of international law to legitimize their actions and delegitimize those of the other.

Partitioning Palestine focuses on the different ways in which Palestinians and Israelis have narrated the key legal texts of the conflict: the League of Nations Mandate, the United Nations partition plan and the Oslo Agreements. The book traces how the conflicting versions of these documents have shaped national identity and sharpened the conflict.

In this pioneering text, John Strawson argues that the belief by each side that it possesses a monopoly of legal justice has hampered the search for a settlement. Law used in this manner, far from offering conflict resolution, has reinforced the trenches from which Palestinians and Israelis confront each other.