Why Statehood Now: A Reflection on the ICC’s Impact on Palestine’s Engagement with International Law

This essay seeks to reflect on the sudden emergence in the international law discourse of a sustained debate on the question of statehood since, after all, the question of Palestinian statehood has been an issue of concern even before 1947. Since the beginning of the second intifada in 2000, the emphasis in legal analysis of the conflict has moved from one primarily focused on individual violations of international human rights and humanitarian law to consideration of broader questions of public international law. This paper aims to reflect, generally, on this development, by touching upon why a legal analysis fitted into a framework largely restricted to human rights and humanitarian law in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, is being expanded temporally and normatively to engage with the overarching politico-legal questions around statehood, colonialism, and self-determination that have for the most part remained in the background of legal analysis since Palestine’s first encounters with the international legal framework under the aegis of the League of Nations.