Palestine and : A Challenge to Justice, John Quigley, Duke University Press, Durham, and (1990), pp. 337.

Reviewed by Raja Shehadeh ��â

Many books have been written about the Israeli - Palestinian conflict. These include books by revisionist historians, like Simha Flapan, Tom Shegev and Iran Pappa, regarding the early history of Israel and the expulsion of the Palestinian population from Palestine after the 1948 war. They have helped challenge many of the early myths that the Zionist movement had perpetuated over many years. Similarly several important books have appeared in the past few years documenting the legal discrimination to which the Arabs in Israel have been subjected, including David Kretzmer's The Legal Status of the Arabs in Israel. Quigley makes good use of these earlier studies and many others, using them to support many of the arguments in his book. His training as a political scientist, in addition to his experience in international law, enables him to place the legal developments in their historical and political context making his book more accessible to non-jurists. This is an important achievement. Another is the comprehensive coverage which Quigley provides. This allows the reader to view the wider spectrum of the challenges to justice in Palestine and gain a better grasp of the broader patterns that have and continue to distinguish the attitudes of the two sides to legal questions over many decades. Chapter 23 is entitled "De�a Vu: Israel's control of the and Gaza." In fact many other parts of Quigley's book evoke a similar sense. Take this description of the events of 1909: The World Zionist Organization formed the Palestine Land Development Company Ltd., which became the main purchasing agency for the Fund. As land purchases increased, so did Arab opposition to them and, consequently, to Zionism itself. At various locations in northern Palestine Arab farmers refused to move from land the Fund purchased from absentee owners, and Turkish authorities, at the Fund's request, evicted them.... At times dispossessed Arab farmers raided settlements built on their former lands and Zionist settlers formed a militia called Hashomer to defend them [page 6]. From 1909, the main features of Zionist colonisation of Palestine and the Palestinian response to it have not changed. After 1967 the Jewish National Fund established a subsidiary, Hamanuta, which it registered in the West Bank as a private limited company for the purpose of registering in its name land bought from . There were not many vendors. Land that could not be purchased was declared by the occupation authorities as public land. In many instances landowners whose land became the subject of such a declaration refused to give up their land and they had to be evicted by force. At the time of writing this review, the Jewish settlers in the Occupied Territories have proposed the setting up of their own militias which they, not coincidentally, also

�â Raja Shehadeh is a Palestinian lawyer practising in the West Bank with Al- Haq, the West Bank affiliate of the International Commission of Jurists. call Hashomer (Hebrew for guard). The difference now is that unlike the situation in 1909 the settlers are supported by the powerful Israeli state and its army, which ranks among the strongest in the world. Reading Quigley's comprehensive coverage makes one also aware of the difference between the responses of the two sides. Quigley writes how under the British Mandate the Jewish Agency became a state within a state (p. 23). He describes the establishment and contribution of many of the national institutions that were established from very early on and the challenge they posed to justice. Unfortunately for the Palestinians, the terms of the British Mandate did not afford them a similar opportunity to establish and run their own civilian affairs. Nor did they try to organise themselves in a similarly effective manner to take over when the British Mandate ended. This failure to appreciate the significance of a policy of creating facts on the ground and building a civil society on Palestinian land continued to mark the Palestinian struggle. Despite its tremendous growth and popularity, the Palestine Liberation Organisation has failed to establish powerful and effective national institutions in the Occupied Territories capable of taking over in the event a peaceful settlement is reached. The response of the two sides to the United Nations Partition plan affords another example of the different attitudes of the two sides. This is how Quigley describes the attitude of the Arab League to United Nations resolution 181: "The Arab League also still hoped for a political solution and made no preparation for intervention." The response to the Jewish side, on the other hand, was to "[proceed] with its plans to establish a Jewish state, although it did not promise to limit itself to the area proposed in resolution 181 (page 38)." Many Palestinians who support the present negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians were prompted by their fear that perhaps rejection would be as costly as it has proven in the past. It is time, they thought, to leave negative stances and to say yes for a change. But it should be remembered that compromise could be surrender, if it is not accompanied by a carefully worked out legal case, which can become the basis for a future argument to a fuller claim. Quigley also reminds us that while the Zionists took care to formulate their legal positions, they also did more. The response of the Jewish Agency to U.N. resolution 181 is telling: it called on "all Jews aged seventeen to twenty five to register for military service in the Haganah. It began purchasing armaments in the United States, and the Haganah operations chief prepared a map showing the strategic character of every Arab village (page 39)." The Arab response on the other hand was much more passive. The Arab Higher Council made no military decisions but called on Palestine Arabs to hold a three-day commercial strike to protest the partition plan. How reminiscent this is of present strategies! Having presented the responses of the two sides to this important U.N. resolution, Quigley then goes on to remind us that "the General Assembly of the U.N. is not a legislature for the world. The U.N. Charter ... gives it only the power of recommendation ... Thus even if the Assembly intended to impose partition it is not clear it had the legal authority to do so (page 47)." It is such comprehensive treatment, encompassing the political as well as the international law dimension of the issues, that distinguishes Quigley's book. The revealing discussion of resolution 181 ends part one of the book entitled "The origins of the Zionist-Arab conflict in Palestine".