Palestine and the limits of international law

In the wake of Israel’s most recent attacks on Gaza, international law took on renewed prominence in political discourse, with popular interest in international legal proceedings at a level seldom seen before. The article looks critically at the turn to international law and, in particular, at demands for the international criminal prosecution of Israel’s leaders, setting these appeals within the longer history of international criminal law and its inability to grapple with the material structures and systemic logics out of which violence and atrocity arise. It then turns to recent proposals for a Gaza Tribunal, setting these against the history of similar peoples’ tribunals. In framing the horror unleashed on Gaza in terms of (il)legality and looking to international legal institutions, formal and popular alike, to advance an emancipatory politics, the article warns, progressive political movements risk naturalising the very structures and logics undergirding the violence they seek to condemn.