Julius Stone and the Question of Palestine in International Law

Abstract

This article is interrogates the international law arguments articulated between the 1940s and 1980s by the influential Australian international law and jurisprudence scholar, Sir Julius Stone. In particular, it critically examines Stone’s views on key controversies which still resonate today: the right of self-determination of peoples in Palestine; the legality of foreign occupation of territory; the lawfulness of Israeli settlements in occupied territory; the applicability of the 1949 Geneva Conventions to occupied territory and to the conflict as a whole; the use of force against “terrorists”; and the legal position, rights and prospects of Palestinian refugees. Many of Stone’s positions on critical international legal issues in the Israel/Palestine conflict stepped outside even generous zones of plausible or reasonable interpretations of the law, even on the law as it then often ambiguously stood, and certainly in hindsight. His casting the Jewish people as the only victims who mattered in that dispute fatally undermines the prospects for a just and equitable application, or creative adaptation, of international law to the Israel/Palestine dispute.

Keywords: Israel, Palestine, self-determination, Julius stone, law of occupation, palestinian refugees, right of return, Palestinian occupied territories, Israeli settlements, Geneva conventions, use of force, terrorism

JEL Classification: K10, K30, K33