Eyal Benvenisti. The International Law of Occupation

Abstract

The first edition of Eyal Benvenisti’s The International Law of Occupation, published in 1993, was the first thorough treatment of occupation law to appear in English in 30 years. Not since Gerhard van Glahn’s volume of 1957 had a scholar comprehensively surveyed this critical area of law. 1 An update was long overdue. The seemingly clear rules of the 1907 Hague Regulations and 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention appeared to be receding in importance, as few states in the post-World War II period acknowledged their status as occupiers; Israel’s prolonged occupation of the Palestinian territories challenged the assumption of occupation as a temporary phenomenon; few governments ousted in recent occupations went into exile to await a return to power, thus calling into question occupation law’s focus on protecting the prerogatives of the ‘de jure regime’; and occupiers had seemingly honoured the ‘conservationist principle’ – the limitation on an occupier’s legislative authority most famously embodied in Article 43 of the Hague Regulations – mostly in the breach. States themselves provided little help in making sense of these and other developments. The discussions of occupation law in the US and UK military manuals, for example, had not been updated since the late 1950s.2 With the striking exception of Israel in the Palestinian territories, occupation law appeared to be receding from relevance.