Human rights in Palestine: from self-determination to governance

Abstract

This article traces a number of historical junctions to show the limited normative and political purchase of human rights in addressing Palestinian demands for sovereignty and self-determination. The article shows how Israel speaks about and addresses itself to normalised settler colonial conditions that constitutively exclude Palestinians. Under these conditions, law and rights are wielded as technologies of rules that presuppose and articulate hierarchies of standings and claims that preclude Palestinian sovereignty and self-determination. Even though, historically, Palestinians have attempted different methods to engage international law and human rights, they repeatedly came up against a geopolitical structure of domination nested in a normative order that either relegates them figuratively outside its border or includes them only as an object of governance.