Symposium | Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law at 20

The Law Was Never Meant to Protect Us

By Zeina Jallad

In Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law, Anthony Anghie shows how Third World sovereignty was forged through the colonial encounter and became a retarding force, making it difficult to undo colonial legacies. His path-breaking book further demonstrates how the state became the idealised form of Third World sovereignty, influencing the way international legal norms were imposed on newly independent nations. What Anghie calls the ‘colonial encounter’ describes the historical process of European territorial expansion, framed as a civilising mission to manage supposedly ‘uncivilised’ colonised peoples (pp. 64–65). In the book, he documents the different ways that international law and related international institutions continue to racially, economically, culturally, and politically subordinate former—and presently—colonised peoples to the imperial center. Among these, he underscores the role of international law in enabling economic domination—a theme that remains central to the Palestinian experience today.

The question of Palestine fits neatly into Anghie’s analysis. For over seventy years, international law and institutions have been managing the issue, but rather than advancing Palestinian liberation, they have been constantly moving the finish line farther away. Many thought the Oslo Accords in 1993 would be a turning point for Palestinian sovereignty, granting Palestinians sovereignty over Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the West Bank in exchange for peace—‘land for peace’, as the slogan went. Within the United Nations, the ‘two-state solution’ still dominates the agenda. The assumption is that recognising a State of Palestine alongside Israel would fulfill the promises of Oslo by creating the conditions for lasting peace. However, long before Israel officially abandoned the two-state solution, many Palestinians already critiqued it. They recognised that Oslo fragmented Palestinian territory into disconnected enclaves, left refugees’ rights unresolved, and failed to put a stop to settlement expansion. Rather than delivering sovereignty, Oslo institutionalised Palestinian dependence.

What is less often examined is how the Oslo Accords built economic subordination into the foundations of any potential Palestinian state. Palestine’s situation reflects both the broader global condition Anghie describes—where postcolonial states remain economically subordinated through international institutions—and a deeper level of dependency embedded within its agreements with Israel. The Paris Protocol of 1994, presented within the Oslo Accords as a framework for economic cooperation, embedded asymmetrical controls into the Palestinian economy. It created a customs union controlled by Israel, preventing the Palestinian Authority from setting tariffs, regulating trade, or collecting its own import taxes. From the outset, the Protocol ensured that any form of Palestinian economic policy would require Israeli approval. This effectively subordinated any expression of Palestinian sovereignty or statehood to Israel, permanently institutionalising economic apartheid. The Protocol grants Israel the capacity to exert leverage over trade restrictions, tax collection, freedom of movement and an already constrained labor market—while upholding the illusion of Palestinian autonomy. This is one element of what are effectively structural constraints in the absence of the Palestinian Authority’s sovereignty over borders, airspace, water, and its own economic policy.

The Paris Protocol exemplifies the managed form of sovereignty Anghie critically examines: one that grants form without substance and authority without independence, utilising the language of development and cooperation to preserve the occupier’s dominance. The Protocol further employs a legal technique that Anghie tracks in his analysis of colonial concession agreements, where colonial powers displaced local sovereignty by using private contracts and privileged European legal norms (pp. 226–35). While the Protocol does not explicitly acknowledge the supremacy of Israeli law, its structure replicates the logic of these agreements. It bypasses the norms of public international law by operating as a bilateral economic arrangement under occupation, entrenching Israeli control without granting Palestinians any comparable legal standing. For instance, the Palestinian Authority cannot set customs duties, independently negotiate trade agreements or import basic goods such as wheat or fuel without the approval of Israeli authorities. These limitations have resulted in a chronic dependency on Israeli suppliers, thus blocking the possibility of real economic self-determination.

The customs union developed by the Paris Protocol with Israel grants the Israeli government veto power over Palestinian trade and sets restrictive conditions on imports and exports. Article III of the Paris Protocol prohibits the Palestinian Authority from setting tariffs, negotiating trade agreements, or independently managing customs procedures. Instead, the Palestinian Authority must rely on a tiered system of import lists, with specific quotas for each set by the Israeli government:

List A1: goods from Egypt, Jordan, and other Arab countries (primarily agricultural and food products).
List A2: goods from Muslim countries and others, but only goods not produced significantly in Israel.
List B: basic goods for economic development, but subject to Israeli approval for any tax changes.

Israel retains the right to prevent the import of goods that compete with its own industries, effectively forcing Palestinians to depend on more expensive Israeli alternatives, thereby effectively subsidising their own occupier. Despite massive demographic and economic changes, most of these quotas remain unchanged since 1994. Even when the Palestinian Authority lowers taxes on List B goods, it must notify the Israeli authorities which have the power to override the former’s decisions by applying its own taxes to exceeded quotas. Attempts to update the Protocol through the Joint Economic Committee (JEC) to include new sectors, such as renewable energy or modern medical equipment, have repeatedly been blocked by Israel. In practice, the JEC has served not as a bilateral forum but as a mechanism for maintaining economic dependency. Thus, Palestinians are subjected to an imposed structure of economic subordination—a modern form of what Anghie calls ‘sovereignty without autonomy.’

Gaza offers a stark illustration of how this legal and economic dependency codified by the Paris Protocol enables the present conditions of Israeli domination. Years of restricted trade, limited control over imports, and stunted development have made Palestinians in Gaza deeply reliant on humanitarian aid. This dependence, shaped by legal frameworks and maintained through Israeli control over borders and goods, has allowed the basic necessities—access to food, water, fuel, medicine—to be strongly weaponised. After October 7, 2023, this reality became even more acute: Israel blocked humanitarian convoys, bombed critical infrastructure, and used starvation as a tactic of war, all under the legal cover of self-defense. The same legal infrastructure that produced economic dependence also enabled a system where collective punishment could be normalised, and where international institutions have failed to intervene meaningfully.

Edward Said once wrote a searing critique of the Oslo Accords’ political and economic limitations, calling for a sober reassessment ‘the morning after’ the agreement was signed. A similar blindness persists even today, with many ignoring Israel’s systemic domination over Palestinian sovereignty and leaning instead on problematic UN rhetoric calling for ‘restraint on both sides.’ Along the same lines, discussions about ‘the day after’ the so-called war in Gaza proceed as if the siege, apartheid, and dispossession only began on October 7, 2023. Such narratives erase the legal and colonial architectures that have governed Palestinian life in Gaza and beyond for decades.

Anghie’s work encourages us to contemplate how we may dismantle the structures of violence and domination embedded in modern international law. How can Palestinians emerge not as humanitarian subjects to be managed or security threats to be neutralised, but as sovereign legal agents? International law has too often reduced Palestinians to objects of pity or fear, thus denying them subjecthood in ways both psychological and pragmatic. Even when international institutions affirm the rights of Palestinians, including that of self-determination as in the recent ICJ Advisory Opinion, they do so without offering enforcement mechanisms or structural remedies, thereby reinforcing recognition without power. Law, once imagined as a tool of liberation, instead preserves structures of domination. When we are reminded that the law was never meant to protect us, we must then ask: what it would take for law to emerge from the people, land, and memory, rather than the colonial and statist frameworks in place today.

A just legal order must recognise Palestinians as inherent sovereign subjects, not as a people who must ‘qualify’ for basic rights. Resisting oppression must be recognised not as a crime, but as a fundamental legal right and moral imperative. Land must be treated as sacred, relational, and inalienable, not as a commodity to be fragmented by treaties and borders. Humanitarianism must not and indeed cannot replace justice; true justice must be restorative, not extractive. Justice for Palestinians will not come from a system that refuses to recognise them as equals. It will come from a future they define for themselves.

Zeina Jallad is Assistant Professor of International Law and Director of the Palestine Land Studies Center at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon.