ISRAEL-PALESTINE AS A GLOBAL FRONTIER: EMPIRE, RESISTANCE, AND THE CRISIS OF INTERNATIONAL LAW

Abstract

The Israel-Palestine issue, which has frequently been imposed as a local territorial conflict is not relevant because it is more a world frontier, a meeting point of historical injustices, imperialism, and international legal contradictions. This paper analyzes the conflict in terms of the theory of borderlands and frontier and how the physical and symbolic borders of the Israel and Palestine mirror the larger Global North-South, empire-resistance and security-human rights conflicts in the world. The paper focuses on the long-term effects that the colonial structures (British Mandate and the Balfour Declaration) had on the region to identify how displacement, settlement growth and the disintegration of Palestinian autonomy have transformed the land into a place of continuous crisis.

The paper also examines different types of Palestinian resistance that have been armed, civil, cultural and digital and the ways in which they interrelate with the spatial politics of occupation, limiting movements, and legality. The weaknesses of international law through lack of enforcement of the United Nations resolutions and use of politics in the dispensation of justice through the International Criminal Court are criticized to show how the system has failed to function effectively in the worldwide humanitarianism. Lastly, the war is placed as symbolic and a strategic border of worldwide unity, where transnational action movements, intersectional justice movements and decentralized networks are reinventing advocacy and accountability. In this perspective the Israel-Palestine crisis is not merely a location of deep-rooted antagonism but a location of possible change necessitating a decolonial, ethical, and integrative re-definition of sovereignty and international interactions.