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Partitioning Palestine: Legal Fundamentalism in the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict, by John Strawson. London: Pluto Press, 2010. ix + 216 pages. Notes to p. 235. Bibliography to p. 242. Index to p. 256. $35.00 paper; cloth $95.00. Reviewed by Michael Lynk Is it a coincidence that, as disillusionment spreads about the viability and justice of a two-state settlement as the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we are witnessing a spate of books that is shifting the political-historical focus from 1967 to the 1917–1948 period as the fulcrum point by which to assess this malignant struggle? Recent histories such as The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict by Jonathan Schneer (Random House, 2010) and Victor Kattan’s From Coexistence to Conquest: International Law and the Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1891–1949 (Pluto Press, 2009) have lucidly and critically explored the colonialist foundations of the British Mandate, the British-Zionist alliance, and the deeply flawed premises of the United Nations partition plan. John Strawson, who teaches law at the University of East London, has recently added to this burgeoning library shelf with his Partitioning Palestine: Legal Fundamentalism in the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict. While his narrative runs from the origins of Zionism up to the end of the second Bush presidency, his focus dwells on the seminal period of the British Mandate and the fateful decision at the United Nations to partition Palestine. Given that Strawson taught law as a visitor at Birzeit University for a decade, and Partitioning Palestine is printed by a remarkable publishing house—Pluto Press—with an admirable Middle East list, one might expect a perceptive and fresh history, infused with the insights of international law as a critical tool to interpret the vital turning points of the conflict. If so, disappointment would follow. Strawson promises in his introduction that his book will “no doubt irritate many Palestinians and Israelis—and their supporters” (p. 7). He is doubtlessly right, but not for the reasons that he may have wished. Partitioning Palestine’s central thesis is that international law has been used as a partisan and unprincipled tool by both Israelis and Palestinians, and the wisdom of compromise has been discarded in the process. In his study, Strawson concentrates on three distinct periods of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to illustrate his argument: the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate, the UN partition plan and the ensuing war, and the post-1967 occupation. All are significant flash-points in the conflict, and the book’s methodological approach could potentially tell us much about the fateful turns in each period. Alas, what Partitioning Palestine offers instead is an unimaginative and unconvincing recounting of the first two periods, and a lukewarm legal critique of Israel’s occupation practices after 1967. Ultimately, Strawson can argue that both sides and their supporters have made a hash of international legal principles only by disfiguring these principles in his own account of the Mandate, the partition decision, and the blood-dimmed consequences. In Strawson’s characterization of the conflict during the Mandate years, he relies on the most benign of the writings of such pivotal figures of this era as Norman Bentwich, Chaim Weizmann, and Sir Mark Sykes as evidence that Zionism lacked any substantive colonialist or aggressive nature and was not premised on the dislocation of the indigenous population. He acknowledges that the Mandate awarded to Britain in 1922 by the League of Nations prioritized the establishment of the Jewish national home in Palestine and mentioned the Palestinian Arabs—at the time, the overwhelming majority—only in passing as the “non-Jewish population.” But the implications of this point are left largely unexplored. Indeed, the three political-historical trends that decisively shaped the Mandate years—the Zionist policy of transforming Palestine’s demography, Britain’s support for settler-colonialism, and the persistent Palestinian resistance—barely figure in Partitioning Palestine. The United Nations’ 1947 partition plan, together with the incorporation of the Balfour Declaration into the 1922 Mandate, has been the central legal basis for the Zionist claim to Palestine. An innovative and critical legal-historical examination of the partition plan might want to inquire into the European and North American domination of the UN in the late 1940s, the use of partition as an imperial instrument to blunt nationalism, the influential role of the Truman presidency and the nascent Israel lobby to push the Palestine partition plan through the General Assembly, and the partition plan’s inequity in how it divided Palestine. Above all, such a study would want to look at the contradictory role of international law throughout the Middle East conflict as both an expression of rights and a tool of realpolitik. Little of this can be found in Partitioning Palestine. Strawson’s attention, and sympathy, are drawn instead to the majority report of the 1947 United Nations Special Committee on Palestine, which adopted the arguments of the Jewish Agency to endorse partition. “The Jewish argument was easier to make,” he writes, “as it accorded with the dominant view of international law” (p. 88). The larger and more intriguing question, left unexplored by Strawson, would be: Whose law? The final section of Partitioning Palestine explores the Israeli occupation of the remaining parts of Palestine after the 1967 war. Leaving aside the book’s debatable observations on the politics of the war (“it would seem erroneous to regard the territorial results of 1967 as deriving from an expansionist impulse” [p. 168]), Strawson’s use of international law to examine this period is marred by both dubious interpretations and glaring omissions. His treatment of the seminal Resolution 242, adopted by the UN Security Council in November 1967, is illustrative of the book’s problem. Partitioning Palestine argues that both sides have misused Resolution 242 by insisting on competing interpretations that only entrench mistrust and misunderstandings. Yet his analysis ignores any mention of the central provision in the resolution—“the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war”—which lies at the very heart of both the United Nations Charter and the law of modern occupation. Missing entirely from the book is any assessment of the legality of Israeli settlements, surely an integral part of understanding the territorial and demographic impulses of the Israeli occupation. To his credit, Strawson is critical of the Oslo process and the thickening of the occupation since 1993, and notes how the 2002 road map required substantive leadership and institutional changes of the Palestinian Authority but demanded nothing of the sort from Israel. Partitioning Palestine reaches high, but falls short. Its methodological premise—that a legal-historical assessment of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can significantly aid our understanding of the situation—is both promising and viable. Victor Kattan’s recent From Coexistence to Conquest demonstrates that this approach can work wonderfully. What gets in Strawson’s way is his skewed theory of the conflict, shaped by some of his defective historical conclusions and his faulty use of the applicable international law. If, as Strawson promises, this book is indeed irritating, it has less to do with his pox-on-both-your-houses assumption and more to do with failing to deliver an analysis that matches the promise.