Confronting Zionism: How international law fails Palestine

In July 2026, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani publicly stated that, if he could, he would arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when the latter comes to the United Nations General Assembly in New York.

If only he could...

Netanyahu, Mamdani said, is a war criminal, not welcome in his city, and he urged the US federal government to act upon the International Criminal Court warrant to arrest him.

Mamdani had earlier pledged, during his election campaign, that he would follow "every applicable law" should Netanyahu visit New York, but he also acknowledged that he does not have that authority.

"It is clear that we do not have the independent legal authority to enforce this warrant," Mamdani said. "The federal government, however, does, and I call on them to join the [International Criminal Court] and execute this warrant."

Of course, US President Donald Trump said Netanyahu would not be arrested "in any way, shape, or form" in the USA.

Mamdani’s inability, and Trump’s refusal, to enforce an arrest warrant by the world’s top criminal court are but one example of the frustrating constraints of international law, which Noura Erakat and John Reynolds examine and explain in their new book, Confronting Zionism: Decolonizing Palestine and Building the World Anew.

The authors are both legal scholars, and the book details how international law, in many ways a weapon of imperial powers, lacks the capacity to indict imperial criminals.

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But rather than stop at this sober assessment, the book also explores the possibility of change, stressing that it must come from organisers and organic intellectuals rather than world politicians.

In the first part of the book, later complemented by many discussions throughout the following chapters, Erakat and Reynolds explain that international law, by failing to name Zionism as an instance of settler colonialism that hinges on racial supremacy, cannot address the root cause of the plight of the Palestinian people, as it fails to recognise the oppressive system that is dispossessing and disenfranchising them.

Yet, as they write, from the very foundation of that state, Israeli law, "racial in its construction of a superior class with exclusive claims on the state, and colonial in its extraction of another people’s wealth and property, is precisely what characterises Zionism as an intellectual and political bedfellow of apartheid," which is a crime against humanity.

They also demonstrate with many examples how Israel’s current heinous attacks on Palestinian refugees in Gaza do not present a departure from its foundational policies, but rather an intensification, encouraged by the lack of accountability afforded to it by the Global North.

What is particularly refreshing is the wealth of Palestinian intellectual history that the authors share with us, revealing how Palestinians, not surprisingly, have always understood Zionism as a settler colonial movement and racist ideology that needs to be addressed through decolonial praxis.

As they write: "Palestinians intuitively and intimately understand the modes of domination and segregation that have been imposed upon them — legally, spatially, and racially."

Additionally, the authors show how many Third World countries had also always understood Israel’s nature as a colonial regime.

Confronting Zionism, then, necessitates demystifying it, presenting it for the oppressively racist and imperial ideology and practice that it is, rather than the "redemptive democracy" it once claimed to be, a façade which imperial powers today continue to promote, even as Israel itself has ended its pretence.

Indeed, Zionism’s greatest success may well be the stealthy way it switched its own narrative, from an initial embrace of colonial ideology and open advocacy of population transfer of the indigenous Palestinian people, to its self-portrayal, still embraced by the Global North, as a beleaguered nation surrounded by hateful, bloodthirsty terrorists, to its current claim that it is defending itself as it engages in genocide.

Even today, as people globally are denouncing its savagery, Israel maintains that critics of its heinous acts are motivated by antisemitism, rather than opposed to Israel’s colonial nature, which hinges on the genocide of the indigenous people.

And so long as Zionism is not recognised as essentially racist, international law will not condemn it, but simply seek to reform it.

The authors then show us how this blindness to the colonial nature of Zionism permeates the various reports that have come out in the past few years, condemning Israel’s "abuses," not its existence.

In 2021, a number of reports by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and B’Tselem documented Israeli apartheid but, as the authors point out, "Zionism and settler colonialism were not named or analysed as such in these apartheid reports. Their absence loomed large. The silence of human rights organisations on the underlying roots of the systems they diagnosed as apartheid revealed its own story. A significant part of this story is how international law itself has normalised conquest and partition in contexts like Palestine."

Additionally, the criticism of recent abuses by Israel "appeared to attribute Israel’s racial regime to a matter of unforeseen deviation — implying to different degrees that Israel only recently crossed a threshold from imperfect democracy into undemocratic apartheid."

In the second part of the book, the authors examine historical examples of anti-colonial struggles, most notably South Africa, which millions of Palestinians use as a model for their grassroots organising.

But they are cautious to tell us that South Africa, where racial power dynamics are as devastating today as they were under apartheid rule, must also serve as a cautionary tale, an example of how dispossession can continue after the legal abolition of apartheid, if decolonisation is not accompanied by "return, reparations, and redistribution" of the stolen indigenous land, wealth, and resources.

Ultimately, Confronting Zionism is about the failure of international law and the need to rely on organic intellectuals’ analysis and civil society organising for genuine liberation, rather than the superficial abolition of a system without addressing its ongoing material consequences.

Instead, decolonising Palestine requires genuine change, which can only come from addressing the root causes of oppression, while creating a new system, a new society, free from the vestiges of colonialism.

Thus the book ends with a call to continued action. Decolonisation, the authors tell us, cannot be strictly symbolic. It is a liberatory struggle that involves a diversity of tactics, from divestment efforts to direct action such as blocking ports and shipping lanes, to consumer and cultural boycott campaigns, all inspired by the century-old determination of Palestinians to build a new world against all odds.

And even though they do not use Audre Lorde’s imagery, these two legal scholars are basically telling us that international law is "the master’s tools."

Lorde, we remember, had warned us that "the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change."

And what is needed, for Palestine, is genuine change, a complete eradication ("from the roots") of the racist settler-colonial regime that has always dispossessed, and is now intent on completely annihilating, the indigenous people of our tormented land.

Nada Elia is an Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at Western Washington University and author of Greater than the Sum of Our Parts: Feminism, Inter/Nationalism, and Palestine

Follow Nada on Instagram: @nadaelia48