As a legal matter, decolonization of Palestine will likely take place through an agreement between the United States and the State of Palestine. What terms should that agreement contain? What lessons can we learn from other decolonization agreements (e.g., the Evian Accords for Algeria)?

Decolonization treaties often include terms that are logistical in character: a timetable for the withdrawal of troops, basing rights, perhaps a limited subsidy for the newly independent state. But they can also include terms that effectively govern the constitution of the newly independent state. A common provision, for example, is a guarantee of formal equality for the part of the colonizer population that chooses to remain in the decolonized state. Are such commitments enforceable at international law (e.g., could a violation constitute grounds for military action against the newly independent state)? To what extent are such constitutional commitments consistent with genuine decolonization? Notably, international law does not normally treat formal inequality in a domestic constitution as grounds for military intervention. Consequently, a decolonization treaty that extracts constitutional concessions from the colonized population would seem to leave the colonized population with something less than the level of sovereignty enjoyed by other independent states. If so, is decolonization consistent with any of the “solutions” to the Palestine question proposed by outside parties, including both two-state solutions, federal solutions, binational solutions, and unitary one-state solutions involving formal equality? All of these would propose to bind Palestine to a particular constitutional form rather than accede to the decolonial principle that the colonized population decides the constitutional form of the liberated state.

Decolonization is often accompanied by what might best be described as massive white flight. As soon as it becomes clear that the colonizer population will be required to live as equals with a colonized population that the colonizer views as subhuman, the colonizer emigrates. The departure of the pieds noires in Algeria is an example. This poses important problems for decolonization because it means that Palestinians may not be able to try colonizers for crimes committed during the colonial period. It also means that Palestinians may have difficulty extracting damages, disgorgement of gains achieved through colonization, or reparations from the colonizer population. How might the international community prepare to assist Palestinians in achieving justice by agreeing either to bar the flight of the colonizer population, prevent the offshoring of colonial assets, or facilitate the extradition of colonizers to Palestine for trial?

Justice for Palestinians is often assumed to be a matter for international fora such as the International Criminal Court. Is such a framing consistent with decolonization? Colonization is not only an international event but also a domestic event. Colonizer populations violate the domestic laws of the colonized population—or prevent those laws from coming into being. As such, a proper decolonial approach to justice for colonized peoples might be to empower colonized peoples to try colonizers in domestic courts for violations of domestic legal rules. How might such a domestic remedy be preserved and implemented for Palestine? Are there precedents in decolonial practice from the 20^th century?

What role should the decolonization of Palestine play in creating the conditions for deterrence of future Western colonization projects? While colonized peoples scored some notable decolonization successes in the mid to late 20^th century, virtually none of these involved the payment of punitive damages. In most cases, decolonization meant the end of the colony and the expropriation of those colonial assets that were tied to the land. Colonizers also lost their investments in failed military operations. But that was all. The result has been virtually no real deterrence against colonization. Western powers effectively enjoy the business equivalent of limited liability for colonization: they can choose how much they lose by limiting the amount they invest in the defense of the colony or in fixed assets. Genuine deterrence would require payment of all damages to Palestinians arising out of their colonization, disgorgement of the present value of all profits derived from colonization by the colonizers and their sponsors, plus additional reparation payments designed to ensure that in future prospective colonizers can expect a net loss from any colonization attempt. While this problem could be remedied through the negotiation of massive reparations for past cases of colonization (e.g., French reparations to Algeria), Palestine affords a unique opportunity to drive the deterrence lesson home with respect to the newest surviving Western colonial project. What sort of reparations should the United States, as lead sponsor of the Israeli colony, as well as other Western nations, be required to pay for the colonization of Palestine? What sort of reparations should be required of the colonizer population and of those private citizens around the world that aided the colonization project? How might the world organize to extract such reparations?

Deterrence aside, how might the liberation of Palestine and the ending of Israel be structured to cement a global norm or legal rule against colonization that might serve to protect against future colonization? Although the General Assembly passed a number of notable resolutions during the decolonization movements of the mid-20^th century, and these resolutions articulated something like a general right to armed struggle against colonization, international law and institutions have failed to make good on the promise of a generally accepted rule against colonization that could be enforced on a practical level. As a result, Palestinian lawfare has had to proceed by borrowing concepts meant for different political situations. Palestinians have hacked away at Israel’s conquests after 1967 using the law of occupation. And Palestinians and their supporters have challenged the current slaughter using the law of genocide and the law of war crimes. But these approaches have proven partial in vision and highly ineffective in application because they do not address the basic problem that Israel is a colony in toto. What might a properly formed international rule against colonization look like? And could it be implemented through the current UN system? Given that colonization is a relationship between empires and weak peoples, a UN system that allows empires a veto on enforcement actions would not seem to be an appropriate vehicle for decolonization. Would a convention against colonization entered into exclusively by the Global South, and backed by a joint military command be more likely to give the force of law to a rule against colonization?

What should become of Israel’s arsenal, weapons industry, and nuclear weapons post-independence? A decolonial frame suggests that all of these should become property of independent Palestine given that they were used to enforce Palestine’s bondage. Israel’s weapons industry in particular represents the industrial fruit of the colonization of Palestine, potentially entitling Palestinians to title via the remedy of disgorgement. Weapons systems are not merely a collection of hardware, but also the technical support and training required to run them. How might the agreement ending Israel provide for continuing technical support for those systems without creating a relationship of dependence between Palestine and the United States or Israel’s other Western arms suppliers? Does Palestine have an interest in retaining control over Israel’s nuclear weapons as a guarantee against Western attempts to recolonize the region? How might Palestinian retention of nuclear weapons—or Israel’s advanced military capabilities—potentially harm Palestine? What steps should the international community take in advance of the liberation of Palestine to ensure that the future of the colonial arsenal is determined via decolonial policy rather than via unilateral actions by the United States, the colonial government, or third parties? How have earlier instances of decolonization disposed of the colonial arsenal?