The ‘Question of Palestine’: From liminality to emancipation

Abstract

While the gravity of the injustice and inequality experienced by Palestinians is now widely documented, evidenced, and acknowledged, when it comes to action the situation appears ‘impervious’ to international law and norms of global politics, with Israel largely enjoying impunity. This article argues that this state of affairs can be most coherently understood through a critical interdisciplinary emancipatory framework centred on ‘liminality’. Referring to situations and actors ‘betwixt and between’, the framework of liminality offers significant potential for understanding how particular actors and spaces are intentionally marginalised, disempowered, and silenced within global politics and international law. Furthermore, in revealing the root causes of liminality, and the inherent vulnerability of such spaces to contestation and subversion, the framework also opens up potential pathways of transformative emancipation. Applying the lens of liminality to Palestine, it is demonstrated that Palestinians have been deliberately corralled to a liminal space within international law and global politics in order to enable an expansionist Zionist/Israeli settler colonial enterprise. After exploring how Palestinian liminality manifests in global politics and international law, the article turns to a range of efforts to subvert Palestinian liminality and assesses prospects for a teleological emancipation for Palestinians.

Introduction

While the gravity of injustice, inequality, and human rights abuses experienced by Palestinians is now widely documented, evidenced, and acknowledged, when it comes to action the situation appears ‘impervious’ to international law and norms of global politics, with Israel largely enjoying impunity.¹ This article argues that the dire reality facing Palestinians can be most coherently understood through a critical interdisciplinary and emancipatory framework centred on the paradigm of ‘liminality’. An emergent concept within critical international relations (IR), but building on a wealth of scholarship in fields such as anthropology and social theory, liminality refers to situations where actors are ‘betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention’.² Liminality offers tremendous potential to understand the processes by which particular actors and groups are marginalised, disempowered, and silenced within the regimes of global politics and international law. In particular, theorising on liminality reveals how liminal spaces do not emerge because of ‘accidents of history’ or ‘local dysfunctions’,³ but rather because it is in the interests of the powerful for certain actors to be corralled as liminal.⁴ Yet liminal status is not necessarily permanent. Liminal spaces and framing are inherently contestable and vulnerable to subversion, enabling mobilisation and, ultimately, emancipation.⁵

In order to understand and potentially subvert liminality, it is necessary to lay bare the drivers and rationale behind the creation of liminal actors and spaces – who benefits, how, and why? As Adi Ophir, Michal Givoni, and Sari Hanafi argue, the ‘Question of Palestine’⁶ is often regarded as arising from a ‘tragedy in which the most moral, most justified “solution” to “the Jewish problem”’ – the creation of the state of Israel as a haven for world Jewry – ‘has taken a perverted, accidental turn’.⁷ This frame of analysis is particularly prevalent within mainstream IR. However, the tragedy of the Question of Palestine is not the result of an ‘accidental’ turn of history. A key aim of the Zionist movement was to create a safe haven for Jews in the face of virulent anti-Semitism in Europe – which eventually reached its dreadful peak with the Holocaust. However, Zionist strategy for this safe haven did not aim to co-exist with the indigenous Palestinian inhabitants, but instead to achieve control over the largest amount of historic Palestine – while minimising, as much as possible, the number of indigenous Palestinians remaining within it.⁸ This resulted in a settler colonial project to ‘eliminate, eradicate and replace’ the indigenous people of historic Palestine, an endeavour that was enabled on a large-scale once client-patron alliances were established between Britain and the Zionist movement, and after 1948, between the United States (US) and the state of Israel.⁹ As a result, a settler colonial project has been enacted in historic Palestine from the earliest days of the Zionist movement through to its current apogee in the Israeli state – including Israel threatening an illegal annexation of the West Bank in 2020.¹⁰

In order to enable this Zionist/Israeli settler colonial enterprise, and in an attempt to justify the violence used against the indigenous people of Palestine to this end, the Palestinians have been cast into a deeply liminal zone within global politics and international law where their political and legal subjectivity has been stripped,¹¹ and they have been demonised as a ‘Monstrous Other’.¹² The direct result of this Othering is that all political and legal initiatives relating to the Question of Palestine have been fashioned within liminal confines, including measures ostensibly aimed at ‘improving’ the Palestinian reality – such as the so-called Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Such initiatives have enabled Israeli settler colonialism to continue unabated, resulting in an ever-worsening reality for Palestinians on the ground. The framework of liminality, then, reveals that the origins of the ‘Question of Palestine’ lie in naked power politics.

As liminal positioning and framing is inherently unstable, however, an analysis through the paradigm of liminality reveals potential for emancipation. The emancipation considered here is a teleological one that goes beyond the conflation of emancipation with discourses such as human rights, human security and democracy, and instead conceives of the Palestinian people freeing themselves from colonial, apartheid, and racist oppression.¹³ While Palestinians have thus far been relegated to what might appear to be a permanent chamber of liminality, they have capitalised on the dynamic nature of liminality – chipping away at, contesting, challenging, and destabilising the boundaries of their liminality by looking for what Laurie King-Irani calls the ‘cracks that let in the light’.¹⁴ This has occurred both through steadfast work to engage the remaining counter-hegemonic potential of international law and global politics, and efforts outside of the main architecture of the international system through civil society and social movements.¹⁵

The first section of this article maps the conceptual framework employed, making the case that the concept of liminality, within a wider critical interdisciplinary emancipatory approach, presents a potential ‘Master’ concept for analyses of actors struggling against injustice and inequality.¹⁶ The article then turns to concrete examples of how this liminality situates Palestinians ‘betwixt and between’ the norms of global politics and undermines their subject position within the supposed universalist confines of international law. The third part of the article addresses the origins of Palestinian liminality – namely in the Zionist/Israeli settler colonial project to ‘eliminate, eradicate and replace’ Palestinians; and the justification of this project through the deployment of hegemonic discourses which frame Palestinians as a ‘Monstrous Other’. Finally, the subversive potential of liminality is explored. This includes examples which draw on existing structures of global politics and international law – such as the recognition of the State of Palestine, Palestine's actions in the International Criminal Court (ICC), and the use of the legal mechanism of Universal Jurisdiction (UJ). The article also explores action outside of the main corridors of global power – namely the efficacy of social movement actions in relation to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and the growing push for a ‘One State Solution’ in Israel and Palestine.

A critical interdisciplinary emancipatory approach and the paradigm of liminality

The ‘accidental’ or ‘unavoidable tragedy’ explanations for the Question of Palestine have not only obfuscated the root causes of Palestinian liminality, but have resulted in the notion that the Israel-Palestine reality is somehow exceptional, with this leading to a reluctance to apply theory to its analysis.¹⁷ As scholars such as Ophir, Givoni, and Hanafi argue, this eliding of theory has impeded the analysis of systems of power between Israel and Palestine and their related ‘history, structure and logic’.¹⁸ In this article, I posit that a critical interdisciplinary emancipatory approach, centred on the paradigm of liminality, reveals that Palestine has been deliberately and instrumentally consigned to a liminal zone within global politics and international law, that the origins of this liminality must be understood and subverted, and on this basis a path can be taken towards transformative emancipation.¹⁹ This framework, moreover, has wider efficacy beyond Palestine, particularly for other global actors rendered liminal.

While liminality is a relatively new concept within critical IR, it has a much longer provenance in fields such as social, cultural, and political geography; cultural and social theory; sociology; and literature. To make the case for the importance of liminality, it is necessary to briefly trace its genealogy. Etymologically, liminal comes from ‘limen’ (‘a threshold that needs to be crossed’) and ‘limes’ (a border between).²⁰ In 1909 the ethnographer Arnold van Gennep – who focuses on liminality as a threshold – theorised ‘liminality’ as ‘a transitory state of inbetweenness’ that occurs during rites of passage.²¹ In the 1960s, cultural anthropologist Victor Turner extended this idea, arguing that liminality is not only a threshold, but can become a ‘place of habitation’ – a position, situation, or status that is ‘neither here nor there, betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention’ and ceremony.²² Liminality, Turner believes, can ‘become a set way of life’, and a crucial concept for understanding social change.²³ Turner moreover posits that those occupying liminal situations ‘may be disguised as monsters, stripped naked’, which, as will be demonstrated, resonates with the work of Edward W. Said, Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, and Achille Mbembe on the dehumanisation of the ‘Other’.²⁴ Critically, Turner also argues that liminal groups possess revolutionary potential to subvert social limits and constraints.²⁵

The concept of liminality was applied more widely from the 1980s, when it emerged as a key idea among sociologists, cultural theorists, postcolonial scholars, philosophers, and political anthropologists. Sociologist Shmuel Eisenstadt, for example, uses it to trace sociopolitical transformations across social and cultural contexts,²⁶ while for Homi Bhabha, liminality is the location where ‘the margins’ displace ‘the centre’.²⁷ For Said, the experience of exiled intellectuals is one of liminality, of being ‘neither completely at one with the new setting nor fully disencumbered of the old’,²⁸ and for Zygmunt Bauman, liminality is ‘an unstructured, formless condition, where neither the “old” nor the “new” rules apply’.²⁹ Such ideas are echoed in the work of political anthropologist Liisa Malkki, where liminality assists in understanding the experience of refugees, who fall ‘outside’ of the ‘categorical order of nation-states’ in global politics.³⁰ Bjørn Thomassen, meanwhile, argues that liminality signifies something basic and universal, namely ‘finding oneself at a boundary … an in-between position, either spatially or temporally’. He thus argues that liminality assists in understanding how people deal with social, cultural, and political change.³¹ Such is the utility of liminality that the concept has been applied to subjects as diverse as natural disasters, transgender identities, airports, cyborgs, and the politics of young people.³²

Over the past three decades – as IR (and critical IR in particular) has increasingly engaged with a range of disciplines such as critical anthropology, cultural theory, and postcolonial studies – liminality has found itself to be of increasing utility to the field. It has been applied to scholarship including: analyses of political identity;³³ European politics;³⁴ the positioning of marginal states within the EU;³⁵ Australia's geopolitical positioning;³⁶ post-communist transitions;³⁷ the diplomacy of marginal actors;³⁸ Turkish exceptionalism;³⁹ peacebuilding;⁴⁰ social movements;⁴¹ and refugees.⁴² A number of critical IR scholars, however, argue that liminality has ‘considerable unrealised potential’ and comprises a ‘Master concept’ for the field.⁴³ As Maria Malksoo notes, liminality has the potential to make a significantly greater contribution to IR scholarship – particularly in relation to understanding power, sovereignty, and security, and for analyses of ‘agent structure relationship, state formation and recognition, war and political violence, structural transformation of the international system, extraordinary politics during the times of transition, and the constitution of political identities’.⁴⁴

According to Malksoo, the reason liminality has not been widely applied to these topics and areas to date is that liminality challenges foundational approaches of traditional IR, disturbing deep-seated ‘level of analysis’ frameworks which emphasise a ‘fundamental ontological interconnection between the “high” and “low”, the “centre” and the “periphery”’ and other static categories.⁴⁵ Applying liminality as a framework in IR thus has important epistemological and ontological ramifications, revealing the ‘entangled nature and asymmetrical power configurations’ of geopolitics, calling for a ‘cyclical’ rather than a ‘progressive’ conception of global politics, and pushing for a ‘relational rather than absolute conception of power’.⁴⁶

Liminality is of particular relevance to those in IR who are concerned with the critical project, with the frame of liminality functioning to reveal, and demand greater critique of, injustice, inequalities, and alienations produced by hegemonic processes in global politics.⁴⁷ A particularly vital contribution here is the way the lens of liminality spotlights marginalised actors.⁴⁸ As Maria Malksoo, Bahar Rumelili, and Iver Neumann outline, liminality enables us to understand how and why marginalised spaces are deliberately created within global politics and how these liminal spaces and positionalities might be challenged and subverted.⁴⁹ This focus on the margins, Fiona McConnell argues, raises questions of who is, who is not, and who should be regarded as a ‘legitimate actor’ in global politics, thereby troubling ‘the stasis’ of hegemonic political subjectivities.⁵⁰ The focus of liminality furthermore demands that IR take seriously ‘practices, discourses and experiences’ that are often considered to be beyond the primary focus of global politics, and seeks to ‘capture the particular, contingent and idiosyncratic’ with a ‘sensitive grasp of context’.⁵¹

One example of how liminality troubles the stasis of hegemonic approaches is the application of the lens to the ‘Arab Spring’. As Rumelili outlines, rather than the standard approach of analysing whether Arab states are becoming liberal democracies, the frame of liminality invites us to critique how the uprisings in the Arab world from 2011 might reshape ‘discourses on democracy’.⁵² Likewise, instead of statist analyses critiquing what they see as deficiencies of the European Union (EU) in the anarchical system, a liminal critique focuses on the frailties of ‘Westphalian structures of bounded community’.⁵³ Due to the efficacy of liminality as a framework, a number of scholars have applied the lens to various aspects of the Question of Palestine – with Laurie King-Irani exploring Palestinian liminality within international law,⁵⁴ Lisa Bhungalia examining the framing of the Gaza Strip as liminal so as to collapse the categories of ‘combatant’ and ‘civilian’,⁵⁵ and Michelle Pace and Polly Pallister-Wilkins unpacking the framing of Hamas as a liminal actor.⁵⁶ In this article, I apply the lens of liminality to the wider ‘Question of Palestine’.

When applying the framework of liminality, it becomes clear that it exists in a symbiotic relationship with emancipation. On the one hand, it is only once the root causes of injustice and inequality are revealed by a liminal framework that potential avenues for emancipation are revealed. At the same time, without approaching a space or place inscribed as liminal from the perspective of creating transformative emancipation, it becomes difficult to subvert liminality, and achieve change that is anything more than ‘lip service’. The notion of emancipation is, of course, a core concern of many critical IR scholars – particularly those from critical security studies – and has been the subject of significant scholarly attention.⁵⁷ It is necessary, then, to define emancipation for the purposes of this article. While this article takes into account concerns that ‘emancipation’ can slide into metanarratives beholden to Enlightenment legacies of elitist, ethnocentric, and thinly-veiled imperialist endeavours, as critical IR scholars such as Richard Falk, Ken Booth, and Richard Wyn Jones rightly argue, it is crucial not to ‘throw the baby out with the bathwater’ and abandon efforts for real change on the ground for those experiencing violence, injustice, and inequality.⁵⁸ Instead, it is necessary to ensure that such emancipation reflects the critical project. As its starting point then, this article builds on Falk's concern to transcend injustice through a non-ethnocentric, emancipatory struggle engaged with the realities of the most vulnerable, alongside Booth's agenda of overcoming ‘physical and human constraints’ such as war, poverty, political repression, and poor education,⁵⁹ and J. Ann Tickner's ‘elimination of unjust social relations’ including gender relations.⁶⁰ It also takes seriously Anthony Burke's concern about the increasing conflation of emancipation with ideas such as ‘democracy’, ‘freedom’, and, I would add, discourses of human rights and human security, within ‘systems of knowledge and power that continually work to … align individual interests with those of the state and capital’.⁶¹

In terms of the possibilities of an emancipatory project, Wyn Jones argues that struggles should be viable, and based on ‘immanent possibilities’ and ‘realizable utopias’.⁶² Burke, quite rightly, however, cautions that scholars must be careful not to become limited to current horizons where this is ‘disabling and risk(s) denying the entire purpose of the critical project’.⁶³ Addressing such concerns, Falk's notion of emancipation is to strive to reform current realities within the ‘horizon of plausible aspirations’/‘realm of the possible’, working towards making ‘desirable, yet unlikely, social movements’ succeed through the ‘slow merger of horizons of necessity and desire’.⁶⁴ As Burke also stresses, emancipatory projects must moreover show concern for ‘the Other’, rather than a pure focus on ‘self-realisation’.⁶⁵ Bringing these elements together, emancipation is defined for the purposes of this article's framework as a reflexive and non-ethnocentric schema aimed at transforming and transcending the structural causes of inequality, injustice, and concomitant violence with a requisite concern for the Other. Such an emancipatory agenda is therefore a teleological one – moving beyond conflations with concepts such as democracy, human rights, and human security. Rather, the emancipation envisaged here is about enabling people facing injustice and inequality – in this case the Palestinians – to throw off colonial, apartheid, racist, and oppressive yokes.⁶⁶

In striving for emancipation, critical IR has increasingly recognised the benefits of cross-fertilisation with other relevant disciplines, a recognition this article coheres with.⁶⁷ As Burke argues, while ‘insecurity, violence and conflict getting ever more destructive’, the prevailing theoretical and ‘policy frameworks we use to understand and respond to them are deeply inadequate’.⁶⁸ As such, this article argues that it is beneficial to draw on key interventions from critical social and political theory, and fields such as postcolonialism and critical international law. As Michel Foucault notes, it is crucial to consider how discourses of power define, shape, and mediate global norms, laws, institutions, and politics, and in particular, which knowledges are legitimated or marginalised.⁶⁹ Such work, alongside Antonio Gramsci's thinking on ideological hegemony, is crucial to reveal and contest unequal structures of power.⁷⁰ As will be demonstrated in this article, hegemonic discourses relating to Israel and Palestine have underpinned and reified the liminality ascribed to Palestine. Foucault's work on biopower (the ability ‘to foster life or disallow it to the point of death’) and biopolitics (the ‘techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations’), is also conceptually valuable for understanding the practices and techniques of regulation, control and domination of Palestinians by the settler colonial Israeli state.⁷¹ Building on Foucault's theories, Giorgio Agamben's work is similarly useful in elucidating how a state of exception can be instituted within a political order such that certain people are condemned to the category of homo sacer or ‘bare life’ – where they are excluded from norms and laws.⁷² As Ophir, Givoni, Hanafi, and Neve Gordon argue, a state of exception has come to be normalised within the context of the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), with Palestinians regarded as bare life – stripped of ‘every right’ and at all times ‘exposed to an unconditional threat of death’.⁷³

Drawing on Foucault and Franz Fanon, Achille Mbembe takes this idea further, arguing that ‘contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death’ means that the killing of the enemy ‘Other’ has become an ‘absolute privilege’ of the powerful in a way that the notion of biopolitics fails to fully encapsulate.⁷⁴ What has instead emerged, Mbembe posits, is necropolitics – where sovereignty becomes the ‘capacity to define who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not’.⁷⁵ Necropolitics has resulted in spaces of extreme precarity and vulnerability for those inscribed as the ‘Other’, with Mbembe calling these spaces ‘deathworlds’ – where exploitation and elimination are normalised.⁷⁶ Mbembe has specifically applied his framework to the Israeli settler colonial project, arguing that it comprises the ‘most accomplished form of necropower’.⁷⁷

Scholarship on processes of Othering also makes an invaluable contribution to the conceptual framework utilised here. The work of cultural theorist and postcolonial scholar Said, for example, is fundamental to understanding the historical and ideological processes by which the East/‘Uncivilised’/Orient/Developing World/South is presented by the powerful West/‘Civilised’/Occident/Developed World North as ‘backward’ and ‘Other’ in order to justify and maintain the latter's hegemony.⁷⁸ Said also contributed pathbreaking work to understanding the specific ‘Othering’ of Palestinians – a central problematique underpinning the Question of Palestine.⁷⁹ Feminist philosopher Butler builds on, and extends, such traditions, demonstrating that contemporary discourses of exclusion are expressed on an axis categorising people from those considered ‘human’ to those who are ‘non-human’ (or only spectrally human).⁸⁰ As Butler notes, this judging of who is ‘less than human’ often occurs through a ‘racial or ethnic frame’.⁸¹ Those who are deemed to be spectrally human are regarded as possessing ‘unliveable lives’ and have their legal and political status ‘suspended’.⁸² Such scholarship is crucial to understanding the ‘Othering’ of Palestinians – as the ‘Monstrous Other’, ‘terrorists’, as bare life, not fully human, and ‘ungrievable’ – and how this underpins, and continually reinscribes, the liminal space they have been accorded in global politics and international law.

Pursuing a critical emancipatory agenda through the lens of liminality also invites consideration of the ground-breaking interventions of critical international law. Critical international law scholars, including those working on Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), such as Antony Anghie, B. S. Chimni, Balakrishnan Rajagopal, Susan Marks, and Falk, have exposed the colonial origins of international law; the rebranding of nineteenth-century power relations in terms of the ‘developed/developing’ and global governance discourses; and the continuing Eurocentricism of mainstream international law.⁸³ Such scholarship is central to addressing the foundational flaws of international law in resolving real-world inequality and injustice. As Anghie and Chimni note, behind the veil of international law's claims of apolitical universality lies a ‘continuing complicity between international law and structural violence’ in today's global order.⁸⁴ As Burke notes, the impulses of contemporary geopolitical power are seldom limited by international law, and indeed are often able to find the ‘thinnest’ legitimation through it.⁸⁵

For example, while norms such as anticolonialism and self-determination are often held up as exemplars of international law's postwar emancipatory influence, in reality they more reflect the lip service and broken promises embedded in hegemonic international law.⁸⁶ In terms of the former, for example, while the 1960 UN ‘Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples’ effectively outlawed colonialism, it was not retrospective, and without enabling reparations, in reality it ‘naturalised’ and ‘normalised’ the colonialism that preceded it.⁸⁷ This effectively gave imperial and colonising states a ‘get out of jail free’ card, therefore perpetuating global inequalities through to today (including in relation to the Question of Palestine, with its origins in Zionist settler colonialism). Likewise, while the principal of self-determination is seen as seminal to the modern global political and legal regime, those who are relegated to liminal spaces (such as Palestine) continue to be denied meaningful access, even when they meet the criteria for statehood under international law – such as under the Montevideo Convention. In such ways, international law holds out the promise of equality, justice, and dignity but ‘in fact enables control and [infinite] deferral’ of supposedly universal principals and rights for liminal actors.⁸⁸ As Falk summarises, this means that for those in the Global South, the ‘rights of power’ more often than not ‘trump’ the ‘power of rights’.⁸⁹ The work of critical international law is therefore crucial for understanding how liminal actors are subjected to international law while being denied full subject positionality.

Importantly, critical international law also focuses on disentangling the remaining counter-hegemonic elements of international law. As Rajagopal contends, while international law's emancipatory potential has been deeply constrained by power politics, this must be continually challenged, and work undertaken to retain and strengthen counter-hegemonic elements.⁹⁰ Especially crucial here, Falk notes, is work towards making ‘desirable, yet unlikely’ aspects of emancipatory struggles succeed through the ‘slow merger of horizons of necessity and desire’.⁹¹ Some examples of such efforts explored in following sections of this article include the Palestinian Authority (PA) using their liminal and ambiguous subject positionality to lobby for, and achieve, recognition as a non-member state by the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA); use of Universal Jurisdiction (UJ) in relation to Israel; recognising Palestine's right of resistance as a colonised people under international law; and potentially charging Israel with the crime of aggression.

‘Through the looking glass’: Palestine in global politics and international law

While Palestine is certainly not the only liminal actor within contemporary politics, it is particularly important as a case study because liminality permeates every level and aspect of the Question of Palestine within global politics and international law. As per the 1949 Armistice Agreements, Palestine is defined as the territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.⁹² However, because of control of these territories by Jordan and Egypt respectively between 1948 and 1967, and the Israeli military occupation after 1967, Palestine's ‘position and status are fundamentally ambiguous’ and it does not comprise ‘an actualized territory’.⁹³ Since 2012, Palestine is recognised as a non-member state by the UNGA, is recognised in bilateral relations with 138 states, and has acceded to key UN bodies such as the ICC. On the ground, however, Palestine functions as an ‘occupied nation-state' that is ‘neither self-governing' (aside from small pockets of the West Bank, and ostensibly Gaza, although it remains blockaded since 2007 and is still de facto occupied) nor integrated into the government of its Israeli occupiers.⁹⁴ On top of this, Israeli and US leaders continually demand that the PA exert the powers ‘of a fully functioning nation-state’ when it is in Israeli/US interests (such as suppressing Palestinian resistance) while at the same time undermining any potential for development and ensuring that an independent Palestinian state is prevented from emerging.⁹⁵ The liminality of the Question of Palestine is further compounded by the spatial complexity of the Palestinian body politic – comprising Palestinians within the OPT (who are divided between Fatah rule of the West Bank and Hamas rule in Gaza), Palestinians within the ‘Green line’ of Israel who live as ‘second-class’ Israeli citizens, some five million refugees (mostly in the Middle East region) awaiting their ‘Return’ to their homeland, and another six million Palestinians in the wider Palestinian exilic diaspora.⁹⁶ Liminality is also apparent in the continual effort by some pro-Israeli politicians, scholars, and commentators to deny the very reality of the Question of Palestine, claiming that ‘there is no such thing as a Palestinian’, that historic Palestine was a ‘land without a people’, and that the Palestinian territories are ‘disputed’ rather than occupied.⁹⁷

One example of how this liminality manifests is the most prominent political initiative ostensibly aimed at addressing the Palestinian Question – the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. While officially the objective of the peace process is a two-state solution for Israel and the Palestinians, a more critical analysis reveals that it has been structured so as to ultimately preserve the existing balance of power, therefore reinforcing the stark asymmetry between the two groups.⁹⁸ As a result, the peace process has enabled Israel to both greatly expand its project of settler colonialism throughout the OPT, and to separate Palestinians from Israelis – to ‘keep the land but not the indigenous population’.⁹⁹ Today, the number of illegal Israeli settlers in the Palestinian West Bank has increased to over 611,000 people, with settlements (and their infrastructure) covering over 40 per cent of the West Bank. The percentage of the West Bank out of bounds to Palestinians is, moreover, even higher when Israeli military zones, and the wider closure regime are taken into account.¹⁰⁰ Israel has, furthermore, established a matrix of biopolitical control and surveillance in the West Bank, with the Wall, checkpoints, roadblocks, and panoptic towers, allowing Israel to effectively ‘contain’ Palestinians into a plethora of non-contiguous enclaves.¹⁰¹ These enclaves – a ‘series of islands adrift in a sea of Israeli-Jewish colonialists’ – separate Palestinians from their families, friends, lands, schools, places of work, and from medical assistance, and are arguably designed to make life unbearable so as to force further migration out of Palestine (for those who have the means).¹⁰² Meanwhile, Gaza remains under blockade, experiencing humanitarian disaster. The extreme violence Israeli settler colonialism has wrought for Palestinians reveals that the OPT has become a deathworld where Israel undertakes necropolitics.¹⁰³

Palestine is also effectively consigned to a liminal zone within the regime of international law – despite the latter's claim to being apolitical and universal. This liminality means that despite significant evidence and acknowledgment of the injustice and inequality relating to the Question of Palestine, the field of international law is: ‘littered with the detritus of failed legal efforts, including a multitude of UN resolutions (ignored or vetoed), analyses by foreign ministries, forgotten academic studies, and thousands of human rights reports by NGOs reporting the same violations of law noted in earlier reports and demanding action that is never forthcoming.’¹⁰⁴ While there is a strong record of UNGA resolutions attempting to hold Israel to account under international law, effective action to implement recommendations and resolutions has been stymied by negative interventions and voting by powerful states of the Global North. Most potently, these interventions occur in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), the only UN body with authority to issue binding resolutions. A key issue here has been the right of veto possessed by the UNSC's five permanent members, which reproduces significant global power asymmetries. While Palestine is not the only marginal actor impacted by the veto mechanism, the use by the US of its veto to stymie dozens of resolutions addressing the Palestine question and/or criticising the State of Israel is testament to the deeply liminal space accorded to Palestine.¹⁰⁵ Indeed, while it has long been official US policy (alongside the wider international community) that Israeli settlements in the OPT are illegal under international law and an impediment to peace, the US has vetoed the vast majority of UNSC resolutions criticising settlements. One prominent exception, considered a radical and ‘landmark’ moment, consisted of the US abstaining on such a vote. This December 2016 abstention, which occurred during the final days of the Barack Obama administration, is widely accepted as a pointed rebuke of both the belligerence of the hawkish Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and incoming president Donald Trump's efforts to influence US foreign policy before his inauguration.¹⁰⁶ The fact that voting for such a resolution – despite it reflecting formal US policy and the desire to ‘send a clear message’ to both Netanyahu and Trump – was considered outside the realm of possibility to the US administration, demonstrates the full extent of Palestinian liminality.

Even the International Court of Justice (ICJ) – the highest international legal body – was effectively ignored when it issued an Opinion in relation to Palestine. The 2004 Advisory Opinion of the ICJ in relation to the Israeli Separation Wall found that the Wall was illegal under international law and needed to be dismantled immediately.¹⁰⁷ The UNGA voted overwhelmingly to accept the Opinion, and demanded that Israel comply with the ruling.¹⁰⁸ Israel and its allies, meanwhile, denounced the Opinion as politically driven, despite the ICJ being widely accepted as ‘conservative’ and ‘rarely reaching beyond settled judicial authority’.¹⁰⁹ A year after it was issued, eight Special Rapporteurs with the UN Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR) issued a joint international appeal for the Opinion to be put into effect.¹¹⁰ Over 16 years later, however, it remains unimplemented. The disregarding of the Opinion is exceptional – particularly given the response of the international community to previous ICJ rulings such as its 1971 Opinion on the South African occupation of Namibia.¹¹¹

Revealing the origins of Palestinian liminality

As Malksoo notes, a crucial aspect of liminality as an ontological subject is to focus inquiry ‘on the genealogical exploration of the process of becoming’.¹¹² To this end we must ask how the Question of Palestine came to be assigned to a liminal zone. As flagged earlier, while the Question of Palestine is often explained away as the unfortunate outcome of tragic historical circumstance, a critical analysis reveals three interrelated and mutually reinforcing factors relegated Palestinians to a liminal zone within global politics and international law: (1) the Zionist and later Israeli settler colonial project to ‘eliminate, eradicate and replace’ the indigenous in historic Palestine, which required Palestinians becoming liminal; (2) the patron-client relationships that developed between Britain and the Zionist movement, and the US and the state of Israel, which enabled and supported the settler colonial project and made Palestinian liminality a geopolitical necessity; and (3) mainstream discourses on Israel/Palestine which demonise Palestinians as the ‘Monstrous Other’ – thereby justifying and enabling the violent measures necessary to enforce Palestinian liminality.

Within the Zionist movement – which from the 1880s worked to establish a national home for world Jewry – there were only a small number of ‘bi-nationalists’ who wished to co-exist with the indigenous Palestinian inhabitants.¹¹³ The majority of the Zionist movement, including its leadership, instead comprised a settler colonial movement, aiming to achieve control over the largest amount of historic Palestine while minimising the number of indigenous Palestinians remaining within it.¹¹⁴ While settler colonialism is a ‘“structure” and a process that stretches over time’,¹¹⁵ it manifested in specific ways subject to a range of contexts in historic Palestine: (a) in the pre-1948 Zionist movement; (b) in Israeli state policies relating to Palestinian citizens within Israel; and (c) in policies relating to the OPT post 1967.¹¹⁶ It is important here to make the distinction between settler colonialism and imperialism. While imperialism can be summed up as focusing primarily on securing ‘economic benefits’ and ‘spheres of influence’, and does not always involve the occupation of territory militarily and/or administratively, settler colonialism, on the other hand, involves the occupation and enduring settlement of the territory or land.¹¹⁷ To this end, the Zionist and then Israeli settler colonial project (as distinct from the Yishuv, or indigenous Jewish community in Palestine) ‘came to stay’ in historic Palestine, and achieved permanent presence through ‘eliminating, erasing and replacing’ the indigenous people.¹¹⁸

The success of this Zionist and then Israeli settler colonial endeavour was made possible on a large scale as a result of the support, variously, of the British imperial power, and later the US. There is general agreement that British support of the Zionist movement – which manifested most prominently in the 1917 Balfour Declaration – was the result of a mixture of anti-Semitism, support by Christians in the UK, and strategy.¹¹⁹ The latter, however, had the strongest impetus, with the belief that a strong client-patron agreement between Britain and a ‘Jewish Palestine’ would help maintain and protect British imperial interests in the region – particularly the trade route to India.¹²⁰ As Elia Zureik argues, the British government regarded the Jewish settler movement in Palestine as the ‘ideal collaborator group’ to further British interests, akin to those in New Zealand and Australia.¹²¹ As a result, while Zionists undertook the practical, hands-on acts of their settler colonialism, the colonial ‘umbrella’ of the British Mandate in Palestine enabled the ‘political, legal and administrative’ framework facilitating Zionist immigration, land purchases, settlement, and development.¹²² British authorities in Palestine moreover recruited, trained, and armed Zionist forces.¹²³

The equally, if not more, significant alliance between the Zionist movement and the US was first signalled by US support for the 1947 United Nations (UN) vote on the partition of historic Palestine.¹²⁴ While the horrors of the Holocaust, guilt at the US refusal to accept Jewish refugees at its height, and sympathy for Zionist ideas, were factors in this alliance, an equally significant element was the US ‘coveting artificially low-priced energy sources and open access to a large, underdeveloped, structurally dependent market’ in the Middle East, particularly as the Cold War unfolded.¹²⁵ Support for Israel soon became a key pillar of US foreign policy in the Middle East, with significant military, aid, and diplomatic outcomes for Israel.¹²⁶

As discussed earlier, the 1960 Convention on the Independence of Colonial Peoples effectively naturalised ‘historic’ cases of imperialism and colonialism. The Convention was, however, meant to prohibit active or ongoing cases. The ongoing and expanding Zionist-Israeli settler colonial enterprise, therefore, required that Palestinians remain within a liminal zone in global politics and international law, so Palestinians could not prevent, nor seek redress for, this settler colonialism. For the Protocols Additional to the Geneva Conventions (Art1/4) of IHL recognise the right to resistance through armed struggle for ‘armed conflicts in which peoples are fighting against colonial domination and alien occupation and against racist regimes in the exercise of their right of self-determination’.¹²⁷ Palestinians, therefore, have a right, under international law, to armed resistance.¹²⁸ The point must be made here that the activation of such a right would undoubtedly result in further asymmetric violence and would therefore be unlikely to lead to any significant improvement in the Palestinian situation. Such an approach would also not be in keeping with the critical emancipatory framework proposed here – in terms of concern with the position of the Other (in this case, the settler colonial state of Israel). The point here is that Palestinians possess this right, and a recognition of this by the mainstream international community has the potential to generate significant international pressure on Israel (as occurred with South Africa in relation to Namibia). Because of such implications for the Palestinian struggle, however, there has been a concerted effort to obfuscate this right to the point where mainstream political discourses frame it as taboo to even name Zionist and Israeli settler colonial projects as such.¹²⁹ As Rachel Busbridge notes, identifying Israel's settler colonialism is often portrayed as ‘evidence of anti-Semitism. This manoeuvre … has been relatively successful in keeping the colonial question out of the international arena.’¹³⁰

The recognition of Israeli settler colonialism also has the potential to challenge the hegemonic discourse presented by Israel, and reproduced by its allies, which demonises Palestinians as a ‘Monstrous Other’.¹³¹ According to this discourse, acts of Palestinian violence (and many of their acts of non-violence) comprise irrational anti-Semitic ‘terrorism’ and are the root cause of the conflict with Israel.¹³² This conflation of all Palestinian resistance, including non-violence, with ‘terrorism’ serves a particular function. As Saree Makdisi argues, Israel's use of ‘terrorism’ to describe all Palestinian resistance means that ‘the label is not restricted to specific acts of violence but functions instead as an ontological category … it is only by identifying all Palestinians, and their collective being, with “terrorism”’ that Israel can justify its extreme and violent repression.¹³³ This hegemonic discourse also acts to render invisible the actual root cause of Palestinian resistance – in Zionist and Israeli settler colonialism. Moreover, this discourse demonises Palestinians by slandering them, without evidence, with the most pernicious smear in post-Holocaust global politics – anti-Semitism.¹³⁴ As Tony Klug notes, Palestinian resistance against Israeli brutality is not driven by anti-Semitism: ‘Had it been a Hindu or a Buddhist state … the Palestinians would have been no less embittered if the state, irrespective of the motive, had dispossessed them and later proceeded to corral and dispossess them further through policies of annexation, expropriation and the settling of their would-be state with its own citizens.’¹³⁵

The framing of Palestinians as Other, of course, has a long history. As Said's work demonstrates, in order to justify the violence, exploitation, domination, and subordination of imperialism, colonised people have long been described as ‘depraved’, ‘childlike’, ‘irrational’, and ‘inferior’.¹³⁶ The prevalence of such Orientalist ideas has then resulted in a ‘web of racism, cultural stereotypes, political imperialism, [and] dehumanizing ideology’ within powerful Global North states when it comes to Palestinians, and Arabs and Muslims more widely.¹³⁷ In particular, as Burke notes, the ‘matrix of cultural and epistemological assumptions’ that encapsulate Orientalism underlies US policy and strategy when it comes to the Middle East.¹³⁸

This entrenched demonisation of Palestinians allowed post-1945 global society to enable and continue the liminality ascribed to Palestinians, and look away from the extreme violence of the Israeli settler colonial project.¹³⁹ As Mbembe argues, colonies are the sites ‘where sovereignty consists fundamentally in the exercise of a power outside the law’.¹⁴⁰ In the case of Palestine, Israel applies a ‘concatenation of multiple powers: disciplinary, biopolitical, and necropolitical’, resulting in the ‘absolute domination over the inhabitants’.¹⁴¹ As Ophir, Givoni, and Hanafi outline, Palestinians are ‘exposed to arbitrary violence and coercive regulation of daily life’ on the ‘whims’ of Israel with impunity.¹⁴² In many cases, this violence comprises gross violations of International Human Rights Law (IHRL) and International Humanitarian Law (IHL).¹⁴³ There is also increasing agreement that the policies and practices of the Israeli occupation meet the definition of the crime of apartheid as outlined in the 1973: ‘International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of Apartheid’ (ICSPA).¹⁴⁴ Yet, as Gordon argues, a state of exception has come to be normalised within the OPT such that Palestinians are regarded as bare life – reduced to homo sacer, where they can be killed without it even being considered a crime.¹⁴⁵

Butler's work further assists us in understanding how Palestinians have come to be regarded as bare life, or unhuman. As she argues in Precarious Life, discourses of exclusion, underwritten by hegemonic Othering of Palestinians, have occurred to the extent that Palestinians have been cast as only spectrally human, as people without a livable life or grievable death.¹⁴⁶ Butler illuminates this reality through the example of an obituary written by a US citizen in tribute to Palestinians killed in the OPT. It was rejected by the San Francisco Tribune on the basis that ‘obituaries could not be accepted without proof of death’ (a reasonably dubious assertion given the onerous bureaucracy such a policy would entail). When the notice was rewritten as a ‘memorial’, the text was again rejected – this time on the basis that the ‘newspaper did not wish to offend anyone’.¹⁴⁷ The notion that the grieving of Palestinian lives can constitute an affront to those who support Israel led Butler to ask, ‘What is the relation between the violence by which these ungrievable lives were lost and the prohibition on their public grievability? … Does the prohibition on discourse relate to the dehumanization of the deaths - and the lives?’¹⁴⁸

Emancipating Palestine

While Palestinian liminality has underlined much of their experiences of injustice and inequality, Palestinians and those concerned with their struggle have worked tirelessly to subvert this liminality. As this section of the article will argue, this has been through: (a) attempts to harness the remaining counter-hegemonic potential of global politics and international law; and (b) efforts bypassing the main architecture of the global regime – namely through civil society and social movements.¹⁴⁹

As has been demonstrated, the full emancipatory potential of international law has been deeply constrained by power politics. As Burke notes, ‘international human rights instruments and conventions … are difficult to enforce and are riddled, in their text and operation, with disabling compromises to sovereign power and prerogative’.¹⁵⁰ As Falk argues, however, it is crucial to attempt to reclaim the remaining emancipatory potential found in the ‘normative architecture’ of international law and associated norms that are ‘ethically helpful in challenging prevailing forms of oppression and exploitation’.¹⁵¹ Particularly crucial here has been work towards making ‘desirable, yet unlikely’ aspects of the Palestinian struggle succeed through the ‘slow merger of horizons of necessity and desire’.¹⁵² King-Irani elaborates how this has been achieved in the Palestinian struggle by using the ‘roles, structures and political ideologies flickering at the edges of the known legal and political universe … cracking open the implicit interstices of existing judicial structures by enlarging legal and socio-political spaces.’¹⁵³ She argues that ‘By using their interstitial location and liminal status … Palestinians have availed themselves of, and helped to consolidate, mechanisms of international justice that transcend the nation-state system and that are not based solely on territorial jurisdiction.’¹⁵⁴ Where gains have often been achieved, King-Irani continues, is where Palestine has worked ‘around, through and above, rather than against, the nation-state system’ – looking for potential where the ‘cracks' in liminality let in the ‘light’.¹⁵⁵ Examples of such endeavours include: using UJ mechanisms to bring alleged Israeli perpetrators of crimes against humanity to justice; the 2012 UNGA recognition of Palestine as a non-member state; and the accession of Palestine to important international organisations such as the ICC.

The assessment to date of such initiatives is, of course, mixed. UJ is a legal principle enabling a state to undertake proceedings in relation to serious crimes against international law – regardless of where the crime occurred or the nationality of those involved. While historically UJ has been utilised sparingly, it has been applied in both Belgium and the UK in relation to alleged Israeli war crimes.¹⁵⁶ In Belgium in 2003 it was determined that Ariel Sharon had a case to answer in relation to 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacres of Palestinians in Lebanon.¹⁵⁷ In the UK, evidence submitted by human rights lawyers resulted in arrest warrants being issued for leading Israeli officials, a number of whom subsequently cancelled trips there.¹⁵⁸ In Belgium, however, a UJ case subsequently brought against US officials resulted in significant pressure by the US, and occasioned Belgium to render UJ non-universal, making the previous Sabra and Shatila decision null and void.¹⁵⁹ Similarly, in the UK, following pressure by Israel, laws were changed so that UJ arrest warrants had to receive approval from the UK Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP).¹⁶⁰ The UJ example, then, arguably shows where emancipatory potential exists, but power politics continue to undermine its efficacy on the ground.

Another effort to challenge Palestinian liminality and extend the realm of Palestinian subjectivity and agency through the existing global architecture is the 2012 UNGA recognition of Palestine as a non-member state. Given that for many years Israel and its allies had managed to cleave Palestine's right to self-determination from international law, and instead make it conditional on a (highly unlikely) negotiated political outcome with Israel, this recognition comprised a momentous symbolic shift. In addition, to date, 138 states have recognised Palestine as a state in bilateral relations. Despite the symbolism of these achievements, however, arguably anything less than full political acknowledgement of Palestinian sovereignty, and an end to, and withdrawal of, Israeli settler colonialism within the OPT, will do little to change the dire reality on the ground.¹⁶¹ The UNGA move, however, has allowed Palestinians to apply for membership of key UN bodies such as the ICC.¹⁶² While Palestinian membership of the ICC has been encumbered by significant bureaucracy and politicking, in December 2019 the ICC Chief Prosecutor ruled that ‘all the statutory criteria under the Rome statute for the opening of an investigation’ into alleged Israeli and Palestinian war crimes in the OPT had ‘been met’.¹⁶³ While the ICC were lobbied to discontinue the investigation on the grounds that Palestine is ‘not a state’, in early mid-2020 the ICC reiterated that the investigation was going ahead.¹⁶⁴ This move suggests that the ICC avenue retains emancipatory potential for subverting Palestinian liminality.

Despite the challenges inherent in these examples, a key takeaway is that they were regarded as outside the realm of possibility even twenty years ago. They were achieved through many years of struggle – working steadily to lay the necessary groundwork so that emancipatory paths could be forged when, as King-Irani puts it, ‘cracks' let the ‘light' in,¹⁶⁵ or what Falk describes as the ‘opportunities where the unforeseeable suddenly becomes foreseeable’.¹⁶⁶ There are also, arguably, other ‘cracks’ in liminality that can be similarly pursued. The first of this would be a widespread acknowledgment of the Palestinian right to resistance under the Geneva Conventions potentially galvanising international action.¹⁶⁷ The second would be international action against Israel (including through the ICC) on the basis that their actions in the OPT meet the definition of the crime of apartheid under the 1973 ICSPCA Convention.¹⁶⁸ Thirdly, Orna Ben-Naftali, Aeyal H. Gross, and Keren Michaeli argue that the illegality of Israel's ongoing military occupation, their failure to protect the Palestinian population, and their refusal to transfer OPT control to the Palestinians could ‘be construed as a form of aggression’, thereby demanding an international response.¹⁶⁹ Such examples all suggest tentative glimmers of hope to use international law in a more emancipatory way.¹⁷⁰

Significant subversions of Palestinian liminality have also occurred as a result of efforts by global civil society and social movements – what Falk calls the work of ‘citizen pilgrims’ working towards non-violent emancipation through direct action.¹⁷¹ As Stanley Cohen notes, the main non-violent tools that civil society and social movements can harness to pressure states to end injustice and inequality are: shame, accountability, isolation, and sanctions (economic, military, and cultural).¹⁷² To this end, civil society organisations and social movements have played a significant role in revealing the injustice and inequality experienced by Palestinians. As demonstrated by this article, however, despite the awareness raised, Israel's impunity continues. A major issue underpinning this impunity is the continued traction of the hegemonic discourse relating to Palestine, and its obfuscation of Israeli settler colonialism. As Sally Engle Merry highlights, ‘ways of packaging and presenting’ ideas of social movements ‘generate shared beliefs, motivate collective action and define appropriate strategies of action’.¹⁷³ A recognition of the reality of Israeli settler colonial violence within the global mainstream, therefore, has the potential to shift the way the situation is regarded. As Busbridge argues, a recognition of Israeli settler colonialism hypothetically increases the ‘readability and accessibility of the Palestinian struggle in sympathetic terms’; creates significant solidarities and alliances between Palestinians and other anti-colonial movements; and offers new strategies and pathways for transformative emancipatory action.¹⁷⁴

Given that the hegemonic discourse on Palestine has stymied the efficacy of tactics of shame and accountability to date; it is increasingly argued that direct non-violent action aimed at isolation of, and sanctions against, Israel, is the most promising path to subvert Palestinian liminality. A key development here is the BDS movement.¹⁷⁵ Launched in 2005 by Palestinian civil society, BDS calls for an end to the Israeli occupation, full equality for Palestinian citizens of Israel, and justice for Palestinian refugees. BDS has evolved into a global non-violent movement (with this including support from a range of Israeli NGOs and individuals) centred around: boycotts of ‘products and companies (Israeli and international) that profit from the violation of Palestinian rights’ and ‘Israeli cultural and academic institutions’ that ‘directly contribute to maintaining, defending or whitewashing the oppression of Palestinians’; divestment from ‘corporations complicit in the violation of Palestinian rights’; and sanctions against Israel until Palestinian rights are upheld ‘in full compliance with international law’.¹⁷⁶

BDS has experienced significant success,¹⁷⁷ and has therefore been met with a fierce reaction by Israel, including Israel barring entry to the Jewish state of foreigners who support BDS and bringing lawsuits in foreign states against both individuals and organisations instituting BDS.¹⁷⁸ Within Israel, financial penalties apply for supporting BDS, there have been calls to revoke the citizenship of such Israelis, and Israel's Ministry of Strategic Affairs utilises its intelligence services to undertake surveillance against, and work to undermine, BDS supporters.¹⁷⁹ One of the most pernicious aspects of Israel's anti-BDS programme has been the attempt to frame the movement as anti-Semitic. All official BDS literature outlines that the movement adheres to the UN definition of racial discrimination and ‘does not tolerate any act or discourse which adopts or promotes, among others, anti-Black racism, anti-Arab racism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, sexism, xenophobia, or homophobia’.¹⁸⁰ The BDS movement furthermore repeatedly stresses in all publications that BDS members and partners must abide by the ‘movement's commitment to nonviolence as well as its ethical and anti-racist principles’ or they will be expelled.¹⁸¹ A more critical analysis, therefore, suggests the charge of anti-Semitism against BDS is linked to wider attempts to conflate legitimate criticism of the state of Israel with anti-Semitism, with this serving as a powerful trope of silencing.¹⁸²

As explored earlier, it is widely accepted that the so-called ‘Two-State Solution’ has been rendered unviable – due to the deeply problematic peace process, the related expansion of the Israeli settler colonial project, and repeated statements by Israeli leaders that they will never allow the emergence of a Palestinian state.¹⁸³ A final example, therefore, of looking for emancipatory potential where the ‘cracks' let in the ‘light’ is the growing movement for a ‘One State Solution’ – the idea of creating a single, bi-national, democratic, and secular state based on principles of equality for all Israelis and Palestinians. Proposals for a One State Solution have, to date, been outright rejected by Israel, as it would comprise the end of Israel as a religious and ethnocratic state. Such ideas, moreover, have a long road ahead in terms of concrete and workable strategies for dismantling entrenched power asymmetries between Israelis and Palestinians, and reconciling the tragic and violent nature of their intertwined histories. However, important collaborations to this end, including efforts between leading Palestinians and Israelis, demonstrate that such an outcome is within the ‘horizons of the possible’.¹⁸⁴ As demonstrated by the 2007 ‘One State Declaration’, such blueprints offer concrete and breakthrough pathways to transcend the current violent reality and work towards teleological emancipation where justice and peace is achieved for both Palestinians and Israelis.¹⁸⁵ The One State Solution therefore deserves significantly more scholarly and policy attention.¹⁸⁶

Conclusion

As this article demonstrates, an interdisciplinary theoretical framework centred around liminality and teleological emancipation offers the most coherent understanding of the origins of the Question of Palestine and transformative pathways forward. Such a framework reveals the origins of the injustice and inequality experienced by Palestinians, and how extreme violence against them has been enabled and justified as a result of discourses of Othering and exclusion. This framework also shows, however, how Palestinians have continually challenged and subverted their liminality. By working around and through the existing architecture of global politics and international law, Palestinians have destabilised their liminal positionality and reclaimed elements of political subjectivity – such as in their recognition as a non-member state of the UNGA and their membership of the ICC – achievements once considered outside the realm of possibility.

Moving forward, a key challenge in subverting Palestinian liminality and working towards transformative emancipation is to destabilise the hegemonic discourse which continues to frame Palestinians as ‘Other’ and obfuscate the Israeli settler colonial project. As leading US civil rights advocate Michelle Alexander argued in 2019, it is time to end the ‘silence’ on Palestine and complicity in ‘this grave injustice of our time’.¹⁸⁷ Such an approach demands a normative rethink of the unconditional support given to Israel by much of the powerful Global North, and establishes a strong case for international action on the Question of Palestine – such as through a recognition of the right of Palestinians to resistance, and/or pursuing charges of the crimes of aggression and/or apartheid.¹⁸⁸ While BDS has had considerable impact, the continual disintegration of the situation facing Palestinians on the ground means the ‘One State Solution’ will arguably soon become the only via path of meaningful emancipation.

As demonstrated in its conceptual unpacking, the theoretical framework applied here also has significant potential beyond the Question of Palestine, particularly in terms of analyses of other marginalised actors within global politics and international law. For a lens of liminality, centred on achieving teleological emancipation, critiques liminal spaces and/or roles, and interrogates the genealogy behind such corralling. It reveals that political structures and subjectivities are not static, and that liminality possesses inherently subversive and emancipatory potential. Liminality also enables boundaries to be pushed, and for a critique of the very structures and agents who create liminal spaces. In sum, claims that liminality is a ‘Master’ concept for IR – epistemologically, ontologically, in terms of richer empirical analyses, and in regards to working towards meaningful emancipation – are well founded and should be taken seriously.