Two parts of a whole: material conditions of self-determination and the Palestine question

In the decades after the founding of the United Nations, international law prioritised political independence, while the decolonising Third World’s claim to economic self-determination challenged, but could not overcome, the powerful interests behind capital as it globalised. Despite Third World attempts to frame the emerging international norm of economic self-determination as an indispensable aspect of their independence, including ultimately in the context of the Palestine occupation, this seminal insight of global decolonisation was lost. The International Court of Justice’s liberal account in its 2024 Advisory Opinion on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, significant as it is in its confrontation with aspects of a longstanding problem, overlooks the material account central to the prolonged occupation. This article focuses on the lessons of reading political and economic self-determination indivisibly. In offering three fundamental insights that a material narration of the occupation elucidates, it points to how the ICJ, in its act of determining the legal consequences to arise from Israel’s policies and practices in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, confronts, at last, the pivotal role played by the consolidation of capital and thus the political economy of the enduring occupation.