Socio-Legal Studies in Times of Colonial Occupation: Law and Society in Palestine.

Colonial occupations produce societies where legal institutions which have an ambivalent role due their tenuous jurisdiction. In the case of Palestine the last four decades of occupation have enmeshed Israeli legal institutions and norms with Palestinian ones compromising the legitimacy of the latter. Israeli legal institutions and doctrine undermine Palestinian's efforts to establish the rule of law. Thus it is to the Israeli courts that challenges to the wall are necessary directed. Despite its established illegality under the international law, Israeli effective control leaves Palestinians little choice than to mount challenges to it within the more limited contexts and on grounds arguable within Israeli law. At the same time despite the creation of the Palestinian Authority and the withdrawal and redeployment of Israeli forces from some part of the West Bank - up until 2001 - the Israeli military maintains a system of military courts. Through this system about 10,000 indictments are brought each year and they have jurisdiction over "administrative detention." In 2005-6 some 2700 Palestinians were detained without trial under this procedure. This indicates the porous character of Palestinian jurisdiction which saps its legitimacy. The argument in this paper is that thee studies emphasis the technical aspects of law and legal method. It encourages a positivist mode of thinking in which the isolation of law from actual (occupied colonial) society is encouraged. Law and Society in a Palestinian context can only begin from the engagement with law in the social environment of occupation. The paper will engage with the work of Said (1978, 1993), Mitchell (1988. 2002), Cohn (1998) Benton (2002), Massad (2006). ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]