Book review: Victor Kattan's legal history of the colonization of Palestine

From Coexistence to Conquest is a unique work of legal history on the Arab-Israeli conflict. Unlike other works whose main focus is the law (e.g., Musa Mazzawi's Palestine and the Law: Guidelines for the Resolution of the Arab Israeli Conflict and The Palestine Problem in International Law and World Order by Thomas and Sally Mallison) Kattan's book stands alone in the literature because of its reliance on a remarkable amount of archival material. Although the book contains legal analysis of the kind that would mainly be familiar only to international lawyers, Kattan endeavors to simplify the legal issues and make them accessible to a novice reader. In this he meets his objective of writing a book that appeals to a general audience.

From Coexistence to Conquest ends with a quote by former British Foreign Secretary Sir Arthur Balfour describing the 1917 declaration which bore his name. Balfour stated that the policy of creating a Jewish national home in Palestine is a "great experiment, because nothing like it has ever been tried in the world, and because it is entirely novel" (251). While the suffering of the millions displaced ever since, the thousands killed and the further millions whose lives have been affected over the past hundred years until today calls into question the success of Balfour's experiment, Kattan's book successfully and methodically shows how law was used, or rather abused, in this experiment.

Mazen Masri is a PhD Candidate at the Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, Toronto, Canada. A longer version of this book review was first published in volume 15 of the Palestine Yearbook of International Law.
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