What is the problem of international law that it has always failed to protect the people of Palestine? What is the missing link or the lacuna that Israel is getting away with its acts without any scrutiny? The answer lies in the international law discourse as international law is a law that has been hegemonic in nature and silences the voices from the Third World, an emerging theory in international law called the Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL).
Like other critical theories of law, TWAIL is a critical school of thought as explained by Antony Anghie in Rethinking International Law: A TWAIL Perspective. He avers that “we cannot achieve global justice unless we achieve justice for the people in the Third World, and it is TWAIL scholarship that reveals important and systemic inadequacies in the international order that prevents this from occurring”. To understand contemporary International law, one has to be mindful about the colonial and hegemonic origins of International law that is how the current International law framework is systematically biased and allow the exploitation of people of Palestine since its inception. As Jason Beckett attests, “public international law is neocolonial in function.”
