Under international law, occupation is meant to be temporary and occupying powers cannot be sovereign in the territory they occupy. In contrast, since 1967 Israel has systematically altered the status of the OPT with the aim of annexing it, de facto or de jure. During this time, though the UN has focused on documenting the legality of a range of individual violations of international law by the occupying power, scant attention has been paid by the Organization to the legality of the occupation regime as a whole. Emphasis has instead been placed on encouraging the parties to bring the occupation to an end through continued, though widely discredited, bilateral negotiations. By what rationale can it be said that Israels occupation remains either legal or legitimate in the absence of good faith on its part in negotiating the occupation’s end? How can its end reasonably be made contingent on negotiations between occupier and occupied? This chapter argues that the UN’s failure to take a more principled position on the very legality of Israel’s half-century ‘temporary’ occupation of the self-determination unit of the Palestinian people is demonstrative of the maintenance of Palestine’s legal subalternity in the UN system, under a different guise.

The postscript concludes with a discussion of General Assembly resolution 77/246 of 30 December 2022, passed while this book was entering production. The resolution requests the International Court of Justice for an advisory opinion on the legal status of Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory in line with the research presented in Chapter 5. As the opinion of the Court is to be given after the publication of the book, this update looks to this recent development as the latest attempt by Palestine to resort to the counter-hegemonic potential of international law with results as yet unknown