I entered into a profession whose instrument has been used against my people longer than I have been alive.
Shaban al-Dalou scored 97.9 percent on his university qualifying exam, memorized the Quran by heart, and began studying software engineering at Al-Azhar University in Gaza in September 2023. Two months after he started, Israel bombed the university. His family was displaced five times across central Gaza before they ended up in a tent he built with his own hands in the courtyard of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, which Israel had already bombed several times before it bombed it again on October 14, 2024, while Shaban was inside connected to an IV drip, recovering from injuries he had sustained in an earlier strike on a mosque. The fire reached him before anyone could pull him free. His mother burned beside him. When they searched the wreckage for their bodies, they could not tell which charred remains were hers until they found the gold necklace she always wore. They buried them in one grave. He was nineteen years old and had been accepted to universities in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Qatar.
I graduated from law school this past week and I am not sure what that is supposed to mean, or if it means anything at all when I think about Shaban and the tens of thousands like him.
For three years I learned how a society decides what counts as a wrong and what counts as a remedy, how to argue both sides of anything, how to find the statute and read the case and locate the exception within the exception. I learned the language of a system that presents itself as the last civilized alternative to chaos, and I learned it while every university in Gaza was being bombed into rubble, all twelve of them, gone, while I sat in Ann Arbor taking notes on jurisdiction or “free speech”, and while I was being trained to believe in the law, the law was conducting its own education on Gaza, and the lesson it delivered there was nothing that appears in any casebook I have read.
Legal education teaches you the meaning side of law without ever honestly reckoning with its power side, the way every interpretation, every judgment, every holding eventually resolves into a body with a gun at its base. We are given the great cases, the landmark decisions, the slow arc of justice bending toward something better, and we are taught to see the law as a set of principles floating above the world, neutral and aspiring, when what legal interpretation has always done is take place in the shadow of the violence that enforces it, serving power as one of its most sophisticated instruments, giving domination the appearance of reason and making dispossession look like administration. Europeans did not simply conquer; they arrived with deeds and treaties and surveyor’s maps, declared indigenous existence a legal problem to be managed, and built courts to process the theft. The law was always also the weapon, and the weapon always wore the law’s face.
Palestinians have known this for nearly eighty years. The legal weaponry of Palestinian elimination runs from the British Mandate through the partition plan through military orders that classify Palestinian rainwater as Israeli state property, through the permit system that makes Palestinian farming on Palestinian land conditional on Israeli approval, through the administrative detention regime that holds people for years without charge inside a court system with a conviction rate exceeding ninety-nine percent, each individual act of dispossession presented as a bureaucratic procedure, the cumulative logic of those procedures being the destruction of a people. I spent three years learning the methods of a system that has spent eighty years making that destruction legible as something other than what it is.
What international law has revealed about itself since October 2023 is not a failure in any ordinary sense, because failure implies a standard that was almost met, a principle that fell short of its own aspirations. What we have watched is the system functioning as it was designed to function, by the powers that designed it, in the service of the interests those powers have always protected. The International Criminal Court was built to prosecute individuals and deliberately denied jurisdiction over the states that created it, so that when a state issues the orders, funds the weapons, and provides the political cover for a genocide, the court can at most reach the general who carried them out while the system that produced him continues undisturbed.
When the court finally moved on Netanyahu, the United States threatened the judges with sanctions and the judges paused their work, which tells you more about how that system actually operates than any of its founding documents ever will. The International Court of Justice found in 2007 that Serbia bore legal responsibility for failing to prevent the genocide at Srebrenica, and in response it awarded Bosnia a declaratory judgment, not reparations or accountability in any material sense, but a formal declaration that a wrong had occurred, issued a decade after the mass graves had been filled, which satisfied the procedural requirements of international law while delivering nothing to the people whose families were buried in those graves.
The scholars who study these institutions most carefully have stopped calling this an impunity gap and started calling it planned impunity, because the selectivity follows racial and colonial lines with too much consistency to be explained any other way.
The specific intent standard for genocide, the requirement that genocidal purpose be the only reasonable inference from the totality of the evidence, is demanding enough that in Bosnia, where the killing was massive and documented and named and the graves existed, only Srebrenica crossed the legal threshold. Israeli officials have announced their intent on camera, in parliament, in the public statements of cabinet ministers who bragged about rolling out a Gaza Nakba. Israeli citizens, over 75%, continue supporting the genocide. Israeli occupation forces are caught, on tap they filmed themselves, violating every tenant of International law. The UN Commission of Inquiry concluded that genocidal intent was the only reasonable inference from the evidence. And still the system processes this through years of provisional measures and jurisdictional thresholds and evidentiary standards and procedural delays, delays that have allowed a “yellow line” to swallow over 60% of Gaza, while the killing continues and the rubble accumulates and the children who survived two years of bombardment still wake up every morning Palestinian, still teach themselves from whatever remains of what their schools used to be, the law’s timelines long because long timelines serve the people who write the law, its definitions narrow because narrow definitions protect the people who commit the crimes the definitions were supposedly written to name.
What does it mean to graduate into this? What does it mean to carry a credential from institutions I do not trust, inside a profession whose central instrument has been used against my people more reliably than it has been used for them? I have thought about this longer than I have thought about almost anything, and what I keep arriving at is that the law’s insufficiency and its necessity exist together and have always existed together, and the people who have done the most for Palestinian rights inside legal institutions have understood this without being paralyzed by it. The law was not built for Palestine. It was built by the colonial powers whose violence it now struggles to name, and its definitions are drawn to exclude the crimes of those powers while criminalizing the resistance of their victims. To use it anyway, to bring the genocide case to the Hague knowing the Hague moves in decades, to build the legal record knowing the record will outlive the moment and become what the archive holds when the killing is finally over, is to use the vocabulary the world has agreed to use for crimes against the interests of those who wrote that vocabulary, knowing they will resist it and slow it and may ultimately refuse it, and doing it anyway because the record matters and the naming matters and the evidence assembled in the language of international law is a form of witness that the bombs cannot reach.
There is a question I have not been able to answer since I started law school, which is whether belief in the law is a prerequisite for using it or whether using it is something you can do in full knowledge of what it is, the way you use a language you did not choose and did not invent and that has been used to say things you find unconscionable, because it is still the only language the room understands. I think it is the second thing. I think you can hold the law in contempt and still file the motion, because contempt is not the same as abandonment and abandonment helps no one. Shaban al-Dalou built the tent that became his grave and never got to use a single one of his university acceptances. I got to use mine, in a country that armed the people who killed him, inside institutions that buried the scholarship that named what they did. I am going to carry that into every room this degree opens, as the kind of knowledge that makes it impossible to practice law as though the law were innocent and in service of all the lives the law stole.
