Mohammad Fadel’s Beyond Liberal Zionism, is an extraordinary work of legal and moral imagination. Fadel reframes one of the most enduring and polarizing questions in international law: what would a just Zionism look like? In his answer, Fadel insists that international law and political liberalism, properly understood, retain the moral and institutional resources to guide Israelis and Palestinians toward a just settlement.
The article opens with an assessment of liberal Zionism. Fadel argues that what is commonly called liberal Zionism recognizes Palestinian suffering but denies Palestinians standing as rights-bearers. This position is exemplified by New York Times commentator Ezra Klein and by the late Israeli legal theorist Ruth Gavison. The goal of liberal Zionism is a humane peace, not a just one. This distinction—between a moral appeal to compassion and a juridical claim to equality—animates Fadel’s entire article. Through a careful reading of Klein’s widely discussed, post-October 7 podcast series on the Israel–Palestine conflict, Fadel shows how even the most self-consciously liberal commentators confine Palestinian aspirations to a humanitarian vocabulary of aid, decency, and empathy. The effect is to transform a problem of law and justice into a problem of sentiment. Palestinians appear as objects of moral concern rather than subjects of legal right.
The first half of the article is a meticulous diagnosis of this moral displacement. Using a Rawlsian framework, Fadel argues that liberal Zionism’s pursuit of political goods such as security and Jewish national self-determination are “rational” aims. However, Zionism’s refusal to recognize any duty to pursue its rational political aims within a framework that acknowledges an obligation of reciprocal recognition of Palestinians as free and equal citizens renders the Zionist political project unreasonable from a Rawlsian perspective. By emphasizing humanitarianism, liberal Zionism implicitly constructs Palestinians as rightless—a people who may be treated with compassion but not with juridical equality.
The second half of the article offers one of the most rigorous reconstructions of Palestine’s legal personality under international law. The coherence of liberal Zionism, Fadel argues, depends on historical erasure of the existence of Palestine as a juridical person in the post-World War I era with citizens having rights as Palestinian citizens. Against this erasure, Fadel turns to the League of Nations Mandate system and the Covenant’s Article 22, which declared that the former Ottoman territories had reached a stage of development where their existence as independent nations could be “provisionally recognized.” Palestine, therefore, was not a terra nullius, but a recognized international legal person. Pursuant to the terms of the Palestine Mandate, Great Britain, as mandatory, was obligated to assist Palestine achieve independence and protect Palestine’s independence from external threats. The duty that Great Britain undertook toward Palestine and its people, moreover, was described as “a sacred trust of civilization” in the Covenant of the League of Nations.
Fadel’s account of the Palestine Mandate is particularly illuminating. He reminds readers that Article 2 required the British to “safeguard the civil and religious rights of all the inhabitants of Palestine, irrespective of race and religion,” while Article 7 obligated Britain to promulgate a nationality law—an act that it duly performed through the Palestine Citizenship Order of 1925. This order recognized both Jewish and Arab citizens of the Ottoman Empire who had been habitually resident in the territory that became Palestine as Palestinian citizens, reflecting the settled principle of customary international law governing state succession at the time. Drawing on historical treaties, judicial decisions, and the Mavrommatis Palestine Concessions case before the Permanent Court of International Justice (Mavrommatis Palestine Concessions (Greece v. U.K.), 1924 P.C.I.J. (ser. B) No. 3 (Aug. 30).), Fadel reconstructs a complex legal order in which Palestine participated in international agreements, possessed recognized borders, promulgated a domestic legal order, had courts and maintained a functioning nationality regime. In this light, the Arabs of Palestine were not stateless: they were citizens of a state awaiting independence, as expressly recognized by the international instruments that concluded World War I. Moreover, the post-World War I order in the former Ottoman provinces also confirmed that they were not citizens of any other successor state of the Ottoman Empire.
Fadel then connects this historical reconstruction to his central normative claim. Once Palestine’s legal existence is acknowledged, the Nakba—the mass expulsion and denationalization of Palestinians in 1948—cannot be seen merely as the tragic byproduct of war; it must be understood as a violation of core principles of international law – no one may be rendered stateless – and of the League of Nation’s “sacred trust of civilization,” a duty that the UN Charter reaffirmed. Fadel’s point, in my reading, is not to rehearse historical grievances, but to recover the legal continuity of Palestinian rights under the international system that Zionism, in reliance on the Balfour Declaration, the Mandate for Palestine and the proposed UN Partition Plan of 1947, ignores. The result is striking: Fadel uses the same liberal and legalist traditions of public international law that early Zionists appealed to—self-determination, equality, and progress—to show that these principles, if taken seriously, establish a de jure right of self-determination for the Arab population of Palestine no less than that accorded to Jewish Palestinians .
From this historical and legal foundation, the article moves to its philosophical culmination: a reconstruction of Zionism within the framework of Rawlsian political liberalism. Here Fadel’s ambition becomes clear. If political liberalism aims to reconcile citizens holding different comprehensive doctrines under fair terms of cooperation, then it cannot privilege one ethno-religious community’s conception of the good over another’s. A just Zionism, in Fadel’s view, would therefore accept liberal principles of justice as politically prior to the claims of national identity. He applies the consequence of this idea to Israel’s “basic structure,” arguing that its current constitutional order—comprising nationality laws, land policy, and the structure of citizenship—institutionalizes ethnic domination and therefore fails to satisfy basic principles of liberal justice. Accordingly, reforming that basic structure to secure Palestinian political equality is not an act of benevolence but a requirement of justice.
The implications are far-reaching. In Fadel’s account, Zionism consistent with political liberalism would preserve Jewish collective life and cultural expression but within a state that fully recognizes the political equality of all its citizens. It would subject sovereignty to moral and legal constraints, reimagine property and return through the lens of international law, and transform the right of return from an existential threat into an affirmation of equality before law. In this vision, justice and security are not opposites; they are mutually dependent.
What makes Beyond Liberal Zionism such an important contribution is not only its moral courage but its juridical genius. Fadel refuses the easy binary between political theory and positive law. He reads the Mandate, the Treaty of Lausanne, the United Nations Charter, and contemporary doctrines of state succession with the same care that he reads Rawls and Gavison.
Readers will find Fadel’s article not merely diagnosing a failure but building a path forward—a moral project animated by faith in the redemptive possibilities of law. For scholars of international law, constitutional theory, and political philosophy, this is essential reading. It reminds us that the project of liberal justice is neither exhausted nor irrelevant to the world’s most difficult conflicts. Fadel’s intervention is as much a defense of liberalism’s moral core as it is a critique of its failures. It is an invitation to recover the law’s ethical imagination, and to believe once more that equality—secured by law, not sentiment—is still within reach.
