ABSTRACT
The early legal battles of the Arab-Jewish conflict in Palestine contain the seeds of many of the arguments dominating the legal clashes between the parties today. This is especially true regarding the two main legal issues addressed in this study: the interplay between the McMahon Pledge and the Balfour Declaration, and the parties’ rights and claims to the Wailing Wall and the surrounding area. While some commentators describe the Palestinian and Israeli use of the law in recent years as a “new” phenomenon known as “lawfare,” the parties in fact have been using the law as a tool or resource against each other and to influence international opinion for more than a century.
