'Legal fictions and settler colonialism: the case of the Defence (Emergency) Regulations, 1945 in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories'

Since Israel's establishment, the Defence (Emergency) Regulations, 1945 has served as the primary law enabling the state's repression and dispossession of Palestinians, authorizing land confiscations, house demolitions, deportations, warrantless searches and arrests, administrative detentions, movement restrictions, surveillance, censorship, the outlawing of civil society associations, and the establishment of military courts. This article demonstrates that the law is invalid and that its artificial validity has been sustained by a legal fiction, thereby illuminating the indispensability of legal fictions to the legitimation of settler colonial conquests.