Noura Erakat, a human rights attorney and professor at Rutgers, examines a paradox at the heart of the Palestinian condition: international law has been invoked endlessly on behalf of Palestinians, yet it has consistently failed to deliver them justice or self-determination. Her argument is that this is not a simple story of law being inadequate to politics. Law, in Erakat's account, is itself the work of legal actors who choose which arguments to advance, which precedents to invoke, and which interpretations to legitimate; the historical record on Palestine is a record of those choices being made, again and again, in ways that have entrenched dispossession rather than alleviated it. The book moves through five episodes—the Balfour Declaration and the British Mandate, the 1948 war and the creation of the refugee regime, the 1967 occupation and the law of belligerent occupation, the Oslo Accords and their reframing of Palestinians as candidates for statehood, and the post-2008 wars in Gaza—showing how legal categories have been shaped to fit Israeli and great-power interests. Drawing on her training as a lawyer who has represented Palestinian clients in U.S. and international forums, Erakat writes with both legal precision and political clarity. The book won the 2019 Palestine Book Award and is widely used in courses on international law, settler colonialism, and Middle East studies.