Noura Erakat is an Associate Professor at Rutgers University, New Brunswick in the Department of Africana Studies and the Program in Criminal Justice. Her scholarly interests include humanitarian law, human rights law, refugee law, and national security law. She earned her BA and JD from Berkeley Law School and her LLM in National Security from the Georgetown University Law Center. She is a Co-Founding Editor of Jadaliyya e-zine and an Editorial Board Member of the Journal of Palestine Studies. Prior to beginning her appointment at Rutgers, Noura was an Assistant Professor at George Mason University, a Freedman Fellow at Temple Law School and has taught International Human Rights Law and the Middle East at Georgetown University since 2009. www.nouraerakat.com Address: Fairfax, Virginia, United States
This book narrates the Palestinian struggle for freedom as told through the relationship between ... more This book narrates the Palestinian struggle for freedom as told through the relationship between international law and politics during five critical junctures between 1917-2017. It argues that international law is politics and to serve an emancipatory function it must be wielded in the sophisticated service of a political program that challenges the geopolitical structure sustaining an oppressive status quo. The book carries this argument by exploring how the balance of geopolitical power, the historical context, and the strategic deployment of law have shaped the content and application of international law to both advance and blunt Israeli as well as Palestinian interests. While international law has been the site of resistance and oppression, on balance, it has done more to advance Israel’s interests due to the country’s relative power and its correlate appreciation of the law’s utility. These entwinements of law and politics over one-hundred years provide a history of the present by examining how each of the five junctures structured diplomatic relations around, as well as conceptual frameworks about, the Palestinian struggle for freedom. In the present context of the death of the two-state solution and the reality of Israel’s singular jurisdiction across Israel and the Palestinian Territories, the book traces how a sovereignty framework has become a trap. While a rights-based approach may overcome this trap, it remains inadequate for lacking a political program for decolonization. The book culminates in offering counterintuitive approaches to transcend the current impasse in the Question of Palestine.
In 1922, the League of Nations inscribed the goal of establishing a settler colony in Palestine f... more In 1922, the League of Nations inscribed the goal of establishing a settler colony in Palestine for the Jewish people-in denial of the national self-determination of the Indigenous Arab population-in public international law. 1 The Palestine Mandate juridically erased the national status of the Palestinian people by: (1) framing the Arabs as incapable of self-rule; (2) heightening the significance of establishing a Jewish national home; and (3) distinguishing Palestine from the other Class A mandates for possessing religious significance that exceeded the interests of any single national group. A century later, the still-unresolved "question" of Palestine remains central to struggles for anti-racism and anti-colonialism in international law. This essay revisits two flashpoints in the tangled history of Palestine and international law, where questions of race and racism have been central: first, ongoing debates over the regime and crime of apartheid; and second, the now-repudiated UN General Assembly Resolution 3379, recognizing Zionism as a form of racism and racial discrimination. Both stories demonstrate the importance of understanding race and colonialism as conjoined concepts, neither of which can be properly understood in isolation from the other.
Hizma is a Palestinian village historically located within the Jerusalem Governate that Israel ha... more Hizma is a Palestinian village historically located within the Jerusalem Governate that Israel has arbitrarily severed from it in its quest to expand and entrench a Greater Jerusalem. To eliminate the village and its natives, the settler state has incrementally deployed a series of urban planning policies that together constitute an eliminatory infrastructure. These have included overlapping and tenuous jurisdictional areas; movement restrictions imposed through closures, checkpoints, and surveillance regimes; transformation of common lands into a state-run nature preserve; and the construction of the Apartheid Wall through the village. These measures have concentrated Hizma's residents into an urban area and severely isolated them from their agricultural lands, places of worship, education, families, and health facilities. Based on field work conducted between 3 August and 18 August 2019, this essay sets out to explore two phenomena. First, it seeks to understand how Palestinians navigate and resist Israel's eliminatory infrastructure. Second, it explores what this infrastructure revealed about the relationship between the violence of settler colonialism and the banal administration of urban planning. Using autoethnography, this essay documents the journey of Palestinians in Hizma across three eliminatory terrains erected by planning policies: through the Apartheid Wall, within the suffocating physical and juridical bounds of entrapment, and into the community's expropriated spring.
International law’s indeterminacy and its capacity to be shaped by what Duncan Kennedy describes ... more International law’s indeterminacy and its capacity to be shaped by what Duncan Kennedy describes as “legal work,” or the intervention of the legal worker to shape many available parts, (i.e., evidence, primary documents, testimony) into an argument makes certain that there is no singular account of a conflict in international law. Despite the myriad legal arguments presented in jurisprudence, scholarship, and advocacy, not a single one of them is the “truth” to the exclusion of all others as the law itself represents a terrain of battle rather than a science to be discovered or verified. This could not be truer in the case of the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict. The conflict itself refers to the establishment of Israel, self-defined as a Jewish state, in Mandate Palestine, where a native, and numerical majority, Arab population sought to be self-determined. Perhaps the worst way to pursue this scholarly inquiry is to begin in the 1948 War between Israel and six Arab armies. Doing so effectively erases the three decades of British colonial oversight in its capacity as the Mandatory power that facilitated the settler-colonization of Palestine, the supplanting of nascent Palestinian sovereignty with Jewish-Zionist settler-sovereignty, and, ultimately, the country’s transformation into the modern state of Israel. While I begin this inquiry roughly during the First World War, which ended with the defeat of the Ottoman Empire and its dominion over Palestine since 1299, there is room to begin much earlier especially in regard to the development of legal regimes regulating nationality and citizenship as well as land to understand their mutations over the course of the Palestine Mandate between 1922 and 1948. Similarly, it would be a mistake to end this inquiry upon Israel’s establishment, and then begin again during the 1967 War and the subsequent occupation of Arab lands, as do most legal accounts. The intervening decades between the two wars serve as an analytical bridge to understand the continuities in law between Britain’s colonial oversight of Palestine, Israel’s racialized governance of Palestinian natives who remained, and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, which together provide a more holistic picture of an ongoing settler-colonial regime of land usurpation, native removal, and settler replacement. This bibliography aims to provide historical context as well as reflect some of the debates within the historiography and legal literature. It includes a mix of primary sources, legal analysis, and historical accounts that together should help shape a robust research project.
Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR) Review, 2020
This response essay to Raef Zreik’s second lecture, ‘Justice’, builds on his critical interventio... more This response essay to Raef Zreik’s second lecture, ‘Justice’, builds on his critical intervention in two ways. First, it examines the his- tory of the Balfour Declaration to flesh out one of Zreik’s ‘good arguments for justice’ by highlighting how the British policy doc- ument’s juridical erasure of Palestinian peoplehood represented a sovereign exception beyond the reach of legal challenge and oversight. Once incorporated into the Palestine Mandate, the exception became international law and policy and, thereafter, structurally impeded Palestinian claims for self-determination. Second, the essay addresses Zreik’s critique of first and second or- der arguments of justice and shows how the structure of law, like the structure of an argument, can reify an unjust status quo even as it seemingly advances claims for justice. The essay concludes by exploring how decolonial alternatives may help pave a path to- wards optimal futures.
This introductory essay outlines the context for this special issue of the Journal of Palestine S... more This introductory essay outlines the context for this special issue of the Journal of Palestine Studies on Black-Palestinian transnational solidarity (BPTS). Through the analytic of “renewal,” the authors point to the recent increase in individual and collective energies directed toward developing effective, reciprocal, and transformative political relationships within various African-descendant and Palestinian communities around the world. Drawing from the extant BPTS literature, this essay examines the prominent intellectual currents in the field and points to new methodologies and analytics that are required to move the field forward. With this essay, the authors aim not only to contextualize the field and to frame this special issue, but also to chart new directions for future intellectual and political work.
The Ferguson-Gaza moment, characterized by the concurrent bombardment of Gaza and occupation of F... more The Ferguson-Gaza moment, characterized by the concurrent bombardment of Gaza and occupation of Ferguson in the summer 2014, catalyzed a renewal of Black-Palestinian solidarity as an analytical framework and political practice. During its apex from the late 1960s through the early 1980s, Black-Palestinian solidarity emerged from the crucible of a Third World upheaval and framed racism and colonialism as entwined and co-constitutive structures of domination. Drawing on the stories of four key Palestinian-American activists who helped forge Black-Palestinian solidarity in the Ferguson-Gaza moment, together with reflections of key Black activists, this article shows that a critical germ for current renewals developed among Palestinian-Americans in response to white supremacy. Black-Palestinian intimacies together with critical encounters with anti-black racism mobilized these interlocutors to align with Black communities in solidarity and joint struggle for liberation. These stories help reveal that U.S. white supremacy is a critical and catalyzing force of transnational solidarity. They also signal how Black-Palestinian solidarity continues to function as a political analytic targeting imperialism, rather than a form of identity politics. Finally, these articulations of solidarity are forged outside the context of Third World revolt thus indicating that current renewals are resonant with, but independent of, historic articulations.
This essay is a response to Scott Kurashigie's 2019 Presidential address at the American Studies ... more This essay is a response to Scott Kurashigie's 2019 Presidential address at the American Studies Association meeting.
In the Gaza Strip, Israel’s military used lethal force against civilian protestors engaged in the... more In the Gaza Strip, Israel’s military used lethal force against civilian protestors engaged in the ‘Great Return March’ of 2018. In its late May 2018 ruling, the Israeli Supreme Court held this use of force as legitimate self-defense. This article challenges Israel’s security response to these protests in an attempt to both unsettle a warfare discourse and to urge for a distinct ontological approach. The article argues that an ongoing settler-colonial project has racialised the Palestinian body as a security threat, and historicises Israel’s shoot-to-kill policy as merely one contemporary mode of dispos- sessing the native body. This includes a novel framework of armed conflict that has diminished the category of the civilian and expanded the scope of legitimate targets permitting the killing of greater numbers of Palestinians in the language of law; the article calls this legal technology the ‘shrinking civilian’.
This introductory essay outlines the context for this special issue of the Journal of Palestine S... more This introductory essay outlines the context for this special issue of the Journal of Palestine Studies on Black-Palestinian transnational solidarity (BPTS). Through the analytic of "renewal," the authors point to the recent increase in individual and collective energies directed toward developing effective, reciprocal, and transformative political relationships within various African-descendant and Palestinian communities around the world. Drawing from the extant BPTS literature, this essay examines the prominent intellectual currents in the field and points to new methodologies and analytics that are required to move the field forward. With this essay, the authors aim not only to contextualize the field and to frame this special issue, but also to chart new directions for future intellectual and political work.
Social movement scholars have described activist burnout-when the stressors of activism become so... more Social movement scholars have described activist burnout-when the stressors of activism become so overwhelming they debilitate activists' abilities to remain engaged-as a formidable threat to the sustainability of social movements. However, studies designed to map the causes of burnout have failed to account for ways burnout might operate differently for privileged-identity activists such as white antiracism activists and marginalized-identity activists such as antiracism activists of color. Building on previous studies of activist burnout in racial justice activists and examinations of the roles of white activists in antiracism movements, this study represents one attempt to fill this gap. We analyzed data from interviews with racial justice activists of color in the United States who have experienced burnout to identify the ways they attributed their burnout to the attitudes and behaviors-the racism-of white activists. These included (1) harboring unevolved or racist views, (2) undermining or invalidating the racial justice work of activists of color, (3) being unwilling to step up and take action when needed, (4) exhibiting white fragility, and (5) taking credit for participants’ racial justice work and ideas. Implications for racial justice movements and the participation of white activists are discussed.
This paper seeks to show how Israel has deployed Occupation Law in strategic ways to incrementall... more This paper seeks to show how Israel has deployed Occupation Law in strategic ways to incrementally take the land of Palestine without its people. It argues that Israel has used UN Security Council Resolution 242 to retroactively legitimate those colonial takings in a political framework shaped by U.S. intervention. In themselves, the constituent pieces of the argument are not new and they have been extensively discussed in legal, political science, and historical literature. Rather than consider them as the sum of their parts, this paper attempts to view the issues that have been kept distinct and separate within disciplinary silos as a mutually reinforcing whole, demonstrating that the United States' political position made an otherwise bankrupt legal argument effective and showing how the Security Council's deliberations gave Israel ample room for maneuver in spite of the drafting parties' original intent. In examining the relationship between law and political power, the article points to the ways in which the balance of power bears upon the meaning and significance of law in international conflict. Thus, the failure of Occupation Law to regulate the occupation of the Palestinian Territories ultimately reflects the outcome of a political, not a legal, contest: Israel's legal argumentation that the territories are merely under its administration would have no value were it not for the power politics that shape international relations in the region.
Harvard Journal of Ethnic and Racial Justice , 2015
This essay seeks to read Whiteness as Property onto contemporary Israel by demonstrating that the... more This essay seeks to read Whiteness as Property onto contemporary Israel by demonstrating that the value ascribed to Jewish nationality is not simply a matter of Jew versus non-Jew. Instead, Whiteness reflects a European order that reproduces and embodies the exclusionary and orientalist tropes that produced anti-Semitism in Europe. The State continues to apply those tropes to Mizrahim, Jews of Middle Eastern origin. Mizrahim are the objects of Zionism's modernization project, which necessitates a violent bifurcation of their Arab and Jewish identity on the one hand, and the imposition of a singular European history that effectively marginalizes them on the other. Once consolidated within an ethno-nationality mythology of a European Jewish national, the project of nation building completely excludes the Palestinian who, like the Eastern Jew, is uncivilized, but unlike her, is ineligible for rehabilitation. Instead, the Palestinian must be removed, diminished, and contained geographically, politically, and socially. Law facilitates this process as it dispossess and displaces the Palestinian and simultaneously imbues Jewish nationality with a coveted value, one that mirrors European Enlightenment ideals of civilization and the superiority of Whiteness. Settler-decolonization is necessary for Palestinian self-determination and has the potential to achieve Jewish emancipation beyond the state.
Palestinian refugees in the Middle East constitute a protracted refugee situation. In response to... more Palestinian refugees in the Middle East constitute a protracted refugee situation. In response to political considerations by multiple state actors, they are denied return to their homes of habitual residence and are refused meaningful legal protection in their host countries. As such Palestinians are suspended between their political objectification in a prolonged conflict on the one hand and the vulnerability of their humanitarian condition, like all other refugees, on the other. Unlike their refugee counterparts who are persons of concern to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Statute, Palestinian refugees endure an uneven legal regime. Since the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine (UNCCP) fell into abeyance, no international agency has searched for durable solutions on behalf of Palestinian refugees, thus exposing them to a protection gap. Instead, the United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA), established to furnish Palestinian refugees aid and relief, has provided them with incremental protection, which, however significant, has been insufficient to close the gap. The extent of this protection gap endured by Palestinian refugees has been vividly demonstrated during several episodes of secondary forced displacement in the Middle East. In response to their mass expulsion from Kuwait in 1991, Libya in 1996, and Iraq in 2003, UNRWA and UNHCR have closely collaborated in order to bridge this gap and provide Palestinian refugees with adequate protection. These incidents of inter-agency collaboration constitute de facto policies between the two agencies, which demonstrate the flexibility of otherwise rigid delineations between their existing mandates. In particular, past practice makes clear that UNRWA and UNCHR can have overlapping geographic and operational mandates. During the most recent crisis in Syria, these de facto policies have proven inadequate to protect Palestinian refugees. To overcome this challenge, UNHCR and UNRWA should formalize their inter-agency collaboration on behalf of Palestinian refugees during times of calm as well as crisis in conformity with the spirit of the UNHCR Statute and the 1951 Refugee Convention as well as with past practice. Beyond crisis, the agencies should consider innovative approaches to definitively close the protection gap.
President Barak Obama's authorization to use unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, to lethally inc... more President Barak Obama's authorization to use unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, to lethally incapacitate persons he believes constitute a threat to the US has become a hallmark of his Administration. Consider that President Barak Obama oversaw fifty-three drone missile attacks during his first year in office, which is more than the total number of similar strikes carried out during the eight years of President George W. Bush's two terms. The Obama Administration justifies its use of force as self-defense in anticipation of an inevitable attack, whose time and place is uncertain. While international law recognizes the legitimacy of anticipatory self-defense, the Obama Administration's targeted killing practice, redefines the traditional meaning of imminence by relaxing its temporal standards. The Obama Administration, purports that modern day warfare characterized by adversarial non-state actors coupled with access to devastating weaponry makes the traditional meaning of imminence inappropriate and anachronistic in dealing with these particular threats. Its contention reflects similar concerns raised by US Administrations dating back to Ronald Reagan in the mid-eighties. Indeed, the U.S. has steadily shifted the meaning of imminence for nearly three decades in its response to terrorist threats, not least of which during the George W. Bush Administration, which explicitly declared a “war on terror.” More broadly, the definitional shift of imminence implicates the regulation of the use of force by states. The concept of "new imminence" is highly susceptible to abuse because it can neither be externally regulated nor restrained. To mitigate the risks posed by new imminence, states must either affirm and/or establish an oversight mechanism of the use of force. Alternatively, states should preserve the traditional law of self-defense and insist that states adopt a political, as opposed to a legal, framework to respond to terrorist threats.
Denver Journal of International Law & Policy, 2013
In this article I examine the US Government response to the International Committee of the Red Cr... more In this article I examine the US Government response to the International Committee of the Red Cross’s (ICRC) comprehensive study on Customary International Humanitarian Law. My examination seeks to assess the accuracy of the US’s critique of the ICRC’s approach to establishing customary law. In doing so, I both develop an argument about the appropriate methodology for establishing customary law as well as examine one case study, on universal jurisdiction, in close detail. Narrowly, the question I seek to answer is whether, and to what extent, the US Government’s response to the ICRC’s study is valid in light of proper approaches to the formation of customary international law? More broadly, I am asking whether global superpower and/or a minority of the world’s most powerful states can shape customary international law by affording extraordinary weight to practice, and, relatedly, to the doctrine of specially affected states. I argue that the modern approach to custom is more appropriate as concerns human rights and humanitarian law because of the unreliability of operational state practice, as well as the fact that the community of nations is not an aggregate of its many parts but rather a collective whole. I note, however, that this does not discount the tangible and heavy-handed impact of the behavior of powerful states upon the formation of custom. In my conclusion I assert that whereas the International Court of Justice in the North Sea found that custom cannot be established in the face of protest by a specially affected state in regard to a specific right, I suggest that global superpower, by virtue of its status, is always specially affected by a supranational law.
UCLA Journal of Islamic and Near Eastern Law , 2012
The legal nature of Israel’s blockade regime, imposed on Gaza since Hamas’s ouster of Fatah from ... more The legal nature of Israel’s blockade regime, imposed on Gaza since Hamas’s ouster of Fatah from the Gaza Strip in June 2007, became a pressing question for scholars and international media alike in the aftermath of Israel’s fatal attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla in May 2010. The ongoing legal debate revolves about the prohibition of collective punishment, as enshrined in Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, and consequently scrutinizes the manner in which Israel has administered its blockade. This article examines the Gaza blockade in international law and demonstrates its illegality for violating the Laws of Occupation, which delimit the use of permissible force available to an Occupying Power, irrespective of the manner in which it is imposed. Accordingly, by maintaining its blockade, Israel also challenges the existing legal order, namely the scope of legal self-defense as well as the permissible use of force under the Laws of Occupation. This legal challenge works to embolden states at the expense of protections that should be afforded to civilians during armed conflict. Rather than resist this critical attempt to shift the law, the United Nations’ Security Council has perpetuated this confusion at best and, at worst, has colluded in the redefinition of the law thereby undermining its own legitimacy as well as the force of international humanitarian law. This article concludes by recommending that the UN both uphold the rule of law and restore its legitimacy by responding substantively to Israel’s behavior and structurally to its own procedural mechanisms that have facilitated such an outcome.
On December 27, 2008, Israel launched a 22-day military offensive against Gaza called “Operation ... more On December 27, 2008, Israel launched a 22-day military offensive against Gaza called “Operation Cast Lead.” Israeli forces killed some1,300 Palestinians, including 280 children, and injured approximately 4,300 others, including 1,100 children. Civilians comprised nearly 70 percent of the Palestinian death toll. The aerial and ground offensive also destroyed 2,900 homes, 29 schools, 121 commercial and industrial workshops, 60 police stations, and 30 mosques. During the Operation, thirteen Israelis were killed including three civilians and four soldiers killed by friendly fire. This article explores whether Israel's offensive qualifies as an act of self-defense. It concludes that applied to either the Charter framework or the Customary law one, Israel’s military offensive against Gaza fails to qualify as an act of self-defense because of its disproportionate nature.
Berkeley Journal of Middle Eastern and Islamic Law , 2009
Since the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Palestinians have constituted a nation li... more Since the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Palestinians have constituted a nation living as refugees in exile, as civilians under military occupation, or as members of a global Palestinian diaspora. Without a state and a sovereign government, redressing claims of grave violations of international human rights against the Israeli government that both dispossesses and dominates them is an arduous challenge. However, in the alternative to bringing claims in an Israeli court, Palestinians can also bring forth claims in U.S. courts pursuant to the Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA). The ATCA is an eighteenth-century statute made actionable in the present day by a Second Circuit Court decision that held that the statute grants subject matter jurisdiction in federal courts for violations of international customary law. While U.S. federal courts have, through the ATCA, become formally available for redressing violations of international human rights, Palestinians have found no judicial recourse in these courts almost without exception. As defendants, Palestinians have no defenses available to them; as claimants, their claims do not withstand judicial scrutiny. The uniformity of judicial outcomes involving Palestinian plaintiffs and defendants is a function of their politicization, meaning their adjudication according to foreign policy interests irrespective of the legal questions at hand. As such, the politicization of cases involving the Arab-Israeli conflict and critical of Israeli occupation policies is indicative of the interlocking relationship between law and politics and is demonstrated by 1) undue deference to the Executive Branch; 2) legislative and executive endorsement of lawsuits against Palestinians; and 3) the supplanting of legal considerations for political ones in the application of the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act as well as the political question doctrine.
This book narrates the Palestinian struggle for freedom as told through the relationship between ... more This book narrates the Palestinian struggle for freedom as told through the relationship between international law and politics during five critical junctures between 1917-2017. It argues that international law is politics and to serve an emancipatory function it must be wielded in the sophisticated service of a political program that challenges the geopolitical structure sustaining an oppressive status quo. The book carries this argument by exploring how the balance of geopolitical power, the historical context, and the strategic deployment of law have shaped the content and application of international law to both advance and blunt Israeli as well as Palestinian interests. While international law has been the site of resistance and oppression, on balance, it has done more to advance Israel’s interests due to the country’s relative power and its correlate appreciation of the law’s utility. These entwinements of law and politics over one-hundred years provide a history of the present by examining how each of the five junctures structured diplomatic relations around, as well as conceptual frameworks about, the Palestinian struggle for freedom. In the present context of the death of the two-state solution and the reality of Israel’s singular jurisdiction across Israel and the Palestinian Territories, the book traces how a sovereignty framework has become a trap. While a rights-based approach may overcome this trap, it remains inadequate for lacking a political program for decolonization. The book culminates in offering counterintuitive approaches to transcend the current impasse in the Question of Palestine.
In 1922, the League of Nations inscribed the goal of establishing a settler colony in Palestine f... more In 1922, the League of Nations inscribed the goal of establishing a settler colony in Palestine for the Jewish people-in denial of the national self-determination of the Indigenous Arab population-in public international law. 1 The Palestine Mandate juridically erased the national status of the Palestinian people by: (1) framing the Arabs as incapable of self-rule; (2) heightening the significance of establishing a Jewish national home; and (3) distinguishing Palestine from the other Class A mandates for possessing religious significance that exceeded the interests of any single national group. A century later, the still-unresolved "question" of Palestine remains central to struggles for anti-racism and anti-colonialism in international law. This essay revisits two flashpoints in the tangled history of Palestine and international law, where questions of race and racism have been central: first, ongoing debates over the regime and crime of apartheid; and second, the now-repudiated UN General Assembly Resolution 3379, recognizing Zionism as a form of racism and racial discrimination. Both stories demonstrate the importance of understanding race and colonialism as conjoined concepts, neither of which can be properly understood in isolation from the other.
Hizma is a Palestinian village historically located within the Jerusalem Governate that Israel ha... more Hizma is a Palestinian village historically located within the Jerusalem Governate that Israel has arbitrarily severed from it in its quest to expand and entrench a Greater Jerusalem. To eliminate the village and its natives, the settler state has incrementally deployed a series of urban planning policies that together constitute an eliminatory infrastructure. These have included overlapping and tenuous jurisdictional areas; movement restrictions imposed through closures, checkpoints, and surveillance regimes; transformation of common lands into a state-run nature preserve; and the construction of the Apartheid Wall through the village. These measures have concentrated Hizma's residents into an urban area and severely isolated them from their agricultural lands, places of worship, education, families, and health facilities. Based on field work conducted between 3 August and 18 August 2019, this essay sets out to explore two phenomena. First, it seeks to understand how Palestinians navigate and resist Israel's eliminatory infrastructure. Second, it explores what this infrastructure revealed about the relationship between the violence of settler colonialism and the banal administration of urban planning. Using autoethnography, this essay documents the journey of Palestinians in Hizma across three eliminatory terrains erected by planning policies: through the Apartheid Wall, within the suffocating physical and juridical bounds of entrapment, and into the community's expropriated spring.
International law’s indeterminacy and its capacity to be shaped by what Duncan Kennedy describes ... more International law’s indeterminacy and its capacity to be shaped by what Duncan Kennedy describes as “legal work,” or the intervention of the legal worker to shape many available parts, (i.e., evidence, primary documents, testimony) into an argument makes certain that there is no singular account of a conflict in international law. Despite the myriad legal arguments presented in jurisprudence, scholarship, and advocacy, not a single one of them is the “truth” to the exclusion of all others as the law itself represents a terrain of battle rather than a science to be discovered or verified. This could not be truer in the case of the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict. The conflict itself refers to the establishment of Israel, self-defined as a Jewish state, in Mandate Palestine, where a native, and numerical majority, Arab population sought to be self-determined. Perhaps the worst way to pursue this scholarly inquiry is to begin in the 1948 War between Israel and six Arab armies. Doing so effectively erases the three decades of British colonial oversight in its capacity as the Mandatory power that facilitated the settler-colonization of Palestine, the supplanting of nascent Palestinian sovereignty with Jewish-Zionist settler-sovereignty, and, ultimately, the country’s transformation into the modern state of Israel. While I begin this inquiry roughly during the First World War, which ended with the defeat of the Ottoman Empire and its dominion over Palestine since 1299, there is room to begin much earlier especially in regard to the development of legal regimes regulating nationality and citizenship as well as land to understand their mutations over the course of the Palestine Mandate between 1922 and 1948. Similarly, it would be a mistake to end this inquiry upon Israel’s establishment, and then begin again during the 1967 War and the subsequent occupation of Arab lands, as do most legal accounts. The intervening decades between the two wars serve as an analytical bridge to understand the continuities in law between Britain’s colonial oversight of Palestine, Israel’s racialized governance of Palestinian natives who remained, and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, which together provide a more holistic picture of an ongoing settler-colonial regime of land usurpation, native removal, and settler replacement. This bibliography aims to provide historical context as well as reflect some of the debates within the historiography and legal literature. It includes a mix of primary sources, legal analysis, and historical accounts that together should help shape a robust research project.
Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR) Review, 2020
This response essay to Raef Zreik’s second lecture, ‘Justice’, builds on his critical interventio... more This response essay to Raef Zreik’s second lecture, ‘Justice’, builds on his critical intervention in two ways. First, it examines the his- tory of the Balfour Declaration to flesh out one of Zreik’s ‘good arguments for justice’ by highlighting how the British policy doc- ument’s juridical erasure of Palestinian peoplehood represented a sovereign exception beyond the reach of legal challenge and oversight. Once incorporated into the Palestine Mandate, the exception became international law and policy and, thereafter, structurally impeded Palestinian claims for self-determination. Second, the essay addresses Zreik’s critique of first and second or- der arguments of justice and shows how the structure of law, like the structure of an argument, can reify an unjust status quo even as it seemingly advances claims for justice. The essay concludes by exploring how decolonial alternatives may help pave a path to- wards optimal futures.
This introductory essay outlines the context for this special issue of the Journal of Palestine S... more This introductory essay outlines the context for this special issue of the Journal of Palestine Studies on Black-Palestinian transnational solidarity (BPTS). Through the analytic of “renewal,” the authors point to the recent increase in individual and collective energies directed toward developing effective, reciprocal, and transformative political relationships within various African-descendant and Palestinian communities around the world. Drawing from the extant BPTS literature, this essay examines the prominent intellectual currents in the field and points to new methodologies and analytics that are required to move the field forward. With this essay, the authors aim not only to contextualize the field and to frame this special issue, but also to chart new directions for future intellectual and political work.
The Ferguson-Gaza moment, characterized by the concurrent bombardment of Gaza and occupation of F... more The Ferguson-Gaza moment, characterized by the concurrent bombardment of Gaza and occupation of Ferguson in the summer 2014, catalyzed a renewal of Black-Palestinian solidarity as an analytical framework and political practice. During its apex from the late 1960s through the early 1980s, Black-Palestinian solidarity emerged from the crucible of a Third World upheaval and framed racism and colonialism as entwined and co-constitutive structures of domination. Drawing on the stories of four key Palestinian-American activists who helped forge Black-Palestinian solidarity in the Ferguson-Gaza moment, together with reflections of key Black activists, this article shows that a critical germ for current renewals developed among Palestinian-Americans in response to white supremacy. Black-Palestinian intimacies together with critical encounters with anti-black racism mobilized these interlocutors to align with Black communities in solidarity and joint struggle for liberation. These stories help reveal that U.S. white supremacy is a critical and catalyzing force of transnational solidarity. They also signal how Black-Palestinian solidarity continues to function as a political analytic targeting imperialism, rather than a form of identity politics. Finally, these articulations of solidarity are forged outside the context of Third World revolt thus indicating that current renewals are resonant with, but independent of, historic articulations.
This essay is a response to Scott Kurashigie's 2019 Presidential address at the American Studies ... more This essay is a response to Scott Kurashigie's 2019 Presidential address at the American Studies Association meeting.
In the Gaza Strip, Israel’s military used lethal force against civilian protestors engaged in the... more In the Gaza Strip, Israel’s military used lethal force against civilian protestors engaged in the ‘Great Return March’ of 2018. In its late May 2018 ruling, the Israeli Supreme Court held this use of force as legitimate self-defense. This article challenges Israel’s security response to these protests in an attempt to both unsettle a warfare discourse and to urge for a distinct ontological approach. The article argues that an ongoing settler-colonial project has racialised the Palestinian body as a security threat, and historicises Israel’s shoot-to-kill policy as merely one contemporary mode of dispos- sessing the native body. This includes a novel framework of armed conflict that has diminished the category of the civilian and expanded the scope of legitimate targets permitting the killing of greater numbers of Palestinians in the language of law; the article calls this legal technology the ‘shrinking civilian’.
This introductory essay outlines the context for this special issue of the Journal of Palestine S... more This introductory essay outlines the context for this special issue of the Journal of Palestine Studies on Black-Palestinian transnational solidarity (BPTS). Through the analytic of "renewal," the authors point to the recent increase in individual and collective energies directed toward developing effective, reciprocal, and transformative political relationships within various African-descendant and Palestinian communities around the world. Drawing from the extant BPTS literature, this essay examines the prominent intellectual currents in the field and points to new methodologies and analytics that are required to move the field forward. With this essay, the authors aim not only to contextualize the field and to frame this special issue, but also to chart new directions for future intellectual and political work.
Social movement scholars have described activist burnout-when the stressors of activism become so... more Social movement scholars have described activist burnout-when the stressors of activism become so overwhelming they debilitate activists' abilities to remain engaged-as a formidable threat to the sustainability of social movements. However, studies designed to map the causes of burnout have failed to account for ways burnout might operate differently for privileged-identity activists such as white antiracism activists and marginalized-identity activists such as antiracism activists of color. Building on previous studies of activist burnout in racial justice activists and examinations of the roles of white activists in antiracism movements, this study represents one attempt to fill this gap. We analyzed data from interviews with racial justice activists of color in the United States who have experienced burnout to identify the ways they attributed their burnout to the attitudes and behaviors-the racism-of white activists. These included (1) harboring unevolved or racist views, (2) undermining or invalidating the racial justice work of activists of color, (3) being unwilling to step up and take action when needed, (4) exhibiting white fragility, and (5) taking credit for participants’ racial justice work and ideas. Implications for racial justice movements and the participation of white activists are discussed.
This paper seeks to show how Israel has deployed Occupation Law in strategic ways to incrementall... more This paper seeks to show how Israel has deployed Occupation Law in strategic ways to incrementally take the land of Palestine without its people. It argues that Israel has used UN Security Council Resolution 242 to retroactively legitimate those colonial takings in a political framework shaped by U.S. intervention. In themselves, the constituent pieces of the argument are not new and they have been extensively discussed in legal, political science, and historical literature. Rather than consider them as the sum of their parts, this paper attempts to view the issues that have been kept distinct and separate within disciplinary silos as a mutually reinforcing whole, demonstrating that the United States' political position made an otherwise bankrupt legal argument effective and showing how the Security Council's deliberations gave Israel ample room for maneuver in spite of the drafting parties' original intent. In examining the relationship between law and political power, the article points to the ways in which the balance of power bears upon the meaning and significance of law in international conflict. Thus, the failure of Occupation Law to regulate the occupation of the Palestinian Territories ultimately reflects the outcome of a political, not a legal, contest: Israel's legal argumentation that the territories are merely under its administration would have no value were it not for the power politics that shape international relations in the region.
Harvard Journal of Ethnic and Racial Justice , 2015
This essay seeks to read Whiteness as Property onto contemporary Israel by demonstrating that the... more This essay seeks to read Whiteness as Property onto contemporary Israel by demonstrating that the value ascribed to Jewish nationality is not simply a matter of Jew versus non-Jew. Instead, Whiteness reflects a European order that reproduces and embodies the exclusionary and orientalist tropes that produced anti-Semitism in Europe. The State continues to apply those tropes to Mizrahim, Jews of Middle Eastern origin. Mizrahim are the objects of Zionism's modernization project, which necessitates a violent bifurcation of their Arab and Jewish identity on the one hand, and the imposition of a singular European history that effectively marginalizes them on the other. Once consolidated within an ethno-nationality mythology of a European Jewish national, the project of nation building completely excludes the Palestinian who, like the Eastern Jew, is uncivilized, but unlike her, is ineligible for rehabilitation. Instead, the Palestinian must be removed, diminished, and contained geographically, politically, and socially. Law facilitates this process as it dispossess and displaces the Palestinian and simultaneously imbues Jewish nationality with a coveted value, one that mirrors European Enlightenment ideals of civilization and the superiority of Whiteness. Settler-decolonization is necessary for Palestinian self-determination and has the potential to achieve Jewish emancipation beyond the state.
Palestinian refugees in the Middle East constitute a protracted refugee situation. In response to... more Palestinian refugees in the Middle East constitute a protracted refugee situation. In response to political considerations by multiple state actors, they are denied return to their homes of habitual residence and are refused meaningful legal protection in their host countries. As such Palestinians are suspended between their political objectification in a prolonged conflict on the one hand and the vulnerability of their humanitarian condition, like all other refugees, on the other. Unlike their refugee counterparts who are persons of concern to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Statute, Palestinian refugees endure an uneven legal regime. Since the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine (UNCCP) fell into abeyance, no international agency has searched for durable solutions on behalf of Palestinian refugees, thus exposing them to a protection gap. Instead, the United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA), established to furnish Palestinian refugees aid and relief, has provided them with incremental protection, which, however significant, has been insufficient to close the gap. The extent of this protection gap endured by Palestinian refugees has been vividly demonstrated during several episodes of secondary forced displacement in the Middle East. In response to their mass expulsion from Kuwait in 1991, Libya in 1996, and Iraq in 2003, UNRWA and UNHCR have closely collaborated in order to bridge this gap and provide Palestinian refugees with adequate protection. These incidents of inter-agency collaboration constitute de facto policies between the two agencies, which demonstrate the flexibility of otherwise rigid delineations between their existing mandates. In particular, past practice makes clear that UNRWA and UNCHR can have overlapping geographic and operational mandates. During the most recent crisis in Syria, these de facto policies have proven inadequate to protect Palestinian refugees. To overcome this challenge, UNHCR and UNRWA should formalize their inter-agency collaboration on behalf of Palestinian refugees during times of calm as well as crisis in conformity with the spirit of the UNHCR Statute and the 1951 Refugee Convention as well as with past practice. Beyond crisis, the agencies should consider innovative approaches to definitively close the protection gap.
President Barak Obama's authorization to use unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, to lethally inc... more President Barak Obama's authorization to use unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, to lethally incapacitate persons he believes constitute a threat to the US has become a hallmark of his Administration. Consider that President Barak Obama oversaw fifty-three drone missile attacks during his first year in office, which is more than the total number of similar strikes carried out during the eight years of President George W. Bush's two terms. The Obama Administration justifies its use of force as self-defense in anticipation of an inevitable attack, whose time and place is uncertain. While international law recognizes the legitimacy of anticipatory self-defense, the Obama Administration's targeted killing practice, redefines the traditional meaning of imminence by relaxing its temporal standards. The Obama Administration, purports that modern day warfare characterized by adversarial non-state actors coupled with access to devastating weaponry makes the traditional meaning of imminence inappropriate and anachronistic in dealing with these particular threats. Its contention reflects similar concerns raised by US Administrations dating back to Ronald Reagan in the mid-eighties. Indeed, the U.S. has steadily shifted the meaning of imminence for nearly three decades in its response to terrorist threats, not least of which during the George W. Bush Administration, which explicitly declared a “war on terror.” More broadly, the definitional shift of imminence implicates the regulation of the use of force by states. The concept of "new imminence" is highly susceptible to abuse because it can neither be externally regulated nor restrained. To mitigate the risks posed by new imminence, states must either affirm and/or establish an oversight mechanism of the use of force. Alternatively, states should preserve the traditional law of self-defense and insist that states adopt a political, as opposed to a legal, framework to respond to terrorist threats.
Denver Journal of International Law & Policy, 2013
In this article I examine the US Government response to the International Committee of the Red Cr... more In this article I examine the US Government response to the International Committee of the Red Cross’s (ICRC) comprehensive study on Customary International Humanitarian Law. My examination seeks to assess the accuracy of the US’s critique of the ICRC’s approach to establishing customary law. In doing so, I both develop an argument about the appropriate methodology for establishing customary law as well as examine one case study, on universal jurisdiction, in close detail. Narrowly, the question I seek to answer is whether, and to what extent, the US Government’s response to the ICRC’s study is valid in light of proper approaches to the formation of customary international law? More broadly, I am asking whether global superpower and/or a minority of the world’s most powerful states can shape customary international law by affording extraordinary weight to practice, and, relatedly, to the doctrine of specially affected states. I argue that the modern approach to custom is more appropriate as concerns human rights and humanitarian law because of the unreliability of operational state practice, as well as the fact that the community of nations is not an aggregate of its many parts but rather a collective whole. I note, however, that this does not discount the tangible and heavy-handed impact of the behavior of powerful states upon the formation of custom. In my conclusion I assert that whereas the International Court of Justice in the North Sea found that custom cannot be established in the face of protest by a specially affected state in regard to a specific right, I suggest that global superpower, by virtue of its status, is always specially affected by a supranational law.
UCLA Journal of Islamic and Near Eastern Law , 2012
The legal nature of Israel’s blockade regime, imposed on Gaza since Hamas’s ouster of Fatah from ... more The legal nature of Israel’s blockade regime, imposed on Gaza since Hamas’s ouster of Fatah from the Gaza Strip in June 2007, became a pressing question for scholars and international media alike in the aftermath of Israel’s fatal attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla in May 2010. The ongoing legal debate revolves about the prohibition of collective punishment, as enshrined in Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, and consequently scrutinizes the manner in which Israel has administered its blockade. This article examines the Gaza blockade in international law and demonstrates its illegality for violating the Laws of Occupation, which delimit the use of permissible force available to an Occupying Power, irrespective of the manner in which it is imposed. Accordingly, by maintaining its blockade, Israel also challenges the existing legal order, namely the scope of legal self-defense as well as the permissible use of force under the Laws of Occupation. This legal challenge works to embolden states at the expense of protections that should be afforded to civilians during armed conflict. Rather than resist this critical attempt to shift the law, the United Nations’ Security Council has perpetuated this confusion at best and, at worst, has colluded in the redefinition of the law thereby undermining its own legitimacy as well as the force of international humanitarian law. This article concludes by recommending that the UN both uphold the rule of law and restore its legitimacy by responding substantively to Israel’s behavior and structurally to its own procedural mechanisms that have facilitated such an outcome.
On December 27, 2008, Israel launched a 22-day military offensive against Gaza called “Operation ... more On December 27, 2008, Israel launched a 22-day military offensive against Gaza called “Operation Cast Lead.” Israeli forces killed some1,300 Palestinians, including 280 children, and injured approximately 4,300 others, including 1,100 children. Civilians comprised nearly 70 percent of the Palestinian death toll. The aerial and ground offensive also destroyed 2,900 homes, 29 schools, 121 commercial and industrial workshops, 60 police stations, and 30 mosques. During the Operation, thirteen Israelis were killed including three civilians and four soldiers killed by friendly fire. This article explores whether Israel's offensive qualifies as an act of self-defense. It concludes that applied to either the Charter framework or the Customary law one, Israel’s military offensive against Gaza fails to qualify as an act of self-defense because of its disproportionate nature.
Berkeley Journal of Middle Eastern and Islamic Law , 2009
Since the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Palestinians have constituted a nation li... more Since the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Palestinians have constituted a nation living as refugees in exile, as civilians under military occupation, or as members of a global Palestinian diaspora. Without a state and a sovereign government, redressing claims of grave violations of international human rights against the Israeli government that both dispossesses and dominates them is an arduous challenge. However, in the alternative to bringing claims in an Israeli court, Palestinians can also bring forth claims in U.S. courts pursuant to the Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA). The ATCA is an eighteenth-century statute made actionable in the present day by a Second Circuit Court decision that held that the statute grants subject matter jurisdiction in federal courts for violations of international customary law. While U.S. federal courts have, through the ATCA, become formally available for redressing violations of international human rights, Palestinians have found no judicial recourse in these courts almost without exception. As defendants, Palestinians have no defenses available to them; as claimants, their claims do not withstand judicial scrutiny. The uniformity of judicial outcomes involving Palestinian plaintiffs and defendants is a function of their politicization, meaning their adjudication according to foreign policy interests irrespective of the legal questions at hand. As such, the politicization of cases involving the Arab-Israeli conflict and critical of Israeli occupation policies is indicative of the interlocking relationship between law and politics and is demonstrated by 1) undue deference to the Executive Branch; 2) legislative and executive endorsement of lawsuits against Palestinians; and 3) the supplanting of legal considerations for political ones in the application of the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act as well as the political question doctrine.
This book examines the Palestinian UN initiative from the key perspectives of strategy and leader... more This book examines the Palestinian UN initiative from the key perspectives of strategy and leadership; international law and statehood; US foreign policy; and representation. It also includes more recent material from the 2012 sequel to the 2011 initiative, and relevant appendices
Like critical junctures before it, the statehood bid marks yet another turning point in the fate of the Palestinian people and their struggle for self-determination. This collection, based in large measure on articles published in Jadaliyya, attempts to trace the pulse of political developments leading up to it as well as to highlight the most relevant social, political, and economic elements that will comprise the coming phase.
In this essay, I will explore the dominant Palestinian tradition first by highlighting Palestinia... more In this essay, I will explore the dominant Palestinian tradition first by highlighting Palestinian intellectual thought on Zionism as a form of racism and racial discrimination. I will also review the legal analysis underpinning Israel’s apartheid regime, which reflects its Zionist ideology rather than the outcome of a failed political project to establish a Palestinian state. The essay will then show how Zionism is better understood as a political and intellectual analog of apartheid in order to emphasize that Israel did not become a discriminatory regime but is defined by such discrimination. I will conclude with thoughts on the international responsibility to end the apartheid of our time.
This symposium brings together six scholars to discuss Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini’s Human Sh... more This symposium brings together six scholars to discuss Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini’s Human Shields: A History of People in the Line of Fire. It includes a response essay from Gordon and Perugini. Their book provides a startling new take on the history of war, morality, and law. It describes the use of human shields in key historical and contemporary moments across the globe, demonstrating how the increasing weaponization of human beings has made the position of civilians trapped in theaters of violence more precarious and their lives more expendable. They show how the law facilitates the use of lethal violence against vulnerable people while portraying it as humane, but they also reveal how people can and do use their own vulnerability to resist violence and denounce forms of dehumanization.
Human Shields has been shortlisted for the Susan Strange Best Book Prize 2021, British International Studies Association.
This essay examines JPS’s fifty-year archive of law-related content from the prism of its contrib... more This essay examines JPS’s fifty-year archive of law-related content from the prism of its contribution to the author’s own thinking (and writing) about the relationship between law and politics in the context of the Palestinian question. Noura Erakat identifies as a “greatest hit” Hanna Dib Nakkara’s “Israeli Land Seizure under Various Defense and Emergency Regulations” (1985) for its meticulous documentation of the Israeli legal regime estab- lished to confiscate Palestinian lands. Erakat’s “hidden gem” is “Juridical Characteristics of Palestinian Resistance: An Appraisal in Law,” coauthored by W. T. Jr. and S. V. Mallison. Published in 1973, the article argues for the treatment of captured fedayeen as prisoners of war four years prior to the amendment of the Geneva Convention recognizing national liberation struggles as international conflicts.
Neve Gordon & Nicola Perugini discuss their new book, Human Shields: A History of People in the L... more Neve Gordon & Nicola Perugini discuss their new book, Human Shields: A History of People in the Line of Fire (University of California Press, 2020) with Ayça Çubukçu, Noura Erakat & John Reynolds.
In late November 2019, the Israeli Supreme Court upheld the Ministry of Interior's order to depor... more In late November 2019, the Israeli Supreme Court upheld the Ministry of Interior's order to deport Human Rights Watch (HRW) director for Israel and Palestine, Omar Shakir. The court based its decision on a 2017 amendment to Israel's 1952 Entry into Israel Law enabling the government to refuse entry to foreigners who allegedly advocate for the boycott of Israel. The same law was invoked to deny entry to U.S. congresswomen Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar in the summer of 2019. The campaign against Shakir began almost immediately after he was hired by HRW in 2016, and the court's decision marked the culmination of a multi-year battle against the deportation order. In this interview, JPS Editorial Committee member, Rutgers University professor, and author Noura Erakat discusses the details of his case with Shakir in an exchange that also examines the implications of the case for human rights advocacy, in general, and for Palestinians, in particular. The interview was edited for length and clarity.
Black Palestinian solidarity, as an analytic and an activist praxis, helps pierce a formidable na... more Black Palestinian solidarity, as an analytic and an activist praxis, helps pierce a formidable national security framework cloaking Palestinian life and reveals the racial nature of the Palestinian struggle. It also disrupts American exceptionalism, which insists that the United States is an imperfect democracy on the steady course of achieving its full potential and brings into acute view the anti-colonial nature of the Black freedom struggle in the United States. Black Palestinian solidarity thus illuminates the co-constitutive nature of racism and colonialism and urges not only equality and democratization of the colony but decolonization.
The critical framework of Black Palestinian solidarity provides tools to deconstruct specific U.S. and Israeli policy choices that depend on wholesale dehumanization along racialized lines. Within this frame, we can examine how Israel’s shoot-to-kill policy is predicated on the racialization, and dehumanization, of Palestinians within a legal framework, how an internationalist approach, which considers one’s domestic conditions as not bound by the nation-state but, instead, reflect global regimes of capital, violence, and governance, helps explain the militarized response to Black uprisings and, particularly, the significance of U.S. law enforcement trainings in Israel.
Third World Approaches to International Law Review , 2019
Noura Erakat in conversation with John Reynolds on Noura’s book Justice for Some: Law & the Quest... more Noura Erakat in conversation with John Reynolds on Noura’s book Justice for Some: Law & the Question of Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019)
In the July-August 2014 Israeli operation against the Gaza Strip, Israeli forces killed 1,973 Pal... more In the July-August 2014 Israeli operation against the Gaza Strip, Israeli forces killed 1,973 Palestinians, including 459 children; forcibly displaced 350,000 others and rendered 100,000 homeless; and destroyed or severely damaged 16,800 homes and other vital infrastructure. This devastation compounds the humanitarian crisis already endured by the Gaza Strip’s besieged population. This situation is attributable to the systematic impunity afforded to Israel over several decades. This includes its failure to adhere to its obligations and duties as an occupying power and its egregious violations of humanitarian law during hostilities. This analysis addresses Israel’s culpability for war crimes during this most recent offensive. It also briefly discusses the culpability of Hamas and other Palestinian resistance groups and the obligations of third-party states to remedy the situation.
This paper seeks to trace the drafting history of UN General Assembly Resolution 3379 declaring Z... more This paper seeks to trace the drafting history of UN General Assembly Resolution 3379 declaring Zionism as a form of racism with an emphasis on how the text and process shaped a racial theory of Zionist settler-colonization. Fayez Sayegh, Palestinian scholar and founder of the Palestine Research Center, and who would be a leading force in passing the Resolution, provided one of the earliest racial theories of Zionism in 1965. In his essay he explains that Zionism is constituted of three elements, racial purity, racial supremacy, and racial segregation and driven by a policy of “racial elimination.” Notably, Resolution 3379 was not an initiative of the Palestinian Liberation Organization thus providing the earliest indications that the while the nationalist movement understood the racial dimensions of Palestinian subjugation, it believed its struggle was primarily an anti-colonial one for independence. This ambiguity regarding the exact contours of the relationship between racism and colonialism was also evident in the diplomatic process. Despite enthusiastic support for Palestinian self-determination among the African nations that led the Decade Against Racism, there was mixed support for Resolution. The Resolution ultimately passed only to be rescinded by the PLO itself in 1991. This paper seeks to revisit this diplomatic and intellectual history for the sake of considering an alternative trajectory of the Palestinian freedom struggle as one against racism.
Draft chapter forthcoming in edited volume tentatively titled, Race and National Security, ed. Ma... more Draft chapter forthcoming in edited volume tentatively titled, Race and National Security, ed. Matiangai Sirleaf This chapter uses the analytical framework offered by Black Palestinian solidarity to reveal the coconstitutive nature of racism and colonialism as well as the enduring significance of anti-imperialist struggle. It does so first by examining how Israel's shoot-to-kill policy is predicated on the racialization of Palestinians within the framework of national security law. It then uses an internationalist approach, which situates Black subjugation in the United States in the context of global regimes of capital, violence, and governance, to help explain the militarized response to Black uprisings. Using Aime Cesaire's "boomerang effect," the chapter then traces the iterative development of police militarization, forged within the crucible of U.S. imperial dominance since at least the late nineteenth century, and highlights how contemporary U.S. law enforcement trainings in Israel are among the most recent iterations of this trend. The chapter concludes with reflections on the limits as well as the potential of anti-imperialist activist efforts embedded in the praxes of Black Palestinian solidarity.
The United Nations and the Arab World,The UN Statehood Bid: Palestine’s Flirtation With Multilate... more The United Nations and the Arab World,The UN Statehood Bid: Palestine’s Flirtation With Multilateralism, (Vijay Prashad and Karim Makdisi, eds.) University of Minnesota Press (2016)
Is international law part of the solution in the Palestinian quest for self-determination and hum... more Is international law part of the solution in the Palestinian quest for self-determination and human rights – or part of the problem as a number of voices now argue? Al-Shabaka Policy Advisor Noura Erakat provides insights into the positions of those who argue the law is the problem and then discusses the ways in which law can be made to work for the Palestinian people. She shows why the “triumph of human rights does not necessarily lead to justice” and argues for a political program that uses the law rather than letting a legal strategy define politics.
Since the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Palestinians have constituted a nation li... more Since the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Palestinians have constituted a nation living as refugees in exile, as civilians under military occupation, or as members of a global Palestinian diaspora. Without a state and a sovereign government, redressing claims of grave violations of international human rights against the Israeli government that both dispossesses and dominates them is an arduous challenge. However, in the alternative to bringing claims in an Israeli court, Palestinians can also bring forth claims in U.S. courts pursuant to the Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA). The ATCA is an eighteenth-century statute made actionable in the present day by a Second Circuit Court decision that held that the statute grants subject matter jurisdiction in federal courts for violations of international customary law. While U.S. federal courts have, through the ATCA, become formally available for redressing violations of international human rights, Palestinians have found no judici...
This essay is a response to Scott Kurashigie's 2019 Presidential address at the American ... more This essay is a response to Scott Kurashigie's 2019 Presidential address at the American Studies Association meeting.
In the Gaza Strip, Israel’s military used lethal force against civilian protestors engaged in the... more In the Gaza Strip, Israel’s military used lethal force against civilian protestors engaged in the ‘Great Return March’ of 2018. In its late May 2018 ruling, the Israeli Supreme Court held this use of force as legitimate self-defense. This article challenges Israel’s security response to these protests in an attempt to both unsettle a warfare discourse and to urge for a distinct ontological approach. The article argues that an ongoing settler-colonial project has racialised the Palestinian body as a security threat, and historicises Israel’s shoot-to-kill policy as merely one contemporary mode of dispossessing the native body. This includes a novel framework of armed conflict that has diminished the category of the civilian and expanded the scope of legitimate targets permitting the killing of greater numbers of Palestinians in the language of law; the article calls this legal technology the ‘shrinking civilian’.
This chapter focuses on the United Nations's Palestinian “statehood” bid starting in 2011. In... more This chapter focuses on the United Nations's Palestinian “statehood” bid starting in 2011. In May 2011, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)/Palestinian Authority (PA) announced that it would seek membership as a state within the UN. The UN statehood bid would alter the PLO's status as a nonmember observer entity, conferred upon it by the UN General Assembly in 1974. While the benefits of UN membership, or in the alternative, a UN upgrade, are manifold, none of them guarantee Palestinian self-determination or freedom from Israeli control. The chapter suggests that this statehood bid could have been a pivot away from complete reliance on the United States to deliver independence and a return to multilateralism that positioned the world superpower as part of the problem rather than the solution. However, the promise of multilateralism, signaled by Palestinians in 2011, has not been realized. The Palestinian leadership has responded to the ever-diminishing potential of t...
On December 27, 2008, Israel launched a 22-day military offensive against Gaza called “Operation ... more On December 27, 2008, Israel launched a 22-day military offensive against Gaza called “Operation Cast Lead.” Israeli forces killed some1,300 Palestinians, including 280 children, and injured approximately 4,300 others, including 1,100 children. Civilians comprised nearly 70 percent of the Palestinian death toll. The aerial and ground offensive also destroyed 2,900 homes, 29 schools, 121 commercial and industrial workshops, 60 police stations, and 30 mosques. During the Operation, thirteen Israelis were killed including three civilians and four soldiers killed by friendly fire. This article explores whether Israel's offensive qualifies as an act of self-defense. It concludes that applied to either the Charter framework or the Customary law one, Israel’s military offensive against Gaza fails to qualify as an act of self-defense because of its disproportionate nature.
This essay examines JPS’s fifty-year archive of law-related content from the prism of its contrib... more This essay examines JPS’s fifty-year archive of law-related content from the prism of its contribution to the author’s own thinking (and writing) about the relationship between law and politics in the context of the Palestinian question. Noura Erakat identifies as a “greatest hit” Hanna Dib Nakkara’s “Israeli Land Seizure under Various Defense and Emergency Regulations” (1985) for its meticulous documentation of the Israeli legal regime estab- lished to confiscate Palestinian lands. Erakat’s “hidden gem” is “Juridical Characteristics of Palestinian Resistance: An Appraisal in Law,” coauthored by W. T. Jr. and S. V. Mallison. Published in 1973, the article argues for the treatment of captured fedayeen as prisoners of war four years prior to the amendment of the Geneva Convention recognizing national liberation struggles as international conflicts.
This essay seeks to read Whiteness as Property onto contemporary Israel by demonstrating that the... more This essay seeks to read Whiteness as Property onto contemporary Israel by demonstrating that the value ascribed to Jewish nationality is not simply a matter of Jew versus non-Jew. Instead, Whiteness reflects a European order that reproduces and embodies the exclusionary and orientalist tropes that produced anti-Semitism in Europe. The State continues to apply those tropes to Mizrahim, Jews of Middle Eastern origin. Mizrahim are the objects of Zionism’s modernization project, which necessitates a violent bifurcation of their Arab and Jewish identity on the one hand, and the imposition of a singular European history that effectively marginalizes them on the other. Once consolidated within an ethno-nationality mythology of a European Jewish national, the project of nation building completely excludes the Palestinian who, like the Eastern Jew, is uncivilized, but unlike her, is ineligible for rehabilitation. Instead, the Palestinian must be removed, diminished, and contained geographic...
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Like critical junctures before it, the statehood bid marks yet another turning point in the fate of the Palestinian people and their struggle for self-determination. This collection, based in large measure on articles published in Jadaliyya, attempts to trace the pulse of political developments leading up to it as well as to highlight the most relevant social, political, and economic elements that will comprise the coming phase.
Human Shields has been shortlisted for the Susan Strange Best Book Prize 2021, British International Studies Association.
The critical framework of Black Palestinian solidarity provides tools to deconstruct specific U.S. and Israeli policy choices that depend on wholesale dehumanization along racialized lines. Within this frame, we can examine how Israel’s shoot-to-kill policy is predicated on the racialization, and dehumanization, of Palestinians within a legal framework, how an internationalist approach, which considers one’s domestic conditions as not bound by the nation-state but, instead, reflect global regimes of capital, violence, and governance, helps explain the militarized response to Black uprisings and, particularly, the significance of U.S. law enforcement trainings in Israel.