The rights of Israel

The rights of Israel by Joseph Massad

Israel's "lawfare" against the Palestinian people is rooted in a ficticious narrative of having a "right" to exist.

"The rights that Israel claims do not only affect Israel's Palestinian population and the Palestinian refugees living in the diaspora. Even though Israel's negotiations with the Palestinian Authority are said to address the Occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip only (and not East Jerusalem), it seems that these Israeli claimed rights also apply there. To begin with, Israel has insisted since 1967 that Jews have the right to colonise the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, and that this is not a negotiable right. Indeed, to get its point across and to make sure it is not misunderstood, since the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, Israel has more than tripled its Jewish colonial settler population in the West Bank and more than doubled it across the Occupied Territories, including East Jerusalem, totalling approximately half a million colonists. Israel continues to confiscate West Bank Palestinian lands for colonising purposes and suppresses all Palestinian resistance to its colonisation. Moreover, and in addition to the continuing confiscation of Palestinian lands inside Israel, in East Jerusalem, and in the West Bank, Israel has extended it discriminatory laws and enacted new ones to privilege the colonising Jewish population of the West Bank and East Jerusalem over the Palestinian Arabs. This includes an apartheid-style separation between Arabs and Jews, including the construction of the Apartheid Wall, the construction of Jewish-only roads across the West Bank, and the differential access to water resources, never mind confiscated land, to Jewish colonists. The United Nations has invoked the fourth Geneva conventions and passed numerous resolutions (the most famous being UN Security Council resolution 446 passed in March 1979) calling on Israel to dismantle its Jewish colonial settlements and nullify its confiscation of lands to no avail...What Israel has been negotiating over with the Palestinians is the form, the terms, and the extent to which Palestinians must recognise its rights without equivocation. It is this reality that has characterised the last two decades of negotiations with the Palestinians. Negotiations will never restore the internationally-recognised rights of the Palestinians; on the contrary, the negotiations that the Palestinians entered with Israel two decades ago are ones wherein one party, the Palestinians, must surrender all their internationally recognised rights and recognise instead Israel's self-arrogated rights, which are not recognised by international law or any other country for that matter. Sixty-three years after the establishment of the Jewish settler-colony, this Palestinian act will not only lend the first international legitimacy to Israeli claims, it will constitute in effect nothing less than the first international recognition of Israel's self-arrogated rights. Israel need give up nothing in return."

A long but significant essay by Josef Massad

Link: http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/05/20115684218533873.html

Goldstone: Israel's War On Gaza, Part Two, Rashid Khalidi's talk on Gaza and the Arab Spring + Q & A

Abstract: European Socio-Legal Studies and Legal Pluralism

In Western universities, law has long been perceived by lawyers and jurists at large as a simple technical skill that prepares students to get a position in courts, mainly as lawyers and judges. Only a minority of scholars understood the capacity of the legal field to contribute to social sciences. In several European faculties of law for instance, it was not until the 1960’s that the very first initiatives in interdisciplinary research in the field of law were inaugurated; an evolution in which the memory of the colonial history of European countries intervened and made jurists aware of the complexity of normative institutions and practices.

Socio-legal studies have grounded their hypothesis on several lines, one of which was the theory of legal pluralism. The success of the theory by the mid-20^th century among anthropologists of law was certainly due to a reaction of concerned scholars towards the dominant and monopolistic theory of legal centralism within Western universities and other academic institutions at the time. However the predominant influence of legal monism in the jurist’s milieu had been thwarted when researchers working on African and Asian societies noted the contradiction existing between imported centralised legal systems and the pluralist organization of the colonized societies. In Europe, especially in very unified political regimes, jurists were progressively compelled to admit the validity of empiric observations made abroad and they later emphasized the fact that their own societies were also governed by plural systems of law.

The development of theories on legal pluralism in recent years owes a lot to the involvement of researchers within the “post-colonial” legal field against the idea that law would be homogeneous and exclusively controlled by the state. As many sociologists and anthropologists have indeed shown since Emile Durkheim, law is before all characterised by its pluralist nature like any other expression of social life. However the dominant Western perceptions of law had a tendency to euphemizing the plural dimension of law in favour of a “doxa”, that of the pre-eminence of the State and particularly the nation-state. European jurists often posit in a rather peremptory manner that societies where the state is poorly structured are fundamentally plural, as opposed to those societies where the state is highly centralised. The codification process in Europe since the 17^th century was inspired by this approach, which was even reinforced when the codes spread out in the world. Its circulation worldwide happened under the hegemony of the nation-state that was formalised in European history with the Treaty of Westphalia (1648). The logic consequence of Max Weber’s observation that the power holder in a given society exercises a monopoly over “legitimate” violence is then that the nation-state also has a monopoly over “stating the law”.

Such a conception has for long been dominant among jurists. It was in fact based on colonial situations that European jurists have begun to recognise the need for a certain degree of pluralism that would call into question legal centralism. In Algeria for instance, French jurists have incorporated local “customs” along “Islamic law” and other local norms and judicial practice into the French legislation applied to local people. This way of codification was used for occulting the various local practices in order to reinforce the colonial arrangements of normative standards. At the end of the colonial period, new approaches of law raised and disqualified the evolutionist process of denying customs and communitarian legislation.

This renewed approach takes into account various contributions among which it is possible to mention some prominent theories which have deeply influenced this field of research. I’ll remind here Eugen Ehrlich and his “living law”, Leopold Pospisil and his “legal levels”, Sally Falk Moore and her “semi-autonomous social fields”, Jacques Vanderlinden and above all John Griffiths who insisted on the “ideological” dimension of the theory of legal centralization. All of them insisted on the existence of the multiple places where law is produced within a given society. On his part, Griffiths assumed that only the state would be able to produce a judicial system, which though not fully exclusive, would nevertheless be central and hegemonic.

Return to Palestine (15 May-Palestinians & the World Remember)

Palestinian Trade Union Coalition for BDS (PTUC-BDS) formed

Palestinian Trade Union Coalition for BDS (PTUC-BDS) formed at historic conference

In commemoration of the International Workers’ Day, the Palestinian trade union movement holds its first BDS conference and announces the formation of the:

Palestinian Trade Union Coalition for BDS (PTUC-BDS)

Statement of Principles & Call for International Trade Union Support for BDS

Occupied Palestine, 4 May 2011 – In commemoration of the first of May – a day of workers struggle and international solidarity – the first Palestinian trade union conference for boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel (BDS) was held in Ramallah on 30 April 2011, organized by almost the entirety of the Palestinian trade union movement, including federations, professional unions, and trade union blocks representing the entire spectrum of Palestinian political parties. The conference marked a historic event: the formation of the Palestinian Trade Union Coalition for BDS (PTUC-BDS) as the largest coalition of the Palestinian trade union movement. PTUC-BDS will provide the most representative Palestinian reference for international trade unions, promoting their support for and endorsement of the BDS Call, launched by Palestinian civil society in 2005, guided by the guidelines and principles adopted by the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee (BNC), of which PTUC-BDS has become a key component.

Link: http://www.bdsmovement.net/2011/ptuc-bds-formed-6912