Human rights in Palestine: from self-determination to governance

ABSTRACT

This article traces a number of historical junctions to show the limited normative and political purchase of human rights in addressing Palestinian demands for sovereignty and self-determination. The article shows how Israel speaks about and addresses itself to normalised settler colonial conditions that constitutively exclude Palestinians. Under these conditions, law and rights are wielded as technologies of rules that presuppose and articulate hierarchies of standings and claims that preclude Palestinian sovereignty and self-determination. Even though, historically, Palestinians have attempted different methods to engage international law and human rights, they repeatedly came up against a geopolitical structure of domination nested in a normative order that either relegates them figuratively outside its border or includes them only as an object of governance.

KEYWORDS:

• Self-determination
• governance
• anticolonialism
• Palestinians
• settler colonialism
• human rights

View correction statement:

Correction

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Jessica Whyte for her astute feedback and comments on earlier drafts of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article was originally published with errors, which have now been corrected in the online version. Please see Correction (http://doi.org/10.1080/1323238X.2023.2320174)

Notes

1 International Commission of Jurists and Law in the Service of Man, Torture and Intimidation in the West Bank: The Case of Al-Fara’a Prison (Al Haq, Ramallah, 1985) <https://www.alhaq.org/cached_uploads/download/alhaq_files/publications/Torture_and_Intimidation_in_the_West_Bank.pdf> accessed 15 March 2023.

2 Commission on Human Rights, ‘Statement by Ambassador Ephraim Dowek on the Report of Law in the Service of Men’, 41st session, February 1985, al-Haq archives cited in Lynn Welchman, Al-Haq: A Global History of the First Palestinian Human Rights Organization (Oakland, University of California Press 2021) 247.

3 Yuval Abraham, Oren Ziv and Meron Rapoport, ‘Secret Israeli Document Offers No Proof to Justify Terror Label for Palestinian Groups’ (The Intercept, 4 November 2021) <https://theintercept.com/2021/11/04/secret-israel-dossier-palestinian-rights-terrorist/> accessed 11 May 2023.

4 See ByMilena A, ‘#StandWithThe6’ Palestinian Civil Society <https://palcivilsociety.com/post/arbitrary-travel-bans-throttle-palestinian-civil-society-directors> accessed 1 May 2023.

5 Raja Shehadeh, ‘By Banning Six Palestinian NGOs, Israel has Entered A New Era of Impunity’ (The Guardian, 29 October 2021) <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/28/ngo-israel-human-rights-al-haq-palestinians> accessed 12 December 2022.

6 Ibid.

7 The United Nations General Assembly recognised the representative standing of the PLO in Resolution 3210 (1974) and Resolution 3236 (1974).

8 Lori Allen, The Rise and Fall of Human Rights: Cynicism and Politics in Occupied Palestine (Stanford University Press 2013) 51.

9 Golda Meir, ‘Interview with Frank Giles: Who can blame Israel’ (Sunday Times, 15 June 1969) 12.

10 David Ben Gurion quoted in Meron Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948 (University of California Press 2000) 14.

11 Ibid.

12 Yasser Arafat, ‘Question of Palestine/Arafat Statement’ (United Nations, 13 November 1974) <https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-187769/> accessed 30 March 2023.

13 Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Harvard University Press 2010) 1.

14 Allen (n 8) 42.

15 Raja Shehadeh, The Third Way: A Journal of Life in the West Bank (Quartet 1982) 57.

16 Raja Shehadeh, Strangers in the House: Coming of Age in Occupied Palestine (Profiles Books 2009) 182.

17 Ralph Wilde, ‘Using the Master’s Tools to Dismantle the Master’s House: International Law and Palestinian Liberation’ in The Palestinian Yearbook of International Law (Brill 2019-2020) 5.

18 Welchman (n 2) 9.

19 Ibid 75.

20 Conceptually, the universal human of human rights is endowed with qualifying attributes, like autonomy and the capacity for reason, that a vast number of non-Europeans, particularly indigenous peoples, are assumed to be lacking. Armed with these attributes, the universal human is licensed to establish his/her sovereign rights by dispossession and expropriation. The disavowal of self-determination and aversion to resistance is most apparent in the drafting of the UDHR and the subsequent anti-colonial attempts to challenge the imperial structures of domination.

21 On settler colonialism in the Palestinian context see, eg, Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, ‘Citizenship as Accumulation by Dispossession: The Paradox of Settler Colonial Citizenship’ (2022) 40(2) Sociological Theory 1511–178.

22 Duncan Bell, Reordering the World: Essays on Liberalism and Empire (Princeton University Press 2016) 4.

23 Lori Allen, A History of False Hopes: Investigative Commissions in Palestine (Stanford University Press 2021) 13.

24 On juridical erasure see Noura Erakat, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine (Stanford University Press 2019).

25 The term ‘Nakba’ (‘Catastrophe’ in Arabic) refers to the dispossession and forced displacement of 80% of the Palestinian population during the 1948 War.

26 Rosemary Sayigh, Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries (Zed Books 1979) 109.

27 Azmi Bishara, ‘Zionism and Equal Citizenship: Essential and Incidental Citizenship in the Jewish State’ in Nadim Rouhana (ed), Israel and its Palestinian Citizens: Ethnic Privileges in the Jewish State (Cambridge University Press 2017) 140.

28 Basic Law, Israel the Nation State of the Jewish People 2018 (Israel), s.1. See translation <https://www.adalah.org/uploads/uploads/Basic_Law_Israel_as_the_Nation_State_of_the_Jewish_People_ENG_TRANSLATION_25072018.pdf> accessed 28 November 2023.

29 Bell (n 22) 40.

30 Natasha Wheatley, ‘New Subjects in International Law and Order’ in Glenda Sluga and Patricia Clavin (eds), Internationalism: A Twentieth Century History (Cambridge University Press 2017) 282.

31 Edward Said, ‘The Palestinian Experience’ in Moustafa Bayoumi and Andrew Rubin (eds), The Edward Said Reader (Granta 2001) 33.

32 Ibid 16.

33 Ibid 20.

34 Esmail Nashif, ‘The Palestinian’s Death’ in Ahlam Shibli: Phantom Home. Exh. cat. Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Jeu de Paume, Paris, and Museu de Arte Contempora^nea de Serralves, Porto (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag 2013) 178.

35 The Palestinian National Charter: Resolutions of the Palestinian National Council (1–17 July 1968) art 3; Avolan Project <https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/plocov.asp#:~:text=The%20Palestinian%20Arab%20people%20possess,their%20own%20accord%20and%20will> accessed 4 September 2023.

36 Susan Marks, ‘Self-determination and People’s Rights’ (1991-1992) 2 King’s College London Journal 81.

37 Ibid.

38 George Abi Saab, ‘The Newly Independent States and the Rules of International Law: An Outline’ (1962) 8(2) Howard Law Journal 97–98.

39 This triumphant project is largely Anglophone however Israel is the exception that proves the rule in understanding itself like the USA ‘as a nation under law’ Paul W Kahn, ‘Speaking Law to Power: Popular Sovereignty, Human Rights, and the New International Order’ (2000) 1(1) Chicago Journal of International Law 2.

40 Ibid 5.

41 Robert Meister, After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights (Columbia University Press 2010) 264.

42 Edward W Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Harvard University Press 2003) xxxiv.

43 See for example Edward W. Said, ‘Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims’ (1979) 1 Social Text 7–58.

44 See ‘What Do Human Rights Do? An Anthropological Enquiry’ (2000) 4(4) Theory & Event <https://muse.jhu.edu/article/32601> accessed 15 April 2023.

45 Peter Hallward, ‘Towards a Pre-History of National Liberation Struggle’ in Rashmi Varma and Sharae Deckard Marxism (eds), Postcolonial Theory, and the Future of Critique: Critical Engagements with Benita Parry (Routledge 2018) 122.

46 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (A Harvest Books 1973) 299.

47 Bell (n 22) 39.

48 Lisa Ford, Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People (Harvard University Press 2010) 205.

49 Antony Anghie, ‘The Evolution of International Law: Colonial and Postcolonial Realities’ (2006) 27(5) Third World Quarterly 742.

50 ‘Universal Declaration of Human Rights’, General Assembly Resolution Res 217 A(III), adopted 10 December 1948 (UDHR).

51 Emma Stone Mackinnon, ‘Declaration as Disavowal: The Politics of Race and Empire in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ (2019) 47(1) Political Theory 57–81.

52 UDHR (n 50).

53 Samera Esmeir, ‘In the Land of the International’ (2016) 48(2) International Journal of Middle East Studies 362.

54 Ibid.

55 Mackinnon (n 51) 57.

56 Ibid 74.

57 Ibid 73.

58 Ibid 73.

59 Ibid 72.

60 See Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (London, Verso 2013); Joseph Massad, ‘Against Self-Determination’ (2018) 9(2) Humanity Journal 161–191.

61 Bell (n 22) 43.

62 Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (University of Chicago Press 1999) 47–8.

63 Adom Getachew, Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton University Press 2019) 29.

64 Ibid, 15.

65 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (adopted 16 December 1966, entered into force 23 March 1976) 999 UNTS 171 (ICCPR).

66 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (adopted 16 December 1966, entered into force 3 January 1976) 993 UNTS 3 (ICESCR).

67 Arafat (n 12).

68 Ibid.

69 Arendt (n 46) 296.

70 Hellen M Kinsella, The Image Before the Weapon: A Critical History of the Distinction between Combatant and Civilian (Cornell University Press 2011) 137.

71 Nassar Abourahme, ‘Revolution after Revolution: The Commune as Line of Flight in Palestinian Anticolonialism’ (2021) 4(3) Critical Times 445.

72 Lori Allen and Tobias Kelly ‘Interview with Lori Allen’ (Humanity Journal, 19 April 2021) <http://humanityjournal.org/blog/interview-with-lori-allen/> accessed 21 March 2023.

73 Rania Jawad, ‘Aren’t We Human? Normalising Palestinian Performances’ (2014) 22(1) The Arab Studies Journal 29.

74 Charles Shammas quoted in Welchman (n 2) 66.

75 Mackinnon (n 51) 63.

76 Wilde (n 17) 61.

77 Ibid 59.

78 On the Carter Administration championing of human rights see Barbara Keys, Reclaiming American Virtue: The Human Rights Revolution of the 1970s (Harvard University Press 2014).

79 A 1977 address by Secretary of State Cyrus Vance cited in Victor V Nemchenok, ‘“These People Have an Irrevocable to Self-Governance”: The United States Policy and the Palestinian Question, 1977-1979’ (2009) 20(4) Diplomacy and Statecraft 597.

80 Jimmy Carter, Keeping the Faith: Memoirs of a President (Bantam Books 1982) 276.

81 Seth Anziska, Preventing Palestine: A Political History from Camp David to Oslo (Princeton University Press 2018) 5.

82 Edward Said, ‘Permission to Narrate’ (1984) 13(3) Journal of Palestine Studies 29.

83 In the application of Pierre Bourdieu, to think of human rights as constituting a field, see Nicolas Guilhot, The Democracy Makers: Human Rights and the Politics of Global order (Columbia University Press 2005) 23.

84 Allen (n 8) 36.

85 Lisa Hajjar, Courting Conflict: The Israeli Military Court System in the West Bank and Gaza (University of California Press 2005) 158.

86 Ibid 46.

87 Brian Cuddy and Victor Kattan, ‘The Transformation of International Law and War between the Middle East and Vietnam’ in Brian Cuddy and Victor Kattan (eds), Making Endless War: The Vietnam and Arab-Israeli Conflicts in the History of International Law (University of Michigan Press 2023) 20.

88 Lisa Hajjar, ‘From the Fight for Legal Rights to the Promotion of Human Rights: Israeli and Palestinian Cause Lawyers in the Trenches of Globalization’ in Austin Sarat and Stuart Scheingold (eds), Cause Lawyering and the State in a Global Era (Oxford University Press 2001) 70.

89 Michelle Burgis-Kasthala, ‘States of Failure? Ungovernance and the Project of State-building in Palestine under the Oslo Regime’ (2020) 11(3) Transnational Legal Theory 401–2.

90 Mouin Rabbani, ‘Palestinian Human Rights Activism under Israeli Occupation: The Case of Al-Haq’ (1994) 16(2) Arab Studies Quarterly 29.

91 B’Tselem, ‘A regime of Jewish Supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid’ (12 January 2021) <https://www.btselem.org/publications/fulltext/202101_this_is_apartheid> accessed 1 December 2023; Human Rights Watch, ‘A Threshold Crossed Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution’ (27 April 2021) < https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution> accessed 1 December 2023; Amnesty International, ‘Israel’s Apartheid Against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime Against Humanity’ (1 February 2022) <https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde15/5141/2022/en/> accessed 1 December 2023.

92 Amnesty International (n 91) 38.

93 Wilde (n 17) 15–6.

94 Michael Sfard, The Wall and the Gate: Israel, Palestine and the Legal Battle for Human Rights (Metropolitan Books 2018) 392.

95 Rabbani (n 90) 29.

96 Lori Allen, A History of False Hopes: Investigative Commissions in Palestine (Stanford University Press 2021) 2.

97 Marks (n 36) 81.

98 Nadim Khoury, ‘Israel and Palestinian Peoplehood: The Power to Eliminate and the Power to Constitute’ (2021) 117(2) Confluences Méditerranée 117.

99 Wilde (n 17) 17.

100 Mahmoud Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton University Press 1996) 18.

101 Orna Ben-Naftali, ‘Zone’ in Ben-Naftali and others, The ABC of the OPT: A Legal Lexicon of the Israeli Control over the Occupied Palestinian Territory (Cambridge University Press, 2019) 520–1.

102 Tobias Kelly, Law, Violence and Sovereignty Among West Bank Palestinians (Cambridge University Press 2006) 13.

103 Mamdani (n 100) 18.

104 Kelly (n 102) 6.

105 Ibid 1.

106 Ibid 181.

107 Ibid 175.

108 Edward Said, ‘Reflection on Twenty Years of Palestinian History’ (1991) 20(4) Journal of Palestine Studies 9.

109 ‘Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples’, General Assembly Resolution 1514 (XV), adopted 14 December 1960, A/RES/1514/XV <https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/declaration-granting-independence-colonial-countries-and-peoples> accessed 23 November 2023.

110 Getachew (n 63) 79.

111 Amilcar Cabral, quoted in ibid 73.

112 Julia Peteet, ‘The Work of Comparison: Israel/Palestine and Apartheid’ (2016) 89(1) Anthropological Quarterly 251.

113 Mahmood Mamdani, Neither Settler or Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities (Harvard University Press 2020) 65.

114 Yael Berda, Living Emergency: Israel's Permit Regime in the Occupied West Bank (Stanford University Press, 2018) 128.

115 Orna Ben-Naftali, ‘Violence’ in Ben-Naftali et al, The ABC of the OPT: A Legal Lexicon of the Israeli Control over the Occupied Palestinian Territory (Cambridge University Press, 2019) 431–447.

116 Burgis-Kasthala (n 89) 401.

117 Yitzak Rabin quoted in Julia Peteet, ‘The Work of Comparison: Israel/Palestine and Apartheid’ (2016) 89(1) Anthropological Quarterly 251.

118 Riccardo Bocco, ‘UNRWA and the Palestinian Refugees: A History within History’ (2009) 23(2-3) Refugee Survey Quarterly 241.

119 Zinaida Miller, ‘Perils of Parity: Palestine's Permanent Transition,’ (2014) 47(2) Cornell International Law Journal 387.

120 Tariq Da’na, ‘Disconnecting Civil Society from Its Historical Extension: NGOs and Neoliberalism in Palestine’ in Saul Takahashi, (ed), Human Rights, Human Security, National Security: The Intersection (Praeger 2014) 131.

121 Burgis-Kasthala (n 89) 401.

122 Hagar Kotef and Merav Amir, ‘Between Imaginary Lines: Violence and its Justification at the Military Checkpoints in Occupied Palestine’ (2011) 28 Theory, Culture & Society 55, 64 quoted in Burgis-Kasthala (n 89) 404.

123 Edward Said, ‘People’s Rights and Literature’ (1993) 13 Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 182.

124 Ibid 183.

125 Getachew (n 63) 28.

126 Edward Said, Out of Place (Granta Books 1999).

127 Ilana Feldman, Life Lived in Relief: Humanitarian Predicaments and Palestinian Refugee Politics (University of California Press 2018) 216.

128 Getachew (n 63) 180.

129 Raja Khalidi and Sobhi Samour, ‘Neoliberalism as Liberation: The Statehood Program and the Making of the Palestinian National Movement’ (2011) 40(2) Journal of Palestine Studies 12.

130 Final Communiqué of the Afro-Asian Bandung Conference, 24 April 1955 <https://www.cvce.eu/obj/%20nal_communique_of_the_asian_african_conference_of%20_bandung_24_april_1955-en-676237bd-72f7-471f-949a-88b6ae513585.html> accessed May 10 2023.

131 Keith Dayton 2009 keynote address at the Washington Institute quoted in Jawad (n 73) 42.

132 Al-Haq, Israeli Apartheid: Tool of Settler Colonial Colonialism (2022) 22 <https://www.alhaq.org/cached_uploads/download/2022/12/22/israeli-apartheid-web-final-1-page-view-1671712165.pdf> accessed May 11 2023.

133 Ibid 42.

134 Ibid 22.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ihab Shalbak

Ihab Shalbak is Lecturer in Human Rights and Social Justice, Discipline of Sociology and Criminology, at the University of Sydney.