Human rights litigation and the transition from policing to warfare: the case of Israel and its governance of the West Bank and Gaza in the Al-Aqsa Intifada

ABSTRACT

This article explores the relationship between human rights NGOs and state/military policies in the case of Israeli organisations operating in the West Bank and Gaza. The article focuses on a period of fundamental change in Israel's management of the West Bank and Gaza unfolding alongside the Al-Aqsa Intifada, a transition from a framework of policing to a framework informed by the logic of war. It argues that NGO litigation, in this case, aided broader legal/political shifts that drifted away from a human rights agenda. Based on the Israeli/Palestinian case, the article aims to contribute to scholarship critically reflecting on human rights NGOs’ position vis-à-vis the state and broad geo-political processes of change.

KEYWORDS:

• Human rights NGOs
• policing
• IHL
• warfare
• Israel/Palestine

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Also known as the “Sharm El-Sheikh Fact-Finding Committee,” an American commission chaired by former US Senator George Mitchell, seeking to inquire the failure of the 2000 Camp David Summit and violence erupting in September that same year.

2. Assaf Meydani's (2011) survey of petitions submitted to the High Court of Justice indicates a trend of increase in the number of appeals to court, from 289 petitions in 2000 to 384 in 2001 and 414 in 2002. The two ministers most commonly addressed in these appeals were the Minister of Interior and the Minister of Defense, the two ministers dealing with petitions relating to the West Bank and Gaza.

3. In recent years researchers increasingly offer analyses of Israel as a settler colonial project. See, for example, Robinson (2013), Rouhana and Sabbagh-Khoury (2015), Shalhoub-Kevorkian (2014), Veracini (2015) and Weizman (2017); see Masri's (2017) work for a comprehensive discussion on the relevance of the settler-colonial framework to Israeli constitutional law.