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ABSTRACT
What do people do when they are said to 'have rights', but the practice of human rights has been neutralized or indeed inverted by states, depriving them of meaningful protection and the power to actualize them? Beyond offering limited protection and presenting an uplifting vision of what a universal regime of justice might look like, can the human rights regime actually guide movements of fundamental change, or at least help create a critical political space? These are some of the questions raised in this article. Since Israeli impunity towards the human rights regime and the support it receives from governments constitute a major challenge to the efficacy of that regime, and since Israel has pioneered many of the assaults on the global human rights regime, the authors evaluate these questions from the point of view of an Israeli political/human rights organization one of its authors (Halper) heads: the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD). Given the weakness of human rights implementation, we ask whether grassroots civil society organizations like ICAHD may provide the basis for new global initiatives of rights enforcement from below, and new counter-hegemonic movements to put rights into practice and so help transform the twenty-first-century world-system.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
Jeff Halper is an Israeli anthropologist, a Co-Founder of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) and the Coordinator of the Wars Against the People project of The People Yes! Network (TPYN). Jeff received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee before moving to Israel in 1973. For more than a decade, he worked as a community worker for the Jerusalem municipality in the working-class Mizrahi (Middle Eastern) Jewish neighborhoods of Jerusalem. As the head of ICAHD, Jeff has been active in opposing the Israeli Occupation. He participated in the first (and successful) attempt of the Free Gaza Movement to break the Israeli siege by sailing into Gaza in 2008. He serves on the international support committee of the Bertrand Russell Tribunal on Palestine, and was nominated by the American Friends Service Committee for the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, together with the Palestinian intellectual and activist Ghassan Andoni. Among Jeff’s many academic and political writings are Between Redemption and Revival: The Jewish Yishuv in Jerusalem in the Nineteenth Century (Westview, 1991); Obstacles to Peace, a resource manual of articles and maps on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, published by ICAHD; An Israeli in Palestine (London: Pluto Press, 2008); and his latest book, War Amongst the People: Israel, the Palestinians and Global Pacification (Pluto Press/University of Chicago, 2015).
Tom Reifer specializes in world-systems analysis and the study of large-scale, long-term social change, and formerly worked as a Research Associate at Focus on the Global South, based in Asia and at the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems and Civilizations at SUNY Binghamton, and was the Associate Director of the Institute for Research on World-Systems at University of California, Riverside. He is currently a Professor of Sociology and Affiliated Faculty of Ethnic Studies at the University of San Diego, and an Associate Fellow at the Amsterdam-based Transnational Institute: An International Fellowship of Committed Scholar Activists. Reifer has published widely on issues of peace and justice, race, power, social movements, US foreign policy and the global system, is currently finishing a manuscript, Lawyers, Guns and Money: Wall Street & the American Century.
Notes
1 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego: Harvest Book, 1951), 296–97.
2 Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents & Citizens (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
3 See Emma Larking, Refugees and the Myth of Human Rights: Life Outside the Pale of the Law (England: Ashgate, 2014); Eyal Weizman, The Least of all Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza (New York: Verso, 2011); Orna Ben-Naftali, ed., International Humanitarian Law and International Human Rights Law: Pas de Deux (New York: Oxford, 2011).
4 Hannah Miller and Robin Redhead, ‘Beyond Rights-Based Approaches’, International Journal of Human Rights, 2017 (this issue).
5 Jane McAdam, ‘Editorial’, International Journal of Refugee Law 28, no. 1 (2016): 1–6.
6 Jean Allain, ‘The Jus Cogens Nature of Non-Refoulement’, International Journal of Refugee Law 13, no. 4 (2001): 533–58.
7 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego: Harvest Book, 1951), 267, 269.
8 UNRWA In figures, 2015, www.unrwa.org/sites/default/files/unrwa_in_figures_2015.pdf (accessed August 28, 2016).
9 Immanuel Wallerstein, European Universalism: The Rhetoric of Power (New York: New Press, 2006). See also Peter Gowan, ‘The Gulf War, Iraq, and Western Liberalism’, New Left Review 187 (1991): 29–71. See also Jeff Halper, War Against the People: Israel, the Palestinians and Global Pacification (London: Pluto, 2015).
10 See Tom Reifer, ‘Review of John Quigley, The Six-Day War and Israeli Self-Defense: Questioning the Legal Basis for Preventive War, Cambridge University Press, 2013, and William Roger Louis and Avi Shlaim, eds., The 1967 Arab-Israeli War: Origins & Consequences Cambridge University Press, 2012’, Journal of Palestine Studies: A Quarterly on Palestinian Affairs & the Arab-Israeli Conflict 42, no. 4 (2013): 95–97. See also Avi Raz, The Bride and the Dowry: Israel, Jordan and the Palestinians in the Aftermath of the June 1967 War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012); ‘The Generous Peace Offer That Was Never Offered: The Israeli Cabinet Resolution of June 19, 1967’, Diplomatic History 37, no. 1 (2013): 85–108; ‘Dodging the Peril of Peace: Israel and the Arabs in the Aftermath of the June 1967 War’, in The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Middle-Eastern and North African History, ed. Amal Ghazai and Jens Hanssen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). See also Tom Farer, Confronting Global Terrorism and American Neo-Conservatism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). See also Michael Mandel, How America Gets Away With Murder: Illegal Wars, Collateral Damage and Crimes Against Humanity (London: Pluto Press, 2004). See also Jerome Slater, ‘Just War Moral Philosophy and the 2008–09 Israeli Campaign in Gaza’, International Security 37, no. 2 (2012): 44–80.
11 International Court of Justice (ICJ), ‘Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory’, July 9, 2004, www.icj-cij.org/docket/index.php?pr=71&code=mwp&p1=3&p2=4&p3=6
12 ICRC, ‘Occupation and International Humanitarian Law: Questions and Answers’, April 8, 2004, www.icrc.org/eng/resources/documents/misc/634kfc.htm
13 ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross), ‘General Problems in Implementing the Fourth Geneva Convention’, October 27, 1998, https://www.icrc.org/eng/resources/documents/statement/57jph6.htm
14 B’tselem, ‘Statistics’, 2016, www.btselem.org/statistics/fatalities/before-cast-lead/by-date-of-event/wb-gaza/palestinians-killed-during-the-course-of-a-targeted-killing/by-month; http://www.btselem.org/statistics (accessed August 28, 2016).
15 B’tselem, ‘Palestinians Killed During the Course of a Targeted Killing in the Occupied Territories [before and after] Operation Cast Lead’, 2016, www.btselem.org/statistics/fatalities/after-cast-lead/by-date-of-death/wb-gaza/palestinians-killed-during-the-course-of-a-targeted-killing/by-month
16 ‘Israeli Forces Arrested 800,000 Palestinians Since 1967’, Abrar Online, December 12, 2012, http://abraronline.net/english/index.php/2012/12/12/israeli-forces-arrested-800000-palestinians-since-1967/
17 DCI (Defence for Children International) Palestine, ‘Military Detention’, 2015, http://www.dci-palestine.org/issues_military_detention
18 R. Segel, D. Tartakover and E. Weizman, A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture (London: Verso, 2003); B’tselem, ‘Statistics on Settlements and Settler Population’, 2015, http://www.btselem.org/settlements/statistics (accessed April 2, 2017).
19 ICJ, ‘Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall’.
20 OCHA, ‘Fragmented Lives: Humanitarian Overview 2014’, March 26, 2015, http://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/fragmented-lives-humanitarian-overview-2014-enarhe
21 Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), 2016, http://icahd.org/faqs-home-demolitions; Jeff Halper, An Israeli in Palestine: Resisting Dispossession, Redeeming Israel (London: Pluto, 2010), 190–93.
22 ACRI (Association for Civil Rights in Israel), ‘One Rule, Two Legal Systems: Israel's Regime of Laws in the West Bank’, October 2014, www.acri.org.il/en/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Two-Systems-of-Law-English-FINAL.pdf
23 See Yuval Ginbar, Why Not Torture Terrorists? (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). See David Luban, Torture, Power, and Law (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
24 ICJ, ‘Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall’.
25 Jerusalem Post Up Front magazine, April 15, 2005, 34.
26 Birzeit University Institute of Law, Advocating for Palestinian Rights in Conformity with International Law: Guidelines (Ramallah: Birzeit University, 2012).
27 Ruth Gavison, ‘The Right of Jews to Statehood’, in Israel at 60: Confronting the Rising Challenge to Its Historical and Legal Rights (Jerusalem: Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs), 25–31. See also Eugene Rogan and Avi Shlaim, eds., The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
28 Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World, updated and expanded ed. (London: Penguin, 2014).
29 Shlomo Gazit, Trapped Fools: Thirty Years of Israeli Policy in the Territories (London: Frank Cass, 2003), 4; David Kretzmer, The Occupation of Justice: The Supreme Court of Israel and the Occupied Territories (Albany: State University of New York, 2002), 32–33.
30 Israel Law Resource Center, ‘Military Orders’, 2007, http://www.israellawresourcecenter.org/israelmilitaryorders/israelimilitaryorders.htm
31 Halper, An Israeli in Palestine, 36–59.
32 Mark Duffield, Global Governance and the New Wars: The Merging of Development and Security (London: Zed Books, 2001); Development, Security and Unending War: Governing the World of Peoples (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007).
33 The People Yes! Network website, 2016, www.thepeopleyesnetwork.org
34 See also Wallerstein, European Universalism.
35 Weizman, The Least of all Possible Evils. See also Sara Roy, The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-Development, 3rd ed. (Washington DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, USA, 2016). See also Ben-Naftali, International Humanitarian Law and International Human Rights Law.
36 Weizman, The Least of all Possible Evils, 227, quoting Hannah Arendt, Responsibility & Judgment (New York: Schocken Books), 35–37. See also Daniel Ellsberg, ‘How Evil Gets Done’, unpublished paper, 1990.
37 Raymond Williams, ‘Means of Communication as Means of Production’, in Problems in Materialism & Culture (New York: Verso, 1980), 50–66; Manuel Castells, Communication Power, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
38 James Der Derian, Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2009).
39 Manuel Castells, Networks of Outrage & Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age, 2nd ed. (New York: Polity, 2015).
40 Giovanni Arrighi, Terence Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein, ‘1989, The Continuation of 1968’, Review: A Journal of the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems, & Civilizaitions 15, no. 2 (1992): 236–37, quoted in Tom Reifer, ‘The “Arab 1848”: Reflections on US Policy and the Power of Nonviolence’, Transnational Institute: An International Fellowship of Committed Scholar-Activists, February 23, 2011, www.tni.org/files/Arab1848_0.pdf. See also Giovanni Arrighi, Terence Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein, Antisystemic Movements (New York: Verso, 1989).