This is actually a really important piece, since it makes explicit what a lot of Israel's defenders have been pointing out for years - that antizionists are subjecting it to a bespoke legal regime that starts with a conclusion (whatever it is you're doing is wrong) and works backwards from there
Columbia Law Review took the whole site down instead of making this law review article available.
PDF version available here:
drive.google.com/file/d/1vC1-...
1. Add alt text.
2. That’s a fundamental misunderstanding of what’s being said. It’s saying that the activities of Israel go beyond current legal frameworks.
3. The argument is that the combination of occupation, apartheid, and genocide is systemic and should be viewed as such in a collective way.
1 Would've from my computer - on my phone which won't let me copy paste the relevant text from pdf
2 it's not a misunderstanding; I've read the piece and the core argument is "none of the existing doctrines really applies perfectly, we need a new legal concept" (along with "and yes, end Israel")
It also leans real hard into "zionism is racism" which - again, as a person who cares about Israel - I appreciate.
Mask off is much much easier to deal with than mask on
Jews started buying back their ancestral homelands in the 1870s, as soon as the cash-strapped imperial Caliphate realized it could make jiyza tax money from Jewish landowners.
Arab settlers increased their migration to the Levant once Jews improved it:
As RFK Sr. wrote in 1948, over 500,000 Arabs came to settle in Jewish Palestine between 1932 and 1944 alone because Jews had improved the area so much.
These Arabs would be used as pawns in various attempted land grabs by Syria and (as Zuheir Mohsen explained to the Dutch paper Trouw) Jordan:
It’s not “bespoke” to say there’s a gap in the law that can and should be addressed. That’s like saying at one point apartheid and genocide were bespoke concepts, sure if you want to stretch the definition of bespoke to its absolute limits. It’s pretty clear what the argument is in the text.
If a new type of crime is being invented, the law has to catch up.
At least I can't find any other example of a whole peoples being flat out denied citizenship (neither two- nor one-state solution) and kept in a stateless limbo for decades.
Yeah guys how incongruous would you like your homeland? How many checkpoints guarded by racist, jackbooted thugs would you choose? More or less than 700-800….
BTW, it's quite funny that when ppl make comparisons btw IL-PA conflict and previous historical situations (eg Apartheid in RSA or colonisation of N America), defenders of IL often say "no, you can't, it's a special case".
Well, special cases sometimes require special legislation!
1. If “end Israel” is the natural conclusion then it is the natural conclusion. Dispute the premises or the logic but don’t start from distaste for the conclusion
2. What do you mean by “end Israel” in this context? Feel free to offer actual quotes to support your view that this is a conclusion
I’ve read most of the way through the piece and I’m really glad it’s published but I do agree with the bespokeness criticism. No facts on earth ever fit perfectly into a neat legal box but abandoning the existing terms seems like a hand-throwing-up at people’s incessant arguing about the particulars
Like yes if you define a new category of thing that is the act of doing the thing Israel is doing then the thing Israel is doing is in that category. But a legal regime meant to describe one singular thing goes around a big point of law: to guide our future behavior and understanding
And largely I think it *is* unnecessary to carve out this particularized set of experiential circumstances. The existing categories are not inadequate. Common language and understanding between historical precedents of expulsion, ethnic cleansing, displacement, and massacres do build positive power
In other ways I do think the piece also leans a little heavy into relying on Pappe, Shlaim, Said, and Khalidi, but I am also guilty of latching on to influential sources with a lot of writing that supports my point instead of spending more time digging so I can’t be too mad about this.
I agree. My point isn’t that it is innovative or new. My point is that it’s a category drawn specifically to hew to past events in a singular specific circumstance. It doesn’t seem like the author even disputes that they’re doing this. That’s their project.
“Recognition of Nakba as a universal concept, one acknowledged and prohibited by international norms, is therefore the first step toward a just and lasting solution in Palestine.”?
I have to believe that’s what you’re referencing and I don’t think it does do that. It’s drawn to fit a specific past
Placing this here so it doesn’t get lost in the back & forth above, also because I’m not really interested in summoning responses from apologists. But bear with me, because I think there are complex problems in some of the dismissals above:
1/x Existing law are grounded in histories of imperialism, settler colonialism, nation-building, etc. While laws present as a universalizing totality, they don’t recognize othernesses that call into question their own founding violence.
2/x Eg, neither Canadian nor international law recognize the day-to-day colonial violences that occur within the territory of Canada. To recognize that violence is to call into question the very founding of Canada, the logic and legality of the Canadian settler-state.
3/x Likewise, international law, while created to mitigate some of the intrinsic violences that accompanied the emergence of the nation-state, is still grounded in the logic and orientation of the nation-state and does not really recognize violences that call into…
4/x question nation-states themselves, of which Israel is both and at the same time exemplary and exceptional (this is also tied to American exceptionalism).
