No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Past, Present, and Future: A Reply to Heyd and Benbaji
Abstract
In this paper I respond to the replies of David Heyd and Yitzhak Benbaji to my paper ‘War and Self-Defense: Reflections on the War on Gaza’. Heyd’s relativizing of narrative overlooks the epistemic hierarchy among narratives and their important role in establishing facts, and his claim that Israel’s history is not colonialist in character fails because it is based on a misunderstanding of colonialism in general and settler colonialism in particular. Historically, I outline how Benbaji’s appeal to the legal status of the Mandate is problematic, because it ignores the illegitimacy of the legal regime behind it, such that accepting his argument would be to legitimize colonialism. Theoretically, I defend the view contrary to Benjabi, that instead of their being a moral tie between two equal sides, the Palestinians have always had fundamental legal and moral rights that the Zionist project violated ab initio and continues to violate.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.
This Article makes three moves. First it suggests and elaborates a distinction—already implicit in the literature—between what I will call the first and second order of arguments for justice (hereinafter FOAJ and SOAJ). In part, it is a distinction somewhat similar to that between just war and justice in war. SOAJ are akin to the rules governing justice in war or rules of engagement, while bracketing the reasons and causes of the conflict. FOAJ on the hand are those principles of justice and arguments that derive their power from the distribution of entitlements, rights and duties of the parties prior to the conflict they are supposed to adjudicate. FOAJ aim in many ways to restore the distribution of entitlements that existed on the eve of the conflict. Thus, all arguments for corrective or historical justice could be viewed as FOAJ.
The second move in the paper associates FOAJ with the Palestinians and SOAJ with Zionism first and Israel later on. The more the settler Zionist project became a reality, the more the Palestinian population felt a threat to their national project and exercised resistance, including violent resistance. The more Palestinians showed resistance, the more appealing and more relevant SOAJ of self-defense, security, and emergency.
The third move in the paper is to ask questions regarding the relation between FOAJ and SOAJ offer a critique of the distinction itself, and offers a critique of the way the distinction is being deployed in the case of Israel-Palestine. The Israeli claims for self-defense and security(SOAJ) are becoming so pervasive that they threaten to suspend the claims for historical justice forever (FOAJ), to the point that everything, even the regime that is crystallizing in front of our eyes as an Apartheid regime, is being justified as a temporal necessity. Israel deployment of SOAJ is done in bad faith.
The relationships, past and present, between Jews and the political left remain of abiding interest to both the academic community and the public. Jews and Leftist Politics contains new and insightful chapters from world-renowned scholars and considers such matters as the political implications of Judaism; the relationships of leftists and Jews; the histories of Jews on the left in Europe, the United States, and Israel; contemporary anti-Zionism; the associations between specific Jews and Communist parties; and the importance of gendered perspectives. It also contains fresh studies of canonical figures, including Gershom Scholem, Gustav Landauer, and Martin Buber, and examines the affiliations of Jews to prominent institutions, calling into question previous widely held assumptions. The volume is characterized by judicious appraisals made by respected authorities, and sheds considerable light on contentious themes.
This book discusses the justifications and limits of cultural nationalism from a liberal perspective. Chaim Gans presents a normative typology of nationalist ideologies, distinguishing between cultural liberal nationalism and statist liberal nationalism. Statist nationalisms argue that states have an interest in the cultural homogeneity of their citizenries. Cultural nationalisms argue that people have interests in adhering to their cultures (the adherence thesis) and in sustaining these cultures for generations (the historic thesis). Gans argues that freedom- and identity-based justifications for cultural nationalism common in literature can only support the adherence thesis, while the historical thesis could only be justified by the interest people have in the long-term endurance of their personal and group endeavors. The Limits of Nationalism examines demands often made in the name of cultural nationalism, such as claims for national self-determination, historical rights claims to territories and demands entailedby cultural particularism as opposed to cultural cosmopolitanism.
Is it possible to justify the existence of a Jewish state? This question, raised with increased frequency in recent years, is not just a theoretical one. Israel will endure as a Jewish state only if it can be defended, in both the physical and the moral sense. Of course, states may survive in the short term through sheer habit or the application of brute force, even when their legitimacy has been severely undermined. In the long run, however, only a state whose existence is justified by its citizens can hope to endure. The ability to provide a clear rationale for a Jewish state is, therefore, of vital importance to Israel’s long-term survival.
This paper reflects on the current war on Gaza in 2024 that followed the Hamas attack on October 7th 2023, reading the events is a wider historical context. The paper has three main parts. In the first part, the paper argues against the fragmentation of the question of Palestine historically and geographically, arguing instead for the importance of the overall context of the conflict. The second part considers the issue of Palestinian resistance. How can the Palestinians resist occupation? This part is mainly descriptive and indicates the impasse that the Palestinians found themselves in it after the Oslo accords in 1993. The third and last part moves to normative questions regarding the question of self-defense both on the part of the Palestinians and on the part of Israel and tries to outline the ways these arguments can develop.
This essay explores a view held by many critics of Israel, which posits that the October 7th massacre is a war crime that is part of a just war of independence, fought by Palestinians against Israel for over a century. Raef Zreik recently presented such a view in these pages. However, this essay argues that a proper understanding of traditional just war theory renders this view false. Even if Zionism is considered a colonial wrong, Palestinians did not have a just cause for war against Zionism until after the Six-Day War in 1967 and perhaps later. Furthermore, the essay contends that the massacre is not a part of this war, as Hamas lacks the moral power to represent the Palestinian people and to fight in their name.
Zionism aimed to establish a national home for Jews in Palestine. It involved settlement of Zionist Jews in the region, despite facing resistance from many local Arabs. Was the unilateral Zionist settlement morally permissible, or was it an instance of wrongful colonialism? Three objections will be discussed here and they all stem from the Kantian ethics of state-building and the minimalistic conception of statehood that follows from it. According to the ‘neutralist objection’, the establishment of a national home is not a just cause for a state building project. The ‘cosmopolitan’ objection argues that unilateral settlement is permissible only in extreme circumstances and that typically, it violates the locals’ right to self-rule. Finally, the imperialist objection argues that Zionist unilateralism exploited the wrongful colonial rule to which Arab Palestinians were subject. I will show that no Kantian objection to Zionism is decisive.
The article critically examines the arguments of Raef Zreik regarding the 2023 war in Gaza. It first analyzes the use of the concept of narrative in defending political causes and actions. It shows that due to their subjective nature two opposing narratives can be equally valid as long as they satisfy conditions of internal coherence and fidelity to the facts. It then shows that Zreik’s argument of ‘fragmentation’ is double edged and cannot be used for laying full responsibility on Israel. It then proceeds to criticize the claim that Zionism is a colonialist enterprise and shows that Zionism does not consist of all the basic characteristics of colonialism. Finally, it analyzes the common argument of self-defense as the only justification of starting a war and shows the limitation of such an argument in a theory of war, mainly because in most wars both sides have the right to defend themselves, including the allegedly unjust party. All that remains after showing the weakness of most arguments for this or that side to the conflict is the conclusion that compromise is the only way out of the deadlock, having the virtue of being pragmatic rather principled.
As one of the longest running disputes on the United Nations agenda, the conventional wisdom holds that the UN’s position offers the only normative basis of a just and lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians grounded in international law. Contrary to this position, this dissertation argues that there has been a continuing though vacillating gulf between the requirements of international law and the position of the UN, which has inevitably frustrated rather than facilitated the search for a just and lasting peace. To this end, the research examines a number of areas in which the UN has assumed a leading role in the question of Palestine since 1947. It critically explores the tensions that exist between the positions adopted by the Organization on the one hand, and various requirements of prevailing international law on the other. If the UN has failed to respect the normative framework of international law in its management of the question of Palestine, what forms has this taken? How long has it persisted? What are the implications, not only on the Palestinian people – whose contemporary leadership has long had faith in the UN as the forum within which their international legal entitlements must be pressed – but also on the Organization itself? By addressing these questions, the research critically interrogates the received wisdom regarding the UN’s fealty to the international rule of law, in favour of what more accurately might be described as an international rule by law. It demonstrates that through the actions of the Organization, Palestine and its people have been committed to a state of what the author calls International Legal Subalternity, according to which the promise of justice through international law has been repeatedly proffered under a cloak of political legitimacy furnished by the international community, but its realization interminably withheld.
This essay discusses the conflict in Israel-Palestine and its long-term evolution in the context of a settler colonial studies interpretive paradigm. It argues this analytical paradigm may offer valuable insights both in the interpretation of the historical evolution of the conflict and in the analysis of its current circumstances. The first section briefly outlines the possible benefits of such reframing; the second specifically targets exceptionalist claims.
Israel's academic community in recent years has been riven by sharp polemics between self-styled critical sociologists and those they refer to as establishment sociologists, with the controversy reverberating among students of Israeli society abroad. A similar debate has been taking place among historians, but here the distinction has been between New and Old Historians. In the early stages, it was possible not to take the sociologists' debate too seriously. It could be attributed to intergenerational rivalry within the academic community or a passing fad imported from abroad, primarily from the United States. Today it can no longer be ignored. Its very existence and substance threaten the foundations of Israeli social science and historiography. The dominance of one side or another is likely to have a far-reaching impact on teaching and research in Israeli departments of sociology, anthropology, and political science. The debate is being conducted on several levels, which may be variously described depending on the viewpoint of the advocate. For example, the discussion might be defined as revolving around the "scientificity" of the social sciences. In this case, the question is less whether the field's "science" can be consolidated than whether such intellectual effort is even worthwhile given that it is inevitably doomed to failure. From another perspective, the crux of the matter is the ideological identity of establishment sociology or the Old Historiography. In this case, the debate is between scholars who consider establishment academia to be tainted by the virus of Zionism and those who believe a Zionist identity is irrelevant to their research.
The book presents an analysis of the justice of Zionism. After a short historical introduction, the first two chapters discuss the justifiability of Zionism's defining principles: its ethnocultural nature and the principle calling for the Jewish return to the Land of Israel, which is mainly based on the historical rights argument and the defense of necessity. It is argued that if these principles are properly interpreted, they are compatible with liberal justice. Chapter 3 argues that the hegemonic interpretation of Jewish self-determination common in Israel is justified only circumstantially and is applicable only to the domains of demography and security. Chapter 4 discusses the implications of this limited hegemony for the arrangements between Israel and the Palestinian people outside Israel. Specifically, it addresses the implications of the justice of Zionism with regard to the Palestinian demand for the return of Palestinian refugees to Israel, and some arguments concerning the just borders between Israel and a future Palestinian state. Chapter 5 spells out the implications of the limited hegemony conception of Jewish self-determination for internal Israeli policies. It deals with issues related to the inequality between Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel. The concluding chapter sums up the main points of the book and explains how Israel's implementation of a just version of Zionist ideology today would affect not only Zionism's moral standing in the present and in the future but also the legitimacy of Israel's reliance on the justice of the Zionist past.
Covering topical issues concerning the nature of the Israeli state, this engaging work presents essays that combine a variety of comparative schemes, both internal to Jewish civilization and extending throughout the world, such as: Modern Jewish society, politics and culture. Historical consciousness in the twentieth century. Colonialism, anti-colonialism and postcolonial state-building. With its open-ended, comparative approach, Israel in History provides a useful means of correcting the biases found in so much scholarship on Israel, be it sympathetic or hostile. This book will appeal to scholars and students with research interests in many fields, including Israeli Studies, Middle East Studies, and Jewish Studies.
At the beginning of the 14th century, the great poet Dante published an imaginative proposal for world order. His experience had led him to believe that the multiplicity of cities, states, and kingdoms was the source of great discord and strife. The growth of nationalism and the internal political consolidation of nations intensified in the 15th century. The consolidation of power within the separate nation–states had intensified the quarrels among the European family of nations. Hobbes devoted passing attention to international relations. But his ideas endangered the entire Grotian vision of world order. Pufendorf’s De jure naturae et gentium makes a heroic effort to sustain the Grotian vision of universal peace against the threats implicit in changing conceptions of human nature. Pufendorf had an aversion to treaties promising peace and friendship since these duties were imposed by the higher principles of natural law.
This article, excerpted and adapted from the early chapters of a new book, emphasizes the systematic preparations that laid the ground for the expulsion of more than 750,000 Palestinians from what became Israel in 1948. While sketching the context and diplomatic and polit-ical developments of the period, the article highlights in particular a multi-year "Village Files" project (1940–47) involving the systematic compilation of maps and intelligence for each Arab village and the elaboration—under the direction of an inner "caucus" of fewer than a dozen men led by David Ben-Gurion—of a series of military plans cul-minating in Plan Dalet, according to which the 1948 war was fought. The article ends with a statement of one of the author's underlying goals in writing the book: to make the case for a paradigm of ethnic cleansing to replace the paradigm of war as the basis for the scholarly research of, and the public debate about, 1948. ON A COLD WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, 10 March 1948, a group of eleven men, vet-eran Zionist leaders together with young military Jewish officers, put the final touches on a plan for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. 1 That same evening, military orders were dispatched to units on the ground to prepare for the sys-tematic expulsion of Palestinians from vast areas of the country. 2 The orders came with a detailed description of the methods to be used to forcibly evict the people: large-scale intimidation; laying siege to and bombarding villages and population centers; setting fire to homes, properties, and goods; expelling residents; demolishing homes; and, finally, planting mines in the rubble to pre-vent the expelled inhabitants from returning. Each unit was issued its own list of villages and neighborhoods to target in keeping with the master plan. Code-named Plan D (Dalet in Hebrew), this was the fourth and final version of vaguer plans outlining the fate that was in store for the native population of Palestine. 3 The previous three plans had articulated only obscurely how the Zionist leadership intended to deal with the presence of so many Palestinians on the land the Jewish national movement wanted for itself. This fourth and ILAN PAPPÉ, an Israeli historian and professor of political science at Haifa University, is the author of a number of books, including The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1947–1951 (I.B. Tauris, 1994) and A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples (Cambridge University Press, 2004). The current article is extracted from early chapters of his latest book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oneworld Publications, Oxford, England, forthcoming in October 2006).
In this paper we examine the Israeli government's use of law to institutionalize the dispossession of Palestinian Arabs displaced by the 1948 war and trace the legal transformation of their land during the formative years of Israel's land regime (1948^60). This legal transformation facilitated the expropriation and reallocation of formerly Arab land to primarily Jewish hands and was therefore a central component of the legal reordering of space within Israel after 1948. Based on close examination of Israeli legislation, archival documents, Knesset proceedings, and other sources we delineate a 12-year legislative process consisting of four phases, each concluding with the enactment of major legislation. The process was led by senior and second-tier Israeli officials, and the result was the construction of a new Israeli legal geography. The culmination of the process was the integration of appropriated Arab land into the country's new system of Jewish-Israeli 'national land' known as 'Israel Lands'.
Settlement in Eretz Israel: A Colonialist Enterprise? Critical Scholarship and Historical Geography
- Ran Aronson
A Land Of Two Peoples
- Martin Buber
Zionism Reconsidered
- Hannah Arendt
The Two Wars of 1948
- Hillel Cohen
The Legal Transformation of Ethnic Geography: Israel Law and the Palestinian Landholder 1948-1967
- Sandy Kedar
Declaration of Independence
- Israel State Of
Palestine as a Question: Formation
- Raef Zreik
Is Zionism Colonialism? Introductory Remarks
- Yoav Gelber
Palestine as a Question: Justice
- Raef Zreik
The National Rights of the Jews.” In Israel’s Right as a Nation State in International Diplomacy
- Ruth Gavison
Are There Any Natural Rights?” In Theories of Rights
- H L A Hart