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Lisa Hajjar
The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza
Eyal Weizman, The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza. New York: Verso, 2011. [This review was originally published in the most recent issue of Arab Studies Journal. For more information on the issue, or to subscribe to ASJ, click here.] In that historical moment after the September 11 terrorist attacks, American politicians and pundits launched a debate about whether torture should be employed to combat terror. Those who endorsed the ...
Keep Reading »Lawfare and Armed Conflict: Comparing Israeli and US Targeted Killing Policies and Challenges against Them
![[Lisa Hajjar. Image from below video]](/content_images/3/sm_lisakellan.png "[Lisa Hajjar. Image from below video]")
In this public lecture, I engage the concept of lawfare (an amalgamation of “law” and “warfare”) to compare Israeli and US twenty-first century armed conflicts. Specifically, I focus on both states’ targeted killing policies and the legal rationales that have been advanced to try to project their lawfulness, and legal challenges to these policies in order to tell a larger story about the relationship between contemporary practices of law and war. In order to tell this story, ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Lisa Hajjar, Torture: A Sociology of Violence and Human Rights
Lisa Hajjar, Torture: A Sociology of Violence and Human Rights. New York: Routledge, 2012 [“Framing Twenty-First Century Social Issues” series]. Jadaliyya (J): What inspired you to write this book? Lisa Hajjar (LH): Torture is my great and terrible obsession. I think, read, write, and talk about torture all the time, as anyone who knows me can attest. I was inspired to write this book in order to share my knowledge, my passion, and—to be blunt—my anger about torture with ...
Keep Reading »Is Gaza Still Occupied and Why Does It Matter?
![[Entering Gaza at the Erez Checkpoint. Image by Olly Lambert.]](/content_images/3/sm_3909821917_51b14f9bb2_z.jpg "[Entering Gaza at the Erez Checkpoint. Image by Olly Lambert.]")
Yes, the Gaza Strip is still occupied. Despite official Israeli remonstrations that the unilateral disengagement of 2005, which removed Israeli military bases and Jewish settlers, transformed Gaza into “no longer occupied territory,” neither those changes nor anything that has transpired since has ended the occupation. “Occupation” is a legal designation of an international nature. Israel’s occupation of Gaza continues to the present day because (a) Israel continues to ...
Keep Reading »Anatomy of the US Targeted Killing Policy
![[RQ-1 Predator aircraft at Tallil Air Base, Iraq. Image from Flickr.]](/content_images/3/sm_flickr-3195196177-original.jpg "[RQ-1 Predator aircraft at Tallil Air Base, Iraq. Image from Flickr.]")
As President Barack Obama geared up for the 2012 campaign, he and his administration were eager to capitalize on their most bipartisan “victory” -- the targeted killing of Osama bin Laden on 2 May 2011. With the one-year anniversary of bin Laden’s death approaching, top officials took to podiums to deliver remarks that, while differing in some particulars, were consistent in their message: The targeted killing policy is legal, it is necessary to keep Americans ...
Keep Reading »CIA: KUBARK's Very Long Shadow
![[Lobby seal from the original CIA building. Image from Wikimedia Commons.]](/content_images/3/sm_Cia-lobby-seal.jpg "[Lobby seal from the original CIA building. Image from Wikimedia Commons.]")
A 2011 FBI "primer" on overseas interrogations, which became public on August 2, 2012, as a result of Freedom of Information Act action taken by the American Civil Liberties Union, repeatedly cites the Central Intelligence Agency's 1963 KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation. KUBARK was the code name the CIA used for itself. The FBI briefing also cites the CIA's 1983 Human Resource Exploitation Manual (Honduras version) which was compiled by sections of KUBARK ...
Keep Reading »Litigating the New Frontier in the War on Terror
![[Model drone in front of the White House. Image from Brendan Smialowski / AFP]](/content_images/3/sm_whitehousedroneschmelz.jpg "[Model drone in front of the White House. Image from Brendan Smialowski / AFP]")
In the landscape of the global “war on terror,” the Center for Constitutional Rights and the American Civil Liberties Union are veteran pioneers. CCR hacked into the “legal black hole” of Guantánamo by pursuing the first challenge, back in February 2002, to the denial of habeas corpus for people detained there incommunicado; they prevailed at the Supreme Court in 2004. The ACLU tunneled into the glacier of governmental secrecy with one Freedom of Information Act ...
Keep Reading »Roundtable on Targeted Killing: Lawfare and Targeted Killing Revisited--A Response
![[An envisioning of lawfare. Image from Harper’s.]](/content_images/3/sm_war_crimes_lawfare_image.jpg "[An envisioning of lawfare. Image from Harper’s.]")
[This is the sixth part of a six-part series associated with a Jadaliyya roundtable discussing targeted killings . Participants include Richard Falk, Nathan Freed Wessler, Pardiss Kabriaei, Leonard Small, and Lisa Hajjar. Click here for the introduction to the roundtable.] The speech that Attorney General Eric Holder delivered on 5 March 2012 in which he outlined the Obama administration’s position on the legality of the ...
Keep Reading »Lawfare and Targeted Killing: Developments in the Israeli and US Contexts
![[Training photo of Israeli special forces; Image from Zvi Koren/Polaris Images.]](/content_images/3/sm_UndercoverUnit_ZivKoren_PolarisImages.jpg "[Training photo of Israeli special forces; Image from Zvi Koren/Polaris Images.]")
Over the last decade, the term lawfare, an amalgamation of “law” and “warfare,” has been adopted and popularized among people engaged in monitoring, judging and debating the legality of a state’s wartime behavior vis-à-vis enemies on and off the battlefield. Today, the dominant theme in debates about lawfare turns on the contested legitimacy of litigation to challenge military and security policies and practices; and efforts to sue or prosecute state agents, ...
Keep Reading »Roundtable on Occupation Law: Part of the Conflict or the Solution? (Part II: Lisa Hajjar)
![[Meir Shamgar in center. Image from idi.org.il]](/content_images/3/sm_ForumPresent1.jpg "[Meir Shamgar in center. Image from idi.org.il]")
[This is the second part of a six-part series associated with a Jadaliyya roundtable discussing the relevance of occupation law to the Palestinian-Israel conflict at this historical juncture. Participants include Darryl Li, Lisa Hajjar, Nimer Sultany, Asli Bali, Ahmed Barclay, and Dena Qaddumi. A description of the roundtable can be found here.] The West Bank and the Gaza Strip are the quintessential “hard case” in international humanitarian law (IHL). With the ...
Keep Reading »Is There A Pill For This?
![[Image from OliviaB]](/content_images/3/sm_IsThereaPillforThis_image.jpg "[Image from OliviaB]")
In my first Jadaliyya post, I described my “great and terrible obsession” with torture. Generally speaking, I love my obsession; thinking and talking about torture in an age of torture seems not only rational and reasonable but politically responsible. I’d bet my torture-related information command center (i.e., the part of my brain that stores, categorizes and operationalizes torture data) would be a source of great riches if there was a Jeopardy-Torture game ...
Keep Reading »Bio
Lisa Hajjar teaches sociology at the University of California – Santa Barbara. Her research and writing focus on law and legality, war and conflict, human rights, and torture. She is the author of Courting Conflict: The Israeli Military Court System in the West Bank and Gaza (University of California Press, 2005). In addition to being a Co-Editor at Jadaliyya, she serves on the editorial committees of Middle East Report and Journal of Palestine Studies. She is currently working on a book about anti-torture lawyering in the United States.
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