BADIL Resource Center’s Winter 2013–2014 installment of the al-Majdal quarterly magazine seeks to advance a classical Palestinian discourse questioning the utility of employing Israeli law for Palestinian human rights.
Israel’s implementation of protracted occupation, apartheid and colonization is hyper-legalized. This regime is sterilized through the language of law and its violence dispersed through many bureaucratic institutions and complex legislation. As such, whether citizens of Israel, residents of the occupied Palestinian territory, or exiled refugees–lived reality demonstrates to Palestinians that the Israeli legal order is anything but just.
Yet, Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line continue to use Israeli law to advance their claims. Why is this the case? And is there a political vision that guides litigation? By gathering leading Palestinian human rights organizations involved in litigation together in one issue, it is our hope that the answers to these questions take on clearer form. Al-Majdal’s fifty-fifth issue contributes to the topic by emphasizing the role of civil society organizations and their potential for embodying a Palestinian strategy.
The Paradox of Using the Law of the Oppressor
Issue No. 55, Winter 2013-2014
Editorial
- Climbing out of the rabbit hole, by BADIL Staff
Dis/engaging the Law
- Israel’s Justice System is Useless; Why Palestinians Should Still Engage with It, by Mahmoud Abu Rahman for Al-Mezan
- Beyond Justice: al-Haq after the Ruling in Adalah (2009-2013), by Susan Power for al-Haq
- The Reality of Legal Resistance in the Occupation’s Military Courts, by Randa Wahbe for Addameer
- The Israeli Supreme Court’s Jurisdiction over the Occupied Palestinian Territory Severely Limits the Tactic of Litigation, by Husam Yunis for the PNA’s Ministry of Detainees
- Litigating from Within Lays the Trajectory for an International Legal Strategy, by Ingrid Jaradat Gassner for CCPRJ
- Litigating in the Occupier’s Court: A Reading of the Palestinian Authority’s Position, by Mohammad Elias Nazzal for the PNA’s Wall and Colonization Portfolio
Reflections on the Legal Order
- Israeli Military Law: A Tool to Legitimize Oppression and Injustice, by Ayed Abu Eqtaish for DCI – Palestine
- The Injustice of the Israeli Judicial System: Experiences of the Jerusalem Legal Aid and Human Rights Center, by Rami Saleh for JLAC
- Surgical Use of the Israeli Legal System, by Mossawa
- Colonialism, Occupation, Patriarchy: The Impossibility of Achieving Justice for Palestinian Women, by Lucy Garbett and Manal Jubeh for WCLAC
Commentary
- Law as Tactic: Palestine, the Zapatistas, and the Global Exercises of Power, by Linda Quiquivix
- Challenging Administrative Detention: Hunger Strikes and the Diffusion of Extra-Legal Resistance, by Julie M. Norman
- “When we sit to judge, we are being judged”: A Call for the Establishment of a Database of Israeli Judicial Complicity in International Law Violations, by Allegra Pacheco