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Review Roundtable Part III: Goldstone in Political Context
The political dymamics surrounding the report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict (commonly known as the Goldstone Report) provide a number of interesting insights into the recent evolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It bears recollection that the report was produced during a period when the Palestinian leadership was engaged in what has been characterized as serious permanent status negotiations with Israel. Yet the vast majority of Palestinians seemed more interested in the deliberations of Judge Richard Goldstone than those of President Mahmoud Abbas. This reflected more than widespread Palestinian indifference to diplomacy ...
Keep Reading »Special Bodies, Speculative Personhood: Bradley Manning and Mohamed Bouazizi
![[Image from lawanddisorder.org]](/content_images/3/sm_Guantanamo.jpg "[Image from lawanddisorder.org]")
He was very sincere. We are like soulless bodies since he left. –Basma Bouazizi, sister If Brad Manning, 22, is the Collateral Murder and Garani massacre whistleblower then, without doubt, he’s a national hero. –Wikileaks He may be a mutilated trunk dismembered all about, the spirit removed all around and separated from the limbs, yet he lives and breathes the vital air. –Lucretius, De Rerum Natura Bradley Manning and Mohamed Bouazizi’s names have become known because they galvanized world attention through what has been perceived as incalculable personal sacrifices. By comparing the respectively imprisoned and immolated bodies of two of the ...
Keep Reading »[The Military Council Approves Egypt's Additional Emergency Law] المجلس الأعلى يقر قانون طوارئ إضافي
![[الشرطة العسكرية وهي تطوق المعتصمين في ميدان التحرير إستعداد لفض إعتصامهم-منتشر على الإنترنت، المصدر غير معروف]](/content_images/3/sm_militaryheads.jpg "[الشرطة العسكرية وهي تطوق المعتصمين في ميدان التحرير إستعداد لفض إعتصامهم-منتشر على الإنترنت، المصدر غير معروف]")
رزحت المجتمعات العربية لعقود عدة تحت وطأة القوانين الإستثنائية المقيدة للحريات السياسية. لذلك ما أن قامت الثورات والانتفاضات العربية الأخيرة حتى تعرضت هذه القوانين (وخاصة قوانين الطوارئ ومحاكمها التي تعرف في مصر بإسم محاكم أمن الدولة طوارئ) إلى هجوم عنيف في كافة أرجاء العالم العربي، ما أدى إلى إلغاء قوانين الطوارئ في عدة دول من بينها الجزائر وسوريا، وإلغاء عدد من الترتيبات المقيدة للحريات في كلا من تونس والمغرب. لكن بغض النظر عن جدية هذه الإصلاحات، ظلت مصر بعيدة كل البعد عن هذا المسار الإصلاحي؛ فلم يتجاهل نظام <<الثورة>> المصري المطلب الشعبي الكاسح بإلغاء قانون الطوارئ فحسب، وإنما قام بإقرار قانون طوارئ إضافي منذ يومين <<في ...
Keep Reading »At the Table: Sharif Waked's Khumus
![[Sharif Waked, Khumus (2008). Image from artist's archive]](/content_images/3/sm_(K)HUMUS_5-1m.jpg "[Sharif Waked, Khumus (2008). Image from artist's archive]")
Just outside a Palestinian restaurant, named “al-Bayt” in the recently recognized village of Ayn Hawd southeast of Haifa, a table and two chairs stand precariously balanced on a steep slope. From a distance it is a pretty scene that promises the serenity of a picnic. On closer look, there is deformity and fragility. Together they offer an incisive reflection on those many moments when the Palestinian everyday in Israel meets the persistent apprehension and restlessness of memory. Sharif Waked’s installation Khumus tells of the inextricability of two communions—one that is untenable in the present and another in the past that has been made absent. On this slippery slope ...
Keep Reading »Video of the Goldstone Debate at Stanford Law School
On Monday March 28th, the Stanford International Law Society hosted a debate on the legacy of the Goldstone report and the larger application of international law to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict featuring Justice Richard Goldstone himself in one of his first public commentaries on the investigation. Four days later, Justice Goldstone published his controversial op-ed in which he "reconsiders" the Fact-Finding Mission's Report. Debate panelist Abraham Bell, professor of law at the University of San Diego Law School, thereafter published an op-ed in the Jerusalem Post attributing Goldstone's sudden shift to the Stanford debate. Other ...
Keep Reading »What Emergency? The ADL, Academic Freedom, Lawfare, and Palestine
![[Palestinian boy crawling through the wall. Image by Baz Ratner/Reuters]](/content_images/3/sm_wall-openingBazRatnerReuters.jpg "[Palestinian boy crawling through the wall. Image by Baz Ratner/Reuters]")
On the evening of March 24, the board of directors of University of California – Hastings College of the Law held an emergency meeting that lasted until midnight. The putative emergency was a two-day conference titled “Litigating Palestine” scheduled to start at 3 pm the following day. What resulted was the following statement: BE IT RESOLVED by the Board of Directors…in its EMERGENCY CLOSED SESSION that it is in agreement that the College should take all steps necessary to remove the UC Hastings name and brand from the "Litigating Palestine" conference. By taking this action, the Board strongly endorses the principles of academic freedom and the ...
Keep Reading »Focus on Freedom: In Solidarity with Iranian Filmmaker Jafar Panahi
In December 2010, a court in the Islamic Republic of Iran sentenced filmmaker Jafar Panahi to six years in prison for collusion against the government. Even after his body is released from prison, the government wants to control his thoughts, his dreams, his words and prevent him from expressing them in cinematic form. The court also banned him from writing scripts, making films, traveling abroad, and speaking with any media for twenty years. “It’s depressing,” said director Martin Scorsese, “to imagine a society with so little faith in its own citizens that it feels compelled to lock up anyone with a contrary opinion. As filmmakers, we all need to stand up for ...
Keep Reading »"The Responsibility to Protect": Notes on Libya, Sovereignty, and the UN Security Council
![[The UN Security Council in session. Image from alphabetic.info]](/content_images/3/sm_UN-Security-Council-image-from-a-jan.-6-2009-meeting.jpg "[The UN Security Council in session. Image from alphabetic.info]")
I am writing on 27 February 2011, when there are calls for the international community to intervene, if necessary with violence, into Libyan affairs. Most recently, and “in a distinct echo of the tactics they pursued to encourage US intervention in the Balkans and Iraq, a familiar clutch of neo-conservatives appealed Friday for the United States and NATO to "immediately" prepare military action to help bring down the regime of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.” Falling short of some expectations, and exceeding others, the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution last night, on 26 February, imposing sanctions on Libya. “Considering that the widespread ...
Keep Reading »Algeria's Military Capabilities
The basic Algerian tripartite configuration of a national gendarmerie, the police, and the armed forces (army, navy, air force) mirrors in many ways its French counterparts. As with the French national Gendarmerie, the Algerian equivalent, made up of 150,000 people, serves as a paramilitary force charged with public safety and policing among the civilian population especially outside urban areas. Additional core tasks include counter-terrorism patrols and searches in the countryside as well as urban crowd and riot control units for each of Algeria forty-eight administrative wilaya. Gendarmerie duties overlap with those of a police force of 200,000 whose specialized ...
Keep Reading »Non-Negotiable
The naysayers who had been suggesting (or, in some cases, hoping) that the protests in Egypt were running out of steam have been proven wrong, once again, by the Egyptian people. By some accounts, the crowds in Midan Tahrir today were the largest yet — “hundreds of thousands,” according to the Guardian’s live reports — and many of those protesting today were coming out onto the streets for the first time. As I write this, protests continue in front of the Parliament building, with the possibility of a sit-in there; one tweet, from an Al-Jazeera producer, reported that a protester had “climbed on the front gate of parliament to put up a sign saying ‘closed until the ...
Keep Reading »Little Protests, Big Erasures
![[The Back of a Guantanamo Prison Uniform, Image from Unknown Archive]](/content_images/3/sm_DSC_0913.jpg "[The Back of a Guantanamo Prison Uniform, Image from Unknown Archive]")
In a recent interview with Carol Rosenberg, Joint Detention Group Commander Col. Thomas’ has stated that, contrary to reports issued by the Center for Constitutional Rights and CUNY Law School, detainees at Guantanamo Bay are not, in fact, engaged in protests. According to Col. Thomas, detainees are neither holding sit-ins, nor particularly moved by the events unfolding across the Middle East. Instead, Col. Thomas -- in an attempt to “set the record straight”-- tells us that detainees are actually far more engrossed in following soccer tournaments. I suppose it’s no coincidence that in presenting this as the ‘real’ state of affairs, Guantamano Bay gets fashioned as ...
Keep Reading »Jerusalem's Protracted Demographic Transformation
![[Image from nikolaihegertun.wordpress.com]](/content_images/3/sm_jerusalem.jpg "[Image from nikolaihegertun.wordpress.com]")
In the shadow of what may be one of the Arab world’s most seminal shifts is the steady continuation of an insidious policy aimed at altering the demographic make-up of Jerusalem. Unlike the shifts underway in Tunisia and Egypt, Jerusalem’s transformation has been a protracted shift underpinned by a web of laws, policies, and decrees. It is a narrative of forced displacement and dispossession by using a policy of population transfer under a regime of apartheid and colonialism. It is a system that violates the core tenets of freedom and self-determination, democratic governance, equality, and ethnic pluralism all under the auspices of a benevolent western-like democracy in ...
Keep Reading »Israel's Blockade of Gaza is Cracking
Egypt has announced that it will open its border crossing with Gaza on a permanent basis thereby reversing Egypt’s collusion with Israel’s blockade regime. The interim Foreign Minister, Nabil al-Arabi, has described support for the blockade by the previous Egyptian regime as "disgraceful." While Israeli officials have responded to this announcement with alarm they have limited capacity to undermine the new Egyptian government’s prerogative. Since the capture of Israeli soldier Gilad ...
Keep Reading »What is Sharia?
This question has animated scholarly, religious, and political debates for centuries. These debates have been lively, at times contentious, and have been held (under different circumstances and leading to different results) in different parts of the Muslim majority world as well as in parts of the world with few, if any, Muslims. More recently, it seems that the question “What is sharia?” has become a pressing concern in Western countries with growing Muslim minorities who continue to be unevenly ...
Keep Reading »Roundup on the Goldstone Controversy
While the impact of Justice Goldstone’s op-ed on accountability and justice remains to be seen, one thing has already been made clear: his contentious and vague editorial has worked to place Israel’s Winter 2008/09 offensive back on center stage. Like Israel’s fatal attack on the Mavi Marmara in May 2010 that inspired heated debate on the legality of Israel’s Gaza blockade, Goldstone’s editorial has produced a watershed of commentary on Gaza’s ongoing submission to a debilitating blockade and the ...
Keep Reading »Why Goldstone Wrote that Op-Ed? Video Interview with Jadaliyya Co-Editor
On Friday April 1st, justice Richard Goldstone wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post that seemingly retracts his report investigating the Gaza war known as Cast Led. No one really knows what exactly led the justice to do this. In the video interview below, Jadaliyya Co-Editor Noura Erakat explores some possible answers. Noura participated in a debate a week prior over the very same Goldstone report (watch the debate here). The debate was tweeted live here at Jadaliyya. Erakat published this op-ed in ...
Keep Reading »What Wasn't Said at Senator Durbin's Hearing on “The State of Muslim Civil Rights in the US”
Senator Dick Durbin, the senior Democrat from Illinois, held a historic hearing last week on “The State of Muslim Civil Rights in the U.S.” The hearing, called by Durbin as the Chair of the Senate’s new Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights, took place on March 29, 2011 – and it was reportedly the first-ever Congressional hearing on these issues. Durbin said that he called the hearing because of recent increasing bigotry against Muslims, including the massive outcry the Park51 ...
Keep Reading »Live Twitter Feed Event: The Goldstone Report and International Law Debate at Stanford
As tensions between Israel and Hamas build in the wake of Israeli airstrikes on Gaza this week that killed eight and renewed rocket fire, the Goldstone Report, the landmark investigation into war crimes during Operation Cast Lead in 2008-09, remains the subject of significant discussion and controversy. Although the report documents extensive crimes against humanity committed by both Israel and Hamas, the international community continues to debate how best to act on these significant findings. On ...
Keep Reading »The Peter King "Radicalization of Muslims" Hearing and American Democracy
Republicans clearly think that they have found a political winner in Muslim-bashing. Peter King, Republican representative from New York’s Third Congressional District (in Long Island), is the new chair of the House Homeland Security Committee. He was way ahead of the Muslim-bashing curve. Most Republicans didn’t get excited about the possibilities of using an anti-Muslim platform as a wedge issue until 2010, after the wild popularity of the "Obama is a secret Muslim" meme and the meteoric rise ...
Keep Reading »A Call From Saudi Intellectuals to the Political Leadership
[The following translation from Arabic is provided by Khuloud] Declaration of National Reform It is no secret that the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt have led to crises and political agitations in many Arab countries- at the heart of which is our country. This has imposed new conditions on us to reevaluate our current state of affairs, and do our best to reform them before they worsen and we find ourselves facing consequences we can neither prevent nor predict. A group of Saudi intellectuals ...
Keep Reading »Anti-Authoritarian Revolution and Law Reform in Egypt: A Jadaliyya E-Roundtable
[Our first Roundtable is moderated by Jadaliyya Co-Editor Lisa Hajjar] Jadaliyya's Editorial Committee presents an electronic roundtable about the politics of revolution and law reform in post-Mubarak Egypt. The participants—Hussein Agrama, Asli Bali, Samera Esmeir and Tamir Moustafa—have contributed responses to a set of questions we posed to them. The information they provide and the differences of opinion and emphasis among them will, hopefully, stimulate further discussion and debate about these ...
Keep Reading »Statement from Cairo University's Faculty of Law Around Legal and Constitutional Solutions to Meet the Needs of the Peoples Revolution
[Arabic statement and translation originally appeared on “Liberty for Egypt” blog] Statement from Cairo University- faculty of law Issued from the discussion forum held on 7/2/2011 around legal and constitutional solutions to meet the needs of the Peoples revolution On Monday the 7th of February 2011 the professors of the faculty of law at Cairo university met and after many fruitful discussions and thorough analysis of the parameters of constitutional thought and what ...
Keep Reading »How Can Egypt Get From Tahrir Square to Democracy? Lessons from Poland in 1989
This article is co-written by Michael Kennedy and Shiva Balaghi “To Husni Mubarak: leave already. Arabs around the world are trying to sleep,” read a tweet. “Leave already, my hand hurts,” read a sign held up by a man on Cairo’s streets. From Tahrir Square, we hear that protesters are facing a new pressure possibly more strong than the pro-Mubarak thugs set lose on them in recent days. Family members, neighbors and merchants in the Tahrir area are pleading with them to go home already and let life get ...
Keep Reading »Omar Suleiman, the CIA's Man in Cairo and Egypt's Torturer-in-Chief
On January 29, Omar Suleiman, Egypt’s top spy chief, was annointed vice president by the tottering dictator, Hosni Mubarak. By appointing Suleiman, part of a shake-up of the cabinet in a (futile?) attempt to appease the masses of protesters and retain his own grip on the presidency, Mubarak has once again shown his knack for devilish shrewdness. Suleiman has long been favored by the US government for his ardent anti-Islamism and willingness to talk and act tough about Iran, and he has been the ...
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