Working Paper Series

This paper will consider the international politics of the apartheid analysis, addressing questions such as:  Why is it possible for Israel to project itself in the west as ‘the only democracy in the middle east’?  and why is it possible for it to effectively evade critical scrutiny, let alone prosecution before international war crimes tribunals, as Uri Davis put it in his book Apartheid Israel (2003)? Is Zionism above scrutiny? Or is it, like any other political movement, subject to a critical examination according to the values of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? Why are Zionist groups the only ones in the world, as Noam Chomsky asked, immune from such criticism?  Is European and American guilt about the Holocaust a factor?  Also, in light of the Trump Executive order in December 2019 to ‘combat campus antisemitism’, what are the new challenges facing freedom of speech and academic research?  What effective measures can be taken to put an end to this anomaly?

From the different forms of Israeli control and surveillance on the Palestinians in the oPT, architecture emerges as very a powerful tool. Israeli forensic architect and pioneer in this field,  Eyal Weizman  (with Rafi Segal) demonstrated how, through a sophisticated network of roads, highways, tunnels and walls, the spatial arrangements of colonization are managed not only by the government, but also by architects, settler groups, political parties and even international and local activists. Weizman shows that the different layers of occupation are manipulated in three ways:  vertically, above the ground, and below the ground. Israel sustains its colonial system by ‘making the ground below and the air above separate and distinct rather than continuous and organic’. In light of Weizman’s many studies on the subject, and since he is the most prominent scholar to have done such a research, he may be asked to submit a paper along the same lines with an update in light of the latest Trump ‘plan’, and demonstrate how this would further dismember an already dissected landscape, or whatever thoughts he might have on the subject.

When Israel annexed Jerusalem in 1967 it made Jerusalemites permanent residents of Israel, but not citizens.  In effect, they were deemed ‘resident aliens’ in their own city. They are not eligible for Palestinian passports.  This was/still is, designed to pressure them to leave their city by all means. Residency can be annulled from any Jerusalemite, at any time. Discrimination against Palestinians continues. This paper will document and analyze discrimination against Palestinians in Jerusalem in Israeli laws, policies and practices. It will highlight differentiated treatment of Palestinians and Jewish Israelis in residency laws, taxes and municipality fees, rights to retirement, to health services, right to family reunion or lam alshamel, in services like garbage collection, water, and sanitation, in issuing building permits and house demolitions, in school curricula and in government support to educational and health facilities. The paper will analyse such policies and practices from the perspective of international law. It will also assess whether such practices are in contravention of Zionist ideology or an integral part of it. Did Zionism foresee or seek to establish a system of ‘distinctions, exclusions, restrictions and preferences’, or was this system only an unfortunate result of an erroneous implementation of the Zionist dream? How should the new paradigm of a one state solution deal with the city of Jerusalem? Jerusalem can be used as a case study where all these questions and more can be answered effectively in this microcosm of racial discrimination.

How has the law been used to dispossess Palestinians of their land? Since the early days, Herzl the lawyer stated in his Judenstaat that the Zionist movement can only be inaugurated “with absolute conformity to law” and with the “friendly co-operation of interested Governments, who would derive considerable benefits from it”.  Once the Jewish state was established in 1948, how did the Israeli Government use the law to institutionalize the dispossession of Palestinians and turn their private lands to the ownership of the Jewish National Fund to be owned by all Jews in the world, everywhere, and ‘in perpetuity’.   And again after 1967 in the oPT . On what ‘legal’   premises is Palestinian land still being expropriated and given to settlers?  On the Bible?  What are the various forms of Israeli legislation that made this possible? What can archival documents and Knesset proceedings reveal?  Reaching up to the present, this paper will explore the evolving process of Apartheid through the manipulation and use of law, and will consider whether this can be challenged in international tribunals and national courts with universal jurisdiction.

 Israel’s unique and creative contribution to Apartheid is the concept of Present Absentees, adopted in 1948 to prevent Palestinians who stayed from claiming back their lands and homes when they were internally displaced. There have been some studies on this Orwellian concept but it remains understudied and almost unheard of in the world. How did Israel get away with it, and could a legal case be made and brought against Israel to be prosecuted under a universal jurisdiction doctrine?

Moving from an apartheid state to a state for all its citizens is no easy task, particularly when the legacies of a settler colonialist enterprise are concerned. Since there are no easy precedents and models to lean on, and as Israel is a far more complex case than either South Africa or Algeria, creative answers to a whole set of complicated questions must be considered.  Since it is not envisaged that any of the settlers who came from outside Palestine will be asked to leave the new state, the most important of these issues relates to rights. Who owns the right to a property, the person forcefully evicted from it, or the person who bought it in good faith from the evictor? Should there be any compensation schemes? Is international law of any help in this case? How easy or how difficult it is to change from the status of a “superior” citizen to merely a citizen, equal in rights and opportunities to all others? Are there any mechanisms to help in this shift in status and mental framework?