Bulletin: Peacemaking, Peace Building and the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process

Books

• Ilan Alon and Daniel Bar-Tal, eds. The Role of Trust in Conflict Resolution
• Carmel Borg and Michael Grech, eds. Pedagogy, Politics and Philosophy of Peace
• Herbert C. Kelman and Ronald J. Fisher, eds. Herbert C. Kelman: A Pioneer in the Social Psychology of Conflict Analysis and Resolution

Articles

• Bashir Bashir, The Strengths and Weaknesses of Integrative Solutions for the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
• Susan S. Lanser & Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Israeli–Palestinian Narratives and the Politics of Form: Reading Side by Side
• Rotem Nagar and Ifat Maoz, Predicting Jewish-Israeli Recognition of Palestinian Pain and Suffering
• Padraig O’Malley, Israel and Palestine: The Demise of the Two-State Solution
• Tina Kempin Reuter, Simulating Peace Negotiations: A Case Study of the Arab-Israeli Conflict
• Karen Ross, Untangling the Intervention-Context Dyad through Horizontal Comparison: Examples from Israeli Peacebuilding Organizations
• Mohammed Samhouri, Israeli-Palestinian Economic Relations, 1994–2014
• Mandy Turner, The Peacebuilding–Counterinsurgency Nexus in the Occupied Palestinian Territory
  

Reviews

• Michael Shulz, on Jacob Eriksson’s Small-State Mediation in International Conflicts: Diplomacy and Negotiations in Israel-Palestine

Theses

• Rebecca Katherine Buchanan, Analysis of Strides for Peace in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict with the Application of Theories by Butler and Buber (BA, Wofford)
• Andrew Rizzo Naudi, Track-Two Diplomacy and Conflict Resolution: A Case Study of Israel-Palestine Negotiations in the Run-Up to the Oslo Accord (MA, Malta)

New Article: Joronen, Ill Treatment of Palestinian Children under the Israeli Military Order

Joronen, Mikko. “Politics of Precarious Childhood: Ill Treatment of Palestinian Children under the Israeli Military Order.” Geopolitics 21.1 (2016): 92-114.

 

URL: https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2015.1123251

 

Abstract

This paper examines the corollaries of the exceptional treatment of Palestinian children under the Israeli military rule. It is shown how the widespread and systematic ill treatment of Palestinian children accrues from exceptional provisions and lack of legal cover of the Israeli military law. Such lack constitutes a precarious condition under which Palestinian children are not treated as children but as a security threat legally accountable for their acts, in many respects with ways similar to adults. Precarity, the paper argues, is produced through three conditions. First, the lack of protection is institutionalised through the legal, territorial and population-regulating techniques internal to state channels. Second, the lack of protection delegates significant power to the discretion of what Judith Butler calls the ‘petty sovereigns’ – to the soldiers, interrogators, police officers, etc., who are asked to rely on their own judgment when making decisions on the fundamental matters regarding the order and justice, even life and death of children. Third, the use of discretionary power is not only encouraged by the legal system and its exceptions; it also works in tandem with the institutional culture of impunity that accepts the violent disciplining, even torture, of Palestinian children.

 

 

 

New Book: Morag, Waltzing with Bashir: Perpetrator Trauma and Cinema

Morag, Raya. Waltzing with Bashir: Perpetrator Trauma and Cinema. London: Tauris, 2013.

 

Waltzing with Bashir proposes a new paradigm for cinema trauma studies – the trauma of the perpetrator. Recognizing a current shift in interest from the trauma suffered by victims to that suffered by perpetrators, the book seeks to theorize this still under-studied field thus breaking the repression of this concept and phenomenon in psychoanalysis and in cinema literature. Taking as a point of departure the distinction between testimony given by the victim and confession made by the perpetrator, this pioneering work ventures to define and analyze perpetrator trauma in scholarly, representational, literary, and societal contexts. In contrast to the twentieth-century definition of the perpetrator based on modern wars and totalitarian regimes,Morag defines the perpetrator in the context of the twenty-first century’s new wars and democratic regimes. The direct result of a drastic transformation in the very nature of war, made manifest by the lethal clash between soldier and civilian in a battlefield newly defined in bodily terms, the new trauma paradigm stages the trauma of the soldier turned perpetrator, thus offering a novel perspective on issues of responsibility and guilt.

Such theoretical insights demonstrate that the epistemology of the post-witness era requires breaking deep-seated psychological and psychiatric, as well as cultural and political, repression. Driven by the emergence of a new wave of Israeli documentary cinema, Waltzing with Bashir analyzes the Israeli film and literature produced in the aftermath of the second Intifada. As Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir and other new wave films demonstrate, Israeli cinema, attached on one side to the legacy of the Holocaust and on the other to the Israeli Occupation, is a highly relevant case for probing the limits of both victim and perpetrator traumas, and for revisiting and recontextualizing the crucial moment in which the victim/perpetrator cultural symbiosis is dismantled.

Raya Morag is an Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at the Department of Communication and Journalism, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.

Table of Contents

Introduction
From Victim to Perpetrator Trauma

Part I: Victim Trauma
1. The Body as the Battlefield
2. Chronic Victim Trauma and Terror
3. Queerness, Ethnicity, and Terror

Part II: Perpetrator Trauma
4. The New Wave of Documentary Cinema: The Male Perpetrator
5. The New Wave of Documentary Cinema: The Female Perpetrator
6. The New Wave of Documentary Literature

Conclusion
The Perpetrator Complex

Cite: Benhabib, Ethics without Normativity and Politics without Historicity On Judith Butler’s Parting Ways

Benhabib, Seyla. “Ethics without Normativity and Politics without Historicity On Judith Butler’s Parting Ways. Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism.” Constellations 20.1 (2013): 150-63.

 

URL: http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/cons/2013/00000020/00000001/art00013

Cite: Gunneflo, The Targeted Killing Judgment of the Israeli Supreme Court

Gunneflo, Markus. "The Targeted Killing Judgment of the Israeli Supreme Court and the Critique of Legal Violence." Law and Critique 2012 (online first; final publication details n/a)

 

URL: http://www.springerlink.com/content/j762431w1767056v/

 

Abstract

The targeted killing judgment of the Israeli Supreme Court has, since it was handed down in December 2006, received a significant amount of attention: praise as well as criticism. Offering neither praise nor criticism, the present article is instead an attempt at a ‘critique’ of the judgment drawing on the German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin’s famous essay from 1921, ‘Critique of Violence’. The article focuses on a key aspect of Benjamin’s critique: the distinction between the two modalities of ‘legal violence’—lawmaking or foundational violence and law-preserving or administrative violence. Analysing the fact that the Court exercises jurisdiction over these killings in the first place, the decision on the applicable law as well as the interpretation of that law, the article finds that the targeted killing judgment collapses this distinction in a different way from that foreseen by Benjamin. Hence, the article argues, the targeted killing judgment is best understood as a form of administrative foundational violence. In conclusion Judith Butler’s reading of Benjamin’s notion of ‘divine violence’ is considered, particularly his use of the commandment, ‘thou shalt not kill’, as a non-violent violence that must be waged against the kind of legal violence of which the targeted killing judgment is exemplary.