New Article: Aboultaif, Just War and the Lebanese Resistance to Israel

Aboultaif, Eduardo Wassim. “Just War and the Lebanese Resistance to Israel.” Critical Studies on Terrorism (early view; online first).

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17539153.2016.1175268

 

Abstract

The literature on Lebanese resistance to Israel is overwhelmed with work on Hezbollah, the role of religion, and its connection to Iranian influence. However, few of these studies have looked at the totality of Lebanese resistance, from its secular origins to its Islamic monopoly. Moreover, no work to date has looked at Lebanese resistance through the prism of just war theory. This article aims at addressing this gap by applying the criteria introduced by Childress regarding the justness of war. Moreover, the article examines resistance as a practice of non-state actors and its terrorist label, and at the same time, evaluates Israel’s military response to Lebanese resistance through the prism of state terrorism.

 

 

 

New Article: Wright, The Ethico-Politics of Love and Mourning in Jewish Israeli Solidarity Activism

Wright, Fiona. “Palestine, My Love: The Ethico-Politics of Love and Mourning in Jewish Israeli Solidarity Activism.” American Ethnologist 43.1 (2016): 130-43.
 
URL: dx.doi.org/10.1111/amet.12268
 
Abstract

Jewish Israeli left-wing activists engage in a subversive affective politics when they express love for, and mourn the loss of, Palestinian life. But the affects of love and mourning also bind these solidarity activists to Israeli state violence and sovereignty in various ways, entangling them in the very forms of power they aim to challenge. Loving and mourning the Palestinian Other involves an ambivalent ethics in which the activist subject objectifies the Other, and this objectification is a kind of violence that emerges in the affective becomings of solidarity activism. Activist loving and mourning thus call into question the nature of solidarity and alert us to the difficulty of ethics as troubled relations enmeshed in the violence of politics.

 

 

 

Report: Cohen & Mimran, A Reexamination of Israel’s Home Demolition Policy (Hebrew)

Cohen, Amichai, and Tal Mimran. Cost without Benefit: A Reexamination of Israel’s Home Demolition Policy, Policy Studies 112. Jerusalem: Israel Democracy Institute, 2015 (in Hebrew).

URL: http://www.idi.org.il/cost_with_no_benefit/

 

Abstract

Under a policy that was in force from 1967 until 2005, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) demolished the homes of the perpetrators of terrorist acts and various security offenses, as well as their accomplices. In 2005, a commission of experts, headed by Maj. Gen. Ehud Shani, expressed its doubts as to the policy’s legality and efficacy and recommended that it be abandoned. Notwithstanding, the home demolition policy was revived three years later, in 2008.

The demolition of homes is an extreme measure. The arguments against it include that it is a disproportional infringement of private property rights, constitutes collective punishment, and that there are no evident gains that can justify its use. Nevertheless, over the years, decision-makers in the IDF insisted that the deterrent effect outweighs other considerations and justifies the infringement of rights. The Supreme Court of Israel, almost without exception, has given its full backing to that position. The underlying assumption about the deterrent effect of home demolition is based on the intensity of the sanction against the terrorist and his family as well as the rapidity with which it is implemented.

This study is a three-part examination of how the IDF reached the conclusion that home demolition is an effective policy and employed it for so many years without ever conducting an empirical study. We also consider what caused the decision-makers to revive the policy only three years after it was decided to abandon it.

 

 

 

New Book: Kotef, Movement and the Ordering of Freedom

Kotef, Hagar. Movement and the Ordering of Freedom: On Liberal Governances of Mobility. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015.

 

We live within political systems that increasingly seek to control movement, organized around both the desire and ability to determine who is permitted to enter what sorts of spaces, from gated communities to nation-states. In Movement and the Ordering of Freedom, Hagar Kotef examines the roles of mobility and immobility in the history of political thought and the structuring of political spaces. Ranging from the writings of Locke, Hobbes, and Mill to the sophisticated technologies of control that circumscribe the lives of Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank, this book shows how concepts of freedom, security, and violence take form and find justification via “regimes of movement.” Kotef traces contemporary structures of global (im)mobility and resistance to the schism in liberal political theory, which embodied the idea of “liberty” in movement while simultaneously regulating mobility according to a racial, classed, and gendered matrix of exclusions.

 

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgements

• Introduction
• 1. Between Imaginary Lines: Violence and Its Justifications at the Military Checkpoints in Occupied Palestine / Hagar Kotef and Merav Amir
• 2. An Interlude: A Tale of Two Roads—On Freedom and Movement
• 3. The Fence That “Ill Deserves the Name of Confinement”: Locomotion and the Liberal Body
• 4. The Problem of “Excessive” Movement
• 5. The “Substance and Meaning of All Things Political”: On Other Bodies
• Conclusion

Notes
Bibliography
Index

 

HAGAR KOTEF is based at the Minerva Humanities Center at Tel Aviv University.

 

 

New Article: Hertzog, Minors’ Welfare and Bureaucratic Violence in Israel

Hertzog, Esther. “Minors’ Welfare and Bureaucratic Violence in Israel.” Anthropology of the Middle East 9.1 (2014): 42-58.

 

URL: http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/berghahn/antmid/2014/00000009/00000001/art00004

 

Abstract

The article examines the welfare policy in Israel concerning ‘minors at risk’, mainly the cancellation of parents’ custody over their offspring and their placement in welfare institutions. I suggest that the ideological discourse plays a major role in this context and terms like ‘minor’s well-being’ are widely used for achieving public legitimacy of the social workers’ control of this field. Describing and analysing case studies which I attended and followed since the beginning of the 1990s reveal the consequences of taking away children from their families and placing them in state institutions. The analysis focuses on the organised bureaucratic violence towards children and their parents which accompanies the legally enforced procedures. It also discusses the forceful means used by the staff in the institutions towards the inmates, as part of maintaining order and discipline. I suggest that violent behaviour of officials and organisations which use the state’s organised power of coercion against minors and their parents is linked to personal, organisational and political motives.