Human Rights, Local Plights: The Implications of Rights Discourses in the Struggle over Arab-Palestinian Bedouin Land in Israel

A widely diffused, engaged approach understands human rights as an opportunity to enhance moral progress. Less visible has a critical realm of research that reveals the often ambiguous social life of human rights discourses. This article draws on a specific case study from the intricate issue of how activism for Arab-Palestinian Bedouin citizens in Southern Israel engages with the global human rights discourse. It follows the implications of mobilization, focusing on events related to a campaign against house demolitions in informal,unrecognised settlements. The case shows how human rights discourses tend to silence the agency of political subjects, victimizing and patronizing those who seek emancipation. The ethnographic insights emphasize the role of a range of carnivalesque and spontaneous acts ofresistance, which subvert the patronizing implications of the human rights language.

Acts of Solidarity: Crossing and Reiterating Israeli-Palestinian Frontiers

In academic and public discourses on the Zionist-Palestinian conflict prevails still a ‘methodological nationalism’ based on a separatist imagination that overshadows the existence and role of Israeli-Palestinian forms of communality and solidarity. This article analyzes micropolitical practices that cross existing frontiers both within Israel and between occupied Palestinian territories and Israel. Through recent conceptualizations of ‘acts’, I read these ethnographic episodes in their intentional and performative dimension. What is the role of these ‘acts’? What are their effects on both the participants and the wider public? Through two interconnected cases, different functions of acts are explored. The first case relates to encounters between Israelis and Palestinian in the embattled city of Hebron in the occupied Palestinian territories; the second investigates moments of a Gandhi-inspired peace march at the ‘internal’ frontier of the Israeli Negev desert. The ethnographic perspective reveals what lies behind and beneath the acts, going beyond the obvious structures of power of the conflict. Acts function primarily as a valve of catharsis for the participants themselves, both overcoming and reproducing hegemonic discursive elements of the conflict. Paradoxically, acts of solidarity are often crucial in creating public knowledge about the conflict in more sectarian terms. 

Revisiting Politicide: State Annihilation in Israel/Palestine

State annihilation is a persistent concern in Israel/Palestine. While the specter of Israel’s destruction increasingly haunts Israeli public political debates, the actual materialization of Palestinian statehood seems to be permanently suspended, caught in an ever-protracted process of state-building. The current paper claims that to understand the unfolding of the discursive formations, as well as the spatial dimensions of conflict and control in Israel/Palestine, we should explicate the workings of the processes of politicide. Politicide, in this regard, denotes the eradication of the political existence of a group and sabotaging the turning of a community of people into a polity. This analysis suggests that the insistence that the State of Israel is under threat of extinction should be understood as a speech act, a performative reiteration, which allows for the securitization of Israeli rule in the occupied Palestinian territory, a securitization which then serves to rationalize the ongoing concrete politicide of the Palestinians. Elaborating on the concept of politicide, and diverging from defining it solely through the use of brute violence, this examination suggests that what is often overlooked in discussions of politicide are the seemingly more benign means of its implementation, the micro-power mechanisms of spatial control, prohibitions and regulations.