NOVANEWS
Legal scholarship on Palestine-Israel and international law has largely focused on the Israeli occupation since 1967 of the Palestinian territories of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza and the illegality of Israel’s settlements and apartheid colonization in these territories.
This conference will include focus on the legality of the creation and the nature of the Jewish state itself.
CALL FOR PAPERS/PANELS
An international interdisciplinary conference will be hosted by the Law School at the University of Southampton, United Kingdom, 24th-26th October, 2014.
International Law and the State of Israel: Legitimacy, Responsibility and Exceptionalism.
Background
This conference seeks to analyse the challenge posed to international law by the Jewish State of Israel and the whole of historic Palestine – the area to the west side of River Jordan that includes both what is now the State of Israel and the Palestinian territories occupied in 1967.
For its initial existence, the State of Israel has depended on a unilateral declaration of statehood and as well on both the expulsion (some would say the ethnic cleansing) of large numbers of non-Jewish Palestinian Arabs in 1947-49 and the prevention of their return. Furthermore, the Jewish nature of the state has profoundly affected the economic, constitutional, political and social life of those non-Jewish Arabs who were allowed to stay. Up to this day, as recently confirmed by its Supreme Court, Israel does not recognize an Israeli nationality but officially has a list of 139 ‘nationalities’, of which only the ‘Jewish nationality’ bestows some vital privileges. This fact generates the possibility of the exclusion of non-Jewish citizens of Israel by racial gerrymandering and the existence of two layers of Israeli citizenship and an inherent differential between Jews and non-Jews.
Legal scholarship on Palestine-Israel and international law, involving issues of self-determination, human rights and constitutional law, has largely focused on the Israeli occupation since 1967 of the Palestinian territories of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza and the illegality of Israel’s settlements and apartheid colonization in these territories.
Alongside these debates there has been a persistent if marginalized scholarship examining and analyzing problems associated with the creation and the nature of the Jewish state itself and the status of Jerusalem.
This research has combined historical scholarship and legal analysis and problematized the manner the State of Israel came into existence as well as what kind of state it is. The issues explored linked reflections on the relationship between international law and: identity and injustice; violence and morality; nationality and citizenship; self-determination and legitimacy, responsibility and exceptionalism.
Themes
The motivation for this interdisciplinary conference is to examine the role international law can play in political struggles. The search is for certain steps enabling movement and dynamism and allowing ongoing critical reflection about transitional justice and the tension between political pursuits and international law. The conference will seek to overcome doctrinal limits and contradictions by bringing to light ideological and existential fetters that perhaps render international law the very instrument of rationalization of violence and suffering. The question to be debated is what international law demands with respect to any envisioned constitutional basis for historic Palestine. This basis must constantly be subjected to the dynamic constitutional challenges of equal citizenship for all through a framework of equality and liberty as well as through social, economic and cultural rights.
The organizers will invite a range of legal perspectives, and in turn, disagreements, in international law regarding the Israeli state including, of course, whether such a focus is itself legally justifiable and defensible in the context of the emergence of legal and political entities more generally. In organizing this conference, it is felt that there are enough questions that justify rigorous academic exploration and public debate without partisanship.
Given the urgency of responding to – indeed the urgent responsibility to answer for and to avert – the persistent suffering in historic Palestine, it is time to give a scholarly, academic platform to the exploration of pervasive disagreements regarding the legitimacy in International Law of the Jewish State and the status of Jerusalem. Given recent developments in International law, particularly the dynamic nature of its self-understanding and in turn, its responsibility, radical disagreement and arguments become possible that defend a conception of the kind of protection international law ought to be offering. It is thus time to bring together leading scholars in international law, in both doctrine and jurisprudence, some of whom do not necessarily write on Palestine and ask them to explore architectures of arguments that could respond to the suffering that afflict historic Palestine.
The conference will thus include focus on the legality of the State of Israel rather than merely on whether its actions, either within its borders or in the Occupied Territories, comply with international law, human rights law and humanitarian law.
Palestinian refugee camp in 1948 near Damascus, Syria.
The conference will, however, consider the relationship between the nature of these actions and the nature of the state itself.
The conference will be the first of its kind because it links three main interlinked pillar-themes:
- The legality, validity and legitimacy in international law of the Israeli state, a state whose very nature, indeed itsraison d’être, is based on constraining both the egalitarian, transformative potential that constitutes the impulse of international law as well as any free internal constitutional reflection, giving as it does constitutionally entrenched, privileged citizenship to Jews.
- Responsibility: the conference explores the challenge posed by Historic Palestine to ethical reflections on legal principles that demands the answerability of and action by, actors in International Law.
- The question of exceptionalism and the law is a key theme in legal and constitutional reflection, and Palestine serves as a place within which to explore this notion of ‘exception’. On the one hand, as to whether and how to address its inbuilt non-egalitarian basis but also, on the other hand, whether to make it a moral exception that allows toleration of some of the injustice as ‘reasonable injustice’. The suffering of European Jews is often cited as a justification for the existence and nature of the state in the geographical location of historic Palestine, thus eschewing structured suffering inflicted on the non-Jewish Palestinian Arabs by that state. Relatedly and additionally, debates will ensue as to whether there is any ground to hold Israel as exceptional in comparison with other unjust regimes, especially given the fact that many states, including the United States and Australia, were established with extreme violence towards indigenous populations.
The conference will link legal, ethical, political, historical and philosophical issues that follow from these pillars. In so doing, it will have to consider the extent to which the legal challenge posed by historic Palestine necessitates a meditation on the nature of international law itself: what it is, what it is for, and to what extent the state is an essential actor with a duty to respond to and avert structural and systematic injustice and suffering. Depending on the views taken on these questions, legal arguments can overcome conventional limits of many of its doctrines including self-determination, international criminal law, peremptory norms of international law, states’ and United Nations responsibility, state recognition and indeed the whole basis for norm creation and enforcement in international law.
Self-interpretation of international law, moreover, will be linked to some argumentative possibilities within it, for instance concerning the challenge posed by historic Palestine to international law’s dependence on the notion of ‘a state’. Nothing short of the contestable limits, and thus potentialities, of international law is at stake. The conference will include a detailed examination of Israel’s domestic law, the reflexivity of Israel’s constitutional structure with reference to its own domestic law, and its structural ability or inability to observe international legal obligations.
In considering these issues complex questions arise concerning the relation of law and morality, the philosophy and history of international law, and wider subjects ranging from the history of Palestine to general philosophy. The conference will therefore be highly inter-disciplinary, enabling the formation and contestation of appropriately informed legal arguments. Last but not least, the connection between the constitutional Israeli municipal law and international law demands critical and refined exploration and debate.
A Platform for Debate
Recognizing the moral as well as legal complexities these issues raise, and the intensity of emotions involved, the conference’s purpose is to open up and serve as a platform for scholarly debates rather than an activist aim of adopting a firm normative position. In exploring possible legal arguments and disagreements that relate the jurisprudence of international law to its various doctrines, the conference will provide a wide range of perspectives and outlooks. These can explore and contest radically different views concerning the legal duty and capacity of international law, jurisdictionally and in terms of institutional responsibility, to enforce a reasoned position with regard to the prima facie case for asking the question of the legal validity and legitimacy of the Israeli state. In turn, it can examine the condition of validity for any future polity that can be envisioned in historic Palestine.
Palestine and International Law by Henry Cattan
Dedication of Conference and Book
The conference and the book of its proceedings will be dedicated to Henry Cattan (1906-1992), a leading Palestinian international lawyer, indeed a legal prophet, who long ago mounted a challenge to the validity of the state of Israel and the legal and moral authority of those institutions that brought it about.
Papers and Panels
The conference will be plenary and will consist of invited keynotes and panels each consists of three or four 20 minutes papers. Substantial time will be given for audience participation.
Please send a title and 250 words abstract and a 150 word biographical note to: plstnlaw@soton.ac.uk. Please include personal details, institutional affiliation and email address.
Deadline for panels and papers Friday 25th of April 2014
Contact
The conference will have its webpage linked to Southampton Law School Website from April 2014.
For general inquiries concerning themes and nature of conference please contact:
Professor Oren Ben-Dor, Law School, University of Southampton, UK, obd@soton.ac.uk.
Professor George Bisharat , University of California Hastings College of the Law, US, bisharat@uchastings.edu.
For General inquiries regarding organisation, registration and accommodation please contact:
Ms. Jo Hazel, Event Coordinator, Faculty of Business and Law, University of Southampton,J.Hazel@soton.ac.uk.
Publicity
The proceedings of the conference will be published as an edited collection and the whole conference will be documented and filmed.
Fees and Funding
We will be able to either fully fund, or to substantially assist with the funding of, contributors’ expenses who will give papers and keynote addresses.
There will be a conference fee £50 people on wages, students £30 and not fees for the unwaged. Payment will be made with the online registration, please follow the webpage for alternative method of payment.
