Human Rights Discourse in Domestic Settings: How Does it Emerge?

Building on the literature that analyzes the impact of norms and ideas on international and domestic politics, it is our assumption that the widespread introduction and dissemination of a human rights discourse enables oppressed groups to translate events into rights language and to appeal to courts, politicians and media in order to seek remedies for their grievances. In so far as human rights discourse actually helps introduce more ethical policies and legislation, it is crucial to understand how this discourse, which in the past 55 years evolved and proliferated on the global level, emerges and develops in domestic settings. Using Israel as a case study, and more specifically analyzing the Israeli press, we further develop some of the existing theoretical claims about how the global and local interact. We argue that in order to understand how the rights discourse is imported into the domestic arena and how it expands once it enters the local scene, it is crucial to employ a broader conception of the global and a more differentiated view of the local. We emphasize the significance of local events and practices in determining the impact of the global on national settings, suggesting that one cannot understand transnational flows without unveiling the black box of the domestic arena.     

Of Dowries and Brides: A Structural Analysis of Israel's Occupation

In this article I attempt to uncover some of the causes leading to the dramatic changes that have taken place over the past four decades in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Drawing attention to the way in which the Palestinian inhabitants have been managed, my central thesis is that the occupation's very structure, rather than the policy choices of the Israeli government, has led to the shifts in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. More specifically, I maintain that the interactions, excesses, and contradictions produced by the means of control that have been applied in the Occupied Territories can help explain why, following the 1967 war, a politics of life, which aims to secure the livelihood of the occupied residents, was emphasized by the military government and why we are currently witnessing a macabre politics characterized by an increasing number of deaths. An interrogation of this kind is advantageous because it helps us see beyond the smoke screen of political proclamations, and thus improves our understanding of why the acrimonious Israeli–Palestinian conflict has developed in the way that it has.

When I asked Eshkol what we were going to do with a million Arabs, he answered: “I get it. You want the dowry, but you don't like the bride!”     

Thomas Paine's influence on the Girondin constitutional project of 1793

This article aims to investigate what may have been Thomas Paine's influence on the Girondin constitutional project presented by Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat Condorcet to the French National Convention, of which he was a member, on 14 and 15 February 1793. Indeed, the English radical was part of the nine-member committee, by the majority Girondin faction, in charge of drafting a new constitution for France. That project, which was accompanied by a Declaration of Rights, never came to fruition, but it has always been recognized as an important document for the interpretation of the evolutionary dynamics that characterized the French revolutionary period. Many of the provisions in the constitution recall Painite political thought, and studying this element can also be useful for understanding the links between the American and French Revolutions, given the fact that Paine actively participated in the experience of institutional upheaval initiated by the American colonists in 1775. The English thinker elaborated a political theory in his writings inspired by the most important democratic principles and based on respect and protection of fundamental human rights, all elements that, in their different mode of expression and declinations, can be found again in the Girondin constitutional charter of 1793.     

Zionism, Translation and the Politics of Erasure

This paper examines the translation of classic political philosophy into Hebrew, arguing that a variety of ideological positions can be disclosed simply by examining the erasure process employed during translation. Exploring the connection between translation and nation-building, I claim that segments from John Stuart Mill's On Liberty , John Locke's Two Treaties of Government and Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan were excised in the service of a Zionist identity politics. Insofar as Zionism is a discursive formation, its production and maintenance involves the expulsion of components that may hinder the fabrication of a unified identity. Counter-narratives of the nation that disrupt its totalizing boundaries may disturb, in Homi Bhabha's words, 'those ideological maneuvers through which "imagined communities" are given essentialist identities'. By way of conclusion, I argue that the altered texts are in effect a sign that one ideology overpowered another and led, as it were, to the corruption of the spirit underlying the original project of translating classics into Hebrew, a project that was initiated by Leon Roth for different ideological reasons.     

Human Rights as a Security Threat: Lawfare and the Campaign against Human Rights NGOs

In this article, I show how the term lawfare is being deployed as a speech act in order to encode the field of human rights as a national security threat. The objective, I claim, is to hinder the work of human rights organizations that produce and disseminate knowledge about social wrongs perpetrated by military personnel and government officials, particularly evidence of acts emanating from the global war on terrorism—such as torture and extrajudicial executions—that constitute war crimes and can be presented in courts that exercise universal jurisdiction. Using Israel as a case study, I investigate the local and global dimensions of the securitization processes, focusing on how different securitizing actors—academics, nongovernmental organizations, think tanks, policy makers, and legislators—mobilize the media, shape public opinion, lobby legislators and policy makers, introduce new laws, and pressure donors to pave the way for a form of exceptional intervention to limit the scope of human rights work.