7/26/2019 Special Issue on Palestine, Palestinians, and Israels State Criminality edited by Penny Green and Nadera Shalhou

1/4

Produced and distributed by Pluto Journals www.plutojournals.com/scj/

Penny Green is Professor of Law and Globalisation at Queen Mary University of London and Directorof the International State Crime Initiative (statecrime.org), and she is also an Editor in Chief of State

Crime; Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian is Lawrence D. Biele Chair in Law, Institute of Criminology

Faculty of Law, School of Social Work and Social Welfare, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mt.

Scopus, Jerusalem.

INTRODUCTION

Penny Green and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian

Why a special issue on the state crimes of just one small state?

Many states engage in state criminality on a scale which is breathtaking in its

violence, corruption and cruelty.

But as Mark LeVine writes in this volume, Israels occupation of Palestinian

territory represents criminalized state behavior at the most systematic, intricately

planned and executed, widest possible scale, and longest duration. It is also state

crime which has enjoyed not only national and international impunity but interna-

tional funding. Without Americas $3 billion annual military aid package, state

crime in Israel would certainly assume a different character.

This special issue is devoted not only to Israels state crimes but also to

Palestinian resistance and will be published just months before the 50th anniver-

sary of Israels occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and Golan Heights.

The special issue demands that we ask about state violence in relation to his-

toric Palestine, since silence about Israeli state criminality allows for the continu-

ation of the settler colonial regime of dispossession. In speaking, researching and

writing about Israeli state violence one is confronted by a range of hegemonic

epistemological, theoretical and methodological problematizations which the con-

tributers here have addressed to produce alternative ways of knowing.

One of the most critical problematizations is that of denial. As Stan Cohen so

powerfully illustrated, denial is a critical and defining feature of state criminality,

but few criminal states have developed a denial machine of the character and scale

of Israel. This special issue thus offers an evidenced-based corrective to the sys-tematic distortion of truth which the Israeli denial machine propagates.

The first three contributions of this special issue examine the dramatization of

state violence as good violence and provide analyses that have hitherto been

denied a platform in the course of the global political narrative of denial of crimes

by the sacred state. The articles expose the use of power under the state totalitari-

anism of Israeli occupation, with its various operatives, to shed light on state

7/26/2019 Special Issue on Palestine, Palestinians, and Israels State Criminality edited by Penny Green and Nadera Shalhou

2/4

6 PENNY GREEN AND NADERA SHALHOUB-KEVORKIAN

STATECRIME5.1 SPRING2016

criminality. LeVines article The Quantum Mechanics of Israeli Totalitarianism

looks closely at the systematic, well-planned and decades-long criminal behaviour

of Israels occupation. It claims that the duration and comprehensiveness of

Israels rule over [the] Occupied Territories has few if any equals, and hence,understanding the intricacies of Israeli state criminality over such occupied space

and community can be extremely difficult. The author argues that the states use

of military and securitized discourse in the context of colonial Israel brings further

oppression and dispossession, incorporating high levels of criminality. But LeVine

also asks in what way are state crimes, in fact, criminal? To answer this question,

he analyses states of confusion, delves into the missing question of the legality

of an occupation, examines what he defines as the road to criminality, and

explores the quantum mechanics of occupation and its matrix of control. RonitLentins article, Palestine/Israel and State Criminality: Exception, Settler

Colonialism and Racialization engages critically with the settler colonial analyti-

cal framework, while invoking theories on racism and racialization. Her analysis

requires the reader to theorize Israeli state criminality within the framework of a

racial state. By invoking Weheliyes argument, concerning racializing assem-

blages, she places race at the centre of state criminality, as well as an insistence

on the routine nature of the brutalization of Palestinian flesh and the dehumanizing

of Palestinians to achieve ideological normality (Weheliye 2014). The third arti-cle, Colonialism and Apartheid against Fragmented Palestinians: Putting the

Pieces Back Together by Rinad Abdulla, compliments the work of Lentin. It

utilizes the settler colonial analytical framework, while challenging narrower

frameworks. The author rejects the use of the concept of conflict in framing

Israeli military occupation and argues that a-historicizing and depoliticizing the

ideology behind the Israeli settler colonial project are misleading and inappropri-

ate. The article challenges both international law and localized legal discourse and

takes the reader into the settler colonial nature of the Israeli state, apartheid, colo-

nialism and discriminatory policies, while looking closely at five segments of

Palestinian society, each existing within the hierarchy of Israeli dominance: the

West Bank, Gaza, Jerusalem, Palestinian citizens of Israel and the refugees in the

Diaspora (the result of the two major wars of expulsion: 1948 and 1967). The

article concludes by arguing that, as in South Africa, only through decolonization,

the dismantling of Israels apartheid structure and the restructuring of an all-

encompassing, single, democratic state with equal rights for all are fairness and

justice possible.

Colonial technologies of violence as they pertain to Palestinian exclusion and

to stolen, occupied and yet to be stolen Palestinian space are revealed in the two

articles by Green and Smith, and Shalhoub-Kevorkian, David and Ihmoud. Both

articles speak to the continuity of the Nakba and to Israels normalization

7/26/2019 Special Issue on Palestine, Palestinians, and Israels State Criminality edited by Penny Green and Nadera Shalhou

3/4

INTRODUCTION 7

Produced and distributed by Pluto Journals www.plutojournals.com/scj/

of violence and corruption in its relations with Palestine and Palestinians. Both

articles explore Israels demonization of Palestinian space and its reification of

Judaized territorial ambitions. It is impossible, as these articles reveal, to under-

stand the practices of forced eviction throughout Israel and Palestine, or Gazasslow death, outside a framework that recognizes Israels settler colonialism as a

permanent structure of invasion and elimination (Wolfe 2006). In Gaza, the West

Bank, East Jerusalem and the Naqab, Israel operates a theologized political econ-

omy of erasure.

In their article on forced eviction, Green and Smith reveal the contours of a

continuous Nakba. In empirical detail, they document Israels practices of forced

eviction as mechanisms in the larger related state projects of ethnic cleansing and

Judaization. The article reveals the historical land and planning complexitiesbehind forced evictions in Israel/Palestine, the mechanics of house and village

demolitions, the impact of the separation wall, the devastating impact of illegal

Jewish settlements on the lives of Palestinians, the role of Jewish National Fund in

eliminating the traces of Palestinian history and how the invocation of archaeol-

ogy is used in the project of ethnic cleansing. Throughout, it explores processes of

Judaization as the driver of Israeli settler colonialism.

Developing this theme, Shalhoub-Kevorkian and her colleagues advance the

critical concept of security theology in order to explain the defensive rationale(more accurately denial) deployed by the Israeli state for its crimes of terror in

Gaza. Security theology, they argue, rests on the states assumption of a monopoly

on victimhood and it is with this assumed moral monopoly that the state seeks to

neutralize and deny its crimes and redefine the real Palestinian victim as perpetra-

tor. Security theology thus allows impunity to flourish. Gazan lives, geographies

and welfare are reproduced in the form of Gazans as no-bodies, Gaza as a non-

space, and the Gazan community, with no life to live, while alive.

The final two articles explore both violent and non-violent Palestinian resist-

ance to Israels state crimes. Both articles also interrogate the responses that

Palestinian resistance has engendered from the Israeli state and the international

community.

Kovner and Shalhoub-Kevorkian in their analysis of Palestinian child arrests

and detention in Occupied East Jerusalem argue that children are deeply imbri-

cated in the racialized politics of the occupation. In the context of widespread

poverty, discrimination and structural violence, Israels form of counterterrorist

politics casts children both as terrorist and as key sources of Palestinian com-

munity intelligence. Children come to define the resistance and are in turn defined

by it. This politics underpins the panoply of structural violence(s) directed against

them. Constructing children as a threat to Israeli security enables the state to arrest,

detain, imprison and abuse them with impunity or as the authors argue, to erase

7/26/2019 Special Issue on Palestine, Palestinians, and Israels State Criminality edited by Penny Green and Nadera Shalhou

4/4

8 PENNY GREEN AND NADERA SHALHOUB-KEVORKIAN

STATECRIME5.1 SPRING2016

these children from the category of the human and the legal apparatus of human

rights and childrens rights a process they describe as state-hate crime.

Mason and Falk then highlight one of the most intransigent problems faced by

those seeking justice for Palestinians the refusal of Israel and the internationalcommunity to respond to the long history of Palestinian non-violent resistance.

Rather, their article documents a host of measures designed to undermine non-

violent initiatives and the perverse strategy of recasting non-violent forms of

resistance, such as the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, as

violence.

Every article in this special issue speaks to the complicity or weakness of the

international community in confronting Israels crimes against the Palestinians.

BDS, as Mason and Falk argue, is one of the very few non-violent (and effective)strategies possible in the face of the unwillingness by the United Nations (UN),

European Union (EU) and powerful countries to take strong actions against Israel.

Israel has predictably, and unconscionably, denounced both BDS and its support-

ers as anti-Semitic a traditional Israeli public relations (PR) tactic designed

explicitly to deflect attention from the very grave issues, outlined throughout this

volume, that BDS is challenging.

Palestinians it seems must simply accommodate the abuses, killings, discrimi-

nation, segregation, land theft and multitudinous deprivations, inflicted upon themby Israel. The only acceptable form of resistance, from this perspective, is

departure, exile or death.

We hope that this special issue can offer new insights into theorizations of state

criminality and state crime. State criminality, as an all-encompassing power that

traps communities in a state of slow death, results in transforming populations

from must live conditions to have to die conditions.

Deepening our understanding of state criminality, at the macro and micro level,

with a focus on crimes of the Israeli state, requires exposing the profound dynam-

ics and fusions underlying politics, state-ness and criminality.

References

Weheliye, A. (2014) Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist

Theories of the Human. Durham: Duke University Press.

Wolfe, P. (2006) Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native, Journal of Genocide

Research, 8(4): 387409.