Sept. 29 - Occupied Territory: Human Rights Analysis
At a full-house event at the Law School, “The Occupied Palestinian Territory: A Human Rights Analysis,” we heard from the heads of two Israeli human rights organizations, Neta Patrick, Executive Director of Yesh Din and Tania Hary, Director of Gisha, regarding their latest analyses based on work on the ground in the West Bank and in Gaza.
Focusing on the West Bank, Yesh Din publishes incisive reports on its litigation work together with analyses of general settler “land takeover practices” and Israel’s “silent policies of transforming unauthorized outposts into official settlements”.
In 2011, as a Fellow at the Human Rights Institute at Columbia, Neta gave an incisive paper on the then new phenomenon known as “Price Tag,” which refers to Israeli settler violence against Palestinians and their property as the settlers’ redirected response to Israeli government policies, typically with these two words scrawled on the burnt out walls of houses or mosques. Providing detailed case illustrations, Neta documented a general pattern of legal impunity, as most of the settler-perpetrators were not prosecuted. In 2014, Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, a Professor at Hebrew University, spoke about this same topic at a CPS cosponsored event, but with reference to acts committed in Jerusalem (see her 2016 article in the British Journal of Criminology-). (on Nadera’s work, see further below, Oct. 16, Dec. 5.)
Regarding critical approaches to Human Rights Law, it may be noted that a related CPS book discussion scheduled for April 8, 2016 unfortunately had to be cancelled. The book in question is The Human Right To Dominate (Oxford, 2015), co-authored by Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon.
