Exploring the territories of denial:
A critical reading of the legal-academic discourse on “Israeli democracy”
with Prof. Alexandre (Sandy) Kedar
Faculty of Law, Univ. of Haifa and the Minerva Center for the Rule of Law under Extreme Conditions
May 29, 2024 at 14:15-15:45
Hybrid event: Zoom* and room 1013, Hamadrega building, University of Haifa**
* Link to zoom will be active here at the time of event
** See map here. For car entry permit to campus e-mail Michal at least one day before the event at: minervaextreme@univ.haifa.ac.il
Abstract
This work in progress analyzes the legal-academic discourse on the Israeli political regime and geography. A preliminary review reveals that the vast majority of legal scholars who write on Israel assume, often implicitly, that Israel is a “democracy” or even a “liberal democracy.”
The paper demonstrates that three related disregards and silences contribute to this effort to shield the Israeli regime from critical scrutiny.
First, most publications that characterize Israel as a democracy do not provide a definition of democracy or engage with the social sciences scholarship that characterizes democracies.
Second, these publications do not engage with significant social science scholarship or the scant legal scholarship that views Israel as a non-democratic state, such as an ethnocracy.
Lastly, and most importantly from a critical legal geography perspective, this democratic characterization of Israel is achieved by fabricating a fantasized map of “Israel.” Accordingly, “Israel” comprises of the territory within the “green line,” i.e., Israel within the pre-1967 borders, as well as a selective imaginary extension of its territory to the “West Bank.” This extension encompasses exclusively Israeli settlers and settlements. While the portion of the map delineating “Israel” within the “green line” roughly corresponds to its physical borders, the portion of the map that includes Israeli settlers and settlements is fictitious because it ignores the presence of Palestinians within the same territory. This legal scholarship also often claims that the West Bank should be excluded from the analysis of the Israeli political regime, since it is temporarily “occupied” under military rule and in accordance with international law.
On the same space, however, two territorial and legal systems coexist: one for Israelis and one for Palestinians. Thus, the situation on the ground approaches the characterization of apartheid in international law. Additionally, Israeli elections are decided by the Israeli settlers, and many state functions, including in the government, the parliament, and even the Israeli Supreme Court, are managed by settlers; and therefore, one cannot analyze the Israeli regime while bracketing and excluding the OPT. This fabricated Israeli territory enables legal scholars to work within a paradigm in which Israel is conceived as a democracy.
Professor Alexandre (Sandy) Kedar teaches at the Law School at the University of Haifa. He holds a Doctorate in Law (S.J.D) from Harvard Law School. He was a visiting professor at the University of Michigan Law School as well as a Grotius International Law Visiting Scholar there and a visiting associate professor at the Frankel Institute for Judaic studies in the University of Michigan. His research focuses on law and society, legal geography, legal history, and land regimes in settler societies.
Sandy served as a co-founder and member of the Israeli Legal History Association as well as served as a board member of Association of Israel Studies and of the Research Center of Poverty and Exclusion at the University of Haifa. He served as the editor of Law and Government and the founding editor of Haifa Law Review. His research is supported by several competitive research grants, including three ISF and two GIF grants. He is the co-founder (in 2003) and director of the Association for Distributive Justice, an Israeli NGO addressing these issues. He has been, and is, active in Israeli public life, particularly in issues related to Palestinians’ and minority’s land struggles.
Kedar has been awarded numerous research grants including an Israeli Science Foundation research grant for the period of 2019-2023 on The Land Regime of the Territories Occupied by Israel: A Legal Geography of The West Bank, 1967-2017 and is working on a book and several articles on this subject.
