Lisa Hajjar

A groundbreaking exploration of the philosophy underpinning Western humanitarian and military intervention. The principle of the “lesser evil”—the acceptability of pursuing one exceptional course of action in order to prevent a greater injustice—has long been a cornerstone of Western ethical philosophy. From its roots in classical ethics and Christian theology, to Hannah Arendt’s exploration of the work of the Jewish Councils during the Nazi regime, Weizman explores its development in three key transformations of the problem: the defining intervention of Medecins Sans Frontieres in mid-1980s Ethiopia; the separation wall in Israel-Palestine; and international and human rights law in Bosnia, Gaza and Iraq. Drawing on a wealth of new research, Weizman charts the latest manifestation of this age-old idea. In doing so he shows how military and political intervention acquired a new “humanitarian” acceptability and legality in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

This chapter focuses on the contributions of Israeli and Palestinian cause lawyers to the creation and development of a human rights movement in Israel and Palestine, with particular focus on the protection of the rights of residents in the Occupied Territories, and on the work of lawyers within the Israeli military court system. Their activities demonstrate that mobilization around the cause of human rights is not an effect of globalization but one of its manifestations.

Grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions are international offenses and perpetrators can be prosecuted abroad if accountability is not pursued at home. The US torture policy, instituted by the Bush administration in the context of the “war on terror” presents a contemporary example of liability for gross crimes under international law. For this reason, classification and secrecy have functioned in tandem as a shield to block public knowledge about prosecutable offenses. Keeping such information secret and publicizing deceptive official accounts that contradict the truth are essential to propaganda strategies to sustain American support or apathy about the country’s multiple current wars. Although a great deal of information and evidence has come to light about the US torture policy, there has been no thorough domestic investigation up the chain of command, no full public disclosure, and no effort to prosecute its intellectual authors in US courts. The classified diplomatic cables al...

The interests of sovereign states and individuals do not always agree and this complicates the politics of human rights at the broadest levels. Relatedly, torture is not merely the infliction of pain but involves complex interconnections between morality, legality and politics. Justice, on the other hand, is an abstract principle that is devoid of the immediacy on physical destruction. And on the whole, the necessity for collective security takes precedence over the interests and desires of the individual.

Hajjar 475 edge (how the subject is framed) and power (what strategies of intervention are used)." Yet there is a distinction between cause lawyering and human rights: the latter is already globalized; the genealogy of human rights is rooted in the globalization of mod-ernist ...

This article focuses on the issue of domestic violence in Muslim societies in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. The analytical framework is comparative, emphasizing four factors and the interplay among them: shari'a (Islamic law), state power, intrafamily violence, and struggles over women's rights. The comparative approach historicizes the problem of domestic violence and impunity to consider the impact of transnational legal discourses (Islamism and human rights) on “local” struggles over rights and law. The use of shari'a creates some commonalities in gender and family relations in Muslim societies, notably the sanctioning and maintenance of male authority over female relatives. However, the most important issue for understanding domestic violence and impunity is the relationship between religion and state power. This relationship takes three forms: communalization, in which religious law is separate from the national legal regime; nationalization, in which the state...

Torture is absolutely prohibited and constitutes one of the core crimes under international law. There is a substantial body of sociolegal literature that addresses torture's illegality. But this article tackles the question “does torture work?” The analysis locates the practice of torture in historical and global perspective, accommodating but not constrained by post-9/11 scholarship on American torture. The titular question is treated more critically and comprehensively than a narrowly construed focus on the value and veracity of utterances produced as a result of pain and suffering. Drawing on scholarship from a variety of fields, the article addresses how torture works (i.e., why it has been used and its effects) in order to highlight the role of torture in the mutually constitutive histories of law-state-society relations. The final section uses the American case to offer conclusions about the efficacy and effects of torture.

Since 2001, we have witnessed the development of a counterterrorism war paradigm built to advance claims about the post-9/11 scope and discretion of US executive power and to articulate specific interpretations of national security interests and strategic objectives in the “war on terror.” What makes this a paradigm rather than merely a conglomeration of evolving policies is the cohesiveness and mutual reinforcement of its underlying rationales about the rights of the US government to prosecute a territorially unbounded war against an evolving cast of enemies. Drawing on Bourdieu’s concept of a juridical field, the article focuses on how officials who constructed a legal framework for this paradigm, rather than disregarding international law wholesale, have engaged in interpretations and crafted rationales to evade some international humanitarian law (IHL) rules and norms while rejecting the underlying logic or applicability of others. This article traces the counterterrorism war pa...

Since 2001, we have witnessed the development of a counterterrorism war paradigm built to advance claims about the post-9/11 scope and discretion of US executive power and to articulate specific interpretations of national security interests and strategic objectives in the "war on terror." What makes this a paradigm rather than merely a conglomeration of evolving policies is the cohesiveness and mutual reinforcement of its underlying rationales about the rights of the US government to prosecute a territorially unbounded war against an evolving cast of enemies. Drawing on Bourdieu's concept of a juridical field, the article focuses on how officials who constructed a legal framework for this paradigm, rather than disregarding international law wholesale, have engaged in interpretations and crafted rationales to evade some international humanitarian law (IHL) rules and norms while rejecting the underlying logic or applicability of others. This article traces the counterterrorism war paradigm's development and explains how it now competes with and threatens to supersede the customary law principles enshrined in IHL.

Since 2001, we have witnessed the development of a counterterrorism war paradigm built to advance claims about the post-9/11 scope and discretion of US executive power and to articulate specific interpretations of national security interests and strategic objectives in the "war on terror." What makes this a paradigm rather than merely a conglomeration of evolving policies is the cohesiveness and mutual reinforcement of its underlying rationales about the rights of the US government to prosecute a territorially unbounded war against an evolving cast of enemies. Drawing on Bourdieu's concept of a juridical field, the article focuses on how officials who constructed a legal framework for this paradigm, rather than disregarding international law wholesale, have engaged in interpretations and crafted rationales to evade some international humanitarian law (IHL) rules and norms while rejecting the underlying logic or applicability of others. This article traces the counterterrorism war paradigm's development and explains how it now competes with and threatens to supersede the customary law principles enshrined in IHL.

After 9/11, top Bush administration officials assumed that physical and psychological violence would be necessary to elicit actionable intelligence from captured terror suspects and made torture a defining aspect of interrogation and detention policy in the global “war on terror.” But it wasn’t the torture program per se that triggered this rising public support for torture; it was politics—specifically, reactionary politics. Let me make a small point here that I will develop later: the Republican Party is, today, the pro-torture party, but the relationship between pro-torture views and reactionary politics is a reality of American political culture that partisanship alone cannot explain.

Since 2001, we have witnessed the development of a counterterrorism war paradigm built to advance claims about the post-9/11 scope and discretion of US executive power and to articulate specific interpretations of national security interests and strategic objectives in the "war on terror." What makes this a paradigm rather than merely a conglomeration of evolving policies is the cohesiveness and mutual reinforcement of its underlying rationales about the rights of the US government to prosecute a territorially unbounded war against an evolving cast of enemies. Drawing on Bourdieu's concept of a juridical field, the article focuses on how officials who constructed a legal framework for this paradigm, rather than disregarding international law wholesale, have engaged in interpretations and crafted rationales to evade some international humanitarian law (IHL) rules and norms while rejecting the underlying logic or applicability of others. This article traces the counterterrorism war paradigm's development and explains how it now competes with and threatens to supersede the customary law principles enshrined in IHL.

The second intifada and the U.S. " global war on terror, " though quite different, both involve asymmetrical warfare that pits powerful states against non-state organizations. This article focuses on international humanitarian law (IHL) to assess and compare how Israeli and Amer-ican doctrines and policies for waging " wars on terror " have departed from international consensus on norms and rules for military engagement in occupied territories and the treatment of enemy prisoners. Neither Israel nor the United States ignores IHL; rather, they seek to reinterpret it in a manner that permits the pursuit (militarized or otherwise) of political agendas, even while claiming the reinterpretation to be legally valid. THE MERE MENTION of certain place names—Jenin, the Twin Towers, Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, Falluja—evokes images of carnage and suffering. And the list grows: the Beirut suburbs, Qana, Haifa, Bint Jbail. It seems that law has little capacity to mitigate the worst violence of war, yet the adage inter armes, silent leges (in war, law is silent) is patently contradicted by the proliferating discourse and intense debates over what is legal in contemporary " wars on terror. " 1 International humanitarian law (IHL) is a term of art for modern laws of war and armed conflict. 2 As lex specialis, its purpose is to govern the use of force and the treatment of enemies once peace has been broken. Although the " fog of war " often obscures or undermines compliance, until recently, a declared commitment to act in accordance with IHL was a source of legitimacy for war makers. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, however, the legitimating value of IHL has been called into question on the grounds that it is irrelevant to some forms of war and some enemies, thereby threatening the legal foundations of humanitarian behavior in war. 3 This article focuses on IHL and the challenges it faces at the hands of Israel and the United States. Israel has been in a near continuous state of war since

Grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions are international offenses and perpetrators can be prosecuted abroad if accountability is not pursued at home. The US torture policy, instituted by the Bush administration in the context of the " war on terror " presents a contemporary example of liability for gross crimes under international law. For this reason, classification and secrecy have functioned in tandem as a shield to block public knowledge about prosecutable offenses. Keeping such information secret and publicizing deceptive official accounts that contradict the truth are essential to propaganda strategies to sustain American support or apathy about the country's multiple current wars. Although a great deal of information and evidence has come to light about the US torture policy, there has been no thorough domestic investigation up the chain of command, no full public disclosure, and no effort to prosecute its intellectual authors in US courts. The classified diplomatic cables allegedly provided to Wikileaks by Bradley Manning have revealed one critical way in which this unaccountability has been enforced. This article addresses four issues: First, a consideration of the importance of accountability for torture and other gross violations of international law; second, a summary of efforts to hold US officials accused of torture-related offenses accountable in European courts; third, an examination of several leaked diplomatic cables that expose the lengths to which both the Bush and Obama administrations have gone to derail these foreign criminal investigations in Germany and Spain; and fourth, the unexpected consequences that leaks played in unleashing anti-authoritarian uprisings in the Arab world and the possibilities of future accountability.

“Lawfare,” a neologism that combines law and warfare, describes efforts to challenge a state’s military practices and national security policies in court, and to pursue accountability for war crimes and other violations that arise in the context of armed conflict.  Lawfare has a counterpart in what I term “state lawfare.” By this, I mean the practices of officials to reinterpret international humanitarian law (IHL) or human rights laws in ways that deviate from prevailing internationally accepted understandings in order to “legalize” state practices that would otherwise constitute violations. These two concepts—lawfare and state lawfare—are useful in analyzing the Israeli and US governments’ wars in the twenty-first century.  The specific focus here is on the efforts to justify and “legalize” targeted killing, and lawfare attempts to challenge the legality of these policies. Beyond the targeted killing controversy is a larger story about contestations over the parameters of what is legal in war.

Forthcoming: Life in the Age of Drone Warfare, Lisa Parks and Caren Kaplan, eds. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.

The Druze community occupies a distinctive niche in the broader context of Israel/Palestine, one which is located in the interstices of various socio-political cross-currents, notably Jewish/Arab and Israeli/Palestinian. Druze Israeli identity is built around a politics of difference and separation from all other population groups residing in this area, yet it is an ambivalent and contradictory designation. This article focuses on those Druze who, through their service in the army, have been used as translators in the military courts in the occupied territories. The preference of Druze for this role relates to the fact that they have both bilingual skills (Hebrew and Arabic) and a socio-political status as 'non-Arab Arabs'. Following a general discussion of the politicization of Druze identity, I analyse the state's uses of Druze bilingualism for the purposes of maintaining and legitimizing the occupation, and the effects that fulfilling such a role have had on those who have functioned in this capacity.