Some Reflections on BDS and Feminist Political Solidarity
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feminists@law Vol 4, No 1 (2014) __________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Some Reflections on BDS and Feminist Political Solidarity Brenna Bhandar* We are not asking you for heroic action or to form freedom brigades. We are simply asking you not to be complicit in perpetuating the crimes of the Israeli state.1 A little over two years ago, on March 13, 2012, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) made a series of findings in their observations on Israel’s compliance with the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. Significantly, they found that the State of Israel’s policies towards Palestinian and Bedouin communities as regards land rights, citizenship, education and protection from racial and ethnic discrimination, violate several Articles of the Convention, including Articles 3, 5 and 7.2 Article 3 condemns “racial segregation and apartheid.” The news travelled quickly through social and political networks of activists, lawyers working for human rights, and others, but seems to have been ignored by most * Senior Lecturer in the School of Law at SOAS, University of London and a member of the Centre for Palestine Studies. Email [email protected]. She has been a visiting lecturer in Canada and South Africa. Her areas of research and teaching include property law, equity and trusts, indigenous land rights, post-colonial and feminist legal theory, multiculturalism and pluralism, critical legal theory, and critical race theory. In her current research project, she examines techniques of ownership and dispossession in settler colonial contexts. Thanks to Adam Hanieh, Alberto Toscano and David Lloyd for their helpful feedback on an earlier version of this piece. 1 Ali Abunimah, “After witnessing Palestine’s apartheid, Indigenous and Women of Color feminists endorse BDS, 7 December 2011, http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/after-witnessing- palestines-apartheid-indigenous-and-women-color-feminists (accessed 26 April 2014). 2 Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, Consideration of Reports Submitted by States Parties under Article 9 of the Convention: Concluding Observations of the CERD: Israel, 80th session, 13 February-9 March 2012, CERD/C/ISA/CO/14-16, available at http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/cerd/docs/CERD.C.ISR.CO.14-16.pdf. See Orna Ben-Naftali, Aeyal M. Gross, and Keren Michaeli, “The Illegality of the Occupation Regime: The Fabric of Law in the Occupied Palestinian Territory” in A. Ophir, M. Givoni, S. Hanafi, eds, The Power of Inclusive Exclusion: Anatomy of Israeli Rule in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (New York: Zone Books, 2009), pp. 31-88 at 49; the authors speculate that the Israeli government’s actions in the West Bank & Gaza might well be in violation of Article 7 of the Rome Statute, which criminalises apartheid and deems it a crime against humanity. _________________________________________________________________________________________________ 1 Bhandar Some Reflections on BDS __________________________________________________________________________________________________________ mainstream media. Similarly, the Russell Tribunal on Palestine (Findings of the South African Session) found that: [S]ince 1948 the Israeli authorities have pursued concerted policies of colonisation and appropriation of Palestinian land. Israel has through its laws and practices divided the Israeli Jewish and Palestinian populations and allocated them different physical spaces, with varying levels and quality of infrastructure, services and access to resources. The end result is wholesale territorial fragmentation and a series of separate reserves and enclaves, with the two groups largely segregated… this policy is formally described in Israel as hafrada, Hebrew for ‘separation’.3 Ascribing the term apartheid to Israeli state practices raises a plethora of complex political issues, most particularly, the inevitable comparison with South Africa’s apartheid regime. I will instead focus on how the findings of the UN CERD, along with some other recent legislative innovations of the Israeli state, may augment our understandings of the spatial and temporal dimensions of the occupation, and the political contours of this particular settler colonial regime. I will then discuss how apartheid, based on a logic of separation and fragmentation, is challenged by the BDS movement. The animating spirit of BDS, based on a global politics of solidarity, finds a committed ally in a feminist politics that is anti-imperialist and anti-war. The UN Committee’s findings relate to Israeli laws and legal practices in the domains of property and criminal law, and provision of education The UN CERD adopted a series of observations that relate to racial segregation between Jewish and non-Jewish sectors in Israel, including in the education system and in the provision of and access to housing and land, which “raise issues under article 3 of the Convention.”4 The Committee found that the two separate systems of education, one in 3 See Executive Findings of the third session of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine: http://www.russelltribunalonpalestine.com/en/sessions/south-africa/south-africa-session-—-full- findings/cape-town-session-summary-of-findings (accessed 26 April 2014). 4 CERD/C/ISA/CO/14-16, Part C, para. 11. _________________________________________________________________________________________________ 2 feminists@law Vol 4, No 1 (2014) __________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Hebrew and one in Arabic, remain impermeable to one another except in exceptional cases. The maintenance of separate municipalities – Jewish municipalities and the “so- called municipalities of the minorities” – also raises concerns under Article 3.5 In particular, they noted the recently enacted Admissions Committees Law (2011) that empowers private committees to reject applicants who wish to reside in a municipality on the basis of whether they are deemed to be “suitable to the social life of the community.” This has enabled admissions committees in predominantly Jewish neighbourhoods and also of course in burgeoning settlements to bar Palestinians from residing in those neighbourhoods. The Committee noted several different aspects of the legal discrimination with respect to land issues that affect Palestinian and Bedouin communities. Several recently enacted laws led the Committee to recommend that the “state ensure equal access to land and property” and to “abrogate or rescind any legislation that does not comply with the principle of non-discrimination”. The language of non-discrimination doesn’t in my view adequately describe the reality of the ongoing, daily appropriation of Palestinian land in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Naqab (Negev) and many other areas, which begins in the post-Mandate era with the Absentee Property Law. As scores of Palestinian and Israeli scholars have recounted, the Absentee Property Law placed all Palestinian property owned by people who were deemed to be absent in 1948 with the Custodian of Absentee Property. This land was then later transferred to the Israeli State, and in some instances, private organisations, including settler organisations. The use of Military Orders, land use laws and urban planning policies, restrictions on the mobility of Palestinians, Mandate-era laws regarding the appropriation of land on the basis of how the land is used, all operate recombinantly to dispossess Palestinians of their land. Recently enacted laws however, some of which are analysed by the Committee, reflect changes in the mode of appropriation relied upon over the past 68 years. The Israel Land Administration Law of 2009, the 2010 Amendment to the Land (Acquisition for Public Purposes) Ordinance (1943); and finally the 2010 Amendment to the Negev Development Authority Law (1991) effectively set out legislative mechanisms for the appropriation of Palestinian land that will be transferred into a private market economy of property 5 ibid. _________________________________________________________________________________________________ 3 Bhandar Some Reflections on BDS __________________________________________________________________________________________________________ ownership. This reflects a shift from the process by which appropriated land was first held by the Jewish National Fund for the Jewish people, and sometimes at a much later time, transferred into the hands of private organisations, including settler organisations. This marks a significant change from a system of ownership in which the imperatives of an ethno-nationalist settler state initially replaced a private market in land, which is far more typically an attribute of settler colonial systems of property ownership. In Canada, for instance, land that was appropriated from First Nations was placed directly into a private market economy, parasitic on the fiction of underlying Crown sovereignty. There are a few salient aspects of Israeli apartheid and racial discrimination that the Committee did not consider, which are also relevant to a consideration of State- sanctioned racism and segregation. The citizenship laws that were upheld in 2012 by the Israeli Supreme Court make it virtually impossible for Palestinians with Israeli citizenship to reside in Israel with their spouses and children who do not have Israeli citizenship.6 The Citizenship