We asked Jessica Whyte, Goldie Osuri and Marina Velickovic to put together a resource pack of the most important critical (legal) work on the on-going Gaza Genocide. We hope this will be of use in teaching, researching and generally understanding the terrible events that are unforling before our eyes. Generally the texts are blogs and shorter articles, but there are also some deeper dives and further resources.
Abusalim, Jehad. “Gaza: A Model of Exclusion and Its Implications for Global Politics.” The Jerusalem Fund (blog), February 21, 2024. https://thejerusalemfund.org/2024/02/gaza-a-model-of-exclusion-and-its-implications-for-global-politics/
Allan, Lori. “The Rorschach test of Palestine in international law”, Mondoweiss, January 29, 2024. https://mondoweiss.net/2024/01/the-rorschach-test-of-palestine-in-international-law/
Asad, Talal. “Reflections on The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.” Humanity Journal (blog), March 21, 2024. https://humanityjournal.org/blog/reflections-on-the-israeli-palestinian-conflict/
Baars, Grietje. “The Uses of Marxist Theory of Law during a Genocide.” Critical Legal Thinking (blog), February 19, 2024. https://criticallegalthinking.com/2024/02/19/the-uses-of-marxist-theory-of-law-during-a-genocide/
Baconi, Tareq. “Gaza Without Pretenses.” The New York Review of Books (blog), October 11, 2023. https://www.nybooks.com/online/2023/10/11/gaza-without-pretenses/
Erakat, Noura. Genocide and Accountability in Gaza: The Limits and Potential of International Law, 14 February, 2024. https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/genocide-and-accountability-gaza-limits-and-potential-international-law
Luigi Daniele. “A Lethal Misconception, in Gaza and beyond: Disguising Indiscriminate Attacks as Potentially Proportionate in Discourses on the Laws of War,” EJIL: Talk! (blog), November 7, 2023, https://www.ejiltalk.org/a-lethal-misconception-in-gaza-and-beyond-disguising-indiscriminate-attacks-as-potentially-proportionate-in-discourses-on-the-laws-of-war/
De Waal, Alexander. “Famine Expert Alex de Waal on Israel’s Starvation of Gaza,” January 18, 2024 https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/interview/2024/01/18/israel-icj-gaza-famine-starvation-de-waal
Erakat, Noura, Li, Darryl and Reynolds, John. ‘Race, Palestine, and International Law’ 2023 AJIL Unbound 117, 77-81, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4405348
Esmeir, Samera. “To Say and Think a Life beyond What Settler Colonialism Has Made.” Mada Masr, https://www.madamasr.com/en/2023/10/14/opinion/u/to-say-and-think-a-life-beyond-what-settler-colonialism-has-made/
Gurmendi, Alonso. “In Defence of the Defenceless.” Opinio Juris (blog), October 20, 2023. https://opiniojuris.org/2023/10/20/in-defence-of-the-defenceless/.
Haddad, Muna, and Neve Gordon. “The Road to Famine in Gaza.” The New York Review of Books (blog), March 30, 2024, https://www.nybooks.com/online/2024/03/30/the-road-to-famine-in-gaza/
Hammouri, Shahd. “‘How Many Martyrs Left until Liberation?’ Mass Atrocity as International Law’s Price for Emancipation.” TWAILR, February 20, 2024. https://twailr.com/how-many-martyrs-left-until-liberation-mass-atrocity-as-international-laws-price-for-emancipation/
Haque, Adil Ahmad. “Enough: Self-Defense and Proportionality in the Israel-Hamas Conflict.” Just Security, November 6, 2023. https://www.justsecurity.org/89960/enough-self-defense-and-proportionality-in-the-israel-hamas-conflict/
Hirak. “Invasion Day: Palestinian and First Nation Liberation as One.” https://www.newarab.com/. The New Arab, January 26, 2024. https://www.newarab.com/opinion/invasion-day-palestinian-and-first-nation-liberation-one
Iraqi, Amjad. “Unilateral Actions.” The New York Review of Books (blog), March 2, 2024. https://www.nybooks.com/online/2024/03/02/unilateral-actions-gaza-rafah/
Jamshid, Maryami. “Biden Executive Order on West Bank Violence More Likely to Be Used against Palestinians than Israeli Settlers.” Mondoweiss, February 5, 2024. https://mondoweiss.net/2024/02/biden-executive-order-on-west-bank-violence-more-likely-to-be-used-against-palestinians-than-israeli-settlers/
Kattan, Victor. “The Implications of An ICJ Finding That Israel Is Committing the Crime Against Humanity of Apartheid.” Just Security, March 20, 2024. https://www.justsecurity.org/93403/the-implications-of-an-icj-finding-that-israel-is-committing-the-crime-against-humanity-of-apartheid/
Li, Darryl, “Imperialism’s Shell Game”, LPE Project (blog), Accessed May 1, 2024. https://lpeproject.org/blog/imperialisms-shell-game/
Li, Darryl. “The Charge of Genocide.” Dissent Magazine (blog). Accessed April 8, 2024. https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/the-charge-of-genocide/
Maharmeh, Ihab. “Palestinian Workers’ Resisrain the Age of Neoliberal Settler Colonialism.” Critical Legal Thinking, April 23, 2024. https://criticallegalthinking.com/2024/04/23/palestinian-workers-resistance-in-the-age-of-neoliberal-settler-colonialism/
Mazer, Noah. “Liberal Poem for Palestine.” Protean Magazine, March 1, 2024. https://proteanmag.com/2024/03/01/liberal-poem-for-palestine/
McNally, Ed. “Against Solutionism.” NLR/Sidecar, https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/against-solutionism
Mishra, Pankaj. “The Shoah after Gaza.” London Review of Books, March 1, 2024. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n06/pankaj-mishra/the-shoah-after-gaza
Moses, A. Dirk. “More than Genocide.” Boston Review, November 14, 2023. https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/more-than-genocide/
Francesca Albanese, OHCHR. 2024. “Anatomy of a Genocide: Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967 to Human Rights Council” – Advance unedited version (A/HRC/55/73). March. https://www.un.org/unispal/document/anatomy-of-a-genocide-report-of-the-special-rapporteur-on-the-situation-of-human-rights-in-the-palestinian-territory-occupied-since-1967-to-human-rights-council-advance-unedited-version-a-hrc-55/
Palestinian Feminist Collective. “A Feminist Praxis for Academic Freedom in the Context of Genocide in Gaza,” Mondoweiss, April 11, 2024. https://mondoweiss.net/2024/04/a-feminist-praxis-for-academic-freedom-in-the-context-of-genocide-in-gaza/
Saad, Bassem. “Palestine’s Martyrdom Upends the World of Law • Protean Magazine.” Protean Magazine, January 27, 2024 https://proteanmag.com/2024/01/27/palestines-martyrdom-upends-the-world-of-law/
Saba, Dylan and Romm, Jake. “Acts Harmful to the Enemy,” N+1 (blog), January 12, 2024, https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/acts-harmful-to-the-enemy/.
Segal, Raz. “A Textbook Case of Genocide”, Jewish Currents, October 13, 2024, https://jewishcurrents.org/a-textbook-case-of-genocide
Segal, Raz, and Luigi Daniele. “Gaza as Twilight of Israel Exceptionalism: Holocaust and Genocide Studies from Unprecedented Crisis to Unprecedented Change.” Journal of Genocide Research 0, no. 0 (2024): 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2024.2325804
Serisier, Heidi Matthews-Tanya. “Bombing Gaza Isn’t Fighting Sexual Violence.” CounterPunch.org, January 16, 2024. https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/01/16/bombing-gaza-isnt-fighting-sexual-violence/
Shalbak, Ihab. “An Unreliable Witness: The International Court of Justice Has Exposed the Inadequacy of International Law for Palestinians.” ABC Religion & Ethics, February 19, 2024. https://www.abc.net.au/religion/ihab-shalbak-icj-ruling-gaza-genocide-limits-international-law/103485820
Tatour, Lana. “How Human Rights Organizations Are Aiding the Israeli Assault on Gaza.” Mondoweiss, December 12, 2023. https://mondoweiss.net/2023/12/how-human-rights-organizations-are-aiding-the-israeli-assault-on-gaza/
Velickovic, Marina. “International Law and Failure in the Context of Gaza.” Critical Legal Thinking (blog), April 2, 2024. https://criticallegalthinking.com/2024/04/02/international-law-and-failure-in-the-context-of-gaza/
Weizman, Eyal. “Exchange Rate”. London Review of Books, 2 November 2023 https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n21/eyal-weizman/exchange-rate
??Whyte, Jessica. “A ‘Tragic Humanitarian Crisis’: Israel’s Weaponization of Starvation and the Question of Intent.” Journal of Genocide Research 0, no. 0 (2024): 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2024.2339637
Winant, Gabriel. “On Mourning and Statehood: A Response to Joshua Leifer.” Dissent Magazine (blog). Accessed April 8, 2024. https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/a-response-to-joshua-leifer/
Want to read more? Start here!
Allen, Lori. A History of False Hope: Investigative Commissions in Palestine. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021.
Erakat, Noura. 2019. Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
“Writings on Palestine, 2019-2023: A TWAILR Ebook.” TWAILR, November 29, 2023. https://twailr.com/writings-on-palestine-2019-2023-a-twailr-ebook/
Further Resources:
Law for Palestine: https://law4palestine.org/
International Law and the War on Palestine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nykrwUreqbY
About CLT
Orignal Statement of Intent (2009)
Feeling that they were symbolic, we set up this website in the week of the 2009 G20 meeting and the protests that welcomed it to London. For us, that marked the beginning of a critical (legal) fight-back. Neoliberalism is not just a pernicious economic model but an integrated worldview. It became the way we live, the institutional framework of our society, how we understand and imagine our relations with others and the world. Neoliberal capitalism formed the real, its institutions the symbolic and its ideology the imaginary orders of our societies in the last 40 years. A deeper affinity, an alliance, brought together greedy economic policies, political and legal moralisation and biopolitical governance.
Law, a privileged but not exclusive area for our intervention, is no longer the form or the instrument, the tool or restraint of power. Law has started becoming the very operation, the substance of power. Legal form is squeezed and undermined by the privatization of public areas of activity and the simultaneous publicisation of domains of private action. Legal content, on the other hand, becomes co-extensive with the operations of power. The global biopolitical turn and the new humanitarianism mean that the main normative claims of modern law, typically human rights, have now become an integral part of power relations, that they precede, accompany and legitimise the penetration of all parts of the world by the new order. Law acts as an empty signifier that attaches to everything from pavement walking, the ever-present CCTV cameras (surveillance being the new vis anglais), to Iraqi liberation. It is auto-poetically reproduced in a loop of endless validity but is devoid of sense or signification.
But the signs from Athens and France, from Iceland and the G20 protests are positive. Over the last few years, this model of capitalism, deregulated, free-market, greedy, based on financial gambling, cheap credit and disregard for any value other than profit has come to crisis. Bail outs, nationalisation, regulation aim at saving capitalism from its self-generated implosion. At the same time, they have delivered a huge blow to free market idolatry. The crisis of the economic model, something accepted as the indispensable benevolent background of life, gives us a unique opportunity to examine the totality of the settlement of the last 40 years. The best time to demystify ideology is when it enters into crisis. At this point, its taken for granted, natural, invisible premises come to the surface become de-naturalised, objectified and can be understood for that first time for what they are, ideological constructs. The aim of critical (legal) thinking is precisely to start this process and to examine recent institutional strategies as the indispensable companion of neo-liberalism.
This is our time, the time of protest, of change, the welcoming of the event. Critical (legal) theory must be re-linked with emancipatory and radical politics. We need to imagine or dream a law or society in which people are no longer despised or degraded, oppressed or dominated and from that impossible but necessary standpoint to judge the here and now. (Legal) critique is the companion and guide of radical change.
CLT, 2009.
The role of the one who speaks is therefore not the role of the legislator or the philosopher, between camps, the figure of peace and of armistice, in that position of which already Solon had dreamt and also Kant. To establish oneself between adversaries, at the centre and above them, to impose a general law on each and to found an order that reconciles: this is not at all what is at issue. At issue, rather, is the positing of a right marked by dissymmetry, the founding of a truth linked to a relation of force, a weapon-truth and a singular right. The subject that speaks is a warring – I won’t even say a polemical – subject.
— Michel Foucault
