Occupier’s Law

In dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian ‘conflict,’ mainstream literature seems to favour the ‘spectacular’ sides of violence at the expense of an understanding of people and their everyday experiences in such contexts. Tobias Kelly breaks away from this trend and produces a poignant account of the predicament of a West Bank village that has fallen under the civil control of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) after the Oslo Accord (1993) but remains subject to the military control of the Israeli state; a situation causing a myriad of contradictions and confusions in legal rights and claims, particularly in the area of labour law. Arguing that the ‘conflict’ is ultimately one over legal rights, the claims to which produce fear and violence in the region, the author sets out to understand how these rights are negotiated in the everyday and how they are configured in wider multifaceted contexts which are shaped by a constellation of intertwined economic and political determinants that revolve around the Israeli state and its military, Palestinian economic dependence on the Israeli economy and the fragmented PNA. The book unravels the complexity of the situation by addressing different levels of analysis and moving between an exploration of the experiences of residents of the West Bank village of Bayt Hajjar in the Israeli economy and its legal system to encounters with the PNA. The result is a compelling and timely contribution to the understanding of this complex setting.

In line with the literature that has begun to challenge the postulation that the law is culturally alien to Middle Eastern societies, Law, Violence and Sovereignty Among West Bank Palestinians begins by highlighting the centrality of law in the lives of West Bank Palestinians and their cognizance of their entitlements. Using extensive ethnographic evidence, Kelly demonstrates the precariousness of the use of law through litigation when people’s economic lives are at stake and when they have to reconcile their perceived rightful claims and more pressing moral obligations vested in community relations and, more importantly, national solidarity. This is in a context where legal intervention involved the Israeli courts, if not the military. The law, then, rather than being understood in abstraction, is rather ambivalent and ‘multi-stranded . . . at once an instrumental tool, and a complex normative claim . . . given meaning in a context of ongoing relationships, whose implications are constantly being renegotiated’ (p. 28).

West Bank Palestinians live in a legally ambivalent zone which can be understood in light of the ‘jurisdictional politics’ that aim to create a legal and political separation between Israelis and Palestinians, based on ethno-national lines. The attempts to demarcate these boundaries are hindered by inherent contradictions within the Israeli legal processes and the manner in which Israel chooses to govern the West Bank. The dissonance between Israel’s commitment to a ‘Jewish state’ devoted to protecting the rights of ‘the Jewish people’ and its claim to exemplifying a model of ‘the rule of law’ committed to principles of equality and non-discrimination; the placement of Palestinians under a mixture of military rule and a fragile PNA under the Oslo Accords; the dependence of Israeli settlements on Palestinian labour through a deliberate Israeli policy aiming at buffering radicalism through economic dependency; the Israeli state’s denial of occupation and the absence of a Palestinian state; all contribute to the difficulties of demarcation which in all cases only produce differential configurations of rights. To this effect, the book raises an extremely important point: that these contradictions in the process of jurisdictional separation are then resolved through organising rights based not on territorial principles but rather on the legal status of a person as either a West Bank or an Israeli ‘resident’ (regardless where they reside) who is due protection from either the Israeli state or the PNA. The distinction is an ethno-national and not a territorial one. In this context, West Bank Palestinians find themselves in a predicament of inclusion and exclusion at once in a ‘border regime’ that creates spaces enabling them to work in the Israeli economy...