The current issue of State Crime Journal takes up the theme of “Palestine, Palestinians, and Israel’s State Criminality.”

The journal is paywalled but the editors, along with Richard Falk, presented its findings on a recent panel at Queen Mary University in London:

Issue editors Penny Green and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian lay out the themes of the issue in their introduction, which is available for download:

This special issue is devoted not only to Israel’s state crimes but also to Palestinian resistance and will be published just months before the 50th anniversary of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and Golan Heights.

The special issue demands that we ask about state violence in relation to historic Palestine, since silence about Israeli state criminality allows for the continuation of the settler colonial regime of dispossession. In speaking, researching and writing about Israeli state violence one is confronted by a range of hegemonic epistemological, theoretical and methodological problematizations which the contributers here have addressed to produce alternative ways of knowing.

One of the most critical problematizations is that of denial. As Stan Cohen so powerfully illustrated, denial is a critical and defining feature of state criminality, but few criminal states have developed a denial machine of the character and scale of Israel. This special issue thus offers an evidenced-based corrective to the systematic distortion of truth which the Israeli denial machine propagates.

The issue’s contents include:

  • Introduction by Penny Green and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian
  • ‘The Quantum Mechanics of Israeli Totalitarianism’ by Mark LeVine
  • ‘Palestine/Israel and the State Criminality: Exception, Settler Colonialism and Racialization’ by Ronit Lentin
  • ‘Colonialism and Apartheid Against Fragmented Palestinians: Putting the Pieces Back Together’ by Rinad Abdulla
  • ‘Evicting Palestine’ by Penny Green and Amelia Smith
  • ‘Children’s Rights, State Criminality and Settler Colonialism: Violence and Child Arrest in Occupied East Jerusalem’ by Bella Kovner and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian
  • ‘Theorizing State Crime’ by Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Yossi David and Sarah Ihmoud
  • ‘Assessing Nonviolence in the Palestinian Rights Struggle’ by Victoria Mason and Richard Falk