Month September 2016
Muna Haddad: Referring to Palestinian villages as “unlawful clusters” is just one small example of how the state of Israel misuses language to distort history and deny rights to Palestinians.
Jehad Abu Salim: For Palestinians, the fence around the Gaza Strip evokes the Nakba, the refugee struggle, and the occupation. The fence, as a physical barrier to refugee return, was the beginning of the tragedy. The fence today is its continuation. And since the fence caused the problem, the solution must include its removal. The fence is the history that Palestinians in Gaza never want to forget, and no amount of aid can induce them to do so.
Sawsan Zaher: In the Israeli economy, dirty, difficult, and dangerous jobs often are left to some 170,000 foreign workers, among them 55,000 Palestinian workers from the West Bank. Numerous NGO reports and media exposes have documented the abuses faced by these workers. Yet the most vulnerable and exploited segment of Israel’s labor force now faces yet another barrier to justice: in August, Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked issued a new regulation requiring most foreign workers to deposit a financial guarantee as a condition to proceed with lawsuits against their employers in the country’s labor courts. As a result, whatever rights these workers should enjoy by law will likely be too expensive to actually enforce.
Conclusion to symposium on The Dynamics of Exclusionary Constitutionalism: Israel as a Jewish and Democratic State (Hart Press), a forthcoming book by Mazen Masri.
K-Sue Park: When Israeli jurists speak of their country’s “social contract,” they are tapping into a history that goes back further than thinkers like Locke and Hobbes and is instead grounded in agreements concluded by English settlers in North America.
Hassan Jabareen: Israel’s Supreme Court treats the country’s Declaration of Independence as legally binding when used to bolster Jewish rights at the expense of Palestinians but dismisses it as rhetoric when Palestinians invoke its language on equality.
The Nakba Files is proud to present an online symposium on The Dynamics of Exclusionary Constitutionalism: Israel as a Jewish and Democratic State (Hart Press), a forthcoming book by Mazen Masri.