Cause lawyering in transnational perspective: National conflict and human rights in Israel/Palestine

Law & Society Review, 1997 by Lisa Hajjar

The other two dimensions of transnationalism that apply to this study are spatially grounded in the history and politics of Israel and the Occupied Territories (Israel/Palestine). They involve trans-statal and trans-ethnonational relations (see Connor 1994; Verdery 1994). The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been a constitutive aspect of these relations.8 A second issue which this article addresses is the localized dimensions of transnationalism as they affect cause lawyering. The objective is to illuminate the processes and effects of government-in-conflict in relations among population groups in Israel/Palestine, and people's relations to the Israeli state.9 At the most basic level, transnationalism manifests itself locally through the significance of differences between Jews and Palestinian Arabs, and the politico-legal distinctions between citizens of the Israeli state and residents of the Israeli-occupied territories.

Section II provides background information on the political and legal context of Israel/Palestine and a brief overview of the military court system. The remainder of the article focuses on the subject of cause lawyering in the military courts. Sections III and IV concentrate on the local dimensions and dynamics of transnationalism as they inform lawyers' motivations (sec. III) and lawyers' legal and extralegal strategies (sec. IV). Section V extends the transnational perspective to the international level by considering the varying influences of human rights on cause lawyering in this context.

II. Israel/Palestine as a Case Study of Transnationalism

A. Background

In 1967 when Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza, the territorial boundaries of Palestine during the British Mandate were reestablished by the spatialization of control through a single power, now the Israeli state (Kimmerling 1989). But this geographic contiguity manifested itself in an explicitly transnational form. Israeli rule was jurisdictionally divided among several political formations with varying legal statuses: sovereign territory (Israel proper, i.e., inside the borders of the 1949 armistice commonly referred to as the Green Line), military administration (Palestinian population centers in the territories),' and those parts of the Occupied Territories that have been legalistically transformed into de facto annexations (East Jerusalem, Jewish settlements, military holdings, and confiscated lands).ll

Thus, political authority in Israel/Palestine provides one example of trans-statal relations, both because of the heterogeneity of ruling structures and because military occupation is, by definition, an "international" matter. Locally, government (the administration and control of land and people) is a prerogative vested in the Israeli state, which was empowered through the fact of conquest to extend its rule to the territories. The transnationalization of Israeli government was instituted through the various political and legal processes of jurisdictional mapping and administration. But this localized politico-legal arrangement is mediated by the overlapping authority of the international community, which bears-and at times assumes-a degree of accountability for the governance and fate of occupied Palestinians and the lands seized in war (see Playfair 1992).