OUTRAGE: Israel’s Execution Bill For Palestinian Prisoners Passes

Fronts + Fault Lines, is a new podcast on Palestine Deep Dive developed by the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM), an organisation of Palestinian and Arab youth in diaspora struggling for the liberation of our land and people.

Hosted by, Jeanine and Nihal, organisers with PYM in Britain - this new podcast series in collaboration with the Palestinian Youth Movement, offering sharp analysis on the Arab and Iranian region and what it means for us in Britain.

In the wake of Prisoners' Day and in the shadow of the execution bill they are joined by Dr Nimer Sultany who is a leading scholar of constitutional and comparative law, who has written extensively on Israeli law's legitimating function, the legal architecture of occupation, and the relationship between law and colonial power.

They discuss how understanding the execution bill requires tracing the legal genealogy of Israeli incarceration back through its British Mandate inheritance; the emergency regulations, the military ordinances, the administrative detention frameworks that Britain constructed across Ireland, India, and Palestine, and which the Israeli state absorbed and expanded after 1948.

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Episode Transcript

(00:00):
So death to Arabs now became law.
Death to Arabs was a chant by, you know, some factions and
stadiums and you know, Bing veers.
The Bing veers would say death to Arabs and then they would ask
and they would say approached and they would say well, death
to terrorists. So this conflation between Arabs
and terrorists has existed for some time.
This is also relates to what Walid Dhaka, Dhali Dhaka that

(00:23):
you mentioned conceptualized as the small prison and the bigger
prison. So the torturous environment can
manifest in different ways and in a way you can talk about the
whole of the West Bank and Gaza as a torturous environment, as
different techniques that Israelhas inflicted on the population
to make their lives held and therefore deprive them from the

(00:47):
right to movement, which is akinto incarceration.
But much of the British legislation remained and also
became became a blue a blueprintfor the completing the
colonization of Palestine. The fact of the matter is that
the British have controlled different territories,
including, you know, India and, you know, Oman and other and the

(01:10):
Gulf more generally and Jordan and Iraq, etcetera.
So much of the knowledge that was produced in these areas was
also transparent, but the most significant of which is
obviously Ireland. So, you know, the black and tans
is something that both the Irishand the Palestinians
experienced. Israeli prisons were also kind
of just inherited by by the Israelis from the British.

(01:41):
Welcome to our second episode ofFronts and Fault Lines.
Palestinian Prisoners Day falls on April 17th, the date in 1974
when Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails launched a hunger
strike demanding recognition of their political status.
It is a day that belongs for tradition of collective
resistance stretching across decades and across generations.

(02:04):
As of April 2026 / 10,000 Palestinians are held in Israeli
prisons, including 342 children,with over 3500 detained under
so-called administrative detention, meaning without
charge, without trial and without a defined endpoint.
Since October 2023, the International Committee of the

(02:25):
Red Cross has been denied accessto visit Palestinian detainees,
leaving prisoners without the documentation and legal support
that international oversight is meant to guarantee.
On March 30th of this year, justweeks before Prisoners Day, the
Israeli Knesset passed a bill that instructs military courts
to impose the death penalty on Palestinians convicted of

(02:47):
killing Israelis in acts of terror, but will not impose the
same penalty on Israelis convicted of killing
Palestinians. The law mandates death by
hanging and requires that sentences be carried out within
90 days of a final ruling. It restricts access to legal
counsel and family visits, limits external oversight and

(03:07):
grants immunity to those involved in carrying out
executions. Israel's military court system
operates with an approximately 96% conviction rate, based
largely on confessions extractedunder duress and torture during
interrogations. The day the law passed, Israeli
politicians wore hangman's nooses on their labels on the

(03:28):
Knesset floor. It's a Marvin Veer's wife even
celebrated his birthday recentlywith a noose decorated cake.
Today we are joined by Doctor Nimous Sultani.
Dr. Sultani is a leading scholarof constitutional and
comparative law who has written extensively on Israeli law's
legitimating function, the legalarchitecture of occupation, and

(03:49):
the relationship between law andcolonial power.
We're recording this in the wakeof Prisoners Day and in the
shadow of the execution bill. Doctor Nemid, welcome to Front
and Fault Lines. We're really grateful to have
you with us today. Thank you Nihad and Janine for
having me. Thanks, William.
So the first question we want toask really is grounded in the

(04:10):
location we're recording this podcast from, which is Britain.
And the fact that your work engages deeply with how Israeli
law didn't just emerge from scratch in in 1948 with the
establishment of of the colonialstate, but was built on Mandate
era foundation. So foundations they inherited
from the British mandate period.The emergency regulations of

(04:33):
1945, which the British themselves actually revoked
before leaving, were immediatelyreadopted by by Israel.
Can you walk us through that inheritance of, of British
Mandate law, what legal tools the British developed in
Palestine and how they drew on colonial practices from places

(04:56):
like Ireland and from India and South Africa in the development
of these laws? And what does it tell us about
Israeli law that it was built onthese kind of illegitimate
foundations? The British inheritance is
indeed a fundamental shaping thecourse of the evolution of
Israeli legal system and the constitutional framework that

(05:17):
has been developed since 1948. First and foremost is the
constitutional structure. So the 1917 Balfour Declaration
was integrated into the Mandate of Palestine and eventually
became the structure for the denial of self determination in
Palestine. And the main constitutional
document is the 1922 Palestine Constitution or the Persian

(05:41):
Constitution which is which comes in the form of ordering
council. Meaning as one of the Persian
commentators and leaders of the time in 1933 said it was
produced, canned and shipped from London without any popular
involvement, without any democratic consultation.
So it was a top down anti democratic document which laid

(06:05):
down to the subordination of themajority of the population to
the imperial and the colonial designs of replacing one people
with another. And, and that developed into an
undemocratic framework in the sense that there was a lot of
debate in the during the mandateabout something called the
Legislative Council. And that was aborted because

(06:27):
they would not agree to proportional representation.
They would not agree to one person, you know, one vote
framework, because the Palestinians were the majority
and they wanted to deny the impact and the voice of the
majority and to subordinate to the minority interests of the
Zions. So that also makes the Pasilian

(06:48):
case similar to the revolutionary slogan in the US
context or the American context,which is no, no representation
without no, no, no taxation without representation.
Because the Pasilians were demanding, demanding
representation, were demanding that they rule themselves.

(07:09):
And the mandate system was supposed to be in any other
mandatory area as one in which the developed nations tutor the
undeveloped, underdeveloped nations into self governance.
But the British, including people like Lord Balfour,
declared publicly again and again that they are

(07:30):
exceptionalizing Palestine. So it's worst case than the
mandate in Iraq or the mandate in Egypt or the mandate in
Syria. And the sense in this case, the
intention was not to allow the Palestinian majority to get self
governance and statehood by the end of the mandate.
And why? Because they were dismissive of

(07:53):
the interest, desires and rightsof the natives and they wanted
to replace them with the majority of relation.
And both were said very clearly that the great powers of the
time, you know, dominating the recognitions, we are committed
to Zionism. So this is the first element
which is the laying the foundation for the denial of

(08:17):
self determination, for the denial of the natives to govern
themselves in a constitutional structure.
Now that is mimicked and also replaced by the constitutional
structure that created after 1948, which was not codified and
was increasingly written by the 1990s.
But the basic foundation of which was the denial of the

(08:41):
natives or the majority of the the the Palestinians and the
natives of the and they in to govern themselves in their own
homeland. The second element of that
constitutional legal framework is the wide-ranging and
basically unrestricted powers ofthe commissioner or the

(09:02):
basically the commander by the British in the area.
And the Palestinians of the timecomplained that the if you
compare the High commissioner's powers in Iraq or other
mandatory areas to the powers they have in Palestine were
somewhat incomparable because they were much more expensive
and more unrestricted in the case of the the, the rulers of

(09:29):
the British rulers of Palestine.And that leads to collapse any
sense of rule of law, because here you don't have suppression
of powers. You have the commander is at the
same time the executive and the legislator.
And there was no sense in which the the British courts were
actually independent. In fact, there was an an

(09:51):
important episode in the 1930s where a Scottish head of the
judiciary was dismissed because of an attempt to show some kind
of the ills of the British actions, including the
destruction of whole neighborhoods in JAFA at the
time in 1930s. And that criticism in the

(10:15):
additional document became part of the Palestinian discourse and
attempt to affirm their own grievances and complaints
against the British military andthe British policy.
So that Chief Justice was immediately sacked and sent back
to Britain and that created, youknow, raised the ability to have

(10:35):
some form of pushback from the legal system and the courts.
And, and, and again, if you looknow at the military commanders
after 1948, so you have the military commanders between 1948
and 19661966 ruling the Palestinians who remained in
Israel and eventually granted cenship.

(10:56):
So, so that's the Palestinian minority inside Israel around
156,000 at a time today around 2, one half million.
And again, the powers were quiteunrestrained.
And then then there is the thirdelement which you refer to,
which is the one that controls individual rights, including the

(11:19):
right to whom and so and the right and property rights and
free speech. So that's the emergency
regulations, the defence regulations.
In any revolution situation or arupture situation, including the
rupture of the Israelis and the Zionists replacing the British,
there is no vacuum, legal vacuum.
So what happens in most revolution situations or rupture

(11:41):
situations is that the majority of the pre-existing legal system
gets absorbed into the new legalsystem with certain
modifications. So that's what the Israelis did.
Because you, you can't start, you know, legislate immediately
from moment 0. So much of the British
legislation remained and also became became a a blueprint for

(12:03):
the completing the colonization of Palestine.
So importantly, between 1948 and1960, there was a string of
laws, around 12 legislation in the Knesset and regulations that
consolidated the theft of Palestinian land.

(12:24):
So much of it was, you know, done legally legal form.
Some of it was done extra legally, but was retroactively
legalized in order to make it look as law legal or formally
legitimate. So that law became the main

(12:46):
vehicle for transformation, the transforming title of land.
You have these huge numbers of Palestinians, almost 1,000,000
leaving in the span of a year orso their territory.
And this means that there's a lot of property, there's a lot
of land that remained. And then how do you absorb that
into the new legal structure? So the main function of that

(13:09):
legislation was to do exactly that.
And then by 1990, two, 1994, on the so-called basic Laws, which
is legislation now, the right toproperty became a constitutional
right. Now, why did it wait till 1990s
to declare the property rights as council rights highly
protected? It's because by that time they

(13:32):
basically finished the legalization and the
confiscation of the majority of Palestinian lands, including
many of the property that were owned as private property by the
Palestinians who remained and became citizens.
So their confiscation remain in different ways throughout.
And then another element of these defence regulations,

(13:54):
regulations also the control of the Palestinians who remained in
the side, the territory that became Israel.
So the control of their right tomovement.
You need a permit in order to leave your, you know, village
and go to the Jewish city without to sell merchandise or
to work. And that means that you are

(14:15):
completely subject to the whims of the military commander.
And that created a system of nepotism and, you know, and, and
reward and punishment in order to control the population.
But there's also then the question of consciousness.
How do you shape the consciousness of the population?
How do you educate them in a moment in which they are

(14:36):
basically a minority when they were the majority and now are
aliens in their own homeland governed by these newly arriving
settlers? And the other element of this is
that once we moved to the 1967 and its aftermath, the very

(14:57):
structure of the military commander and expansive powers
and military legislation that wehave seen during the mandate.
And then we have seen in in the military government against the
Bustinians inside Israel till 1966 is wholesale transferred to
the West Bank and Gaza. Same almost the same persons,

(15:18):
the same kind of regulations in place.
They they were well prepared prior to 1967 because they
anticipated the that they will control large areas with large
civilian populations, Arab and and Palestinian.
So there are different ways in which that British inheritance
continues to inform the system today.

(15:41):
The denial of basic rights, including the right of movement,
the control of the media, the and the restrictions on on free
speech, the suppression of a national identity and
expressions of national identityand the cultivation of national
identity. And any attempt to create a

(16:03):
national movement through the right association and through
the right of assembly and through the right to movement
and undermining access to education.
So all of these come from the British inheritance and
obviously where in many ways complemented by Israeli

(16:26):
legislation. There's also a broader, you
know, question that you refer to, which is how does this
colonial knowledge move around between different territories
and different. And the fact of the matter is
that the British have controlleddifferent territories,
including, you know, India and you know, Oman and other and the

(16:48):
Gulf more generally and Jordan and Iraq etcetera.
So much of the knowledge that was produced in these areas was
also transparent, but the most significant of which is
obviously Ireland. So you know, the black and tans
is something that both the Irishand the Palestinians experienced
in 1930. The the suppression of the

(17:08):
19361939 revolt in particular, if you you know, go to the
details of the history have had that done many of these
so-called experts and counterinsurgency and
pacification. We're, you know, we're brought
from different zones of colonialgovernance in order to to deal
with the unruly population. Cause at the same time that the

(17:32):
Palestinians were revolting in 1936, other revolts were
happening in India and other. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So that you, if you go also, youknow, forward in history.
So if you look at how the British helped the Omani Sultan
to suppress the far revolution, which is, you know, the latest,
you know, and the longest left wing revolutionary movement in

(17:56):
1960s till the 1970s. And you look at some of their,
you know, particular and concrete practices such as
leaflets thrown, destruction of mosque and you know, warning
shots, roof knocking, etcetera. You see that Israelis have done
much of that playbook later on in Gaza repeatedly.

(18:20):
So it is much to be said about, you know, all these kind of
colonial knowledge that is oftencalled as counter insurgency.
But in fact it is a suppression of the right of national self
determination, the suppression of the natives desire and

(18:42):
striving for freedom. We also know, for example, that
things like administrative, administrative detention were
was introduced originally by theBritish.
And even some of the prisons, I think that still exists, like,
you know, even from an infrastructure perspective that
still exists. Israeli prisons were also kind
of just inherited by by the Israelis from the British.

(19:07):
Also, as you were speaking, I was reminded of a story that I
don't, I am not going to be ableto remember the exact law that
it was that my dad told me, which was my great grandfather
were from the Galilee and he used to go to Argentina a lot
for work. And apparently it was quite
common, I think before the neck birth for Palestinians to go,

(19:28):
you know, back and forth to travel a lot.
And some of the laws around landownership and renewing contracts
of land ownership actually were sent to them with a very short
time period at times where they knew that people would be not in
their homes and they're not ableto renew their their, their,
their contracts for land. So as you were speaking, I was

(19:48):
just reminded of that personal. Story.
Yeah, there's a lot of issues that can be uncovered, you know,
kind of uncovered here. So one important question that
happened once you move from Ottoman citizenship right into
British nationality. Yeah.
What happens to the thousands ofpersonians who left to work in
Latin America? Yeah, there are thousands of

(20:11):
persons who lost their citizenship because the British
and the Zionists created the structure for legislation about
who is, you know, who can acquire censure in ways that
excluded these people. So that's one act of basically
de nationalizing a lot of. Yeah.

(20:31):
Palestinians in that period. Yeah.
Yeah. So the Israeli legal system
maintains an appearance of legitimacy, while the legal
foundations for many of its practices are contested or
inherited from a from this priorcolonial framework that we
talked about. I want to talk about a bit about
the role of the High Court of Justice.

(20:54):
While the court presents itself as a check on power through
judicial review, critics, including yourself, suggests
that it actually serves as the primary architect of this kind
of legal fiction that we talked about.
How does the High Court and the legal system provide a thin
layer of liberal legitimacy to practices like administrative

(21:16):
detention and military trial forcivilians?
And politically, what does it mean for the state to carry out
repression under the guise of law?
And I'm also thinking a bit about, you know, in, in the wake
of the Second World War and the the popularization of
international law in the UN, like how did Israel use the fact

(21:38):
that international law was stillbeing shaped to create a kind of
like new state of exception or normalcy for Israel under
international law? Yeah.
This is a question I think that is fundamental to understand
specifically today. So one element of it is that at

(22:00):
the moment in which the universal Division of Human
rights in 1938 was written, we have this major process of the
replacement, the territorial removal of natives from their
own land and replacing them withan incoming settler society.
Now what's interesting about this is this.
So the major figures who were arguing at the same time for the

(22:23):
establishment of this post WorldWar 2 legal order, a part of
which this declaration of Universal investigation of human
rights were at the time, many ofthem were at the time arguing
for the removal of the Palestinians from their
homeland. So they did not see, because
they were, many of them were Zionists, did not see any

(22:44):
contradiction between arguing for universal rights and the
same time the denial of rights for wholesale populations and
what we call today the global S,because they sub subordinated
this so-called universal discourse to their own political
and ideological project. And we see this throughout the

(23:06):
history when it comes to Palestine.
Now the with respect to the Israeli legal system, one story
about Israeli constitutionalism is that the Israeli Supreme
Court moves from a kind of formal rule of law, very weak
status towards much more stronger and activistic activist

(23:27):
status. So that's basically when the
1990s and the 2000s, you have these two base major basic laws
that become the Bill of Rights. And then there's a legal consul
system moves to a greater qualification that it it had so
far, which is another element ofBritish influence.
They don't have a qualified constitution, but they have
different basic laws that were created over time.

(23:50):
And and that's at this point theSupreme Court becomes an
activist court in the legal discourse, meaning that they can
block legislation that is advanced by government.
They have much more critical andscrutiny of Israeli policies.
And in few landmark cases they did that also with the question

(24:13):
of the Palestinian territories. So one of the most famous is the
one that relates to torture. Now, again, the reading of that
ruling is much more positive than actually what the court
did. But at least the court acquired
this sense of being this pro human rights activist court.

(24:38):
And one of the main figures in that transformation is the Chief
Justice of the Supreme Court, who before that served as the
attorney general of the government during the Camp David
negotiations. His name is Haron Barack.
And then Fast forward and after the genocide in January 2024,
Israel appoints Haron Barack to become their ad hoc judge in the

(25:01):
ICJ case by South Africa againstIsrael with regards to the
allegations of genocide. Ad hoc judge means that you have
the 15 judges who are already inthe court and then if one, none
of them is of the nationality ofthe states that are involved.
So this means South Africa and Israel, these states can appoint
a judge to sit on the court in addition to these judges who are

(25:23):
the permanent judges in that moment.
So is it appointed Aaron Barack?Now the question is why would
they appoint Aaron Barack? And this relates to your
question, question about legitimation.
The fact of the matter is the more human rights sounding and
the more activist image you havecultivated, the more effective

(25:45):
your legitimating effect is. So if you had a court like, you
know, the military courts you mentioned they would, we
wouldn't have a legitimating effect.
Why? Because everyone understand this
is with a military hierarchy, conviction of freight rate is
really high. There's not really much of a
presumption of due process and defendants, right?
But when it comes to supreme courts and concert courts,

(26:07):
usually there's a lot of pomp and circumstance.
There's a lot of mystique of thelaw and concern about procedures
and legal terminology because they want to create that
legitimating effect. And in the case of Israel, that
legitimating effect was harmful.Because if these are the judges,
you know, from a Palestinian perspective, whether a

(26:28):
Palestinian citizens in Israel or the West Bank and Gaza, these
are the best judges you can get within the Israel legal system
because they are supposedly liberal minded, they are human
rights minded, etcetera. They talk the the universal
language, they talk about basic rights and so on and so forth.
And yet they produce these results, which is during this

(26:50):
so-called rise of judicial review, the rise of the activist
stage of Supreme Court. We saw the consolidation of
apartheid. We saw increasing brutality of
the occupation. We saw unleashing lethal
military force that we haven't seen before.
We have seen more and more settlements and settlers and

(27:10):
more and more checkpoints and more and more prisoners.
So at the same time that the Supreme Court was gaining A
reputation both in domestically and internationally as this
activist human rights court thatis willing to be counter
majoritarian, meaning to swim against the tide and to confront

(27:33):
governmental decisions, including vis A vis people like
Benjamin Netanyahu. So that image coincided and
coexisted with that increasing colonization, apartheid and an
occupation, which implies this legitimating effect.

(27:56):
Because when you have a court with that kind of image, this
means to domestic citizens that well, if her own Barack can live
with occupation, I can live withit if the occupation is under
the rule of law. Given these, you know, thousands
and thousands of petitions that the Palestinians and the human
rights organizations that represent representing keep, you
know, sending to the court, thisshows that there is some kind of

(28:20):
process. There are grievances and there
are some potential remedies in the situation.
And occasionally these remedies are given even if in a
compromised form. So that industry of litigation
and adjudication in the Supreme Court and the respect that this
court and a few judges like Arumbarak has gained

(28:41):
specifically in North America and amongst the legal elites and
digital leads, because these judges would go and teach and
Yale and Harvard and Toronto, other professors from these
places will go also teach and Tel Aviv University and other
universities. So this idea that Israeli legal
system is advanced, is liberal, is human rights protecting, and

(29:06):
that the occupation is under control, is under the rule of
law, allowed, in my view, the prolongation of the apartheid
occupation and the increasing violence of the colonial
process. So an immediate effect that you
see now is that once this veil of legitimacy, this veil of

(29:29):
legality is removed, the ICC, the International Criminal
Court, one of the conditions foraccess to justice in the
International Court is that whatwe call complementarity.
So if the domestic legal system is willing and able to prosecute
Netanyahu and Ghaland and his people, the ICC will not

(29:52):
intervene. But once everyone now recognises
what we have been arguing for before the genocide, which is
that there is no actual rule of law, This is a whole, you know,
a facade that only legitimates and does not really protect the
populations under the Israeli control.
Once that removed, you can now activate and initiate the ICC

(30:14):
much more easily. And that was one of our problems
in the past couple of decades since the establishment of ICC
in particular, is because you have these prosecutors who were,
you know, the major figures in the ICC, including the founding
prosecutor at the time who would, and including the current
suspended prosecutor in the in the beginning of the genocide,

(30:35):
who would continue to say, well,Israel has great lawyers, Israel
has the rule of law, Israel has judges, etcetera.
So that shows, I think a misunderstanding of how
complicit Israeli judiciary in the and obviously you would be
aware that Israelis themselves are aware of how important this.

(30:56):
So that's why they have international law department in
the Israeli army. That's we have they have
thousands and thousands working,especially after the genocide,
because they recognize the legitimacy effect of this kind
of involvement and because they want to cover up and and give
justifications and rationalizations for the
horrendous actions of mass murder that they have been

(31:18):
committing. Now to go back to Bharat, Why is
it an important moment and is anexample of what I'm talking
about. In 2004, the the International
Court of Justice was about to rule about the apartheid war,
and it was one of the main and first cases in which the
international legal system, the ICJ, is actually analyzing what

(31:42):
is the legal status of Palestinesince 96 and and and the Israeli
control of it. At that time, Ariel Sharon was
the Prime Minister. Haron Haron Barack was a member
of the Kahan Committee, which was a committee that was
established after Sabra and Shatila massacres and because of

(32:05):
the commendations of that committee.
Basically, Sharon was in exile from politics for about two
decades, and then he returned inthe early 2000s to crush the
second Intifada and became the Prime Minister of Israel.
And even though there's no love between these two individuals,
Sharon understood the value of having a Haron Barack in the

(32:28):
Supreme Court. So he argued public at the time
that the Supreme Court and a Haron Barack will act as a
shield, as a first for Israel International arena.
So one of the things that they did is that they published
rulings before the ICJ ruled andthey immediately translated it

(32:48):
into English. That doesn't usually happen that
fast, but they understood the value from international public
opinion aspect. And then once the ICJ said that
the apartheid war is unlawful tothe extent that it's established
on the occupied 3697, they also produced another ruling that

(33:10):
tried to respond to the ICJ. 20 years later, Netanyahu was doing
the same. So in the two years before the
the genocide, Haron Barack was seen as this liberal figure that
is, you know, representing what the demonstrators against the
so-called judicial coup that Netanyahu and his colleagues

(33:33):
were trying to do, which is to undermine the independence of
the judiciary, to increase the politicization of the judicial
appointment and so on so forth. So Haron Barack was a major
figure hated by the right wing and liked by the liberals and
and Netanyahu was on the and he had nothing with the opposite
sides. But once the genocide happens,

(33:56):
immediately Netanyahu recruits the willing Haron Barack.
And then Haron Barack, because of the reputation he gained
internationally becomes a judge in the ICJ and he was the judge
in the three proceedings. Well, actually there were 4
requests, about 3 eventually proceedings in before the ICJ,

(34:16):
before he retired for personal reasons.
And now he was replaced by even more right wing Israeli legal
scholar. So God knows and hopefully they,
you know, time will tell what kind of work he did in the
internal liberations in the court, because we have seen some
of the obfuscation and some of these orders, provisional

(34:36):
measures by the court in, in, inJanuary, March and May 2024.
And he was part of the these deliberations.
So this is one way in which legitimation is not simply kind
of a a, you know, reputational issue, which is very important
for the currency of Israel beingthe only democracy in the Middle
East, at the helm of which is a Supreme Court that imposes the

(34:59):
rule of law even against the likes of Netanyahu when it's
necessary. Now we see more clearly that how
complicit and how integrated that you share in any colonial
situation, but differently in this one to the colonization of
Palestine, to the covering up ofmass crimes and, and, and
including the genocide currently.

(35:21):
And trying to defend it in public opinion.
Not only to domestically to assure the population, including
the liberal ones that you know, we are still a rule of law
country, we're still a democratic country, but also
externally with ramifications both for the ICC and the ICC.

(35:42):
It's, it's actually so interesting because even despite
these attempts for the Israeli regime and the Israeli
government to position themselves as, you know,
respecting of human rights and this as liberal democracy, they
still pass this new death penalty law.

(36:02):
Maybe because of the, I don't know, you're the expert in terms
of how 11 relates to the other, but this new death penalty law
has been described as discriminatory by design, as a
war crime and also as a formalization of what was
already happening in Israeli prisons through, you know,

(36:23):
things like medical neglects that we saw martyrs like
Hadradnan and and Willie Dhaka martyred because of.
So I'm wondering, from a legal standpoint, how do you read this
new bill? Is it a rupture in Israeli legal

(36:44):
history, or does it represent the logic of that history that
is finally becoming complicit? And also, how does it relate to,
you know, how do they hold theseto maybe like positions next to
each other whereby they, you know, try and do all of this
work to position themselves as in step with, you know,
international law and human rights law while simultaneously

(37:07):
passing bills like this one thatare such flagrant violations of,
of, of human rights? Yeah, I think this bill is a
culmination of a process and solidification of that process.
First of all, there's a, you know, with the increase of the
right wing, obviously the right wing control of Israeli politics

(37:28):
or dominance Israeli politics issomething we have seen since
1977. So there's an increasing control
both in culturally and politically of the right wing.
There was a limited period whichallowed those to process and it
was illegitimate from the right wing perspective because it's
relied on the votes of the Brazilian minority members of

(37:52):
Knesset in the Knesset. And so the this change in how
the both self perception and presentation is exemplified in
the 2018 Basic Law, as well as the nation state of the Jewish
people, which allowed human rights organizations to finally

(38:15):
say that this is an apartheid state.
So following that law which constitutionalizes apartheid,
which declares that only one sovereignty for one people exist
from the river to the sea. So that includes the settlement
on the West Bank. So the Amnesty International,
Human Rights Watch, following that law said in 2021-2022 that

(38:37):
this is an apartheid. Why?
Because it's cannot be denied anymore because we are putting
it in law in ways they did not before.
Before the law was much more technical.
And there's, you know, rarely itwould that it would say, you
know, Arab or Palestinian, it would say it in very technical
terms that would effectively deny rights from the

(38:58):
Palestinians or privileged Jews over non Jews.
And then the second other law that also makes it very explicit
is the death penalty law. And that's why we see some of
the reaction from European Courtstates, because it it it
injuries their liberal sensibilities.
But if you look at this transformation, well, this law I
think shows is both on the expressive level, on the

(39:20):
ideological level, on the expressive level.
The in the government today in Israel, there are, you know,
being weird and smooth region. These people, they come from the
far right tradition of Kahana and Kahana and Kahana High.
And all these and Kahana, as your your viewers might know,

(39:43):
was declared in different times by both Israelis and the
Americans as a terrorist organization, violent, racist.
He was also denied access to parliament, was disqualified
from representation in the end of the 80s in Israel itself, and
Bengveed himself in 2007, I think, was convicted for

(40:04):
incitement to terrorism and incitement to racism because of
his ideological affiliation withthis group.
Now this group and some of them are expressed in by fans like
the ultras and you know, football stadiums in particular
Bettario Salaim and all these football teams is known for the

(40:25):
death to Arabs chant. So death to Arabs now became
law. Death to Arabs was a chant by,
you know, some factions and stadiums and, you know, Bing the
Bing vias would say death to Arabs and then they would ask
and they would say pushed and they would say, well, death to
terrorists. So this conflation between Arabs

(40:45):
and terrorists has existed for some time.
But this bill, what this bill means is that the fantasy and
this minority ideological position and at least in the way
it expresses itself, becomes law.
These people are now ministers of government and it's law.
And there's over 60 members of the parliament who voted for it.

(41:05):
So it's not only Bengveer and his colleagues and, you know,
the fascist party, but also the more centrist right wing parties
and the more centrist parties and more generally Israel.
But there's also another sense in which the reality becomes
law. So since October 23, we have,
you know, death on unprecedentedscale, death to Arabs, right?

(41:28):
Arabs are being killed in Gaza, in the West Bank.
Yeah, but there's also Arabs being killed inside the Pasini
Manor inside Israel. So Bengveer is the minister who
is in charge of the police, which means he's in charge of
the so-called rule of law and enforced law and order inside
the personal communities inside Israel.
And, and under his rule, we saw a spite, a spike in, in how many

(41:53):
people are killed by organized crime, you know, killings and,
and, and domestically. And so that's also another way
you can have death to Arabs by lawlessness, lack of personal
safety and people killing each other without any enforcement
whatsoever from the law. So that's the kind of expressive
level in which I see this law asworking.

(42:15):
But there's also the ideologicallevel.
Now, if you look at the how the colonization happens.
So it's both the the land and the people.
In terms of the land, you have the creation of what the ICJ
called the coercive environment to force people to leave.
Land confiscation harms the militias, you know, bad

(42:37):
employment and education condition and the rest of it.
And then you have the people andthe people here, sorry, the,
the, the land concession, but also the people here are the
main 2 elements I think that have been under attack
especially since October 23, arethe refugees and the prisoners.
Why these two, the refugees? Because they are, you know, 2/3

(43:00):
of the Australians are refugees.The refugees, their mere mere
existence is the question of Palestine.
Their continuity of a political consciousness amongst them of
return is the question of Palestine.
So the attack on Inurua before, you know, October 23 during the
first Trump administration, but more so since October 23 under

(43:22):
one agency that is designated toprovide services for health and
education for personal refugees around the Middle East is part
of this attack on Reggies. But more so after October 23 is
the attack and destruction of refugee camps in near Jenin and
particular and sorry and Pur Karim in particular.

(43:44):
But in previous rounds of fighters like in the when
Israeli invaded Lebanon 1982, they also destroyed at least
three refugee camps, Rashidi, Abuja, Barajneh and obviously
sub Rashidi level massacre. So the other element is the
prisoners. Now, the prisoners are the, you
know, the refugees and the prisoners are the human engine

(44:05):
of the, you know, the Pastinian,but the prisoners in particular
because they are the militant, the mobilized element of the
Palestinian population. And we have seen over time, you
know, a deterioration of the conditions of these prisoners,
including in 2018, there was a law that withheld contributions

(44:29):
to the prisoners from the Palestinian Authority to, you
know, prisoners of martyrs. And I think in February 2025,
the Israeli treasury said they had withheld 4.4 billion of
Persian money, including these marines that should be go to the
prisoners. So there was other, other laws

(44:51):
about the family visits and the like and the deportation of
family members of prisoners and martyrs to make it easier.
And then by October 2023, we seeobviously you know, the
overcrowded nature of the prisons, the starvation, the

(45:12):
torture on a systematic and systematic way.
Even before October ribbing, we was talking about no bakeries,
no fresh bread for these, you know, no barbecues, etcetera.
So trying to and then using October 2023 to further
accelerate the deterioration of these conditions.

(45:35):
But to the extent that now we'retalking not only about
criminalizing resistance, when Iwas talking about eradicating
resistance, destroying this, because these are conditions
that in which people die and arekilled in a higher rate than we
have seen in the decades before.So I see this bill as basically,

(45:58):
you know, an attack on these prisoners and an attempt to, as
an instrument of the genocide process, process itself in order
to not only criminalize resistance, as I said, but to
destroy it. And one way you talked a bit
about how the Israeli legal system, one of its main roles is

(46:22):
to reshape the national consciousness and to discipline
Palestinians on a daily basis. And one aspect of that, one
method of that is torture, right?
Torture inside Israeli prisons So 1 common framing positions
torture as abuse or as somethinghappening in the gaps despite

(46:44):
the law. But scholars like Ali Dhaka or
Raw of Strake argue that tortureis not incidental to to Israeli
colonial rule, but actually constitutive of it.
They argue that it functions to,like you said, to reshape
passing consciousness and extendpunishment beyond the individual
into the family and the community, and ultimately

(47:08):
producing a regime of fear that sustains the colonial project.
Francesca Albanese recently described this as torture
becoming state doctrine. So in your opinion, what role
does torture as routine rather than exceptional practice play
in Israel's attempt to destroy Palestine as a place in

(47:30):
Palestinians as a people? Indeed, torture is important
because it's one of the few rights in international law that
are absolute. And yet, as you said, Israel has
a practice in torture for a longtime, even before October 23.

(47:50):
I mentioned earlier the Israeli Supreme Court ruling in 1999 on
torture. Now in that ruling they didn't
even mention the word torture and it was limited to four or
five interrogation techniques only and limited also to
particular facilities, not to the one governed by the

(48:11):
military. Now, one way in which torture is
represented as an exceptional case is the so-called time
taking, taking time bomb situations in which, you know,
we are trying to save lies in particular situations and
therefore we are employing exceptional means in that

(48:33):
situation. But in the case of the way how
Israel practiced it practiced it, this became repeated,
institutionalized and prolonged.So in this way it doesn't become
as exceptional as it's often claimed.
And in fact, the ruling itself in 1999 said, you know, carved

(48:57):
out a legal loophole called necessity that, you know, these
practices cannot, are prohibitedunless there's a necessity.
And then basically all the interrogators of the Israeli
intelligence started claiming necessity.
So it created the loophole by which torture can be, and became

(49:19):
indeed institutionalized. Similar to like Guantanamo Bay
or Abu Kharib or this kind of global war and terror discourse.
Yeah, indeed, in in the 2000s, following the second father, the
Israelis legislated the so-called unlawful combatants
laws in order to create exactly these liminal spaces in which

(49:42):
these are not criminal prisoners, meaning they're not
protected by criminal procedure and the rise of defendants in a
regular ordinary trials. Nor are they prisoners of war
and therefore governed by the Geneva Conventions and
international humanitarian law. But rather in a space where they

(50:04):
are not given these kind of protections.
And it's much more arbitrary andwhimsical and undermines their
basic rights as as prisoners. But what also since October
2023, the transformation we see is that it is no longer claimed

(50:27):
that this torture is to obtain information, but rather it's
torture to kill them. It's medical neglect to allow
them to die. There is no pretence that there
are any, you know, trials that can happen anytime soon.
We are almost three years since the beginning of the genocide
and people have been tortured and and another element of this

(50:52):
also the numbers that are being tortured compared to before
October 2023. So these numbers show that
again, it's not an exceptional occurrence.
So whatever the claims before October 2023, these claims do
not hold after October 2023. But obviously the context now is
different because now torture isnot simply to suppress

(51:15):
resistance under apartheid. Now torture is to destroy under
genocide. So now torture is an instrument
of a genocidal process itself. It's another way of, as I said
before, death drop as killing Palestinians.
And, you know, we don't need to go into detail about how
ridiculous Israeli arguments are, but one of the main cases I

(51:37):
think that surfaced in the mediawas an 80 plus a Palestinian
woman who had Alzheimer who was held for months and months as an
unlawful combatant from Gaza. So that shows you that there is
no due process, there is no claims for any protections for
rights since October 2023. But these are the kind of legal

(52:01):
technical arguments that are used in order to give what you
call before the veil of legitimacy or the veil of
legality on a completely and fundamentally unjust situation.
But it's interesting about the recent discourse that Francisco
Beniz's report also advocated isthat torture can be the specific

(52:26):
act vis A vis the prisoners or group of prisoners, but it also
can be the creation of a torturous environment.
So this is what Pao Perez Salis argued for as a conceptual
framework in one of his books and then used by Francisco
Benazin AIR recent report. And this is also relates to what

(52:49):
Walid Dhaka that you mentioned conceptualized as the small
prison and the bigger prison. So the tortuous environment can
manifest in different ways and in a way you can talk about the
whole of the West Bank and Gaza as a tortuous environment, as
different techniques that Israelhas inflicted on the population

(53:11):
to make their lives hell and therefore deprive them from the
right to movement, which is akinto incarceration in the in the
2nd and father, we had over like523 in the beginning of the
second father, 523 checkpoints between, in, in inside the West
Bank, between the different villages and communities.

(53:32):
Now, I'll talk about over 900 ofthese.
So that's a creation of prisons cells instead of, you know, one
room. It will be a town, but it'll be
surrounded by different manned and unmanned checkpoints,
therefore limiting the ability of having basic, you know, goods
in and out, basic health services, but also under the

(53:55):
right of movement and, you know,exit from the communities as you
wish if you were in a free country.
One interesting element of this is that actually when Rafael
Lemkin conceptualized the idea of genocide, he was saying,
well, prisoners have something called the Geneva Conventions
where they can be prisoners of war.

(54:16):
They can be protected as prisoners of war.
But nations, the entire nations,their lives can be validated and
they have no protection. So the but so, but these are
nations under occupation, nations in prison.
So they conceptualized the idea of genocide while talking about

(54:37):
nations as imprisoned nations. And it's important to understand
that genocide for him and the way it's actually started, was
about a technique of an occupation, a colonial
occupation, in this case, employing dehumanizing and
demeaning methods for decades institutionalized in Jewish

(55:01):
supremacy, in apartheid, in occupation, and creating a
carcel system, which is something that actually
Francisco Albrezi referred to ina previous report before October
20231 fire report, is about thissystem of incarceration.
This system of surveillance is infected on millions of
Palestinians in the West Bank ofGaza.

(55:22):
And obviously the ultimate case of prison is Gaza and the way it
was treated, at least since 2007.
Yeah, I want to follow up on that question in terms of like
what you were saying about the small prison and the big prison,
this torturous environment, thisidea of Palestine as prison.

(55:46):
And something we talked about before we started recording this
podcast was also how the conditions of of prisoners over,
you know, the last few decades have significantly deteriorated.
So could you speak a bit about that deterioration?
And if you want to touch on yourexperience also working with
prisoners, I think that would bethat would be useful.

(56:09):
And also how that deterioration of the condition in prisoners
has also translated to the condition of Palestinians living
it across Palestine outside of prisons.
Yeah, there's a question of prisoners is important for
Palestinians because we're talking about huge numbers of
Palestinians since 1967 who werein prison.

(56:31):
Obviously many were in prison before 1967, but since 1967,
with the control of a large Palestinian population in the
West Bank, Gaza, the numbers have increased.
So I mean the the numbers are vary and I don't think we have
accurate numbers, but we're talking about hundreds of
thousands of Palestinians who have been imprisoned.

(56:53):
And there's almost no family of Palestinian family in the West
Bengal. Gaza did not experience some
form of detention, incarcerationby at least one member of the
family. So the prison experience is
formative for Palestinian, and the role of the prisoners in the
Palestinian national movement and the Palestinian liberation

(57:17):
struggle and the Palestinian consciousness is also crucial.
Many of the leaders were prisoners or former prisoners
and so on. And it has always been the case
that all the Palestinian movements have maintained
organized structures inside the prisoners, the prisons
themselves. So you know, they would have

(57:40):
meetings, reading, education, etcetera, and ideological
divides within the. Prison itself, and these are
rights they won through hunger strike.
And these were mobilized during,specifically during hunger
strikes, but it was always communication between inside and
outside the prison in order to maintain that movement.
And the prisoners themselves hasalways had a say in the external

(58:00):
issues. And if you remember like, well,
there was one attempt to do somekind of unity or reconciliation
between Hamas and, and, and Fatah after Hamas takeover of
Gaza called the prisoner's document in Saudi Arabia.
So we're always an important part of, of, of the movement And

(58:21):
the conditions have deterioratedbecause as, as you said, and I,
I saw this first hand because I,as, as a lawyer, I, you know, in
1999 and afterwards, I have visited many prisoners,
including the later in Dhaka. So what we have seen throughout
this, these years that there's increasing restrictions, such as

(58:44):
the divide between a lawyer and a prisoner, you know, the glass
divide, the phones, while previously it was much more
ability to communicate with themand to meet them than
afterwards. And the, they used to have
access to duration throughout this, the 2000s that was also

(59:08):
denied. So that means that many of them
studied by correspondents in theOpen University and got degrees
in political science. And the rest of it, they used to
have, you know, TV channels and newspapers and the rest of it
that also was taken progressively.
The hunger strikes obviously is a is, is a again.

(59:30):
And they're they're more generated strikes that the
prisoners have mobilized throughout decades in order to
protect their rights and to advance their position in the
system and to try to repel some of the more oppressive and
excessive practice in the prisonsystem against them.

(59:51):
We're in many ways kind of broken in the in the 2000s and
the following aftermath of the second intifada.
And, you know, the Israelis haveachieved this in different ways.
So when they identified someone like Ritaka as a leader of the
movement, they would keep movinghim between prisons frequently.

(01:00:12):
And the movement would be between prisons is very
difficult for prisoners because the conditions are much more
difficult than in the permanent prison.
The conditions in transit are very difficult for them.
So they had moved somewhat like very, you know, frequently in
the, I think around 2004 in one of the hunger strikes and in

(01:00:34):
order to break the movement. Unfortunately, one of the things
that we have seen is that the prisoners movement was infected
by the divisions outside prisons.
So the increasing fragmentation in the Pastinian body politic in
the West Bank and Gaza led to situation where we started

(01:00:55):
seeing in the prison that the division becomes not only
according to cities, but even according to, you know,
particular towns or religious orcamps.
And the way it was organized. And the perse movements
themselves in many cases became weaker and didn't have the same
kind of structural, you know, and educational and disciplinary

(01:01:17):
hold as they used to in the past.
And again, that reflects the weakness more generally outside
the prisoner itself. And obviously after October
2023, it becomes much more acute.
One of the unresolved issues I think about the prisoners
movement is that a lot of the prisoners who would be released

(01:01:42):
or leave prison given the general conditions and you know,
specifically, specifically afterOctober 23, they don't get
enough social support, psychological support, social
work support. Because you know, if you leave
prison after 20 years or 30 years, especially if you want to
watch etcetera, that would require a lot of support.

(01:02:02):
And the current conditions of destructions of our communities
and the withholding of money from the families of, you know,
that are given by the passing authority.
All of that weakens the ability to integrate many of these
prisoners before October 23. Definitely, but also it's.

(01:02:23):
Also interesting because like you said, even though some of
the disunity that maybe exists outside of the prison has
entered the prison, we also see that the prisoner struggle has
always been a reminder of the importance of of unity in the
Palestinian struggle. There are times where, for

(01:02:44):
example, there has been fragmentation on the Palestinian
St. and it's messages from the prisoners of unity for people to
kind of overcome factionalism and and to insist on unity in
the face of attempts at fragmentation.
Also, we saw, for example, like in the aftermath of October 7th,

(01:03:04):
2023, a lot of the prisoners being released came from all
different Palestinian factions. So I think even amongst, you
know, increased attempts to fragment our people, I think the
prison struggle has been able inin many ways to, to maintain
unity in the face of of Zionism.Indeed, I mean the, the, the

(01:03:25):
unifying condition of prison andthe unifying condition of
oppression should and in many cases, as you say, does remind
us of you know who's the enemy and you know what kind of
resources are required to overcome this kind of
oppression. And sometimes outside the

(01:03:48):
prison, because of the the way in which political system works
is a political systems work, is that there are rewards for
particular political positions, such as, you know, the personnel
authority and the fact that if you want to continue to exist,
you will have to in many ways compromise on a variety of

(01:04:11):
issues because they are funded by external powers and they are
trained by external powers. And, you know, to be able to
exit or enter, you know, Israeliwill has has the the key to
that. So that leads occasionally to
political positions that undermine the national unity,

(01:04:34):
undermine the national movement.But as you correctly you know
stated, the prisoners can be a reminder of what is required,
which is a unified body politic if not institutional
representation in order to show that the person is eventually or

(01:04:59):
despite the older factions or their ideological positions
eventually want the same basic thing which is freedom.
Yeah, so zooming out a bit, overthe past three years, we've been
hearing a lot of discourse about, you know, the the
international rules based order being a sham.
A lot of people have lost faith in international law.

(01:05:20):
The execution bill passed with the US declining to condemn it.
The State Department described it as Israel's sovereign right.
Britain, France, Germany and Italy urged against it but
issued no consequences. So what do you think?
How can you think about the transnational legal strategies

(01:05:42):
of solidarity that currently exists?
You talked about the, the ICJ proceedings, the ICC warrants
and universal jurisdiction casesin terms of what they can and
cannot achieve against the regime that has learned to
operate within the gaps of international law.
Like like what are are their hopes for international law?

(01:06:04):
Like what do people think about,you know, the the third world
approaches to international law movement, for example, is that
can that still be salvage? Yeah.
I mean, the question of international law is a question
of positioning. So for me, if you look at the

(01:06:26):
history of international law, ifthere are someone coming from
the global S, if there are someone coming from Yemen, from
Palestine, international law never worked for you.
So if you look at the international law from below,
you are less likely to be said to be, you know, one of those
who are now suddenly disenchanted with international
law, talk about the death of international law, etcetera.

(01:06:48):
It is true, obviously that is a transformative moment that Gaza
is a world event, that Gaza unveiled the condition of
selectivity, the condition of complete or entire population
that are not really protected byinternational law.

(01:07:09):
That law can be effective in certain situation, but it's not
effective in these situation. It can be mobilized against
Russia because the any of the West, but it's not mobilized.
And the reaction that you mentioned to the death penalty
law is instructive because thesecountries like the, you know,

(01:07:29):
Britain that criticize the law are the same countries of the
complicity and genocide. So your liberal sensibilities
are against capital punishment and some are execution, but you
allow the mass murder of whole entire population, the killing
of 20,000 children. So that again shows, you know,

(01:07:51):
the reaction shows what is wrongwith enters Allah, that the
claimed universality was never actually genuine and that the
reason why there's an outcry now, because there's a
realization that it doesn't really work at all as it should
be. And the fact that the moment in

(01:08:12):
which these tools that were constructed after the Second
World War were directed against someone who's an who's an ally
of the West, you know, that's the ICC arrest warrants against
Netanyahu and Gallant, the ICGA case against Israel.
They wanted those who claimed the rules based order against
Russia or against China, etcetera, are now renouncing it

(01:08:37):
and want to destroy it or want to make it clear that it's not
about, you know, accountability for the West.
It's about accountability to theenemies of the West.
So I think this is a moment of on the one hand, looking in a

(01:08:57):
sober way and realistically about what international law is,
what isn't, what are the advantages and the pitfall, the
pitfalls of the limitations of using international law.
So this is the something we as Palestinians have been, you
know, talking about legal scholars, at least we're talking
about for for a long time. And at the moment of genocide,

(01:09:19):
the mobilization of the ICC and the ICJ was really crucial
because if you look at international law in the context
in which we witnessed the genocide.
So law compared to politics, international relations, the UN
General Assembly, the UN Security Council, their lack of

(01:09:39):
action, the media, the complete mobilization of Western
mainstream media to support the genocide, the British
Parliament, etcetera. The ICJ was suddenly one of the
few limited spaces in which you can tell the Palestinian story,
a comprehensive narrative of what happened to the

(01:10:02):
Palestinians in Gaza since October 2023 till that moment,
December 2023, and to deal with the arguments on the basis of
fact and some rationality in assessing these arguments.
And then once the ICJ rules, that becomes an earthquake
because it mobilized the Genocide Convention that

(01:10:28):
supposedly was created followingthe Holocaust against Israel, a
state that supposedly was created after the obviously the
narrative that it was created because of the hocus is not
correct because the Zen's project started before, but
that's the narrative that was also shattered.
Now the narrative of self-defense as well that Israel

(01:10:48):
claimed after October 23 is irrelevant when it comes to
genocide. So that's why also something
that gets suddenly a finally a push back in an international
arena and then the March and theMay 2024, they become legal
documents of the highest international judicial authority

(01:11:10):
in which the demands from Israeland the violations of these
rules are clear to everyone. And the more Israel and its
allies violate or ignore these rules, the more the lawlessness
of the situation becomes clear. Now, obviously, these rulings

(01:11:34):
did not stop Israel or restricted in any fundamental
way or the US and, you know, those who were complicit in
financing and funding and armingIsrael.
But it did give cover to students.
It did cover cover to labor unions.
It did cover to, you know, new perspectives in in the media to

(01:11:58):
demonstrators because if you remember, students were being
kicked out of universities. They said genocide, You know,
the demonstrations against the genocide were being called hate
marches and attempts to suppressthem is underway.
And then suddenly all these people are getting the cover or
the backup from the highest international court.

(01:12:19):
So that's again part of the legitimacy war.
And then the ICC arrest warrantsis another element of the
legitimacy war, that Israel is now a rogue state.
Israel is now a lawless state and its leaders are fugitives,
are war criminals, not because Neymar or Nehal or Janine say

(01:12:44):
that. We said about them war criminals
for a long time, but now in public discussions it's also the
ICC and the ICJ is saying this. It's not some radical extremist
position, it's the actual legal position.
It's the actual mainstream opposition.
The same with the apartheid thing.
So once you know many of us havespent a long time in the 2000s

(01:13:10):
touring university campuses talking about the apartheid in
the apartheid weeks, Israeli apartheid weeks that started in
western Toronto and that was considered at the time some kind
of radical out there position. And then 2021-2022 the two
mainstream humorous organizations said say apartheid
500 pages, the 2 reports in combined.

(01:13:31):
That's a major vindication of the Pasilian or the critical
position, the anti colonial position.
And then again the ICJ in July 2024, when they mentioned a
little bit in a kind of awkward formulation, but they said as
well as violating Article 3 of the Convention against for the

(01:13:52):
elimination of racial discrimination, Article 3
prohibits racial segregation or apartheid and apartheid.
So that means there are leaps and legal discourse that are
very important in the legitimacyclaim of the Israeli state they

(01:14:12):
used to call themselves and it was accepted as dogma by many in
mainstream Western opinion. It's a country of the rule of
law despite the occupation, etcetera.
And it's the only democracy of the in the Middle East despite
ruling millions of persons who have no right to vote.
So now these are the extremist position, These are the

(01:14:34):
fictional positions that are notreally accepted and can't be
accepted because they don't stand or they don't withstand
the test of reality, the test offacts and documentation.
So the IC, the ICJ and the genocide rule, provisional
measures rulings, the ICJ and the legality illegal occupation
ruling, the ICC are important insolidifying a political

(01:14:57):
discourse. So we understand the effect of
law not only legally and in terms of short term
accountability. There may, may never be
accountability for individual criminals.
We have seen some of that in thecases of in Bosnia, for example,
Bosnian genocide. But at least at this point in

(01:15:19):
which you want to advance the discourse of liberation,
discourse of self determination for the Palestinians in their
own homeland, this legal discourse open opens up the
spaces in which we did not have before.
So many people reacted as if these are, you know, kind of

(01:15:40):
mundane rulings. So what they would say after the
ICJ delivered an 80 page condemnation in July 2024 of
what is the legal structure thatIsrael created since 1967 and
how in a very comprehensive manner, you know, demolitions,

(01:16:01):
settlers attacks, the confiscation of lands, the
situation in Jerusalem, the zoning and planning, planning,
etcetera. In order to show how that
system, you know, became a system of subjugation,
discrimination and colonization and that it is inherently

(01:16:23):
unlawful as far as internationallaw is concerned.
You can say that this is well, they are saying what we all
know. Yes, I and Hal and Janine know,
but we are engaged in these arguments in public arena, in
political debates in Western societies that many of which are
hostile to us. So they are a vindication.

(01:16:49):
They open up spaces in this sense.
Now, in terms of the international kind of order more
generally, obviously it's the moment in which we cannot
anticipate what will happen next.
But one hopes that from the destruction of what exists,
something better will emerge. And it is our function, as, you

(01:17:13):
know, activists, as educators, as human rights defenders, as,
you know, politicians is to try to advance the system.
So what will replace it will be much better than it was.
And even, you know, protecting the minimal structure that
exists now, you know, is, is very important.
But we as Palestinians know morethan anyone that the idea of

(01:17:39):
enforcing the rule, you know, the international law is not
sufficient in the sense that international law itself was
complicit in our colonization and the ethnic cleansing of the
Palestinians, you know. So 181, General Assembly
Resolution 181, the UN Security Council resolution 242 are two

(01:18:05):
major rulings on which the so-called 2 state solution
paradigm and also process are premised.
And both of them are fundamentally unjust.
And both of them were opposed byArab States and the Palestinians
at the at the time. So the idea is, you know, we
might see more injustices in thefuture because there are

(01:18:26):
limitations of the ICC and the ICJ.
The Bosnians were betrayed by the ICJ twice in the past and
were disillusioned from it. So it remains to be seen what
will happen in this legal fora. And it is our job, as you know,
legal scholars, as activists, aseducators, as people engaged in
public, public discussions, is to try to educate against

(01:18:49):
genocide denial, to try to pursue the cause of
accountability, to document, document the genocide, to defend
human rights defenders who are working for all these things in
order not to allow the system ofimpunity that was constructed
for so long to continue unabatedas if a genocide did not happen.

(01:19:13):
Yeah, I think that call to Action is a really good place
for us to to wrap up this episode.
And also the, you know, what youwere saying about what our role
is in terms of raising awarenessand, you know, not allowing the
impunity that we're currently witnessing to continue on

(01:19:33):
question and unchallenged is actually why the Palestinian
youth movement, who Nihal and I both organized with, launched a
campaign a few months ago aroundPalestinian political prisoners
with the knowledge that there's almost like a second genocide
that is currently happening behind bars.
And it's, it's our role also, asyou know, Palestinians and Arabs
and people of conscience in the West and, and, and around the

(01:19:57):
world to, to not only raise awareness of that, but also
insist on some key demand. Simple things like, you know,
the Israeli regime releasing thenames of the 11,000 presidents.
We don't even have the list of names and allowing access for
human rights organizations to toenter.

(01:20:18):
The prisons. So I think it's a really
positive, sobering grounding note for us to to end on.
So thank you very much for joining us.
We really appreciate your time and your expertise.
And this was a really informative and illuminating
episode. So thank you.
Thank you both. Thank you.