Examining Israel’s planning policy within the framework of its military rule-of-law approach, the paper emphasizes the ongoing legacy of international law’s violence in colonial settings. Combining field work with the study of original planning documents alongside the analysis of the law, I develop an analytical framework regarding the use of urban planning in the service of settler-colonial territorial expansion and native removal. Focusing on Hizma, a Palestinian village in the Jerusalem Governate arbitrarily separated from it by Israeli military and civilian infrastructure, I show how the Oslo Interim Agreement (“Oslo II”), established in 1995, designated ninety percent of Hizma as Area C (namely, under full Israeli civil and military authority). I go on to show how Israel uses Hizma’s lands, located in Area C to expand the existing settlements as well as a network of roads to justify further territorial dispossession and Palestinian displacement. In its expansionary efforts, Israel has securitized the Palestinian residents of Hizma and subjected them to various modes of surveillance, policing, and movement restrictions. The paper’s focus on security tactics of enclosure, surveillance, arrest, and racial profiling used to incapacitate Palestinian resistance to their dispossession and removal, highlights how the law helps to produce and shape racialized subjects.

Google Ayosh AnyVision and Big Data’s Shadow Archive In 2019, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz published an expose revealing an Israeli facial recognition start-up, AnyVision, was supplying facial recognition software to Israel’s surveillance apparatus throughout the West Bank. Not only were their cameras used at high-volume border-crossings, Haaretz detailed a secret military operation, nicknamed Google Ayosh, that installed AnyVision’s cameras at clandestine location across East Jerusalem and the West Bank. While Ayosh is the Hebrew acronym for Judea and Samaria, the biblical name for the occupied Palestinian territories, Google referenced the powerful capabilities of AnyVision’s biometric database, which immediately identifies millions of Palestinians based on illicitly gathered photographs as seamlessly as searching for a name on a search engine. This paper takes the nickname “Google Ayosh,” as a starting point to historicize the dangerous intimacies between older tactics of colonial governance and contemporary big data. Drawing from Alan Sekula’s theorization of photography’s “shadow archive,” I thread through the archives of 19th century criminology, Britain’s imperial passport regime in Mandate Palestine, and Israel’s permit system in the occupied Palestinian territories, arguing AnyVision emblematizes the “shadow archive” of big data and the pervasive forms of surveillance it subtends. Digital or analog, these archives are not so much a physical place where photographs are sequestered but a threshold through which the terms of political inclusion and the scope of state-sovereignty are quite literally fleshed out. Emphasizing such continuities links contemporary forms of surveillance to more engrained technologies of colonial rule that have long been contested by those who endure their effects. The provocation these histories make is that Palestine, and other sites of colonial rule, should be central to any study of contemporary surveillance.

This paper analyzes the legal history of Palestine and Israel from the beginning of the British civil administration in 1920 to the end of Israel’s military rule over its Palestinian citizens in 1966. It argues that during the period under inquiry, first the British and then the Israelis utilized the law to facilitate the attainment of colonial and settler-colonial objectives. More specifically, it demonstrates that both colonial projects used law and legal institutions to impose physical control over Palestine and the Palestinians and that the legal regime set up by the British during the mandate contributed to the success of the Zionist project. To evaluate the functioning of law in Palestine and Israel, the paper utilizes the theoretical framework of settler-colonialism, as developed by Patrick Wolfe, Lorenzo Veracini, and others. Despite the fact that settler-colonialism has been utilized in a variety of academic studies on Israel-Palestine, only a few have explored the functioning of law through the lens of settler-colonialism. As Wolfe emphasized, settler-colonial societies pursue two primary objectives in the spaces they colonize: the expropriation of land and the removal of indigenous populations from that land. I contend that the legal regime established by the British and adopted and developed by the Israelis has served to achieve the two objectives identified by Wolfe. To substantiate my argument, I assess the role of law in the legitimization and implementation of two practices that both regimes pursued in order to establish colonial and then settler-colonial control of Palestine: the first, deportation, targets the Palestinian body; and the second, the confiscation and transfer of land to Zionists/Israelis, targets Palestinian territory. Through my assessment of these two practices I show that law in Israel-Palestine was configured and reconfigured to enable the expropriation of Palestinian land and the removal of Palestinians from that land. Thus, this paper contributes to an emerging scholarly discourse regarding the utility and significance of settler-colonialism as a framework of analysis for the functioning of law in Israel-Palestine. The paper draws on primary sources from public archives in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, as well as on a private archive of still-classified military court decisions.

Self-Proclaimed Human Rights Heroes: The Counter-Narrative of Israeli Military Judges Ever since the first Intifada in 1987, Palestinian and Israeli human rights lawyers and NGOs mobilized human rights claims against the Israeli military occupation. The Israeli military courts in particular were discredited for holding summary trials and violating fair trial rights. This paper examines the ways in which Israeli judges in the West Bank military courts responded to these challenges and others, as part of the larger phenomenon of cooptation of the human rights discourse and strategies. Using a multimethod approach to analyze military courts’ judicial decisions, academic articles by military judges, and in-depth interviews with Israeli legal professionals, this paper shows how military judges proclaim themselves to be promoting, rather than violating, the rights of Palestinian defendants, portraying themselves as human rights champions. I also demonstrate how this strategy is useful at enhancing their professional prestige. Taking the approach of the disaggregated and reaggregated state, I dissect two different yet complementary projects: a professional project of military judges seeking professional prestige, and a state project of legitimizing Israel’s control over the Palestinian Territories. Analyzing the interplay between them, I show how they are potentially contradictory, and yet ultimately mutually reinforcing. Military judges contribute to the state legitimating project by responding to human rights criticism and coopting the human rights discourse, while they also employ human rights as a professional strategy within the Israeli legal community. When human rights are used as a discourse synonymous to legal professionalism, their use does not challenge oppressive state power but rather reinforces it. Focusing on a neglected professional group of military judges, I explore the ambivalence and tensions between liberal and progressive ideas of the Israeli legal profession during the 1990s and illiberal state policies maintaining difference and hierarchy.