Posted on January 6, 2017
by Richard Edmondson
Does Israel Have a Right to Exist?
As bad as the settlements are–and as the video above makes clear, they have in essence destroyed any chance of peace–maybe the time has come to stop having debates about the settlements per se. Maybe the time has come instead to approach the problem from an entirely different perspective–maybe, rather than deliberate and wrangle over settlements, the real issue humanity should take up now, after witnessing 50 years of illegal occupation and land grabs, is the question of whether Israel should even have a right to exist at all.
A three-day conference entitled “International Law & the State of Israel: Legitimacy, Exceptionalism, and Responsibility” is scheduled to take place this spring in Ireland. (H/T Rehmat) A visit to the conference website would suggest that this indeed is the question, or at least one of the questions, the conference will attempt to answer.
This is a conference that was initially supposed to have been held in 2015 at the University of Southampton in the UK, but which had to be postponed–and eventually cancelled altogether–due to Zionist pressure applied to the university administration.
It has since been moved to University College Cork, in Cork, Ireland, where Zionists are still trying their utmost to abort it from happening, although so far they have not succeeded.
A statement by the organizers has been posted on their website which reads in part:
This conference will be the first of its kind and constitutes a ground-breaking historical event on the road towards justice and enduring peace in historic Palestine. It is unique because, while most attention today is directed at Israel’s actions in the 1967 Occupied Territories, the conference seeks to expand the debate surrounding the nature of the State of Israel and the legal and political reality within it.
The conference will raise questions that link the suffering in historic Palestine to the manner of Israel’s foundation and its nature. It aims to generate a debate on legitimacy, exceptionalism and responsibility under international law as provoked by the nature of the Israeli state. It will also examine how international law could be deployed, expanded, and even re-imagined, in order to achieve peace and reconciliation based on justice.
A “ground-breaking historical event” that will explore questions surrounding Israel’s “legitimacy” is something that is of course long overdue. Additionally the website states:
Legal scholarship on Palestine-Israel and international law, involving issues of self-determination, human rights and constitutional law, has largely focused on the Israeli occupation since 1967 of the Palestinian territories of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza and on the illegality of Israel’s settlements and apartheid colonization in these territories.
Alongside these debates, there has been a persistent, if marginalized, scholarship examining and analyzing problems associated with the creation and the nature of the Jewish state itself and the status of Jerusalem. This research has combined historical scholarship and legal analysis of the manner by which the State of Israel came into existence as well as what kind of state it is. The issues explored hitherto linked reflections on the scholarship between international law and: identity and injustice; violence and morality; nationality and citizenship; self-determination and legitimacy; exceptionalism; and responsibility.
Hopefully these debates–i.e. on Israel’s “foundation and its nature,” and, by turn, its ensuing “legitimacy” or lack thereof–will continue to be “marginalized” for not much longer. And a conference of this nature stands a good chance of helping to push the issue from the margins to the mainstream.
Perhaps this is why Zionists are working so feverishly to stop it. The Board of Deputies of British Jews reportedly was instrumental in killing off the conference in the UK, and according to a report here the Israeli Embassy in Ireland is now issuing condemnations of the organizers.
The conference is scheduled to take place March 31-April 2, 2017. The list of confirmed speakers includes academics from the US, the UK, and Israel:
Professor Richard Falk, Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University and Research Fellow of the Orfalea Centre of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara
Professor Ilan Pappe, Department of History, University of Exeter
Professor Ugo Mattei, Distinguished Professor of Law, and Alfred and Hanna Fromm Chair in International and Comparative Law, University of California, Hastings College of the Law
Professor Cheryl Harris, School of Law, University of California Los Angeles (UCLA)
Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Faculty of Law/Institute of Criminology and the School of Social Work and Public Welfare, Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Dr. Azmi Bishara General Director, Doha Institute of Graduate Studies, and former Member of the Knesset
Elias Khouri, Novelist, Beirut
Dr. Haitam Suleiman, Al-Quds University Jerusalem
Dr. Salman Abu-Sitta, Palestine Land Society
Dr. Anthony Löwstedt, Media Communications Department, Webster University Vienna
Dr. Blake Alcott, Independent Researcher
Dr. Catriona Drew, School of Law, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS)
Dr. Ghada Karmi, Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter
Dr. Hatem Bazian, Departments of Near Eastern and Ethnic Studies at Berkeley University of California (UC Berkeley)
Dr. Jeff Handmaker, the International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University (EUR)
Dr. John Reynolds, Law Department, National University of Ireland Maynooth
Dr. Marcelo Svirsky, School of Humanities & Social Inquiry LHA Faculty, University of Wollongong
Dr. Mazen Masri, City Law School, City University of London
Dr. Michael Kearney, School of Law, University of Sussex
Dr. Mutaz Qafisheh, College of Law, Hebron University
Dr. Ronit Lentin, Retired Associate Professor in Sociology, Trinity College Dublin
Dr. Ruba Salih, Centre for Gender Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS)
Dr. Valentina Azarova, Centre for Global Public Law, Koç Üniversitesi
Dr. Victor Kattan, Law Faculty, National University of Singapore
Joni Assi, Community arts activist
Mr. Eitan Bronstein Aparicio, Co-Director of De-Colonizer and Founder of Zochrot
Ms. Lea Tsemel, Lawyer and human rights activist
Ms. Mia Tamarin, Law School, University of Kent
Ms. Ofra Yeshua-Lyth, Writer, journalist, and member of Jaffa One State Group.
Ms. Salma Karmi Ayyub, Barrister
Professor Alan Johnson, Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM)
Professor Brad Roth, College of Liberal Arts & Science and School of Law, Wayne State University
Professor Geoffrey Alderman, Politics and Contemporary History, University of Buckingham
Professor George Bisharat, Hastings College of the Law University of California
Professor Haim Bresheeth, Centre for Media Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS)
Professor Joel Kovel, Independent Researcher.
Professor John Strawson, School of Law, University of East London
Professor Kevin Jon Heller, School of Law, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS)
Professor Nur Masalha, Centre for Religion and History, St. Mary’s University
Professor Oren Ben-Dor, Law School, University of Southampton, UK.
Professor Penny Green, School of Law, Queen Mary University of London
Professor Robert Wintemute, Law School, King’s College London
Professor Robert Home, Law School, Anglia Ruskin University
Professor Virginia Tiley, Professor of Political Science, Southern Illinois University Carbondale
Professor Yakov Rabkin, Department of History, University of Montréal
Professor Yosefa Loshitzky, Centre for Media Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS)
Adv. Yoella Har-Shefi, legal adviser for the Ani-Israeli Association and a human rights activist
See also
Video: “In Defense of the Rocket,” or…’Let’s pardon a murderer!’
River to Sea
Uprooted Palestinian 
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