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16/10/2020 Category: Futile Political Gestures Tagged with: futility hope international law Palestine

The False Hope of International Law in Palestine

Lori Allen

As analysts, we can only describe political acts or efforts as futile if there is a defined purpose against which to assess them. As Adolfo Estalella notes in his contribution to this collection, ‘to assess the futility of political actions requires making political judgments’. Doing so can present a problem to anthropologists, however, as we tend to work with an appreciation of dynamic processes and contingency. This future-oriented wariness of declaring anything about the present is a problem, though, if we want our work to contribute to political change, and to political thinking and strategising to achieve that change.

As anthropologists, we work among people who engage in political activity without a clear vision of how their efforts might bring them to their desired endpoint, even when political change or a specific outcome is the explicit goal. Many people undertake activities without thinking through next steps, or simply rely on faith that their hard efforts will pay off. Understanding how hope comes to replace strategy could offer another perspective on understanding ‘futile political gestures’. But it does require a willingness to pronounce certain gestures futile, to label certain hopes as false, and not shy away from ‘an instrumental reading’ of politics. When our interlocutors themselves have explicit aspirations and named goals for social change, we should contribute to identifying what has kept them from achieving that change.

For over one hundred years, Palestinians have been calling on international law and international legal institutions to support, justify, implement, or enforce their national independence and human rights. At the League of Nations, the United Nations, the International Court of Justice, and now the International Criminal Court (ICC), Palestinian representatives have been provided a forum in which to state their political claims. Nation-state sovereignty, freedom from discrimination and from systemic human rights violations, refugees’ right of return, and equal treatment under the law are some of the demands they have long been making (Allen, 2017).

The International Criminal Court is a good example. The ICC Prosecutor has not yet decided to open a formal investigation of possible international crimes committed by Israel in the occupied Palestinian territories. In July 2018, the Pre-Trial Chamber of the International Criminal Court established ‘a system of public information and outreach activities for the benefit of the victims and affected communities in the situation in Palestine’. Its fourth ‘Report on Information and Outreach Activities Concerning Victims and Affected Communities in the Situation’ was a five-page summary of ‘outreach to victims’ that seems a derisively feeble gesture in the face of recent and ongoing violence against Palestinians living in the territories occupied by Israel since 1967. Nevertheless, Palestinian civil society organisations have issued cautious praise of this step, while they and the Palestinian government continue to call for a decision by the ICC to pursue prosecution of Israeli crimes, a decision that has been in abeyance since the case was brought to the Court in 2014.

The realisation of Palestinians’ national goals has never been more distant. Given the recursive disappointments produced by international law, it is a puzzle that so many people have gotten so hopeful about each international legal mechanism, commission and court; that Palestinians have invested so much optimistic effort in them. There are reasons that hope is regenerated, as each new generation of international legal innovation offers new platforms for making political claims and assurances of justice to come. But the hope it offers is false. The facts on the ground confirm this. The conditions that enable this impunity remains. And the individual states that make up the ‘international community’ at the UN do nothing to change these conditions. They have not ended the sale of arms to Israel or ended the blockade of Gaza. And while the European Union condemns Israel’s settlement activity as illegal and a breach of international law, they take no action to end it.

The central question guiding my recent research has been why so many Palestinians continue to invest such hope in an international legal system that has let them down for over a century (Allen, 2020).  Theoretically, it points to a quandary that social scientists face in how we analyse political motivation and political effects, in determining the futility of others’ politics, and in deciding whether such a determination is appropriate at all.

International human rights and humanitarian law that pronounce the universality and necessity of the very rights Palestinians are demanding would seem to be a hopeful resource, a logical recourse. Another reason for this continued engagement is the relentlessness with which the ‘international community’ invites Palestinians to make their case, to tell their story, to pronounce their suffering (Allen, 2016).

One mode of invitation has been the tens of international investigative commissions that have come to Palestine. Dispatched by the British, the US, the UN and other state coalitions, investigative commissions have repeatedly produced venues in which international law has been invoked as the arbiter of the conflict, and Palestinians have been summoned to demand their collective and individual rights. In the last two decades, the UN alone has sent or tried to send eight commissions to Palestine. Many of these fact-finding missions have reported that the violations of human rights and humanitarian law that they have found—such as the intentional shooting of civilians not directly participating in hostilities by the Israeli army—may have risen to the level of war crimes or crimes against humanity. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu, leader of a commission in Gaza, said: ‘If enough voices of integrity keep saying these messages, … surely they will be heard eventually’. UN commissions lead the victims of this violence to believe that accountability is near. The evidence of Palestinian history—as well as the history of the ICC, and of the UN’s investigative commissions in places such as Yemen, Syria, and elsewhere—indicates that victims of violations may be heard, but neither compensation nor rectification of unjust systems emerges from that (Krever, 2014).  What is produced is false hope.

The concept of false hope points to the active engagement of people in systems that promote expectations of the future, but which do not deliver on their promises. Unlike what a Gramscian analysis might suggest, it is not a class position or structural condition that constructs these serially unfulfilled expectations. In the Palestinian case, people from across the social and political spectrum have invested a great deal of energy working to activate international legal institutions. Nor does this equate to false consciousness. Discussions of false consciousness often contemplate the power of ideology to persuade people to lower their expectations and adapt their preferences to what are perceived to be the only ‘feasible’ options, thereby perpetuating a status quo that goes against their own interests. I’m not trying to understand the power of ideology to induce people to have high expectations—but rather, I’m trying to understand the power of a system that is not set up to produce deep structural change.

Identifying hope as false requires an analysis of how a system functions and entails a judgment of the effects of political efforts. Even if in the Palestinian case (as in many others) the Sisyphean attempts to make international law deliver on its promises are not meaningless—there are many effects and forms of satisfaction from being heard that it can offer. International legal venues can authorise narratives and offer venues in which to garner sympathy. These can be beneficial in achieving people’s goals, but if they are taken as a success and endpoint in and of themselves, they are the fuel of false hope.

It’s only by first considering the evidence—both of history and the assessments of our interlocutors—and by declaring a judgment of political failure that we can consider the dangerous political consequences of suspending an instrumental reading of politics.

References

Allen L (2020) A History of False Hope: Investigative Commissions in Palestine. Stanford: Stanford University Press (in press, December).

Allen L (2017) Determining emotions and the burden of proof in investigative commissions to Palestine. Comparative Studies in Society and History 59 (2): 385-414.

Allen L (2016) UN Commissions in Palestine: fact-finding or feeling with? In: Makdisi K and Prashad V (eds) Land of Blue Helmets: The United Nations in the Arab World. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press pp. 58-73.

Krever T (2014) Dispensing global justice. New Left Review 85: 67

Cite As

Lori Allen (2020) The False Hope of International Law in Palestine. Anthropological Theory Commons. Url: http://www.at-commons.com/2020/10/16/the-false-hope-of-international-law-in-palestine/

About the author(s)

Lori Allen is Reader in Anthropology at SOAS University of London. She is the author of The Rise and Fall of Human Rights: Cynicism and Politics in Occupied Palestine (SUP 2013), as well as many articles on Palestinian society and politics. Her book, A History of False Hope: Investigative Commissions in Palestine, is forthcoming with Stanford University Press in 2020.

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