School of Law
at University of London, Birkbeck CollegeSign up to Academia.edu
Eurocentrism.
Online Dictonary Social and Political Key Terms of the Americas: Politics, Inequalities, and North-South Relations, Version 1.0 (2012).
Download (.pdf) No harm done? Considering the potential consequences of the enhanced governmental control over English and Welsh criminal trial judges
by Eva Marschan
Presented at the Socio-Legal Conference at the University of Sussex in April 2011
The paper examines the impact of the 2005 Criminal Procedure Rules on the judicial role in the criminal litigation... more The paper examines the impact of the 2005 Criminal Procedure Rules on the judicial role in the criminal litigation process and considers potential implications for the processes of the trial. I argue that the requirements by the rules are in conflict with the notion that judges should act and appear impartial in jury trial proceedings and that the changes are jeopardizing the defendant’s right for a fair trial.
Law and Identity In Mandate Palestine. By Assaf Likhovski
This is a review of Law and Identity in Mandate Palestine by Assaf Likhovski This is a review of Law and Identity in Mandate Palestine by Assaf Likhovski
The Honey
Twenty-four hours in Palestine
Kaelen Wilson-Goldie
Last Updated: Jul 24, 2008
Twenty-four hours in Palestine
Kaelen Wilson-Goldie
Last Updated: Jul 24, 2008
The Honey Zeina B Ghandour Interlink Books Dh49 Zeina B Ghandour's debut novel The Honey begins with a fable about an abandoned village in Palestine. Long ago, the men of Al Ahmar painted their yellow mosque blue but it turned out green. They peeled and painted again - resulting first in navy, then in midnight, then in indigo, but never the benevolent sky blue they desired. "The women in the village did not speak," writes Ghandour, "feigning not to notice the vacant ritual." The men grew despondent and their families started to leave, having failed to atone for mysterious sins. Eventually, Al Ahmar lost all of its inhabitants except one, and it was said that on moonless nights a woman named Ruhiya climbed the mosque's minaret to deliver the dawn call to prayer herself.
This story may come at the start of Ghandour's book, where it is labelled a prelude, but in the imagined time of the novel it is more accurately the end. The fable of Al Ahmar is the only trace left behind to signify the real story that unfolded there. It is a distillation, a myth that smoothes over a complex tangle of tragedies, traumas and secrets that went more or less untold. Ghandour was born in Beirut in 1966. She is now based in London and ranks human rights, international law and comparative Jewish and Islamic jurisprudence among her professional pursuits. But for fans of experimental literary fiction from or about the Levant, she is probably best known as the author of two dazzlingly sassy and rambunctious short stories, War Milk and Omega: Definitions, that were published in the recent anthologies Transit Beirut: New Writing and Images and Hikayat: Short Stories by Lebanese Women, respectively.
The 2008 publication of The Honey, for Interlink's world fiction series, is in fact a reprint. Quartet Books first released the novel in 1999, after which point it was translated into Arabic and fell out of circulation completely. Now, for readers who responded to the explosive attitude of her short stories - which are more like fast-paced prose poems, with lust portrayed as a "cannibalistic intestinal craving," Iraq as a place where "elite gangsters are filling up their piggy-bank with straight cold theft" and the roots of Islam as "deliciously, rock-worshippingly pagan" - there is opportunity to indulge Ghandour's style in a longer form, and relief in finding that she modulates her energy to sustain a novel.
The Honey covers a 24-hour period in which a young man sets off with a colleague on a suicide-bombing mission. At dawn, his lover (later revealed to be his father's daughter) breaks a serious taboo by delivering the call to prayer herself. The luminosity of her voice rattles the young man's will. He abandons his duties just as his partner blows himself to pieces. A thrill-seeking foreign journalist shows up and follows the story to the village of Al Ahmar, where it shatters into a rumour about the young woman acting as muezzin. The journalist elicits many metaphors but no facts from the village elders, until a young girl tells her to find two lovers in the desert. From there, The Honey tunnels through crime and sorrow to the tale of how these two lovers came to be.
After the prelude and before an equally enigmatic epilogue, The Honey proceeds in five sections, each of which carries four names or themes. Each section is named for one of the five daily prayers in Islam - dawn, noon, afternoon, dusk and nightfall. On another level, each section follows a page describing an act - bid'a, meaning deviance or a breach of sacred tradition; nushuz, meaning that which tries to elevate itself above ground; ta'arrud, a verb with sexual connotations meaning to barricade; kashf, to unveil and reveal; and kheshya, to fear god.
Each of the sections is centred on a single character - Ruhiya, Yehya, Maya, Asrar and Farhan. And on another level still, each character is meant to embody a larger idea - Ruhiya means soulful or spiritual, Yehya means the will to live, Maya (in Hindu and Buddhist traditions at least) means the veils of illusion, Asrar means secrets and Farhan means happy or joyful (other characters in the novel include the white-haired healer Al Ashkar, meaning the fair one; Radwan, the compassionate, who forgives huge transgressions; and Hurra, meaning freedom, Radwan's wife and Ruhiya's mother, who achieves hers by tying a rope around her neck and tumbling).
At 107 pages, The Honey is slim. But the story is so tightly packed that every word resonates and multiple readings are required. The pay-off is a glinting little novel that emanates big ideas about politics, pleasure, language, religion and fulfilment, be it earthy or otherwise. Kaelen Wilson-Goldie reports from Beirut for The National.
A Discourse on Domination in Mandate Palestine - Property, Imperialism and Insurgency
Here is a review of the book, which appeared in the Modern Law Review.
Zeina B. Ghandour, A... more
Here is a review of the book, which appeared in the Modern Law Review.
Zeina B. Ghandour, A Discourse on Domination in Mandate Palestine:
Imperialism, Property and Insurgency, London: Routledge, 2010, 202 pp, hb
d70.00.
This book is a pleasure to read. Threading together an analysis of a rich and
varied range of texts, from narratives of Palestinian refugees, laws, ordinances
and policies relating to land and governance, to the personal diaries of colonial
agents, Ghandour disrupts conventional historical discourses of Mandate
Palestine. Ghandour’s style of writing is perceptive, engaging and re£ects a depth
of sense that is not often encountered in academic prose. The sense that I speak of
encapsulates an acute empathy for the subjects of her analysis, an incisive
political analysis, and an intellectual project that is realised through a strategy of
unsettling.
In this review, I will discuss three aspects of the book that I found particularly
innovative and which contribute meaningfully to existing literatures on post-
colonial theory and legal analyses of the colonial settlement of Palestine. The ¢rst
regards the writing of history. The author’s aim is to challenge the very rules of
history as a genre and speci¢cally to disrupt the linear teleological narratives that
characterise dominant discourses of the Mandate in Palestine. At the outset of the
book she poses the question: ‘[w]hat would happen to the discipline of history if
historical studies were received as though they were works of art: as the emotive,
evocative, subjective creations of their author?’ (83).
She unsettles the authorial power of dominant historical discourses on Man-
date Palestine in a variety of ways. Most pointedly, she does so by relaying the
voices of Palestinian refugees, speaking about a range of experiences but most
particularly the Rebellions of 1935 -1939. Along with challenging ‘accepted lin-
guistic and cultural constructs’ she also hopes that the narratives of Palestinian
refugees might ‘make the reader feel slightly sick and uncomfortable when faced
with them’ (5).
Uncovering narratives of the subaltern is not a new strategy in post-colonial
theory, invested as it is in challenging dominant, imperial discourses of colonisa-
tion. However, rather than utilise the transcripts of her interviews to provide
evidence of a counter-narrative of settlement or to provide proof that imperial
discourses are rife with orientalist ideologies and mistaken assumptions, Ghan-
dour quite simply lets the voices speak for themselves. In Chapter Three, the
narratives of people involved in the Rebellion conclude the chapter without
immediate commentary or analysis by Ghandour, and the e¡ect is very powerful:
the very terms and vocabulary of imperial discourses on the Rebellion are irre-
vocably altered by the refugees themselves, as Palestinian memories and under-
standings of what happened create an entirely di¡erent framework for
understanding the Rebellion. In this way, Ghandour suggests that whether or
not the Rebellion successfully achieved de-colonisation is really not the point.
In shifting our gaze, she challenges an imperial logic that sees power relations as
a zero-sum game. Violence, in the context of the Mandate, becomes inevitable
rather than necessary, but necessary as a ‘reclamation of the self ’ (10). The value of
the rebellion is assessed by Ghandour in very di¡erent terms as the value it had
for the colonial subject who was ¢ghting, perhaps, to exit ‘the distress of [an]
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existence deprived of power, peace and rest’ (A. Mbembe, On the Postcolony
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001) 12).
The second innovative aspect of the book is its exploration of the relationship
between a¡ect, knowledge and power. She examines travel narratives of three Brit-
ish men involved in governing the Mandate (and other colonies) in order to trace
the relationship between a¡ect and knowledge production within the colony, and
how this shaped relations of power between the coloniser and colonised. She poses
the question: ‘Why should those men and their cultural and emotional baggage
matter to us? Why bother to poke around their personal motivations, their insati-
able emotional needs, their ¢xation with honour and fairness or the pain behind
their wanderlust?’ (18) In taking account of the emotional needs and obsessions of
the colonial authorities she sheds light on the a¡ective dimensions of supposedly
‘rational’ justi¢cations for colonial policies. Ghandour ponders how these men
‘made political domination look like devotion and sel£essness’ (16). For instance,
the assertion that ‘we recognise your right to self-government but cannot grant
you that’ (in some cases, yet; in other cases, ever) carries with it, in the perverse
a¡ective universe of the coloniser’s obsession with control, emotional resonances
of care and benevolence. The a¡ective and emotional dimensions of colonialists’
self-perception (and self-delusion) lay at the basis of some rather tricky strategies
they employed to maintain and rationalise their control over subject populations.
The diaries of colonial agents, which form almost a sub-genre within the travel
literature of that period, have given us a rich archive of how colonisers and other
Europeans viewed non-European subjects. Ghandour goes beyond the question
of representation and analyses the personal writings and diaries of colonial
administrators in order better to understand the relationship between how a¡ect
is implicated in knowledge production of the native subject. She reads these
accounts in a nuanced manner, unveiling how their observations, and the feelings
and sensations that accompanied these observations, helped form the value judge-
ments that they made about native subjects and the landscape. In turn, these judge-
ments formed the basis of colonial strategies of governance.
At times Ghandour’s observations are peppered with a playful quality; but this is
not to underestimate their signi¢cance. I found a candidness that was refreshing,
novel, and thought provoking. She skillfully disrupts the usual attribution of emo-
tion to the native subject in contrast to the rational, scienti¢c mind of the European
by paying close attention to the feelings expressed in Captain F. D. Lugard’s diary.
Lugard had marched from Mombasa on the coast to Buganda through plains,
mountai ns and forest. He arrived with his sleeves rolled up (as it was his habit to
march, and this must have made him look quite con¢dent and laid-back), with a
conti nually seeping wound in his arm (where he had been shot whilst storming a
slaver’s stockade two years previously, and which was so severe Lugard was still
periodically pulling out splinters of bone), and a no less serious wound in his heart
(a romantic betrayal which ‘nearly destroyed his mind’). (20 - 21)
In mentioning the heartbreak that Lugard endured, and how this may have
deranged his mind, she introduces the place of contingency into the unfolding
of historical events. The decisions taken by Lugard, as with other men in powerful
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positions, were not simply or transparently the outcome of cold hard rationicina-
tion about the geo-politics of whichever territory they were attempting to colonise.
The third aspect of the book that contributes signi¢cantly to post-colonial
theory is the discussion of key colonial strategies utilised to settle the land and
colonise the population. Two strategies stand out. The ¢rst is how colonial autho-
rities recognised the rights and entitlements of some colonial subjects to govern
themselves in varying degrees, while simultaneously refusing to grant the subject
population self-government. Sometimes this recognition was explicit; at other
times, acknowledged discreetly among colonial authorities concerned about
how to manage troublesome native insurgents. Ghandour comments on the
e¡ects of this recognition of the right to self-govern and its simultaneous denial:
Wordplay aside, it is clear that the concept of self-determination, as well as the use of
the term in this context is not an absolute, unquali¢ed or self-su⁄cient one . . . but
one which is dependent on the word which must precede it, the concept of entitle-
ment to it: I (war victor), am not pronouncing you (ex-enemy territory) self-deter-
mining, but I am willing to concede that you are entitled to self-determination. So
what? In terms of actual self-determination, this is beginning to sound like its
antithesis. (32)
Recognition and refusal operate in tandem with the objective of prolonging the
victor’s occupation. Deferral of granting the very thing that they recognised as the
entitlement of the colonised population was an ancillary technique deployed in
the same vein. Ghandour discusses the continual deferral of creating a Legislative
Council for Palestinians (137-138). It is not di⁄cult to imagine the supreme arro-
gance this entailed on the part of the occupying power.
Central to maintaining his psycho-a¡ective and political power, Ghandour
also notes how the coloniser has quite regularly to put the native in her place.
‘He must display his physical/mental prowess on a regular basis in order to remind
the native that he is his superior’ (45). This compulsive £exing of muscles, so to
speak, aids the shoring up of the coloniser’s sense of mastery. This corresponds to
Orientalist ideologies and racist understandings of the native as weak, rife with
moral and physical oddities and defects, decrepit.
There is nothing new per se about a discussion of how Orientalist and racist
ideologies underpin colonial policies pertaining to land appropriation and govern-
ance. However, this discussion sets the stage for a discussion of the strategy
employed to protect and bolster colonial domination: namely, lawfare. Drawing
on the work of John Comaro¡, Ghandour refers to the origins of the term: the
Tswana speaking people in South Africa in the 19th century referred to law as the
English mode of warfare (J. Comaro¡, ‘Symposium Introduction: Colonialism,
Culture and the Law - a Foreword’ (2001) 26 Law and Social Inquiry 305). Lawfare is
a particular type of military-political aggression. It can refer to the making legal of
warfare before, during and after a con£ict. One of the oldest tactics in the arsenal
of colonial ideological weaponry, the legal justi¢cation of violence by the military
also recalls Benjamin’s insights into the state’s monopoly of violence. Civilian deaths
become an unwanted cost in a military operation that becomes a necessity (even if,
ostensibly unwanted), when targets are de¢ned legally as military targets.
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Lawfare also operates, in the historical context of the Mandate, as a way of
articulating and making manifest the relationship between Orientalist and racist
ideologies and the imposition of legal norms and principles. The second chapter
of the book deals with the appropriation of land in Mandate Palestine, and the
imposition of English land law principles. The decrepit and decaying qualities of
native subjects are transposed onto the land itself; the land becomes in need of
development and regeneration, which is only possible with the imposition of
English property laws. Thus the ground is forti¢ed for the imposition of a new
regime of ownership and the erasure of pre-existing law; the dispossession of peo-
ples realised with reference to contractual norms and principles of exchange.
By promising to match dearth with cornucopia, laziness with technology . . . the
colonialist claims moral, spiritual, intellectual and cultural superiority over the native.
He reinforces this with wholesale references to treaties, covenants and agreements, to
legal education and training, to regard for the principles of equity and respect for local
custom. Together, these form an arti¢cial moral headquarters or base camp (46).
Ghandour focuses on the technology of mapping as key to the British assertion of
an epistemological and material hold over the land. Ghandour’s analysis of colo-
nial technologies is also bolstered by a very clear explanation of the pre-existing
forms of tenure and property ownership that were in e¡ect wiped out in order to
impose market-oriented reforms that bene¢ted the colonial power. While the
chapter on land is certainly engaging, in some ways it does not go far enough
(or as far as the analyses of the Rebellion and the creation of religious, communal
identities) in pushing the boundaries of contemporary understandings of the rela-
tionship between law, colonialism and property law.
How do a¡ective dimensions of colonial knowledge production also contri-
bute to the appropriation of land? The settler and the native, property and racial-
ity are co-constitutive, and this co-constitution has a¡ective dimensions that
Ghandour so carefully reveals in other chapters of the book. How would our
understanding of property and the particular forms of ownership she identi¢es
become unsettled if they were subjected to the same sense of critique as the events
of the Rebellion, or the colonial fabrication of religious communalism, explored
in Chapter 4? Having said that, the chapter is meticulously detailed in its analysis
of Palestinian and English forms of property ownership, and the techniques
employed to stamp out the former.
In sum, Ghandour reveals how the colonialist rendering of the history of Man-
date Palestine was a creation in which the a¡ective and emotional dispositions of
its authors were intricately bound up with the knowledge production of natives
and native territory. In unsettling these creative acts and revealing the violence of
this form of knowledge production, Ghandour unmakes history, and in doing so,
presents us with an invaluable and powerful o¡ering of post-colonial resistance to
dominant discourses of occupation.
Brenna Bhandar
n
n
Law School, University of Kent
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Are the Palestinians of Lebanon the 'homines sacri' of the International Legal Order?
by Steven Allen
Undergraduate Law Dissertation 2010
Examines the legal and theoretical position of the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon since 1948.
Part One... more
Examines the legal and theoretical position of the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon since 1948.
Part One examines the specific nature of the international legal mechanisms established to deal with the situation of Palestinian refugees, contrasting this to the system in operation under the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. It is argued that the current system in place for over 60 years results in a 'protection gap' for Palestinian refugees, which sets the scene for their exceptionalism in host states.
Part Two assess the complex history of the Palestinian refugee community in Lebanon between 1948 and 1982, focusing in particular on the way in which the community have been increasingly restricted within Lebanese society, except during a brief period of PLO control in the refugee camps under the auspices of the Cairo Agreement.
Part Three looks at the increasing exclusion and ghettoisation of the Palestinian refugees within Lebanese society under a new security paradigm and in the vacuum of protection created by the expusion of the PLO presence in the country. It charts recent developments including the destruction and reconstruction of Nahr el-Bared by the Lebanese Armed Forces as a clear example of the way in which the camps have become states of exception and their residents 'homines sacri'.
The Conclusion explores the way in which the exceptionalism experienced by the Palestinian refugees of Lebanon are not simply the raw exercise of power associated with state sovereignty, nor simply the result of the uneven distribution of resources upon a Marxist analysis, but are a combination of these and other complex factors.
