In our featured essay, Neve Gordon and Catherine Rottenberg engage in the radical act of centering care as politics.
For some time now human rights have served as the global moral yardstick used to evaluate governmental and corporate policies and practices.1 The widespread acceptance of human rights as the dominant moral framework in the national and international arena has, without doubt, propelled a range of discursive and institutional changes.2 This acceptance is reflected in the way that liberal and conservative governments as well as many corporations have integrated the language of human rights into their policies. Simultaneously, human rights have become part of mainstream culture through their incorporation
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Abstract Since Médecins sans Frontières’ denunciations of the 2015 bombings of hospitals by the United States and Russia in Afghanistan and Syria, respectively, subsequent polemics have taken scholarly and policy debates about Attacks on Healthcare (AoH) in new directions and called on history to better understand their origins and wider long-term impacts. Despite increased calls for more rigorous data collection and research on the social, behavioral, psychological and economic impacts of AoH, recent international meetings organized in the wake of the fifth anniversary of the
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Julie Billaud, Geneva Graduate Institute Antonio De Lauri, Chr. Michelsen Institute Abstract : International law has historically been manipulated to render acceptable the suspension of liberal normative standards when it comes to violence and suffering perpetrated against non-Western populations. Yet the litigation initiated by South Africa against Israel at the International Court of Justice illustrates the Global South’s unwavering commitment to challenge the international world order through legal means. Can the case of Palestine propel the ‘return’ of the political project of the Third
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“At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could reach the nation’s ear, I would, today, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke.” Frederick Douglass – “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July” When the absurd is sustaining a slaughterhouse and we are witnesses. When our collective will to stop the slaughterhouse is met with imaginary structures built for us to fight with. A part
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Speaking to a group of Israeli high school students in 2022, Deputy Religious Services Minister Matan Kahana commented: “If there was a sort of button you could push that would make all the Arabs disappear, send them on an express train to Switzerland, I would press that button.” It has long been obvious, and has become more obvious since Israel’s campaign of annihilation in Gaza began last October, that most Israelis and many in the West wish, with Minister Kehana, that Palestinians—or what some refer
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In the remarks that follow I want to focus on a few of the ways language is used to describe the violence unleashed by Israel on the Palestinians. We are all no doubt aware that language is related in complex ways to action – not only in describing and misdescribing reality but also in experiencing words and motivating action. I begin with a striking passage from an article by Brian Klug on the most recent Gaza massacre: “Sometimes it is better,” he writes, “to be
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Humanity is pleased to announce a prize for the best essay published in the journal in a calendar year. The prize is open to graduate students or those without tenure track jobs at the time of submission. It’s our pleasure to announce the winner of the 2023 Early Career Essay Prize for Humanity journal: Howie Rechavia-Taylor. Howie Rechavia-Taylor, “German Colonialism In The Courtroom — Law, Reparation, And The Grammars of the Shoah,” Humanity 14, no. 2 (Summer 2023): 212-229. Abstract: In the quest to address the
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