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Seminar talk with:

Dr. Rottem Rosenberg-Rubins

Post-Doc Fellow the Minerva Center, University of Haifa

From a state of exception to hyper-legality:
Israeli counter-terrorism law in the post-two-state era

Wednesday, April 22, 2020 at 21:00 (Israel time)

 

Lecture is available on YouTube here  

 

 Abstract:

In 2016, Israel passed the comprehensive Counterterrorism Bill, which strives to reach a new balance between emergency powers and the principles of conventional criminal law for coping with security offences. The lecture will consider the underlying logic of the legislation and its implications for Israel’s relationship with the Palestinian residents of the occupied territories. I argue that the 2016 Counterterrorism Bill does not merely strike a new balance between law and emergency, which gives more weight to the former. Rather, the Bill signifies the institutionalization of a combined law-emergency regime, in which the two types of tools may be used interchangeably. Such a regime, I contend, is consistent with a tendency that Nasser Husain has termed “hyper-legality” – an inflation of laws, rules, and legal mechanisms that causes the subjects of power to be over-regulated rather than abandoned by the rule of law. This logic, in turn, represents a new understanding of terrorism, and particularly Palestinian terrorism, as a permanent and mundane threat that materializes “at home”. Consequently, while the new counterterrorism regime treats Palestinian residents of the occupied territories as a particular security threat, it does not construct them as complete “enemies” or “outsiders” to the Israeli political community. This intermediate status designated to Palestinians by the legislation deserves further attention, as it may potentially constitute a model for governing the Palestinian population under the post-two-state era.

For more details, contact Michal at  This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.  

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