Adalah's Review Volume 4 - In the Name of Security (Spring 2004)

From the introduction by Samera Esmeir:

It is difficult to devote an issue of a critical journal published by a human rights organization to the theme of “security.” For in such a case, the work of critique is expected to juxtapose security considerations with human rights, and to reveal the violations of the latter carried out “in the name of security.”

Demography, Arab-owned lands, Arab Palestinians moving and crossing borders, political dissent, certain forms of knowledge, speech, memory and the relationship to the past – all of these, as the articles in this issue elaborate, have been realized as security concerns in Israel. The term security contains the reasons, the means and the ends, and as such, it justifies its own deployment. It is a magical term able to absorb any and all content.

Instead of considering security in opposition to other rights and interests, and therefore, overlooking the act of making secure and the various definitions of what is secure, articles in this issue of Adalah’s Review probe the politics of securing as efforts to impose a specific reality, to fix it, and to attempt to bring it to a close.