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Lisa Hajjar
Chair, Law and Society Program, University of California –
Santa Barbara
Adalah’s invitation to this virtual roundtable accurately
summarizes the abysmal record of the Israeli Supreme Court in protecting—let
alone advancing—Palestinian rights claims. I concur that litigation to the
court has been ineffective at best if one considers the court as an end in
itself. However, I argue in favor of continuing litigation because the court
should be regarded as a means to other ends. This court—or any court—where
weighty and contentious cases can be brought, serves an instrumental function
in exposing the contours and logics of legal repression, and the frivolity of
claims to justice. Now, given that most “liberal” Israeli Zionists love their
Supreme Court and regard its decisions as legitimating their state’s
rights-violating practices, knowledge of legal repression and injustice is
wasted on them. Rather, the knowledge drawn from litigation is valuable and
useful to those who are intellectually capable and inclined to assess Israel’s
occupation and the rights of Palestinians in broader terms, as part of a
“universe” of rights, law and justice. This brings us to the question of what
value such knowledge can have when injustice is so entrenched. Since space is
limited, let me draw from the critique of the critique of rights articulated by
Critical Race Theorists and others. The value of litigation, it has been
argued, is not the naive belief that legal victory is imminent or that a
favorable decision will “liberate” you, but rather that by utilizing the law,
the aggrieved, the violated, and the discriminated position themselves in a
universe of humanity that those who repress them seek to exclude them from by
demonizing them as legitimately rightless. To go to court, then, is to insist
on rights and on humanity.
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