Volume 45, February 2008

Virtual Roundtable
Ronen Shamir
Professor of Sociology and Law, and at present Head of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel Aviv University

This debate is not a new one. In the 1980s – following failed attempts to petition against home demolitions, forced deportations, and the closure of newspapers – the PLO called upon the Palestinians to avoid petitioning the Israeli Supreme Court.  The Palestinian public, by and large, disregarded this call.  I investigated this issue in the late 1980s, with the aim of understanding why my earlier findings concerning the slim chances of winning a case on the one hand, and the perceived contribution of the Supreme Court to the legitimation of the occupation in the eyes of the Jewish-Israeli public and the international community on the other hand (Shamir 1990), had not had a ‘cooling effect’ on potential petitioners.  I found (Shamir 1991) that we need to distinguish between ‘political petitioners’ and ordinary people.  Petitioners of the former category are those directly involved in the Palestinian liberation struggle and who are sensitive to the broader symbolic implications of petitioning the Supreme Court.  Among this group there is indeed a strong tendency not to petition the court; among those who continue to do so, the assessment is that the legitimation effect is counter-balanced by the creation of a ‘record of the occupation’.  Petitioners in the second category, namely ordinary people, petition the court for other reasons.  The larger bulk of petitions come from such people.  These people are not naïve and are aware of their slim chances; however, they may hope to delay a certain sanction or even obtain a minimal compromise, and, perhaps most importantly, they seek recognition, to make their voice heard, to feel that they fought back and did not passively accept their fate.  For such people this debate is moot, an intellectual privilege.