INTRODUCTION

Penny Green and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian

Why a special issue on the state crimes of just one small state?
Many states engage in state criminality on a scale which is breathtaking in its
violence, corruption and cruelty.
But as Mark LeVine writes in this volume, Israels occupation of Palestinian
territory represents criminalized state behavior at the most systematic, intricately
planned and executed, widest possible scale, and longest duration. It is also state
crime which has enjoyed not only national and international impunity but international funding. Without Americas $3 billion annual military aid package, state
crime in Israel would certainly assume a different character.
This special issue is devoted not only to Israels state crimes but also to
Palestinian resistance and will be published just months before the 50th anniversary of Israels occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and Golan Heights.
The special issue demands that we ask about state violence in relation to historic Palestine, since silence about Israeli state criminality allows for the continuation of the settler colonial regime of dispossession. In speaking, researching and
writing about Israeli state violence one is confronted by a range of hegemonic
epistemological, theoretical and methodological problematizations which the contributers here have addressed to produce alternative ways of knowing.
One of the most critical problematizations is that of denial. As Stan Cohen so
powerfully illustrated, denial is a critical and defining feature of state criminality,
but few criminal states have developed a denial machine of the character and scale
of Israel. This special issue thus offers an evidenced-based corrective to the systematic distortion of truth which the Israeli denial machine propagates.
The first three contributions of this special issue examine the dramatization of
state violence as good violence and provide analyses that have hitherto been
denied a platform in the course of the global political narrative of denial of crimes
by the sacred state. The articles expose the use of power under the state totalitarianism of Israeli occupation, with its various operatives, to shed light on state
Penny Green is Professor of Law and Globalisation at Queen Mary University of London and Director
of the International State Crime Initiative (statecrime.org), and she is also an Editor in Chief of State
Crime; Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian is Lawrence D. Biele Chair in Law, Institute of Criminology
Faculty of Law, School of Social Work and Social Welfare, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mt.
Scopus, Jerusalem.

Produced and distributed by Pluto Journals www.plutojournals.com/scj/

Penny Green and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian

criminality. LeVines article The Quantum Mechanics of Israeli Totalitarianism

looks closely at the systematic, well-planned and decades-long criminal behaviour
of Israels occupation. It claims that the duration and comprehensiveness of
Israels rule over [the] Occupied Territories has few if any equals, and hence,
understanding the intricacies of Israeli state criminality over such occupied space
and community can be extremely difficult. The author argues that the states use
of military and securitized discourse in the context of colonial Israel brings further
oppression and dispossession, incorporating high levels of criminality. But LeVine
also asks in what way are state crimes, in fact, criminal? To answer this question,
he analyses states of confusion, delves into the missing question of the legality
of an occupation, examines what he defines as the road to criminality, and
explores the quantum mechanics of occupation and its matrix of control. Ronit
Lentins article, Palestine/Israel and State Criminality: Exception, Settler
Colonialism and Racialization engages critically with the settler colonial analytical framework, while invoking theories on racism and racialization. Her analysis
requires the reader to theorize Israeli state criminality within the framework of a
racial state. By invoking Weheliyes argument, concerning racializing assemblages, she places race at the centre of state criminality, as well as an insistence
on the routine nature of the brutalization of Palestinian flesh and the dehumanizing
of Palestinians to achieve ideological normality (Weheliye 2014). The third article, Colonialism and Apartheid against Fragmented Palestinians: Putting the
Pieces Back Together by Rinad Abdulla, compliments the work of Lentin. It
utilizes the settler colonial analytical framework, while challenging narrower
frameworks. The author rejects the use of the concept of conflict in framing
Israeli military occupation and argues that a-historicizing and depoliticizing the
ideology behind the Israeli settler colonial project are misleading and inappropriate. The article challenges both international law and localized legal discourse and
takes the reader into the settler colonial nature of the Israeli state, apartheid, colonialism and discriminatory policies, while looking closely at five segments of
Palestinian society, each existing within the hierarchy of Israeli dominance: the
West Bank, Gaza, Jerusalem, Palestinian citizens of Israel and the refugees in the
Diaspora (the result of the two major wars of expulsion: 1948 and 1967). The
article concludes by arguing that, as in South Africa, only through decolonization,
the dismantling of Israels apartheid structure and the restructuring of an allencompassing, single, democratic state with equal rights for all are fairness and
justice possible.
Colonial technologies of violence as they pertain to Palestinian exclusion and
to stolen, occupied and yet to be stolen Palestinian space are revealed in the two
articles by Green and Smith, and Shalhoub-Kevorkian, David and Ihmoud. Both
articles speak to the continuity of the Nakba and to Israels normalization
State Crime 5.1 Spring 2016

INTRODUCTION 7

of violence and corruption in its relations with Palestine and Palestinians. Both
articles explore Israels demonization of Palestinian space and its reification of
Judaized territorial ambitions. It is impossible, as these articles reveal, to understand the practices of forced eviction throughout Israel and Palestine, or Gazas
slow death, outside a framework that recognizes Israels settler colonialism as a
permanent structure of invasion and elimination (Wolfe 2006). In Gaza, the West
Bank, East Jerusalem and the Naqab, Israel operates a theologized political economy of erasure.
In their article on forced eviction, Green and Smith reveal the contours of a
continuous Nakba. In empirical detail, they document Israels practices of forced
eviction as mechanisms in the larger related state projects of ethnic cleansing and
Judaization. The article reveals the historical land and planning complexities
behind forced evictions in Israel/Palestine, the mechanics of house and village
demolitions, the impact of the separation wall, the devastating impact of illegal
Jewish settlements on the lives of Palestinians, the role of Jewish National Fund in
eliminating the traces of Palestinian history and how the invocation of archaeology is used in the project of ethnic cleansing. Throughout, it explores processes of
Judaization as the driver of Israeli settler colonialism.
Developing this theme, Shalhoub-Kevorkian and her colleagues advance the
critical concept of security theology in order to explain the defensive rationale
(more accurately denial) deployed by the Israeli state for its crimes of terror in
Gaza. Security theology, they argue, rests on the states assumption of a monopoly
on victimhood and it is with this assumed moral monopoly that the state seeks to
neutralize and deny its crimes and redefine the real Palestinian victim as perpetrator. Security theology thus allows impunity to flourish. Gazan lives, geographies
and welfare are reproduced in the form of Gazans as no-bodies, Gaza as a nonspace, and the Gazan community, with no life to live, while alive.
The final two articles explore both violent and non-violent Palestinian resistance to Israels state crimes. Both articles also interrogate the responses that
Palestinian resistance has engendered from the Israeli state and the international
community.
Kovner and Shalhoub-Kevorkian in their analysis of Palestinian child arrests
and detention in Occupied East Jerusalem argue that children are deeply imbricated in the racialized politics of the occupation. In the context of widespread
poverty, discrimination and structural violence, Israels form of counterterrorist
politics casts children both as terrorist and as key sources of Palestinian community intelligence. Children come to define the resistance and are in turn defined
by it. This politics underpins the panoply of structural violence(s) directed against
them. Constructing children as a threat to Israeli security enables the state to arrest,
detain, imprison and abuse them with impunity or as the authors argue, to erase
Produced and distributed by Pluto Journals www.plutojournals.com/scj/

Penny Green and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian

these children from the category of the human and the legal apparatus of human
rights and childrens rights a process they describe as state-hate crime.
Mason and Falk then highlight one of the most intransigent problems faced by
those seeking justice for Palestinians the refusal of Israel and the international
community to respond to the long history of Palestinian non-violent resistance.
Rather, their article documents a host of measures designed to undermine nonviolent initiatives and the perverse strategy of recasting non-violent forms of
resistance, such as the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, as
violence.
Every article in this special issue speaks to the complicity or weakness of the
international community in confronting Israels crimes against the Palestinians.
BDS, as Mason and Falk argue, is one of the very few non-violent (and effective)
strategies possible in the face of the unwillingness by the United Nations (UN),
European Union (EU) and powerful countries to take strong actions against Israel.
Israel has predictably, and unconscionably, denounced both BDS and its supporters as anti-Semitic a traditional Israeli public relations (PR) tactic designed
explicitly to deflect attention from the very grave issues, outlined throughout this
volume, that BDS is challenging.
Palestinians it seems must simply accommodate the abuses, killings, discrimination, segregation, land theft and multitudinous deprivations, inflicted upon them
by Israel. The only acceptable form of resistance, from this perspective, is
departure, exile or death.
We hope that this special issue can offer new insights into theorizations of state
criminality and state crime. State criminality, as an all-encompassing power that
traps communities in a state of slow death, results in transforming populations
from must live conditions to have to die conditions.
Deepening our understanding of state criminality, at the macro and micro level,
with a focus on crimes of the Israeli state, requires exposing the profound dynamics and fusions underlying politics, state-ness and criminality.

References
Weheliye, A. (2014) Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist
Theories of the Human. Durham: Duke University Press.
Wolfe, P. (2006) Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native, Journal of Genocide
Research, 8(4): 387409.

State Crime 5.1 Spring 2016