Neve Gordon

On Visibility and Power: An Arendtian Corrective of Foucault*

Freedom, conceived ontologically, is powers condition of possibility. Yet, considering that the subjects interests and identity are constantly shaped, one still has to explain how – theoretically speaking – individuals can resist control. This is precisely the issue I address in the following pages. Following a brief overview of Foucaults contribution to our understanding of power, I turn to discuss the role of visibility vis-à-vis control, and show how the development of disciplinary techniques reversed the visibility of power. While Foucault illustrates that during different historical periods, distinct modes of visibility are produced by power in order to control society, I argue that the very same power that produces visibility is concomitantly dependent upon it. In addition, I maintain that visibility is a necessary component of resistance. But Foucault – perhaps due to his premature death – never adequately explains how individuals can resist the mechanisms of control in a world in which power is ubiquitous. To help clarify this enigma, I turn to Hannah Arendts insights into power, freedom, plurality, and natality. These concepts, I claim, can serve as a corrective to Foucault because they make room for resistance without assuming that humans can exit powers web.

Human Rights Discourse in Domestic Settings: How Does it Emerge?

Building on the literature that analyzes the impact of norms and ideas on international and domestic politics, it is our assumption that the widespread introduction and dissemination of a human rights discourse enables oppressed groups to translate events into rights language and to appeal to courts, politicians and media in order to seek remedies for their grievances. In so far as human rights discourse actually helps introduce more ethical policies and legislation, it is crucial to understand how this discourse, which in the past 55 years evolved and proliferated on the global level, emerges and develops in domestic settings. Using Israel as a case study, and more specifically analyzing the Israeli press, we further develop some of the existing theoretical claims about how the global and local interact. We argue that in order to understand how the rights discourse is imported into the domestic arena and how it expands once it enters the local scene, it is crucial to employ a broader conception of the global and a more differentiated view of the local. We emphasize the significance of local events and practices in determining the impact of the global on national settings, suggesting that one cannot understand transnational flows without unveiling the black box of the domestic arena.

From Colonization to Separation: Exploring the Structure of Israel's Occupation

Abstract Much has changed during Israels 40 years of occupation of Palestinian territory. Within the past six years Israel has, on average, killed more Palestinians per year than it killed during the first 20 years of occupation. Those who help manufacture public opinion within Israel claim that the dramatic increase in Palestinian deaths results from the fact that the Palestinians have changed the methods of violence they employ against Israel, and that Israel, in turn, has also begun using more violent means. Palestinians might invert this argument, claiming that they have altered their methods of resistance in response to Israels use of more lethal violence. While such explanations no doubt contain a grain of truth, they are symptomatic accounts, and do little to reveal the root causes underlying the processes leading to the substantial increase in human deaths. A different approach is therefore needed, one that takes into account the structural dimension of Israels military rule and tracks the two major principles that have informed the occupation over the past four decades: the colonisation principle and the separation principle. By the colonisation principle I mean a form of government whereby the coloniser attempts to manage the lives of the colonised inhabitants while exploiting the captured territorys resources. By the separation principle I do not mean a withdrawal of Israeli power from the Occupied Territories, but rather the reorganisation of power in the territories in order to continue controlling the resources. The major difference, then, between the colonisation and the separation principles is that, under the first principle there is an effort to manage the population and its resources, even though the two are separated. With the adoption of the separation principle Israel looses all interest in the lives of the Palestinian inhabitants and focuses solely on the occupied resources. Such a reorganisation of power helps explain the change in the repertoires of violence and the dramatic increase in the number of Palestinian deaths.

Normative Power Europe and the Power of the Local

In this article, the unfolding events surrounding the publication of the EU Guidelines prohibiting the allocation of funds to Israeli entities in the Occupied Territories are used to offer three observations about the impact of ‘the local’ on ‘Normative Power Europe’ (NPE). First, the case study reveals the growing influence of the power of ‘the European local’ on the decision of whether or not to deploy normative power. Second, it underscores the fact that local power relations in the target country often determine the reaction to NPE, while the reaction often produces the visibility of the normative edicts and thus helps empower NPE. And third, NPE’s visibility has an impact on the EU’s self-identification, but not necessarily on the policies it criticizes. These observations underscore the importance of analyzing the various levels of ‘the local’ and their relation to NPE in order to understand the latter’s political impact.

Foucault's Subject: An Ontological Reading

From the mid-1970s until his death, Michel Foucault sought to develop an account of the subject that would avoid both regarding the subject as merely the passive product of power relations and regarding it as entirely self-creating. Following Foucaults final cues focused on his discussion of the ethics of the self and rooted in a conception of freedom as an ontological condition of possibility rather than as human will drawn mainly from Heidegger, I argue that Foucault sought to develop an account of humans as beings-in-the-world situated within an existing web of relations occurring within a context of background practices, all the while possessing an ontological freedom that is not molded by power relations but is instead the condition of possibility of power itself. In this way, Foucault sought to achieve a balance between activity and passivity, agency and structure in his account of the subject.

Human Rights, Social Space and Power: Why Do Some NGOs Exert More Influence than Others?

Abstract Employing Pierre Bourdieus notion of ‘social space’, this paper attempts to lay bare how human rights NGOs attain the power needed to bring about social change. The paper argues that the strategies NGOs employ cannot explain their social and political impact for the basic reason that many NGOs use the same strategies and yet there is a large power differential among them. Using the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) as a case study, I show that it is the largest and most effective rights group in Israel due to its location in social space; that is, its closeness to sites of power (government, administrative and judicial institutions as well as corporations) as well as the economic, cultural, social and symbolic capital at its disposal. I go on to argue that spatial closeness to sites of power is a double-edged sword: it both enables the organisation to exert more influence and simultaneously inculcates it within the hegemonic worldview, circumscribing and restricting the universalistic agenda which should inform the activities of all human rights NGOs.

Is the struggle for human rights a struggle for emancipation

Is the struggle for human rights a struggle for emancipation? Neve Gordon a , Jacinda Swanson b & Joseph A. Buttigieg c a Teaches in the Department of Politics and Government, Ben Gurion University, Israel b Graduate student in political theory at the Department of Government, University of Notre Dame, E-mail: c Professor of English and Fellow of the Nanovic Institute for European Studies, University of Notre Dame Version of record first published: 24 Feb 2009.

The Geography and Political Context of Human Rights Education: Israel as a Case Study

Studies have shown that human rights education (HRE) can help promote democracy and social progress by empowering individuals and groups and pushing governments to fulfill their obligations towards residents. Assuming that such assessments are accurate, I argue that the successful application of human rights education requires much more than what is generally discussed in the scholarly literature: adjustments to curriculum, additional resources, and adequate teacher training programs. Using Israel as a case study, I show that despite government investment in human rights education, the majority of Jewish youth still do not believe that Palestinian citizens of Israel should enjoy equal rights. This, I maintain, is because other forces, both structural and subjective, always hinder the individual and institutional internalization of HREs basic precepts. Next, I describe the almost complete segregation among Jews and Palestinians in the educational system as well as the centrality of a hyper-ethno-nationalist ideology, and argue that the specific spatial and political context within which the educational process takes place helps determine to what extent human rights education is successful in promoting the values and practices associated with tolerance, respect, and protection of rights. I conclude by offering an example of an alternative desegregated pedagogical model that tries to provide meaningful human rights education.

Outsourcing violations: the Israeli case 1

Using the Israeli case as a point of reference, this paper suggests that the term outsourcing, borrowed from economic discourse, can serve as a powerful explanatory device that facilitates the conceptualization of existing processes pertaining to human rights violations. It allows us to draw a connection among several phenomena that are usually conceived to be independent and unconnected, while disclosing and capturing some of the predominant features characterizing the global violation of human rights. Demonstrating that outsourcing violations is an increasingly prevalent strategy used to mask power and thus abdicate social and moral responsibility, the author argues that its benefits are legal, political and economic. From a legal perspective, the employment of subcontractors is effective since it obfuscates the connection between Israel and the contravening act, making it extremely difficult to hold Israel legally accountable for violations it sanctions. From a political perspective, outsourcing is beneficial because even if the abuses are exposed, they are frequently presented to the public as having been perpetrated by someone else. Finally, the use of subcontractors is economically advantageous because it enables the violator to avoid legal prosecution and political embarrassment, both of which can have an unfavourable effect on capital.

Zionism, Translation and the Politics of Erasure

This paper examines the translation of classic political philosophy into Hebrew, arguing that a variety of ideological positions can be disclosed simply by examining the erasure process employed during translation. Exploring the connection between translation and nation-building, I claim that segments from John Stuart Mills On Liberty, John Lockes Two Treaties of Government and Thomas Hobbess Leviathan were excised in the service of a Zionist identity politics. Insofar as Zionism is a discursive formation, its production and maintenance involves the expulsion of components that may hinder the fabrication of a unified identity. Counter-narratives of the nation that disrupt its totalizing boundaries may disturb, in Homi Bhabhas words, ‘those ideological maneuvers through which “imagined communities” are given essentialist identities’. By way of conclusion, I argue that the altered texts are in effect a sign that one ideology overpowered another and led, as it were, to the corruption of the spirit underlying the original project of translating classics into Hebrew, a project that was initiated by Leon Roth for different ideological reasons.