POL133 Week 12 - Readings: The Question of Palestine: From Liminality to Emancipation

The Question of Palestine: From Liminality to Emancipation

Abstract

The injustice and inequality experienced by Palestinians are widely documented and acknowledged.
However, the situation is impervious to international law and global politics, with Israel enjoying impunity.
This article argues that this can be understood through a critical interdisciplinary emancipatory framework centered on 'liminality'.
Liminality refers to actors and situations that are 'betwixt and between'.
This framework can reveal how actors and spaces are intentionally marginalized, disempowered and silenced.
It also opens up pathways of transformative emancipation by revealing the root causes of liminality and the vulnerability of such spaces to contestation.
Palestinians have been deliberately corralled to a liminal space to enable an expansionist Zionist/Israeli settler colonial enterprise.

Keywords

Palestine; Liminality; Emancipation; International Law; Global Politics; Critical International Relations

Introduction

The dire reality facing Palestinians can be coherently understood through a critical interdisciplinary and emancipatory framework centered on 'liminality'.
Liminality: situations where actors are 'betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention'.
Liminality helps understand how particular actors and groups are marginalized, disempowered, and silenced within global politics and international law.
Liminal spaces do not emerge due to 'accidents of history' or 'local dysfunctions'.
It is in the interests of the powerful for certain actors to be corralled as liminal.
Liminal status is not necessarily permanent, and is vulnerable to subversion, enabling mobilization and, ultimately, emancipation.

Origins and Rationale

To understand and subvert liminality, it is necessary to expose the drivers and rationale behind the creation of liminal actors and spaces: who benefits, how, and why?
The 'Question of Palestine' is often regarded as arising from a 'tragedy in which the most moral, most justified “solution” to “the Jewish problem”’ – the creation of the state of Israel as a haven for world Jewry – ‘has taken a perverted, accidental turn’.
This frame of analysis is prevalent within mainstream IR; however, the tragedy is not the result of an 'accidental' turn of history.
A key aim of the Zionist movement was to create a safe haven for Jews in the face of virulent anti-Semitism in Europe – which eventually reached its dreadful peak with the Holocaust.
Zionist strategy did not aim to co-exist with the indigenous Palestinian inhabitants, but instead to achieve control over the largest amount of historic Palestine while minimizing the number of indigenous Palestinians remaining within it.
This resulted in a settler colonial project to 'eliminate, eradicate and replace' the indigenous people.
This endeavor was enabled on a large scale once client-patron alliances were established between Britain and the Zionist movement, and after 1948, between the United States (US) and the state of Israel.
A settler colonial project has been enacted in historic Palestine from the earliest days of the Zionist movement through to its current apogee in the Israeli state – including Israel threatening an illegal annexation of the West Bank in 2020.

Liminality and the Question of Palestine

To enable this Zionist/Israeli settler colonial enterprise, Palestinians have been cast into a deeply liminal zone within global politics and international law, where their political and legal subjectivity has been stripped and they have been demonized as a 'Monstrous Other'.
The direct result of this Othering is that all political and legal initiatives relating to the Question of Palestine have beenfashioned within liminal confines, including measures ostensibly aimed at 'improving' the Palestinian reality – such as the so-called Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
Such initiatives have enabled Israeli settler colonialism to continue unabated, resulting in an ever-worsening reality for Palestinians on the ground.
The framework of liminality reveals that the origins of the 'Question of Palestine' lie in naked power politics.
As liminal positioning and framing is inherently unstable, however, an analysis through the paradigm of liminality reveals potential for emancipation namely, freeing themselves from colonial, apartheid, and racist oppression.
Palestinians have capitalized on the dynamic nature of liminality – chipping away at, contesting, challenging, and destabilizing the boundaries of their liminality.
This has occurred both through steadfast work to engage the remaining counter-hegemonic potential of international law and global politics, and efforts outside of the main architecture of the international system through civil society and social movements.

Article Structure

Maps the conceptual framework, advocating liminality as a potential 'Master' concept for analyses of actors struggling against injustice and inequality.
Provides examples of how this liminality situates Palestinians between the norms of global politics and undermines their subject position within international law.
Addresses the origins of Palestinian liminality, namely in the Zionist/Israeli settler colonial project and the framing of Palestinians as a 'Monstrous Other'.
Explores the subversive potential of liminality; examples include recognition of the State of Palestine, Palestine’s actions in the International Criminal Court (ICC), the legal mechanism of Universal Jurisdiction (UJ), social movement actions in relation to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, and the growing push for a 'One State Solution' in Israel and Palestine.

Emancipatory approach and the paradigm of liminality

An approach, centered on the paradigm of liminality, reveals that Palestine has been deliberately and instrumentally consigned to a liminal zone within global politics and international law.
The origins of this liminality must be understood and subverted, and on this basis a path can be taken towards transformative emancipation. Moreover, this framework has wider efficacy beyond Palestine.
Liminality is a relatively new concept within critical IR, it has a much longer provenance in fields such as: social, cultural, and political geography; cultural and social theory; sociology; and literature.
Etymologically, liminal comes from ‘limen’ (‘a threshold that needs to be crossed’) and ‘limes’ (a border between).
In 1909, Arnold van Gennep theorized liminality as ‘a transitory state of inbetweenness’ that occurs during rites of passage.
In the 1960s, Victor Turner extended this idea, arguing that liminality can become a ‘place of habitation’ – a position, situation, or status that is ‘neither here nor there, betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention’ and ceremony.
Turner posits that those occupying liminal situations ‘may be disguised as monsters, stripped naked’; he argues that liminal groups possess revolutionary potential to subvert social limits and constraints.
From the 1980s, sociologists such as Shmuel Eisenstadt, use it to trace sociopolitical transformations across social and cultural contexts.
Homi Bhabha views liminality as the location where the margins displace the center.
Edward W. Said considers the experience of exiled intellectuals to be liminal.
Zygmunt Bauman describes liminality as where neither the old nor the new rules apply.
Liisa Malkki uses liminality when understanding the experience of refugees.
Bjørn Thomassen argues that liminality assists in understanding how people deal with social, cultural, and political change.
Over the past three decades – as IR (and critical IR in particular) has increasingly engaged with a range of disciplines – liminality has found itself to be of increasing utility to the field. Examples of its application include:
- Analyses of political identity
- European politics
- The positioning of marginal states within the EU
- Australia’s geopolitical positioning
- Post-communist transitions
- The diplomacy of marginal actors
- Turkish exceptionalism
- Peacebuilding
- Social movements
- Refugees
Scholars argue that liminality has 'considerable unrealised potential' and comprises a 'Master concept' for the field.
Maria Malksoo notes, liminality has the potential to make a significantly greater contribution to IR scholarship – particularly in relation to understanding power, sovereignty, and security, and for analyses of agent structure relationship, state formation and recognition, war and political violence, structural transformation of the international system, extraordinary politics during the times of transition, and the constitution of political identities
Applying liminality as a framework in IR has important epistemological and ontological ramifications, revealing the ‘entangled nature and asymmetrical power configurations’
Liminality is of particular relevance to those in IR who are concerned with the critical project, with the frame of liminality functioning to reveal, and demand greater critique of, injustice, inequalities, and alienations produced by hegemonic processes in global politics.
A particularly vital contribution here is the way the lens of liminality spotlights marginalised actors. Liminality enables us to understand how and why marginalised spaces are deliberately created within global politics and how these liminal spaces and positionalities might be challenged and subverted.

Link to emancipation

Focus of liminality demands IR take seriously, practices, discourses and experiences that are often considered to be beyond the primary focus of global politics, and seeks to capture the particular, contingent and idiosyncratic with a sensitive grasp of context.
When applying the framework of liminality, it becomes clear that it exists in a symbiotic relationship with emancipation.
It is only once the root causes of injustice and inequality are revealed by a liminal framework that potential avenues for emancipation are revealed.
At the same time, without approaching a space or place inscribed as liminal from the perspective of creating transformative emancipation, it becomes difficult to subvert liminality, and achieve change that is anything more than ‘lip service’.

Defining Emancipation

Emancipation should reflect the critical project; it is a reflexive and non-ethnocentric schema aimed at transforming and transcending the structural causes of inequality, injustice, and concomitant violence with a requisite concern for the Other.
Such an emancipatory agenda is therefore a teleological one – moving beyond conflations with concepts such as democracy, human rights, and human security. Rather, the emancipation envisaged here is about enabling people facing injustice and inequality – in this case the Palestinians – to throw off colonial, apartheid, racist, and oppressive yokes.
Critical IR has increasingly recognised the benefits of cross-fertilisation with other relevant disciplines, a recognition this article coheres with.

Influence of Key Thinkers

Michel Foucault: discourses of power define, shape, and mediate global norms, laws, institutions, and politics, and in particular, which knowledges are legitimated or marginalised.
Antonio Gramsci: thinking on ideological hegemony is crucial to reveal and contest unequal structures of power.
Foucault’s work on biopower and biopolitics is valuable for understanding the practices and techniques of regulation, control and domination of Palestinians by the settler colonial Israeli state.
Giorgio Agamben’s work is similarly useful in elucidating how a state of exception can be instituted within a political order such that certain people are condemned to the category of homo sacer or ‘bare life’ – where they are excluded from norms and laws.
Achille Mbembe takes this idea further, arguing that contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death means that the killing of the enemy Other has become an absolute privilege of the powerful in a way that the notion of bio-politics fails to fully encapsulate. What has instead emerged, Mbembe posits, is necropolitics – where sovereignty becomes the capacity to define who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not.
Edward Said: Understanding the historical and ideological processes by which the East/‘Uncivilised’/Orient/Developing World/South is presented by the powerful West/‘Civilised’/Occident/Developed World North as ‘backward’ and ‘Other’ in order to justify and maintain the latter’s hegemony. Said also contributed pathbreaking work to understanding the specific Othering of Palestinians – a central problematique underpinning the Question of Palestine.
Judith Butler: Demonstrating that contemporary discourses of exclusion are expressed on an axis categorising people from those considered ‘human’ to those who are ‘non-human’ (or only spectrally human). Those who are deemed to be spectrally human are regarded as possessing ‘unliveable lives’ and have their legal and political status ‘suspended’.

Critical International Law

Critical international law scholars (including TWAIL scholars) have exposed the colonial origins of international law; the rebranding of nineteenth-century power relations in terms of the ‘developed/developing’ and global governance discourses; and the continuing Eurocentricism of mainstream international law.
Scholarship is central to addressing the foundational flaws of international law in resolving real-world inequality and injustice. Behind the veil of international law’s claims of apolitical universality lies a continuing complicity between international law and structural violence in today’s global order.
Impulses of contemporary geopolitical power are seldom limited by international law, and indeed are often able to find the ‘thinnest’ legitimation through it. Norms such as anticolonialism and self-determination reflect the lip service and broken promises embedded in hegemonic international law.

The Question of Palestine in Global Politics and International Law

While Palestine is certainly not the only liminal actor within contemporary politics, it is particularly important as a case study because liminality permeates every level and aspect of the Question of Palestine within global politics and international law.
As per the 1949 Armistice Agreements, Palestine is defined as the territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
However, because of control of these territories by Jordan and Egypt respectively between 1948 and 1967, and the Israeli military occupation after 1967, Palestine’s ‘position and status are fundamentally ambiguous’ and it does not comprise ‘an actualized territory’.
Since 2012, Palestine is recognised as a non-member state by the UNGA, is recognised in bilateral relations with 138 states, and has acceded to key UN bodies such as the ICC. On the ground, however, Palestine functions as an ‘occupied nation-state’ that is ‘neither self-governing’ (aside from small pockets of the West Bank, and ostensibly Gaza, although it remains blockaded since 2007 and is still de facto occupied) nor integrated into the government of its Israeli occupiers.
The liminality of the Question of Palestine is further compounded by the spatial complexity of the Palestinian body politic – comprising Palestinians within the OPT, Palestinians within the ‘Green line’ of Israel, some five million refugees, and another six million Palestinians in the wider Palestinian exilic diaspora.
Effort by some pro-Israeli politicians, scholars, and commentators to deny the very reality of the state.

The Peace Process

Example of how this liminality manifests is the most prominent political initiative ostensibly aimed at addressing the Palestinian Question – the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Critical analysis reveals, that it has been structured so as to ultimately preserve the existing balance of power, therefore reinforcing the stark asymmetry between the two groups. As a result, the peace process has enabled Israel to expand its project of settler colonialism throughout the OPT, and to separate Palestinians from Israelis.
Today, the number of illegal Israeli settlers in the Palestinian West Bank has increased to over 611,000 people, with settlements (and their infrastructure) covering over 40 per cent of the West Bank.
Israel has established a matrix of biopolitical control and surveillance in the West Bank, with the Wall, checkpoints, roadblocks, and panoptic towers, allowing Israel to effectively contain Palestinians into a plethora of non-contiguous enclaves.
These enclaves separate Palestinians from their families, friends, lands, schools, places of work, and from medical assistance, and are designed to make life unbearable so as to force further migration out of Palestine.
Meanwhile, Gaza remains under blockade, experiencing humanitarian disaster.
Violence reveals that the OPT has become a deathworld where Israel undertakes necropolitics.

International Law

Palestine is also consigned to a liminal zone within the regime of international law, despite the latter’s claim to being apolitical and universal. While there is a strong record of UNGA resolutions attempting to hold Israel to account under international law, effective action to implement recommendations and resolutions has been stymied by interventions and voting by powerful states of the Global North.
Interventions occur in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), with the UN body being equipped, to issue binding resolutions. A key issue here has been the right of veto possessed by the UNSC’s five permanent members, which reproduces significant global power asymmetries.

Origins of Palestinian Liminality

A critical analysis reveals three interrelated, mutually reinforcing factors relegated Palestinians to a liminal zone within global politics and international law:
- The Zionist (and later Israeli) settler colonial project to replace the indigenous population, which required Palestinians becoming liminal.
- The patron-client relationships that developed between Britain and the Zionist movement, and the US and the state of Israel, which enabled and supported the settler colonial project and made Palestinian liminality a geopolitical necessity.
- Mainstream discourses on Israel/Palestine demonise Palestinians as the “Monstrous Other”, thereby justifying and enabling the violent measures necessary to enforce Palestinian liminality.

Zionist Movement

Within the Zionist movement (establishing a national home for world Jewry) there were only a small number of ‘bi-nationalists’ who wished to co-exist with the indigenous Palestinian inhabitants.
The majority of the Zionist movement was a settler colonial movement.
Settler colonialism manifested in specific ways subject to a range of contexts in historic Palestine: (a) in the pre-1948 Zionist movement; (b) in Israeli state policies relating to Palestinian citizens within Israel; and (c) in policies relating to the OPT post 1967.

Settler colonialism vs imperialism

Imperialism focuses primarily on securing ‘economic benefits’ and ‘spheres of influence’; it does not always involve the occupation of territory militarily or administratively.
Settler colonialism involves the occupation and enduring settlement of the territory or land to stay in historic Palestine, and achieve permanent presence through eliminating, erasing and replacing the indigenous people.

Western Support

Success of this Zionist and then Israeli settler colonial endeavor was made possible on a large scale as a result of the support, variously, of the British imperial power, and later the US.
British support of the Zionist movement (manifesting most prominently in the 1917 Balfour Declaration) was the result of a mixture of anti-Semitism, support by Christians in the UK, and strategy.
Client-patron agreement between Britain and a Jewish Palestine would help maintain and protect British imperial interests in the region, particularly the trade route to India. British government regarded the Jewish settler movement in Palestine as the ideal collaborator group to further British interests, akin to those in New Zealand and Australia.
British authorities in Palestine recruited, trained, and armed Zionist forces.
Alliance between the Zionist movement and the US was first signaled by US support for the 1947 United Nations (UN) vote on the partition of historic Palestine. Horror of the Holocaust were a factor in this alliance, an equally element was the US ‘coveting artificially low-priced energy sources and open access to a large, underdeveloped, structurally dependent market’ in the Middle East, particularly as the Cold War unfolded.
Support for Israel soon became a key pillar of US foreign policy in the Middle East, with significant military, aid, and diplomatic outcomes for Israel.

Modern Day

1960 Convention on the Independence of Colonial Peoples effectively naturalized historic cases of imperialism and colonialism; however, it was meant to prohibit active or ongoing cases.
Ongoing and expanding Zionist-Israeli settler colonial enterprise, therefore, required that Palestinians remain within a liminal zone in global politics and international law: Palestinians could not prevent, nor seek redress for, this settler colonialism
Palestinians, therefore, have a right, under international law, to armed resistance.

Hegemonic Discourses

Hegemonic discourse presented by Israel, and reproduced by its allies, demonises Palestinians as a Monstrous Other.
According to this discourse, acts of Palestinian violence (and many of their acts of non-violence) comprise irrational anti-Semitic terrorism and are the root cause of the conflict with Israel.
Israel’s use of ‘terrorism’ to describe all Palestinian resistance means that the label is not restricted to specific acts of violence but functions instead as an ontological category.
The hegemonic discourse acts to render invisible the actual root cause of Palestinian resistance.
Moreover, this discourse demonises Palestinians by slandering them, without evidence, with the most pernicious smear in post-Holocaust global politics – anti-Semitism.

Post-Colonial Discourse

Colonies are the sites where sovereignty consists fundamentally in the exercise of a power outside the law. Mbembe defines that the Israel settlement applies powers that results in absolute domination over the inhabitants.
The so-called “Two-State Solution” has been rendered unviable – due to the deeply problematic peace process, the related expansion of the Israeli settler colonial project, and repeated statements by Israeli leaders that they will never allow the emergence of a Palestinian state