The state and the human rights framework in Palestine

Of all the places one could write a book about the human rights industry, I would not have expected anyone to choose Palestine, given how the Israel-Palestine war is portrayed in U.S. media, usually with Palestine as the aggressor. Lori Allen’s selection of Palestine as the site to critique the human rights industry and, more broadly, the human rights framework as it is applied to Palestine, makes her work crucial at a time when so many continue to deny the Palestinian people’s oppression at the hands of the Israeli apartheid state.

   

But Allen also reveals that the government of Palestine abuses the very human rights system in which it lays its claims for Palestinian liberation. Invariably, this complicates the movement for Palestinian statehood. Allen’s description of state sovereignty as “flowing not just from [the Palestinian Authority’s] control of the means of violence and not from the citizenry, but from the international community” is a compelling explanation of how oppressive or ineffective governments (such as the PA) maintain power simply because they reaffirm the centrality of the state in the international order.

Although the central issue Allen addresses is the emergence of a human rights industry that is more performative than anything else in Palestine, I find that Allen’s work speaks to some of the limitations of rights-based politics that were discussed in Lisa Marie Chaco’s Social Death. For Allen, the issue is not simply that governments and NGOs are falling short on the promise of human rights in Palestine; rather, that the very framework of “human rights” has proved to be a failure in Palestine (pgs.15-16). Yet it continues to drive the Palestinian struggle for statehood. How do Palestinians begin to move beyond the neoliberal human rights framework? Inevitably, would this mean giving up the fight for the state? The latter question is especially pertinent given the U.S. / UN insistence on a 'two-state solution' -- a solution that has become increasingly geographically untenable given the location of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. What might an alternative Palestinian liberation movement look like?