Suchergebnisse

For this thematic edition on occupation, the International
Review of the Red Cross considered it crucial to complement the academic and
military perspectives reflected in this issue with a viewpoint of someone who
has lived and practised law in an occupied territory. The Review chose to
interview Raja Shehadeh, a Palestinian lawyer, writer, and human rights activist
who lives in Ramallah. In 1979 he co-founded Al-Haq, an independent Palestinian
non-governmental human rights organization based in Ramallah, which is an
affiliate of the International Commission of Jurists in Geneva. He worked with
Al-Haq as co-director until 1991, when he left the organization to pursue a
literary career.Raja Shehadeh is the author of several books on international law, humanitarian
law, and the Middle East, such as The West Bank and the Rule of
Law (1980), Occupier's Law: Israel and the West
Bank (1985 and 1988), and From Occupation to Interim
Accords: Israel and the Palestinian Territories (1997). He was
awarded the Orwell Prize in 2008 for his book Palestinian Walks: Notes
on a Vanishing Landscape. His most recent book is
Occupation Diaries.In this interview, Raja Shehadeh gives his views on the relevance of occupation
law today, as well as his personal reflections on Israel, the Palestinian
Authority, and the work of international organizations such as the International
Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

It is with ancient Greek myths describing women as devilish and needing to be taimed to obey men that Dr. Lamia Shehadeh, Chairperson of the Civilization Sequence Studies department of the American University of Beirut began her lecture about Woman's legislative rights in Lebanon.

Border studies have paid much attention to borders and mobility, conceptualizing borderlines and the power politics that manipulates bordering and border crossing. The work of David Newman, Gloria Anzaldua, and Henk van Houtum has sketched useful ways to conceptualize borders and analyze the processes of border making. This paper investigates borders and mobility in Raja Shehadeh's A Rift in Time: Travels with my Ottoman Uncle (2010) and Mohsin Hamid's more recent novel, Exit West (2017). Shehadeh's localized representation of a postimperial Mediterranean geopolitics is countered by Hamid's more globalized context of postcolonial worlds. With a nostalgic political impulse, Shehadeh, a Palestinian writer, recounts the travels of his Ottoman uncle through the Great Rift Valley, along the Lebanese mountains and the Palestinian Galilee, highlighting the openness of borders under the Ottoman Empire and the greater mobility they seemed to have enjoyed. That mobility is now challenged by the highly bordered space of colonial Palestine, marked by checkpoints and barbed wires. The borderless imperial paradigm of the Ottomans as reimagined by Shehadeh is analyzed in relation to Hamid's representation of the border legacy of Western colonialism. The Pakistani novelist offers an exploration of the migration experience from an unidentified city, moving west to metropolitan centers in Greece, London and California. Mixing real and surreal elements to reconfigure the experience of border-crossing, the novel sheds light on the limits imposed on mobility, featuring borders as sites of opportunities, but more often than not of separation and global displacement.

In the summer of 2008 novelist Marina Lewycka and author and human rights lawyer Raja Shehadeh went on two walks: the first in Palestine near Ramallah near the Beit Eil Jewish settlement, the second on Kinder Scout in the Peak District, the site of the mass trespass in 1932 to reclaim the right to walk on the hills. This account of the conversation they recorded on the second walk includes observations by Marina on writing about Palestine and Israel and reflections by Raja about the effect of the Israeli occupation on the fragile Palestinian landscape. It also includes their discussions on writing, walking and the meaning it has to each of them, as well as political comments on the Israeli‐Palestinian conflict evoked by visiting these sites. They wonder whether a similar act of resistance would be possible in Palestine and what it would mean to the future of the conflict.