Monday 10 June 2024

Rabea Eghbariah's protected species

Legal concepts are building blocks of legal doctrines which are frameworks, sets of rules or procedural steps of various sorts which arise where there is jurisdiction and justiciability. 

Rabea Eghbariah's recent paper 'TOWARD NAKBA AS A LEGAL CONCEPT' has aroused considerable controversy. Under current US law, it is possible for America's assistance to Israel in the current Gaza war to be judged illegal if there is a specific offence which uniquely can only be inflicted on Palestinians. 

Rabea writes

The law does not possess the language that we desperately need to accurately capture the totality of the Palestinian condition.

This is false. The Law has a concept of 'protected species'. Palestinians should be declared one such. They can't be charged with rape or murder or waging war because they are animals who have no concept of any such crime. But, anyone who harms Palestinians, or who helps those who are harming Palestinians, should face legal penalties. 

From occupation to apartheid and genocide, the most commonly applied legal concepts rely on abstraction and analogy to reveal particular facets of subordination.

No. An occupying power may use legal concepts to elaborate a legal doctrine applicable to the occupied area. For example, the Nazi occupation of Poland created new legal categories to designate non-German people who had been selected for 'assimilation'. Apartheid, like Jim Crow, was a legal regime. Genocide might be a legal doctrine or it might be extra-judicial. Anybody who has experienced or heard reports of occupation, apartheid or genocide does not have to rely on 'abstraction' or 'analogy' to reveal that the occupied are being subordinated like fuck while those subject to genocide are simply dying like flies. 

Only a fool with a very expensive education would think that legal concepts reveal facets of a reality which is fucking obvious. Still, it is good to know that if Rabea is beaten and sodomized and then stabbed repeatedly, he will be mulling over legal concepts of assault, rape, and murder so as to gain insight into the type of subordination which is being inflicted on him.  

This Article introduces Nakba as a legal concept to resolve this tension.

Vast herds of Palestinians were grazing peacefully. Then the White Man mowed them down with machine guns. Palestinians should now be declared a protected species.  

Meaning “Catastrophe” in Arabic, the term “al-Nakba” (النكبة) is often used to refer to the ruinous process of establishing the State of Israel in Palestine.

Which was like the ruinous process of establishing the State of Pakistan in the Indian sub-continent, or the ruinous process of making the Kingdom of Jordan safe from Palestinian nutters or the various other runious processes we have sponsored in the region.  

But the Nakba has undergone a metamorphosis; it has evolved from a historical calamity into a brutally sophisticated structure of oppression.

Not as brutal as Hamas. Only if they compound rape and murder with cannibalism will they be able to achieve a greater Nakba for Hanafi Arabs or contribute more substantially to the greater glory of Shia Iran.  

This ongoing Nakba includes episodes of genocide and variants of apartheid

Hamas seems more focused on gang-rape and beheading babies. If its members were considered to be human, then the applicable legal concept would be hostis humani generis. This is why a new legal concept of 'protected species' must be created for Palestinians unless, obviously, they live in Arab lands in which case who gives a fuck?

but remains rooted in a historically and analytically distinct foundation, structure, and purpose.

No. It is rooted in Palestinians doing stupid, self-destructive, shit. Speaking generally, the law only has to get involved when somebody fucked up.  


This Article therefore proposes to distinguish apartheid, genocide, and Nakba as different, yet overlapping, modalities of crimes against humanity.

If Hamas members are human, they have committed crimes against humanity. It is better that all Palestinians be declared a protected species of a particularly savage type. 

The problem here is that Israeli Jews may decide that they too can use the same tactics. We have seen what Arab terrorists can do. Do we really want to see what Mossad can do if it goes equally rogue? 

It first identifies Zionism as Nakba’s ideological counterpart

in which case what is sauce for Hamas is sauce for Mossad 

and insists on understanding these concepts as mutually constitutive.

Why aren't the Israelis doing more in the way of gang-rape and decapitation? Also how come they aren't planting suitcase nukes all over the place?  

Considering the limits of existing legal frameworks, this Article goes on to analyze the legal anatomy of the ongoing Nakba.

That 'legal anatomy' has to do with the right to self-defense. Screw that. Will Israel do genocide? Sooner or later- probably. But, by then Europe and America might be deporting even second or third generation immigrants like me and Rabea. 

No comments: