Suchergebnisse
"Raef Zreik"
Titel: War and Self-Defense: Some Reflections on the War on Gaza
Autor: Raef Zreik
Seite: 191-213
This paper reflects on the current war on Gaza in 2024 that followed the Hamas attack on October 7th 2023, reading the events is a wider historical context. The paper has three main parts. In the first part, the paper argues against the fragmentation of the question of Palestine historically and geographically, arguing instead for the importance of the overall context of the conflict. The second part considers the issue of Palestinian resistance. How can the Palestinians resist occupation? This part is mainly descriptive and indicates the impasse that the Palestinians found themselves in it after the Oslo accords in 1993. The third and last part moves to normative questions regarding the question of self-defense both on the part of the Palestinians and on the part of Israel and tries to outline the ways these arguments can develop.
Titel: Can Two Opposing Narratives Be Equally Valid? Reflections on Zreik’s Reflections on the War in Gaza
Autor: David Heyd
Seite: 319-341
The article critically examines the arguments of Raef Zreik regarding the 2023 war in Gaza. It first analyzes the use of the concept of narrative in defending political causes and actions. It shows that due to their subjective nature two opposing narratives can be equally valid as long as they satisfy conditions of internal coherence and fidelity to the facts. It then shows that Zreik’s argument of ‘fragmentation’ is double edged and cannot be used for laying full responsibility on Israel. It then proceeds to criticize the claim that Zionism is a colonialist enterprise and shows that Zionism does not consist of all the basic characteristics of colonialism. Finally, it analyzes the common argument of self-defense as the only justification of starting a war and shows the limitation of such an argument in a theory of war, mainly because in most wars both sides have the right to defend themselves, including the allegedly unjust party. All that remains after showing the weakness of most arguments for this or that side to the conflict is the conclusion that compromise is the only way out of the deadlock, having the virtue of being pragmatic rather principled.
Titel: Just Independence Wars and the October 7th Massacre
Autor: Yitzhak Benbaji
Seite: 343-364
This essay explores a view held by many critics of Israel, which posits that the October 7th massacre is a war crime that is part of a just war of independence, fought by Palestinians against Israel for over a century. Raef Zreik recently presented such a view in these pages. However, this essay argues that a proper understanding of traditional just war theory renders this view false. Even if Zionism is considered a colonial wrong, Palestinians did not have a just cause for war against Zionism until after the Six-Day War in 1967 and perhaps later. Furthermore, the essay contends that the massacre is not a part of this war, as Hamas lacks the moral power to represent the Palestinian people and to fight in their name.
Titel: Past, Present, and Future: A Reply to Heyd and Benbaji
Autor: Raef Zreik
Seite: 365-386
In this paper I respond to the replies of David Heyd and Yitzhak Benbaji to my paper ‘War and Self-Defense: Reflections on the War on Gaza’. Heyd’s relativizing of narrative overlooks the epistemic hierarchy among narratives and their important role in establishing facts, and his claim that Israel’s history is not colonialist in character fails because it is based on a misunderstanding of colonialism in general and settler colonialism in particular. Historically, I outline how Benbaji’s appeal to the legal status of the Mandate is problematic, because it ignores the illegitimacy of the legal regime behind it, such that accepting his argument would be to legitimize colonialism. Theoretically, I defend the view contrary to Benjabi, that instead of their being a moral tie between two equal sides, the Palestinians have always had fundamental legal and moral rights that the Zionist project violated ab initio and continues to violate.