Suchergebnisse
"Yitzhak Benbaji"
Titel: Kantian Rights and the Zionist Settlement in Palestine
Autor: Yitzhak Benbaji
Seite: 165-189
Zionism aimed to establish a national home for Jews in Palestine. It involved settlement of Zionist Jews in the region, despite facing resistance from many local Arabs. Was the unilateral Zionist settlement morally permissible, or was it an instance of wrongful colonialism? Three objections will be discussed here and they all stem from the Kantian ethics of state-building and the minimalistic conception of statehood that follows from it. According to the ‘neutralist objection’, the establishment of a national home is not a just cause for a state building project. The ‘cosmopolitan’ objection argues that unilateral settlement is permissible only in extreme circumstances and that typically, it violates the locals’ right to self-rule. Finally, the imperialist objection argues that Zionist unilateralism exploited the wrongful colonial rule to which Arab Palestinians were subject. I will show that no Kantian objection to Zionism is decisive.
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.