On Sunday, 18 October 2015, at the opening session of a conference entitled “From Hatred of the Stranger to Acceptance of the Other,” President Rivlin publicly declared that it is time to admit that Israel is a sick society that needs treatment. The Human Right To Dominate helps us understand the trajectory of how Israeli society has become such a sick society today. It does this eloquently by taking us through an elaborate journey on the formation of the Zionist project and how it has sought to build order through a fabricated sense of security based on war and the control of people and landscapes. In their book, Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon, uncover the very nature of the Zionist project vis-à-vis the Palestinians and its core mechanisms of domination and subjugation. In their Introduction the authors define domination as “a broad array of relationships of subjugation characterized by the use of force and coercion.” Their focus throughout this book is on a twofold dimension of this domination: “… in violent practices deployed against individuals and groups in order to dominate them”; … as well as on “how by enacting different relationships of domination these practices are rationalized, legitimized, and made sense of by appealing to human rights” (3). Their Foucauldian inspired reflections shed light on how Israel's notion of security as a disciplinary mechanism functions as orders of social control and how war is used as a matrix for techniques of domination. In a similar fashion to Nadera Shalhoub Kevorkian's 2015 book on Israel's security theology as a settler-colonial ideology, Perugini and Gordon critically investigate how Israel's security discursive practices connect to state power and ideology. They go deeper in revealing how this power permeates at so many levels of Israel's occupation of the Palestinians.
This book is structured into four main chapters on The Paradox of Human Rights (HR), The Threat of Human Rights, The Human Right to Kill and The Human Right to Colonize. The first of these, “The Paradox of HR,” uncovers the linkage between the establishment of the international HR regime and the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. Israel as reparation was espoused by President Truman as “a state where Jewish human dignity could be ‘fully restored’” (33). The chapter then details how the Eichmann trial further signifies the contradictions in the evolution of the HR regime. “Israel violated international law to bring to trial a criminal of international law.” Drawing upon Arendt's reflections the authors further claim how “the Nazi genocide that triggered the development of the universal vocabulary of HR was investigated in Jerusalem in a local court, where this ostensible universal discourse was translated into an ethnonational one” (34–35). They then show how from the first to the second Intifada and the subsequent military campaigns against Gaza, the HR regime has been serving to normalize the colonial relationship between Israelis and Palestinians. The second chapter, “The Threat of HR,” details how HR activism, such as liberal NGOs’ attempts at restricting state violence, has been conceived as a threat in Israeli conservative circles and the institutional response to this perceived threat: a very powerful practice which is ultimately used to legitimize Israel's military warfare. The following chapter “The Human Right To Kill” serves as an eye opener for those with idealistic views on liberal human rights NGOs. Perugini and Gordon demonstrate how some if not most in this industry adopt international law in a way that rationalizes the deployment of lethal violence against Palestinians. It goes far to help us understand why some Palestinian NGOs like the Dalia Association emphasize the need for support from the Palestinian diaspora and supporters worldwide so that Palestinians develop their own models of sustainability that do not require them to mortgage their future to international actors whose vision for Palestine is unacceptable.
The fourth chapter, “The HR to Colonize” depicts the emergence of settler HR NGOs and how these echo the state's use of a HR discourse to advance colonial dispossession both in the OPT and in Israel. Thus, the “Holy Land” is a conglomeration of “NGOs, think tanks, academics, policy makers, legislators (who) have mobilized the media, shaped public opinion, lobbied legislators and policy makers, introduced new laws, and pressured donors in an attempt to construct HR as a security threat to pave the way for a form of exceptional intervention against—HR organisations” (55). The trajectory of how this drama has unfolded in front of the very eyes of the so called international community—which remains on the side speechless and powerless while human beings lose their lives on a daily basis—is a real tragedy on our human consciousness. Not only does this book invite a critical reflection of the global moral order but it is a definite must read for anyone truly concerned with the state of human rights in our world today. Perugini and Gordon have used their profound knowledge of the intricacies of the Palestinian–Israel situation to wisely and urgently suggest a critical reinterpretation of HR that subverts relations of domination. For this reason, this book would have benefited from a subtitle. Overall this is a disturbingly powerful book that shakes off all preconceived ideals about HR and NGOs. It reveals how Israel's obsession with its highly militarized sense of security, its abuse of international HR frames and the negative impact not only on Palestinians but also on Israeli society at large are in urgent emergency mode. For the sake of all human lives involved the occupation must end now.
