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Colonial imprints: settler-colonialism as a fundamental feature of Israeli constitutional law

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 February 2017

Mazen Masri
Mazen Masri*
Affiliation:
Senior Lecturer, The City Law School, City, University of London. E-mail: mazen.masri.1@city.ac.uk.
*
mazen.masri.1@city.ac.uk
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Abstract

Many constitutional questions in Israel are dealt with through the lens of the nation-state paradigm where the state is constitutionally associated with an ethnically and religiously defined majority group. Thus, many of the challenges that face Israeli society and the legal system are often presented as a result of an exceptionally antagonistic majority–minority relationship in a nation-state. This paper offers a novel way of analysing the Israeli constitutional regime using the framework of settler-colonialism. It argues that adding the settler-colonial lens will help better understand many features of Israeli constitutional law. Drawing on theoretical frameworks developed by theorists of colonialism, the paper explores a number of foundational aspects of Israeli constitutional law and demonstrates how they were shaped, and continue to be shaped, by settler-colonialism. The paper argues that settler-colonialism is one of the central features that animate Israeli constitutional law.

Type
Articles
Information
International Journal of Law in Context , Volume 13 , Issue 3 , September 2017 , pp. 388 - 407
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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Footnotes

Some of the arguments of this article were presented at the Third World Approaches to International Law Conference: On Praxis and the Intellectual which took place in Cairo in 2015, and the Annual Meeting of the Law and Society Association in New Orleans (2016).

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