Marwan Barghouti in Tel Aviv

Abstract

On 15 April 2002, Marwan Barghouti, a high profile Member of the Palestinian Parliament and a close aide of the late Palestinian leader, Yasir Arafat, was arrested and transferred to Israel for trial. On 14 August 2002, he was charged with multiple counts of crimes including acts of terrorism, murder and conspiracy to murder. In the Courtroom in Tel-Aviv, Barghouti was being tried for acts of terrorism, but in the court of public opinion, Israel was using the trial to slander and discredit the Palestinian leadership as a bunch of ‘murderous gangs,’ and ‘enemies of all mankind.’ On his part, Barghouti uses the judicial space to go beyond the surface problem of law and legality to the deeper question of occupation – a problem that is at the depth but also all across the normative structure of Israel’s legal order. Through re-signification, the accused becomes the accuser, putting the state of Israel and the occupation on trial. In this article, I consider the ways in which the accused and the accuser repurpose the legal material to produce and disseminate ideas, concepts, and images productive to their respective politics. Attending to the ways in which discourses of occupation, resistance, and terrorism were synchronized with the legal form, the article reflects on how the narratives move from the legal to the political, from the personal to the social, from the local to the global, and from the theological to the political, creating the conditions of possibility for meaning and understanding.

Keywords

Courtroom resistance Marwan Barghouti occupation political trials show trials terrorism trials

On 15 April 2002, Marwan Barghouti, a high-profile Member of the Palestinian Parliament and a close aide of the late Palestinian leader, Yasir Arafat, was arrested and transferred to Israel for trial. On 14 August 2002, he was charged with multiple counts of crimes including acts of terrorism, murder and conspiracy to murder. In the courtroom in Tel-Aviv, Barghouti was being tried for acts of terrorism, but in the court of public opinion, Israel was using the truth generating and image creating power of the court to discredit the Palestinian leadership as ‘murderous gangs’ and ‘enemies of all mankind’. On his part, Barghouti reinscribes the judicial space to go beyond the surface problem of law and legality to the deeper question of occupation – a problem that is at the depth but also all across the normative structure of Israel’s legal order. Through re-signification, the accused becomes the accuser, putting the state of Israel and the occupation on trial. In this article, I consider the ways in which the accused and the accuser repurpose the legal material to produce and disseminate ideas, concepts and images productive to their respective politics. Attending to the ways in which discourses of occupation, resistance and terrorism were synchronized with the legal form, the article reflects on how the narratives move from the legal to the political, from the personal to the social, from the local to the global and from the theological to the political, creating the conditions of possibility for meaning. Finally, the article addresses how counsels for defence, all disciples of the cause lawyering movement, sought to historicize and internationalize the trial to appeal to the conscience of the global public.

Introduction

No issue has preoccupied the attention of the international community over the last 70 years more than the question of Palestine. The question of Palestine ‘has been on the agenda of the United Nations in one form or another since the Organization’s earliest days’ (United Nations, 2008). Despite seven interim agreements, tens of initiatives, hundreds of meetings, and countless hours of debates and negotiations, the conflict remains unresolved. From the Madrid Peace Conference in 1991 to the Oslo Accords in 1993, from the Sharm el-Sheikh Memorandum in 1999 to the final status talks at Camp David in 2000, from the Arab Peace Initiative in 2002 to the Geneva Accords in 2003 and from the Joint Understandings at Annapolis to the intensive and extensive efforts by the Obama Administration, the conflict and bloodshed continues unabated. Instead of restoring balance to a space evacuated of the right balance, the so-called ‘peace process’ created new facts and legal arrangements that effectively transformed the nature of the occupation.

Let us begin at the Camp David Summit and the Second Intifada – two watershed events central to understanding the politics at the heart of the conflict on trial. The final status talks at Camp David failed, among other things, because of disagreements between the two sides over the status of two sacred spaces of unparalleled importance to both Israel and Palestine: East Jerusalem and The Temple Mount (Haram-al-Sharaf) (Hassner, 2003: 1). The then Prime Minister of Israel Ehud Barak regarded the Temple Mount as ‘the Archimedean point of [Israel’s] existence, the anchor point of the Zionist struggle’, while Yasir Arafat considered it ‘more precious than anything else’ (Hassner, 2003: 27). On 28 September 2000, two months after the collapse of the final status talks, Ariel Sharon, then leader of the Opposition, visited the Temple Mount. According to then Likud party spokesman, Ofir Akounis, the visit was ‘a political statement [intended] to show that under the Likud, The Temple Mount would remain under Israeli sovereignty’ (Pressman, 2003: 2).

On 29 September 2000, The Old City of Jerusalem witnessed violent confrontations between Israeli security forces and angry protestors, setting the stage for a new wave of violence that came to be known as the Second Intifada (Baroud, 2006: 22). Israel blamed the Palestinians: ‘Arafat and the Palestinians planned and executed a violent uprising because they wanted to destroy Israel and win a Palestinian state through violent means’ (Pressman, 2003: 3). Palestinians argued that ‘Sharon went to the Temple Mount […] with the manifest intention of provoking Palestinians and ending Israeli-Palestinian political negotiations’ (Pressman, 2003: 3).

In response to Palestinian rock throwers and suicide bombers, Israel deployed tanks, gunfire, and air power, in what it called ‘Operation Defensive Shield’ (Hamzeh and May, 2003: 11). As the death toll in the Palestinian side rose, Barghouti established a Fatah-led armed militia group, the Tanzim, aimed at defending Palestinian neighbourhoods and population centres. As the Tanzim went beyond defensive attacks to offensive strikes, Marwan Barghouti, the one-time staunch supporter of the Oslo Accords and the darling of the peace camp, was arrested and brought to a civilian court in Tel-Aviv to answer for charges of terrorism and murder. What followed was a clash of ideas between two individuals who hold a radically different and irreconcilable ideas of law, society, and the common good, setting the stage for some of the most profound questions about the role of courts and the criminal trial in liberal democracies, the responsibility of judgement, and the disjuncture between law and justice, to be asked (Bilsky, 2010: 99). Rather than being a space for finding truth and dispending justice, the courtroom became a classroom, where competing narratives of occupation, terrorism and resistance were consigned on the legal register and filtered into the global public consciousness.¹

The article proceeds in four stages. The section ‘Political Trials: Power, History, and Memory in the Courtroom’ seeks to provide the theoretical scaffolding within which to situate the trial and the narratives of both the accused and the accuser, focusing on the central appeal of the trial as a pedagogic instrument used for the edification of history and collective memory. The section ‘The Israeli Narrative’ will deal with the Israeli narrative, exploring the different ways by which Israel sought to stage Palestinian terrorism in the courtroom with the view to discrediting the Palestinian leadership as ‘murderous gangs’ and ‘enemies of mankind’ with whom Israel cannot negotiate a lasting peace. The remaining sections deal with defendant’s narratives and strategies and consider the ways in which it sought to re-signify the trial’s spatial, material and temporal coordinates to redefine himself and the conflict, putting the occupation and the Israeli leadership on trial. In section ‘The Palestinian Narrative’, I consider how Barghouti synchronized his narratives with the legal form to generate and filter the Palestinian side of the story. In the last two sections, I look at the defendant’s move from the local to the global and from the legal to the theological to disrupt economies of representation within which the Israeli narrative produces its power effects. In particular, I look at the analogy between Barghouti’s trial and Nelson Mandela’s trial under Apartheid, including a highly disruptive moment from the trial where one of the defence attorneys implicitly compared Barghouti with Moses and the prosecution with Pharaoh.

Political Trials: Power, History and Memory in the Courtroom

To what extent can a trial be used for purposes of legitimizing power, writing history and fixing memory without becoming a legal farce? Under what conditions can a trial serve as a pedagogic instrument aimed at the edification of history and collective memory without degenerating into a show trial? In her ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’, Hannah Arendt warned against the danger of turning the trial into a pedagogic spectacle (Arendt, 2006: 5). In Arendt’s view, it was history and memory that stood at the centre of Eichmann’s trial, not the accused (2006: 5). Arguing against Ben-Gurion’s view of the trial as ‘first and foremost a legal act of a sovereign state’ and his insistence on using Eichmann’s trial to examine the suffering of the Jews from the dispersion to the final solution, the German people, anti-Semitism, racism and the whole of mankind, Arendt put forth one of the most authoritative statements on the normative purpose of the trial. She wrote ‘the purpose of the trial is to render justice, and nothing else; even the noblest of ulterior purposes – “the making of the record of the Hitler regime which would withstand the test of history”…can only detract from law’s main business’ (2006: 253). For her, insofar as it is used as a convenient platform to stage history lessons or to shape the terms of collective memory, the trial is not a trial.

From a normative point of view, the insistence on the construction of legitimacy, the edification of history and collective memory immediately conjures images of the Stalinist show trial, that abominable perversion which sacrifices individual rights in the service of political expediency and is anathema to the architecture of ‘neutral justice which objectively applies’ the law (Sarat and Kearns, 2001: 11). As Ian Buruma eloquently put it:

Just as belief belongs in church, surely history education belongs in school. When the court of law is used for history lessons, then the risk of show trials cannot be far off. It may be that show trials can be good politics…but good politics don’t necessarily serve the truth. (Buruma, 1994: 142)

For positivist legal theory, then, the use of legal procedures for political ends is a contradiction in terms and in any event ill-suited to coming to terms with traumatic history (Koskenniemi, 2000: 3).

In his influential scholarship on political trials, the Frankfurt jurist Otto Kirchheimer draws attention to a range of political trials both within liberal democracies and authoritarian states to demonstrate why political trials are inescapable: ‘With or without disguise, political issues are brought before courts and weighed on the scales of law, much though the judges may be inclined to evade them’ (Kirchheimer, 1961: 47). In this comprehensive and systematic treatment of the subject, Kirchheimer argues against normative claims about law’s autonomy, rationality and objectivity, demonstrating how the articulation of ‘time honoured and generally recognized trial standards’, cannot rule out ‘the intercession of political motivations’ in legal adjudication (1961: 4).

Kirchheimer defines the classic political trial as ‘a regime’s attempt to incriminate its foe’s public behaviour with a view to evicting him from the political scene’ (1961: 46). What makes the trial ‘political’ is not its distance from formal legality so much as the aporia that threatens to disrupt, as to unmask, the court’s power rationalizing and order-legitimizing functions. It is the direct involvement of the judicial apparatus in political struggles that distinguishes political trials proper from ordinary criminal trials and marks out their distinctively political configuration (1961: 49). As he put it:

It is the direct involvement in the struggle for political power [by courts], rather than the long range political effect of socio-economic power contests, or the derivative political effect of the confirmation or destruction of personal power positions, which gives the political trial proper its particular colour and intensity and marks its peculiar problem areas. (1961: 50)

Law is implicated in our political, social and economic worlds. It plays a central part in creating and sustaining relationships that are not just of equality and justice but also of inequality, including relationships of colonial occupation, exploitation and authoritarian domination. The court, as law’s foremost institution with hermeneutic monopoly over the content and meaning of legal rules, constantly engages in the adjudication of political and ideological conflicts that arise from these relationships. Although the court operates discursively as if it has nothing to do with power and politics, the court is not always what general jurisprudence says it is. One of the most important insights that emerge from Kirchheimer’s work is the view that the use of legal procedures for political ends is ‘characterized by both promise and blasphemy’ (Kirchheimer, 1961: 8). Courts serve various purposes, sometimes emancipatory, sometimes subordinating and sometimes both at once. However, trials can have a pedagogic effect, not when the parties deliberately undertake to transform the event of the trial into a partisan political spectacle, but when the judicial process is allowed to run its course, equality of arms is respected and the defendant is treated as a moral agent and allowed to give account of himself and of the dispute in which he is named as a party (Ball, 1999: 216).

Indeed, trials have served as institutional vehicles for the edification of memory and the clarification of the historical record by settling ‘debates about controversial facts, values, or interpretations’ of momentous events of national or international significance (Curran, 1998: 86). As Vivian Curran argues, ‘Trials can be…ideal mediums for representing memory, so long as the concern is to control meaning according to present perspectives, to concretize a normative position’ (1998: 87). In his book, Writing History in International Criminal Trials, Richard Wilson writes ‘criminal trials are now prime venues at which…history is investigated…and eventually stamped with the imprimatur of a legal judgment’ (Wilson, 2011: 8). In his influential work on the trials of the Holocaust, Lawrence Douglas argued that trials can have didactic purposes without necessarily becoming a legal farce (Douglas, 2005). Because political trials are uniquely tied to the collective interest and therefore to history and memory, they inevitably engage with questions far more profound and ambitious than the narrow question of establishing guilt and innocence. As he writes, ‘… courts are invariably thrust into the position of looking into the larger sweep of history and making visible the efficacy of the law as a tool of such inquiry’ (Douglas, 2006: 192).

Although the classic political trial, at least according to Kirchheimer’s definition, is one in which authorities eliminate their political adversaries according to prearranged rules, not all political trials are repressive. Some political trials are transformative. They submit for legal reckoning fundamental political questions that confront enduring themes and fundamental issues that transcend time and place. As ‘ritualized and state sanctioned’ social dramas, ‘[T]rials educate, excite, and pontificate and are exhausting and compelling in equal measure’ (Falk, 2008: 5). Those which confront the dual agendas of law and politics as well as legality and legitimacy supply society with a ‘crucible for defining and refining its identity’ (Christenson, 1986: 7). Thus, the trial of Socrates and Galileo are seen as defining moments of human civilization and enlightened thought (1987: 107). The Dreyfus trial, to use Hannah Arendt’s characterization, was “a fore gleam of the twentieth century” (Arendt: 1968: 93) while the Eichmann trial was considered as having “compelled an entire nation to undergo a process of self-reckoning and . . . a painful search for its identity” (Gouri: 1994: 155). The Nuremberg trial was described as “the greatest history seminar ever held in the courtroom” (Douglas: 2005: 2) while Nelson Mandela’s Rivonia trial is widely seen as the “the trial that changed South Africa” (Joffe: 2009). The trial of Klaus Barbie was “an enormous national psychodrama, psychotherapy on a nationwide scale” while the Papon trial was dubbed “the trial of the Vichy government” (Goslan, 2000: xi). The Eichmann trial was considered as having ‘compelled an entire nation to undergo a process of self-reckoning and…a painful search for its identity’ (Gouri, 1994: 155).

Israel has a well-documented history of using courts for pedagogic purposes, for the teaching of history lessons (Hassan, 2010: 278). In her book ‘Transformative Justice: Israeli Identity on Trial,’ Leora Bilsky examines high-profile Israeli political trials designed and mobilized as vehicles for reconstituting and refashioning Israeli collective identity (Bilsky, 2004: 3). Exploring conflicting narratives in the trials of Kastner (Bilsky, 2001: 153), Eichmann, Kufr Qassem and Yigal Amir, Bilsky demonstrates how Israeli courts have served as sites for settling contested and contingent accounts of history (2004: 11). Conceiving these trials as contestations in power relations, Bilsky identifies what she regards as the central appeal of the political trial: ‘The courtroom transforms dry and distant history or abstract ideological worldviews into a living story with a name, a face, and a body’ (2004: 11).

The trial of Marwan Barghouti was conceived as a pedagogic spectacle to produce certain narratives and images productive to Israel. Israeli authorities publicly insisted that they intend to use the trial to ‘substantiate its claim that the entire Palestinian leadership of Yasir Arafat, in which Mr. Barghouti played a prominent role, is nothing more than a band of terrorists and murderers’ (Schmemann, 2002a). Barghouti was a convenient scapegoat that embodies everything Israel needed to put Arafat and Palestinians on trial. By submitting a prominent and charismatic Palestinian to the scrutiny of its own courts, Israel sought to consolidate and cement the truth of the image and the narrative it sought to construct. The trial is therefore designed not only to form but also to enhance and embed a violent of image of Palestinians within the Israeli and Western social imaginary.

Like Israel, Barghouti too deployed the speaking position offered by the trial to put Israel and the occupation on trial (Schmemann, 2002a). Using the very discursive spaces made available by Israel, Barghouti sought to reconfigure and use notions such as peace, security, truth, justice, and terrorism as a counter discourse and counter-power in defence of Palestinians resistance against the occupation. He attacked the very principles of law and justice that Israel asserts to justify its right to sit in judgement over the leader of the occupied people, dismissing the trial as a show trial: ‘My show trial says more about the sorry state of Israeli morality than it does about me.… Like President Arafat, I have become a scapegoat – my trial simply a public relations event by a morally bankrupt and visionless Israeli leadership’ (Barghouti, 2002).

The Israeli Narrative

In a major address to the Knesset, Ariel Sharon, the then Prime Minister of Israel, set the tone for what will be the framework for understanding and articulating the Israeli narrative against Palestinians in the political, legal and diplomatic arenas:

And there is one dispatcher: Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat. He is the man who, in a series of agreements, promised to abandon the path of terrorism, refrain from committing murder, use his forces to prevent it – and betrayed all his promises…In the territories under his rule, Arafat has established a regime of terror, which nationally and officially trains terrorists and incites, finances, arms and sends them to perpetuate murderous operations across Israel. (Sharon, 2002)

The public trial in Tel Aviv was an integral part of this strategy aimed at constructing Palestinians as the aggressors and Israel as an innocent victim of Palestinian aggression and to stamp this alternative reality with the imprimatur of a legal judgement. As Hilla Dayan writes, Barghouti’s trial ‘is the first case of a defendant, charged with terrorist offenses, not to be tried by a military tribunal, but at an ordinary civil court’ (Dayan, 2010). Giving Barghouti a public trial in a civilian court has the goal of creating a new image and reality of the conflict that corresponds to the official needs of the Israeli government: discrediting Arafat and the Palestinian Authority to justify the status quo and blame Palestinian violence and terrorism for the lack progress in the peace process (Dayan, 2010: 10).

Israeli government officials repeatedly and publicly stated the real political motive behind the trial. An official from the Israeli Ministry of Justice declared that Israel will seek to convince the international community by staging a ‘publicized’ trial and that ‘Barghouti was the central partner in the decisions made by [Fatah] organizations that in the last two years carried out a series of attacks against Israeli citizens’ (Meyer, 2002). Deputy Director General of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Gideon Meir, said: ‘This is an opportunity to tell Israel’s story. We need to tell the story of the Israeli population and what it has been through in the last two years’ (Hirschberg, 2002). A Spokesman for the state of Israel, Daniel Taub, ‘repeatedly insisted’ that ‘what is important to us [Israel] is to ensure that the world understands what it is to be a democracy fighting terrorism’ (Schemann, 2002b). By re-enacting those acts of violence in the presence of both victims and the aggressor, Israel wanted to produce and disseminate narratives and images that can help it control meaning and concretize a normative position with regard to Palestinians and the peace process.

Let me identify two separate but overlapping images Israel’s ‘performance’ of terrorism is designed to produce and embed. First, Israel wanted to form and disseminate a violent and terrorist image of the Palestinian Authority and the Fatah movement to undermine its moral and political authority to negotiate a final settlement on behalf of the Palestinians, exonerating Israel of any obligation to bring the occupation to an end. Sharon argued, ‘Israel wants to enter into peace negotiations and will do so as soon as two basic terms for the establishment of a genuine peace process are met: (1) the complete cessation of terror, violence and incitement’ and (2) a radical structural transformation of the Palestinian Authority ‘in all areas – security, economic, legal and social’ (Sharon, 2002). The trial is such a useful instrument to provide a concrete form and the appearance of legality and legitimacy to these claims.

In ‘Truth and Juridical Forms,’ Foucault identifies ‘judicial practices’ as sites of knowledge production and truth generation: He writes:

Judicial practices, the manner in which wrongs and responsibilities are settled between men, the mode by which, in the history of the West, society conceived and defined the way men could be judged in terms of wrongs committed…seem to me to be one of the forms by which our society defined types of subjectivity, forms of knowledge, and consequently, relations between man and truth. (Foucault, 1994: 4)

The trial’s reduction of complex historical events into a legal proposition and its promise of finality and closure make it such a useful and irresistible site of image production and truth generation. Moreover, the moment of the trial is a ritual moment that exceeds itself both in time and in space. As Judith Butler observes, ‘to the extent that a moment is ritualized, it is never merely a single moment’ (Butler, 2011: 3). As a ritual moment, the trial ‘is a condensed historicity: it exceeds itself in past and future directions, an effect of prior and future invocations that constitute and escape the instance of utterance’ (1997: 3).

By re-enacting instances of terrorism in the courtroom, couching it in the seemingly neutralizing language of law in which the idiom of the other party is not signified, the trial generates, at the level of discourse, images, truths and knowledges productive to the state of Israel. Together with the indictment, the event of the trial discursively operates to associate Palestinians with terrorism and violence – an association that creates a signification spiral that forges a problematic proximity between the signified (Palestinians) and the signifier (terrorism) (Hall et al., 1978: 223). When repeated and amplified ‘within the area of signification’, the association eliminates the distinction between Palestinians, an occupied people, and terrorism – an altogether different phenomenon (Ahmed, 2004: 62–101).

Writing on ‘the affective politics of fear’, Sarah Ahmed suggests the view that ‘the language of fear involves the intensification of ‘threats’, which works to create a distinction between those who are ‘threatened’ and those who threaten. For Ahmed, ‘fear is an effect of this process, rather than its origin…Through the generation of “the threat,” fear works to align bodies with and against others’ (Ahmed, 2004: 72). The economy of fear thus functions to generate a sense of unity between the victims against those who threaten their peace and tranquillity. Thus, the image of Palestinian terrorism projected from the Israeli court as emblematic of a much ‘deeper problem’ links ‘Palestinians’ protest or other acts of resistance to the altogether separate problem of terrorism (Hall et al., 1978: 223).

By trying a prominent political figure that embodies the aspiration of Palestinians to resist occupation and repudiates the modes of thought and forms of reasoning that operate to secure it, the spectacle produces a telling snapshot of the leadership – forging a lasting image of Palestinian terror that enjoys endless repetition. No matter how unjust and questionable the procedure may be, the image clings, even ‘long after the substance has evaporated’ (De Tocqueville, 2002: 160). Indeed, the confessions that were obtained to convict Barghouti from already convicted Palestinians were recanted in court (Reynolds, 2003). Nasser Abu-Hamid, the first prosecution witness, remained silent as an act of defiance and refused to testify. In the middle of the proceeding, he ‘put his fingers in his ears and refused to listen to prosecution questions’ (Reynolds, 2012). Another Palestinian witness tore up confessions extracted from him before the testimony when handed to him by the prosecution and shouted ‘This is like a football match, not a trial’ (Reynolds, 2012). Bilal Barghouti, another Palestinian prisoner, shouted ‘Jerusalem is ours’ and asked to leave the court (Reynolds, 2012). However, under Israeli law, confessions cannot be recanted.

Second, there is an international dimension to Israel’s strategies of knowledge production and image formation. Israel characterizes its conflict with the Palestinians as part of a broader war against extremism and terrorism. While it was trying Barghouti in the courtroom for acts of terrorism, in the court of world opinion, it was conjuring images that go beyond the guilt and innocence of the individual standing trial. By staging Palestinian terrorism in the courtroom and presenting the leadership of Yasir Arafat as ‘the enemy of the entire free world’, it justifies its measures and presents the occupation as a necessary bulwark against Palestinian terrorism and global Jihad. Sharon noted:

He [Arafat] is the enemy of the entire free world. Everyone who seeks freedom, everyone who was brought up on the values of freedom and democracy must know that Arafat is an obstacle to peace in the Middle East. Arafat is a danger to the whole region. (Sharon, 2002)

In providing his performative stunt with an international context, Sharon compared Palestinian violence with the acts of 9/11. To further cement this nexus between Palestinian violence and global terrorism, Sharon says:

Since the horrific attack on September 11th, exactly one year after the outbreak of the Palestinian terrorist campaign against Israel, the United States has been leading the world in a heroic struggle to uproot terrorism.… You must remember that leniency toward terrorists is the same as a green light to terrorists, who have already proven that they do not distinguish between blood and blood, between a Jewish victim and any other victim. You cannot fight terrorism on the one hand, and condemn the victims of terrorism on the other. (Sharon, 2002)

There is absolutely no equivalence between those who send teenage suicide bombers to kill and maim and those who take self-defence actions and try to uproot the infrastructure of terrorism. Only your stand against terrorism and actual sanctions against its perpetrators in the Palestinian Authority, and primarily Arafat, will enable you to make a real contribution to the advancement of peace in the Middle East (Sharon, 2002).

This mobilization of the event of 9/11 and the war on terror invites an understanding of terrorism as a discourse that brings into being the very subject that it ostensibly refers to. By accusing the defendant for terrorism, the accuser transforms the subject (Barghouti) and object (Palestinians) of the trial into a terrorist, excluding them from the category of the human and therefore ineligible for the protection accorded to the human person. In the words of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, they are murderous gangs and enemies of all mankind who ‘do not distinguish between blood and blood, between Jewish victim and any other victim’ (Sharon, 2002). In justifying Israeli measures as necessary and proportionate, Sharon raises the spectre of 9/11 to appropriate the politico-cultural meanings that came to be associated with it within the Western social imaginary. He says, ‘You cannot fight terrorism on the one hand, and condemn the victims of terrorism on the other’. The same mode of thought and forms of reasoning that justified the Global War on Terror, Israel argues, justifies Israeli counterterrorism measures against Palestinians. Sharon explicitly referred to the murder of its Minister of Tourism, Rehavam Ze’evi, as ‘Israel’s own Twin Towers’ (Lea et al., 2002: 32). In this association, it seeks to appropriate the power effects of the good–evil binary that characterizes the US-led war on terror.

Despite mobilizing these strategies, it is not clear to what extent Israel’s main political objectives have been achieved.

Even if we set aside the debate over whether the Israeli social order can sit in judgment over a dispute concerning people fighting to liberate themselves from occupation, the trial fell short of even the most basic of fair trial standards. A legal expert commissioned by the Inter-Parliamentary Union to investigate the legality and the fairness of the procedure rejected Israel’s guilty verdict concluding that ‘the numerous breaches of international law…make[s] it impossible to conclude that Mr. Barghouti was given a fair trial.’² This, however, is not to suggest that a trial that respects due process rights cannot be a show trial: a trial can adhere to the most meticulous and thoroughgoing of standards and still be a show trial. However, in order for a show trial to create images and transmit knowledges and truths effective within particularly power-knowledge frameworks, the legal process must be allowed to run its course and the controls and guarantees of the process protected (Clark, 2006: 85; Roberts, 2006:57).

The Palestinian Narrative

Arguing against the orthodox conception of power as ‘always juridical and discursive’, one that takes ‘the problem of right and violence, law and illegality,…the state and sovereignty’ as its starting point, Foucault argued that resistance is everywhere. The evidence of this, as one of his most rehearsed insights suggest, is that ‘power is everywhere’:

Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power. Should it be said that one is always ‘inside’ power, there is no ‘escaping’ it, there is no absolute outside where it is concerned, because one is subject to the law in any case?…This would be to misunderstand the strictly relational character of power relationships. (Foucault, 1976: 100)

Power, both at the micro and macro level, produces that which comes to resist it (Foucault, 1976: 95). However, resistance is ‘never in a position of exteriority’ to the power that produces and invests it (Foucault, 1976). The particular power–knowledge regime by which Israel synchronizes physical violence with concealing and legitimizing truth discourses generates a resistant response specific to its original configuration (Picket, 1996: 459).

Rejecting Israel’s authority to sit in judgement, Barghouti told the judge on the first day of his trial, ‘There is a mistake here. The one who should be sitting here (in the dock) is the government of Israel’ (Hirschberg, 2002). Invoking what he calls the inherent moral and legal right to resist occupation, Barghouti protested Israel’s legal, moral and ethical authority to try him. He says, ‘I do not recognize the right of Israel to try and sentence a Palestinian’ leader and accused the judges for their central role in legitimizing, authenticating and vindicating the occupation.³ He said, the judges are just like pilots who fly planes and drop bombs’ (Bazelon, 2004: 3). He refused to recognise Israeli criminal jurisdiction and normative order as the starting point of analysis and the appropriate framework to explore criminal culpability for to do so would be to grant recognition to the very architecture of occupation that reproduces and perpetuates the status quo (Barghouti, 2006). He said, the judges are just like pilots who fly planes and drop bombs’ (Bazelon, 2010: 3).

To Israel’s pedagogic spectacle, Barghouti replied with a counter-spectacle: ‘I have a charge sheet with 50 clauses against Israel for the bloodbath of both people’ (Hajjar, 2002: 31). Accusing his accusers, he dismisses the false legalism of his trial as a play of power and uses the opportunity to offer an account of what it means to be a Palestinian living under Israeli occupation:

I categorically reject the authority of this criminal court of occupation and I will not dignify the ludicrous claims against me by responding to them. If my trial were truly a search for truth and justice, it would be Sharon and the Israeli army behind bars – it would be the criminals of occupation who have perpetrated war crimes against the men, women and children of Palestine over decades, who continue to violate UN Resolutions and the 4th Geneva Convention with impunity.⁴

In rejecting Israel’s authority to sit in judgement over the people it colonizes, Barghouti seems to invoke, like Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr before him, the existence of a higher law beyond the posited law of the state. Barghouti rejects Israeli jurisdiction because to concede the power of Israeli social order to sit in judgement over him amounts to accepting Israeli law as an equitable rule of judgement. In the absence of an equitable rule of judgement that signifies the idiom of the parties to the conflict, the dispute is a différend. As Jean-François Lyotard notes, ‘A case of différend between two parties takes place when the “regulation” of the conflict that opposes them is done in the idiom of one of the parties while the wrong suffered by the other is not signified in that idiom’ (Lyotard, 1988: 9). Although Barghouti knows that his objections cannot register in the legal sense of the term, his goal is not to succeed on the legal register. His goal is to filter the Palestinian narrative, via the courtroom, into the court of world opinion. So for him, the battle, to paraphrase John Austin (Austin, 1962: 5), is to accomplish action through words, to advance a performative politics of resistance that disrupts juridical norms that operate to camouflage and normalize the violence of occupation.

Aware of the judiciary’s central role in the legitimation and consolidation of the occupation, Barghouti formulated strategies of resistance that resist through re-signification of the same signs of peace, security and freedom that Israel deploys. Appropriating the opportunity created for speech and visibility, Barghouti sought to demythologize the myths of peace and security, arguing that ‘Israelis must abandon the myth that it is possible to have peace and occupation at the same time, that peaceful coexistence is possible between slave and master’ (Barghouti, 2002). By creating sequence between three words, ‘peace, security, occupation,’ Barghouti formulates a narrative anchor –’No peace, no security, with occupation’ – that served as a framework of meaning and interpretation for his contestations (Hajjar, 2002: 32). It is an anchor that repurposed the same sovereign discourses and vocabularies used by Israel, destabilizing the concepts and categories that helped legitimize and secure the occupation.

Going beyond the jurisprudential, this narrative anchor helped channel the debate toward the submerged and invisible violence of occupation, enabling the accused lead the audience beyond the question of legality and criminality to the fundamental question of occupation. Barghouti does not merely protest his construction by Israel as violent and terrorist; his contestation reveals legal and structural violence as the surface effects of the violence of occupation. He told Israeli citizens that he is a peaceful man who wants nothing more than the freedom and democracy Israelis want for themselves. He reassures the international community, in English: ‘I am a peaceful man. I was trying to do everything for peace between the two peoples. I believe the best solution is two states for the two people’ (Harel, 2002).

In his influential essay, ‘Necropolitics’, Achille Mbembe regards Palestine as ‘a late modern colonial occupation’ (Mbembe, 2003, 27). He argues that this form of occupation is different from early modern colonial occupation in ‘its combining of the disciplinary, the biopolitical, and the necropolitical’ (Mbembe, 2003). Mbembe offers the occupation of Palestine as ‘the most accomplished form of necropower’, a word he uses to account for ‘the various ways in which, in our contemporary world, weapons are deployed in the interest of maximum destruction of persons and the creation of death-worlds […] conferring upon them the status of living dead’ (Mbembe, 2003: 24). As a site of the ‘regulation of death’, a necropolitical space is a site of exception, ‘the location par excellence where the controls and guarantees of judicial order can be suspended – the zone where the violence of the state of exception is deemed to operate in the service of ‘civilization’ (Mbembe, 2003: 24).

Writing for Haaretz, the veteran Israeli journalist Gideon Levy captures this necropolitical logic: ‘Following dozens of assassinations, the Israeli Defense Forces suddenly proved that when it wants to arrest someone instead of assassinating him, it knows how to do it quite well’ (Levy, 2002). Palestinians arrested by the Israeli military have never been dignified with a gesture of a public trial. They were assassinated, indefinitely detained or tried before military courts (Levy, 2002). As Dayan pointed out, Barghouti is the first Palestinian defendant to have been charged with terrorist offenses and tried before a civilian court (Dayan, 2010: 10). The decision to grant Barghouti a civilian trial in Tel Aviv is not a departure from the logic of necropolitics; it is indeed an integral part of its operation. To manage public opinion, Israel, like other colonial states before it, needed to act in the name of reason, freedom and civilization. This public trial is in part an ‘exercise of reason in the public sphere’ that is ‘tantamount to the exercise of freedom’ (Mbembe, 2003: 13). The state redirects and deploys the ideals of freedom and democracy in spheres of ‘unfreedom’, in a zone of colonial governance to create new categories of the culturally intelligible. By framing Palestinian resistance to the occupation and continued construction of illegal settlements as a national and global security threat, the indictment securitizes the occupied, misrecognizes their claim and usurps them of the logos with which they can articulate their grievances and give an account of themselves according to their own lived experiences.

If the Israeli spectacle is designed to generate and authenticate norms that conceal, pacify and normalize occupation, framing occupation and terrorism to suit its own goals, Barghouti’s strategy of resistance returns these norms into the realm of contestation, ensuring their contestability and resistibility. For Barghouti, the violence enumerated in the indictment misrepresents and misrecognizes the underlying conflict. He argues that by framing the dispute as that of terrorism, rather than occupation, the trial commits an injustice of misrecognition, submerging the legitimate aspirations and struggle of the Palestinian people for self-determination. For the Palestinians, the regime of occupation that has been in place since 1967 is itself a form of violence, in both the ontological and epistemic sense of the term. So Barghouti redefines the conflict as that of occupation and reconstitutes himself as a freedom fighter, telling the court: ‘I am a freedom fighter, fighting for the freedom of my people and peace between the two peoples’ (Schemann, 2002b).

Israel presents its culture as democratic and free. Freedom and democracy becomes its ‘cultural attributes’, something that belongs to Israel and one it is defending from the violent culture of the Palestinians. To disrupt this discursive process through which Israel continues to use its power to generate an image of Israeli freedom and Palestinian violence, Barghouti deploys discourses of freedom and democracy in ways that break from and displace their original deployment by Israel. By re-signifying the discourse of freedom and democracy, he disrupts the normative hinge that ties these notions with sovereignty. Writing on this logic of re-signification at work in this kind of disruptive interventions, Karin Zivi argues,

Signs can be misheard or misinterpreted by those to whom they are directed. They may also be deployed in new ways and at new sites and in ways that break with context, displacing the original meaning of a word or norm, denaturalising the concept, changing the way we think or act, even engendering new forms of the culturally intelligible. (Zivi, 2008: 164)

In this decoupling of peace, security and freedom from the dazzling light of sovereignty, Barghouti defended the right to resistance against the overwhelming violence of the occupier. By reconfiguring and refunctioning the language of peace, freedom and resistance, invoking the law of laws, he situates Israel in contradiction to the principles of democracy and freedom it professes to embody and appeals to the deepest imperatives of a truly human ethic:

We have been suffering under your sinister military occupation for over 36 years during which you killed us, tortured us, destroyed our homes and usurped our land. You made our life an enduring hell. We have an inherent moral and legal right to resist your occupation of our country. If you were in our shoes, you most certainly would do the same as we are doing. You would resist. (Barghouti, 2003)

Historicization: Barghouti in Tel Aviv, Mandela at Rivonia

Political trials have both a legal and political agenda. The ‘legal agenda focuses on incidents which can be dated and located, the political agenda calls up analogies from the depths of our culture that are difficult to delineate’ (Christenson, 1986: 256). In order to effectively refute the validity of Israeli analogy, that is, to disrupt the self-evidence and essentialism with which the events of 9/11 were replayed to generate meaning within the Western social imaginary, Barghouti imported his own analogy, Nelson Mandela before Apartheid Courts, to disrupt the context in which the Israeli analogy generates its desired power effects. Just like Marwan Barghouti, Nelson Mandela was accused of terrorism during his long walk to freedom by the South African government and its Western allies (Allo, 2015: 1–2).

To solidify the truth of this analogy, Barghouti’s lawyers extended an invitation to Nelson Mandela – a global icon who represents the ideals of freedom, liberation and justice – to attend Barghouti’s trial (Hajjar, 2002: 35). Although Mandela declined the invitation citing busy schedule, he issued a public statement comparing Barghouti’s trial to his own historic trial (Hajjar, 2002: 35). Moreover, the mere fact of naming Mandela in the course of this trial raised the spectre of Apartheid in the Israeli court, rendering the occupation synonymous with Apartheid. Commenting on the generative effects of this strategy, an Israeli commentator observed:

Barghouti obviously would have been overjoyed to see Mandela in [the] courthouse, but the main aim of his public relations stunt has been advanced – an attempt to burn into the international public consciousness that he, like Mandela, is the victim of an oppressive, pernicious regime. (Hirshberg, 2002)

Drawing parallels between Israel’s deployment of juridical notions and military might to secure the occupation, on the one hand, and Apartheid’s use of similar tactics to defend and preserve a racist order that recognized neither moral nor legal bounds, on the other, Barghouti raises the spectre of Apartheid. Just as Nelson Mandela justified the necessity of what he described as a ‘strictly controlled violence’, as a measure of the last recourse, Barghouti argues that recourse to violence is justified by the law of laws, the cosmopolitan norms of morality or the universal justice that exists beyond Israeli positive law.

The analogy between Mandela’s encounters with Apartheid courts and Barghouti’s encounter with the court of Israeli occupation is a consequential analogy. By establishing connections and forging relations between persons and spaces, the analogy transforms Barghouti from a ‘regular guy from the Palestinian street’ into a ‘Palestinian Mandela’. It enables him to mobilize Mandela’s name – which is more than a mere name – as a kind of gesture that effects something within the existing power–knowledge constellations: power capable of provoking thought, enabling action and aligning and sticking different bodies together (Hook, 2015: 24–25). It is not merely an attention grabbing analogy, but an analogy that transposes the South African image onto the Palestinian scene and confronts us with fundamental ethical questions. It is a transformative analogy that functions as a fulcrum for judgement.

As one commentator noted, ‘Arresting Barghouti may have been just, but it is not wise. Now he will become the Palestinian Mandela’ (Levy, 2002). Almost a decade after his incarceration, this narrative still resonates across the Palestinian territories and the Arab World. As former Israeli member of Knesset Uri Avnery writes, ‘Marwan Barghouti’s manifesto expresses the near-unanimous feelings of the Palestinians…Like Nelson Mandela in apartheid South Africa, the man in prison may well be more important than the leaders outside’ (Avnery, 2013).

By aligning Palestinian struggle with the South African struggle, Barghouti presents himself as a freedom fighter par excellence, like Nelson Mandela before him. In this, he interrupts the discursive economy within which Israel’s narratives and images of violence generate their political effects. Thus, the Mandela analogy institutes what Derrida calls a ‘disjuncture’ between the sign and the context, so that the sign no longer appears self-evident, universal and natural (Derrida, 1982: 317).

Historicization: Moses in Egypt, Barghouti in Tel Aviv

To foreground the Palestinian narrative in the cultural, religious and affective politics of the conflict, the defence team recruited two prominent Jewish lawyers, Gisele Halimi and Shammai Leibowitz, whose political profiles alone destabilizes Israel’s central narrative. Gisele Halimi is a French Jew who acted as defence counsel for the Algerian National Liberation Front during the Algerian War of Independence. Shammai Leibowitz is an Israeli citizen and a conscientious objector to the occupation.

Leibowitz and Halimi, as insiders to the Israeli normative community, protest occupation as a fundamental wrong, remind Israelis of their origin and values, with the view to changing how both communities feel about each other. As citizens of Israel defending a Palestinian determined to resist Israeli occupation through violence, their solidarity is expressive of an ethic of difference that seeks an active way of remaking a world of plurality and equality. Crossing cultural, national and ethnic allegiance, they enact a different kind of politics, ‘a politics based not on the possibility that we might be reconciled, but on learning to live with the impossibility of reconciliation, or learning that we live with and beside each other, and yet we are not one’ (Ahmed, 2004: 17). As Sara Ahmed aptly put it, ‘How we feel about others is what aligns us with a collective’ and it is ‘through how others impress upon us that the skin of the collective begins to take shape’ (Ahmed, 2004, 54). Casting themselves as insiders, who, by virtue of blood and lineage, cannot be against Israel’s security and existence; crossing the Jewish-Arab boundary that has been firmly entrenched, they engage in a moral and ethical solicitation that enacts a politics of possibility, one that mobilizes memories, experiences and desires for a more just and equal relations.

The high watermark of Barghouti’s ethical solicitation came when his kippa-clad attorney, Shamai Leibowitz, made an unexpected and unsettling intervention during the proceedings. Escalating the already tense confrontation, Leibowitz invoked a story from the Torah to provoke an ethical confrontation that transcends nationalistic political considerations. He told the judge:

Moses escaped to Midian after killing the Egyptian because he knew the occupied could not get justice in the occupier’s courtroom. On the other hand, Pharaoh did not put him on trial because he understood that he did not have the authority to judge the leader of a people seeking their freedom. (Gorali, 2002)

In order to escape gatekeeping legal technologies constructed to guard the system precisely from these forms of sudden surprises, Leibowitz compares Marwan Barghouti, the ‘other’ that the state of Israel despises and dehumanizes, with Moses, Judaism’s most important prophet and the author of the Torah, to enhance the surprising effects of Barghouti’s performative defence. The moral of the story does not end there. Implicit in this intervention is a moral outrage at the violent and oppressive rationality that betrayed this messianic tradition that leads him to compare the State of Israel with Pharaoh, a figure ‘described in the Torah and is etched in Jewish consciousness as a murderous tyrant’ (Simon, 2002). These parallels seek to relate the present sufferings of the Palestinian people with the distant persecution of the Jewish people to conjure an image that operates as an ethical solicitation (Butler, 2011).⁵

In her Nobel Museum Lecture entitled ‘Precarious Life and the Obligations of Cohabitation,’ Judith Butler asks important questions about ‘the ethical obligation’ that ‘compels’, ‘concerns’ and ‘moves’ us to respond to the suffering of the ‘other’ whether in proximity or at a distance (Butler, 2011: 3). She asks whether human beings have the ‘capacity or inclination to respond ethically to suffering’ by others and what makes such a response possible (Butler, 2011). Working through Emmanuel Levinas and Hannah Arendt, arguing with them and against them, Butler formulates an ethics of cohabitation that accounts for the impinging power of images, that is, images that ‘impinge upon us’ and compel us to enter into a binding ethical relation with the ‘other’, those with whom we share a piece of the earth (Butler, 2011: 2). She argues,

in spite of ourselves and quite apart from any intentional act, we are nevertheless solicited by images of distant suffering in ways that compel our concern and move us to act, that is, to voice our objection and register our resistance to such violence through concrete political means. (Butler, 2011)

As Butler further points out, ‘obligations to those who are far away as well as to those who are proximate across linguistic and national boundaries are only possible by virtue of visual or linguistic translations’.

Using his Jewish background to interpret the Torah, comparing those distant injustices against the Jewish people with the injustice presently perpetrated by the state that identifies itself as ‘Jewish’ against the Palestinians, Leibowitz is formulating what Butler calls an ‘ethical quandary’ that operates as a site of ‘ethical solicitation’ (Butler, 2011). By crossing communal, racial and religious divides, Leibowitz, the grandson of Yeshaia Leibowitz, ‘one of the most distinguished Israeli philosophers and public intellectuals’, appropriates not only his Jewishness but also his lineage from an eminent family of ‘distinguished Israeli Orthodox public intellectuals’, to express and enact bonds of solidarity with Palestinians. Articulating Barghouti’s position, Leibowitz conjures a counter-image resistant to Israeli ‘economy of fear’:

When the state of Israel cruelly rules over millions of people who live under curfews and closures and makes their lives a living hell – it is the natural and moral right of the occupied people,…to fight for their freedom and independence. (Leibowitz, 2002)

Butler’s approach positions ethics as an active site of reinventing the world, a space from which to effect modes of intervention empathetic and responsive to images of suffering. Within this framework, the image Leibowitz conjures, to use Butler’s formulation once again, ‘compels our concerns, and moves us to act, that is, to voice our objection and register our resistance’ to Israeli violence. Insofar as Israel is seeking to conjure an image of Palestinian terrorism aimed to securing the status quo, Leibowitz is trying to undo the power of that image and reconfigure the status quo. As a Jew who embodies community norms considered ethically binding among the Jewish community, Leibowitz’s enactment reclaims values central to that tradition.

By comparing Barghouti’s leadership of the Palestinians to Moses’s leadership of the Jewish people from Egyptian oppression, Leibowitz is posing subtle ethico-political questions to those, who, while seeming to uphold and preserve these values, are in fact betraying and abusing them. By framing his response as an ethical demand that derives from the Judaeo-Christian tradition, Leibowitz’s likening of Barghouti with Moses, and the Israeli government with Pharaoh unsettles the Israeli narrative and image. Because of the insufficiency of the juridical to transcend the play of power and represent, recognize and articulate the claims of those who have been usurped of the means of articulation, the communication took a theological turn into a Judaeo-Christian tradition, to reclaim not only the ethical duty to respond but also the right to resistance as such. According to this narrative, Barghouti, just like Moses, is fighting a pernicious occupation to liberate his people.

The conflict on trial threatens to denaturalize as to transcend the narrow confines of the jurisprudential – opening up deeper foundational questions about the values and principles of the community exercising the right to judge a person, who, like Moses before him, is fighting to liberate his people. Whatever the factual merit of this comparison, the intervention enraged several members of the audience and destabilized the normative appeal of the juridico-political categories that operate to construct Palestinians as violent and terrorist (Bazelon, 2004). An audience in the courtroom shouted, ‘I will burn all your grandfather’s books’ while another tried a ‘halachic insult’ against the kippa-clad Leibowitz (Gorali, 2002). Just like Bram Fischer, who, having been a member of an elite Afrikaner family, sacrificed his privilege fighting against Apartheid, Leibowitz is taking a great personal risk in his defence of Barghouti. Writing about Fischer’s contribution as a member of the defence team at Rivonia, Mandela writes:

Even his (Bram Fischer’s) political opponents would agree with us his comrades that Bram Fischer could have become prime minister or the chief justice of South Africa if he had chosen to follow the narrow path of Afrikaner nationalism. He chose instead the long and hard road to freedom not only for himself but for all of us. He chose the road that had to pass through the jail. He travelled it with courage and dignity. He served as an example to many who followed him. (Mandela, 1994: 104)

Pointing to the heterogeneous tissue of Israel’s history, Leibowitz calls for an alternative form of relations between the two people, noting that, ‘Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir stopped the terror against the British once they had a state and the same thing will happen with the Palestinians’ (Leibowitz, 2002). The defence knew that this rage has an affective force, that it does things: it transmits meaning in the world (Riedner, 2006:702). In a trial of conscience, it is not factual correctness that matters, but the disruptive potentials, and the surprising effects of the interventions. If resistance consists in the disclosure of subjectifying norms that have become self-evident, this intervention compels reflection and brings back the contingency of juridico-political norms that organize and structure debates over what counts as resistance and terrorism into the realm of visibility.

Conclusion

Barghouti’s trial is a continuation of the Israeli–Palestinian political struggle by legal means. It was conceived and staged by Israel to expand the field of political action into the sphere of the legal, to mobilize the judicial apparatus and its superior ability of order legitimation and power rationalization to secure the occupation. Israel intended to deploy the unparalleled legitimizing and authorizing force of the court to reinforce and concretize its claims about Palestinian violence. By staging a spectacle designed to dramatize the scale and gravity of Palestinian terrorism, the Israeli government sought to use its court to generate images and notions that support the claim that the Palestinian struggle have the goal of destroying Israel and its values of democracy and freedom.

However, courtroom proceedings are not rational validity claims that proceed according to exact rules. The structural logic of the trial and its ordering idioms are not set in stone and can be put to a contrary use. Trials can be performatively reinverted and used for contestation and intersubjective meaning-making in ways that break with the normative expectations of its actors. In fact, by judging Barghouti, Israel presented itself for judgment. Israel laws and institutions of justice, the cultural discourses that enable them and the imaginaries that animate them, the broader structural forces that shape them and the geopolitical imperatives that inform them were all subjected to the scrutiny of the global public conscience. Using the political possibilities opened up by the trial, Barghouti sought to contest and decolonize the terms of recognition and engagement between the two people. He invoked notions such as morality, obligation and responsibility to counter the silencing effects of juridical discourses and desubjugate Palestinian stories. Through resignification, Barghouti sought to reveal the ways in which Palestinian stories were filtered out of mainstream frameworks of knowledge and how their voices have been taken off the epistemic table.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

This article developed out of my PhD project and immensely benefitted from sustained and critical conversations with my supervisors, Emilios Christodoulidis and Alison Phipps, at the University of Glasgow. It also benefitted further from useful criticisms and comments provided by the two anonymous reviewers.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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