Neve Gordon
Biographic Data
| ID | 3606260 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Neve Gordon |
| GIVEN NAMES | Neve |
| FAMILY NAME | Gordon |
| SIGNATURE | GORDON N |
| AFFILIATIONS | Ben-Gurion University of the Negev |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9502-3998 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 53 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 275 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 53 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Safeguarding healthcare workers from political lobby groups
The weaponisation of antisemitism: The Jewish Chronicle and the production of a moral panic
This article maps the word antisemitism on the pages of The Jewish Chronicle (TJC), the world’s oldest Jewish newspaper, examining first the frequency of the term over a period of 100 years before zooming in to interrogate the ways in which ‘antisemitism’ was invoked during the 9 months before and 9 months after October 7, 2023. The data reveals that TJC has been exaggerating and instrumentalising a Zionist notion of antisemitism to foment moral …
Safeguarding healthcare workers in Gaza and throughout occupied Palestine
BOX International humanitarian law stipulates specific obligations during armed conflict, including the protection of healthcare and humanitarian workers
Antisemitism and Zionism: The Internal Operations of the Ihra Definition
In this paper, I focus on the cultural and political work the IHRA definition of antisemitism carries out to explain why it has been adopted by hundreds of actors.I offer three key reasons to explain its effectiveness: First, it operates on an affective level, interpolating people who identify as Jews to also identify with Israel and Zionism; Second, it ties the right to Jewish difference with a Jewish State and Jewish sovereignty; Third, the def…
Medical Lawfare: The Nakba and Israel’s Attacks on Palestinian Healthcare
in this article, the authors coin the phrase medical lawfare to describe how israel has been justifying its systematic attacks on healthcare facilities in the Gaza Strip during its five military assaults on the besieged enclave between 2008 and 2023.they show how israel mobilizes the laws of armed conflict dealing with human shields and "hospital shields" to securitize lifesaving and sustaining infrastructures and legitimize their destruction.the…
On antisemitism and human rights
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was drafted, in part, as a response to the horrific antisemitism leading to the extermination of millions of Jews in World War II. Yet, today, organisations that utilise human rights instruments to criticise Israel’s laws, policies and practices are themselves being cast as antisemitic. How has the contemporary human rights regime come to be charged with antisemitism? The ostensible answer is that the mea…
Between Human Rights and Civil Society: The Case of Israel’s Apartheid Enablers
For decades, human rights organizations have exposed egregious abuses carried out by states across the globe. Yet, simultaneously, other national and transnational civil society actors have waged war on these human rights organizations to shield rights-abusive states from accountability. These assaults have increasingly resulted in the normative claims of human rights organizations being sidelined while rights-abusive laws and policies gain furth…
State Crime, Structural Violence and Covid-19
Ronit Lentin, Traces of Racial Exception: Racializing Israeli Settler Colonialism
Hospital Shields’ and the Limits of International Law
Assaults on hospitals have become part of a widespread warfare strategy, propelling numerous actors to claim that belligerents are not being held accountable for attacking medical units. Acknowledging that international humanitarian law (IHL) offers medical units protections, belligerents often claim that the hospitals were being used to shield military targets and therefore the bombing was legitimate. Tracing the history of hospital bombings alo…
Israel’s Biospatial Politics: Territory, Demography, and Effective Control
Using Israel’s land-grabbing practices alongside its demographic classifications as a conceptual lens, this article advances two claims: one about biospatial strategies, including the construction of space as a racialized category, and the other historical. The article shows that the particular biospatial scaffolding underlying Israel’s colonial project has deployed similar strategies of dispossession and settling across the entire territory loca…
Euroscepticism as an Instrument of Foreign Policy
This article advances three arguments about Euroscepticism. First, using Israel as a case study we describe its alliances with Eurosceptic political actors, claiming that while each side hopes to benefit from these alliances to advance particular interests, the attraction among the actors are based on ideological affinities that do not align with the norms informing EU policies. If these norms become more contested, it may make it more difficult …
Bedouin Sumud and the Struggle for Education
The struggle between Zionists and Palestinian Bedouin over land in the Negev/Naqab has lasted at least a century. Notwithstanding the state's continuing efforts to concentrate the Bedouin population within a small swath of land, scholars have documented how the Bedouin have adopted their own means of resistance, including different practices of sumud. In this paper we maintain, however, that by focusing on planning policies and the spatio-legal m…
Distinction and the Ethics of Violence: On the Legal Construction of Liminal Subjects and Spaces
This paper interrogates the relationship among visibility, distinction, international humanitarian law and ethics in contemporary theatres of violence. After introducing the notions of “civilianization of armed conflict” and “battlespaces”, we briefly discuss the evisceration of one of international humanitarian law's axiomatic figures: the civilian. We show how liberal militaries have created an apparatus of distinction that expands that which i…
Palestinian resistance and the fallacy of destituent play
Naher Und Mittlerer Osten / Near and Middle East
La transformación
Introduction to Symposium on Critical Perspectives on Human Shields
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Ethnic cleansing and the formation of settler colonial geographies
The politics of human shielding: On the resignification of space and the constitution of civilians as shields in liberal wars
In this paper, we use Israel/Palestine as a case study to examine the politics of human shielding, while focusing on the epistemic and political operations through which the deployment of the legal category of human shield legitimizes the use of lethal force. After offering a concise genealogy of human shields in international law, we examine the way Israel used the concept in the 2014 Gaza war by analyzing a series of infographics spread by the …
Human Shields, Sovereign Power, and the Evisceration of the Civilian
Human shields were prominent in the 2016 military campaign seeking to recapture Mosul from the hands of ISIS militants. On October 24, 2016, Pope Francis expressed his concern over the use of over two hundred boys and men as human shields in the Iraqi city. In an election rally the following day, Donald Trump decried the enemy's use of "human shields all over the place," while the New York Times reported that the Islamic State is driving hundreds…
Differentiated Decoupling and Human Rights
One of the major issues attracting the attention of scholars studying global norm regimes, especially the human rights regime, is their impact on domestic settings. Borrowing from organizational studies, some of these scholars have used the term decoupling to conceptualize the widespread phenomenon of states that sign conventions but do not implement these conventions’ norms. In this article, we introduce the concept of differentiated decoupling,…
The Human Right to Dominate
At the turn of the new millennium, a new phenomenon has emerged: conservatives who just decades before had rejected the expanding human rights culture began to embrace human rights in order to advance their own political goals. This book accounts for how human rights—generally conceived as a counterhegemonic instrument for righting historical injustices—are being deployed to subjugate the weak and legitimize domination. Using Israel/Palestine as …
The European Union and Israel's Occupation: Using Technical Customs Rules as Instruments of Foreign Policy
This article describes the rules of origin dispute between the European Union and Israel, and argues that these technical customs rules are also instruments of foreign policy. Although the rules have had no direct impact on Israel’s industry in the Occupied Territories, they have bolstered the European Union’s self-identification as a “normative power” while constituting an important legal precedent that has served to legitimize other actions aga…
Normative PowerEurope and the Power of the Local
In this article, the unfolding events surrounding the publication of theEUGuidelines prohibiting the allocation of funds to Israeli entities in the Occupied Territories are used to offer three observations about the impact of ‘the local’ on ‘Normative PowerEurope’ (NPE). First, the case study reveals the growing influence of the power of ‘the European local’ on the decision of whether or not to deploy normative power. Second, it underscores the f…
Human Rights as a Security Threat: Lawfare and the Campaign against Human Rights NGOs
In this article, I show how the term lawfare is being deployed as a speech act in order to encode the field of human rights as a national security threat. The objective, I claim, is to hinder the work of human rights organizations that produce and disseminate knowledge about social wrongs perpetrated by military personnel and government officials, particularly evidence of acts emanating from the global war on terrorism-such as torture and extraju…
Human Rights as a Security Threat: Lawfare and the Campaign against Human Rights NGOs
In this article, I show how the term lawfare is being deployed as a speech act in order to encode the field of human rights as a national security threat. The objective, I claim, is to hinder the work of human rights organizations that produce and disseminate knowledge about social wrongs perpetrated by military personnel and government officials, particularly evidence of acts emanating from the global war on terrorism-such as torture and extraju…
Ethnic cleansing and the formation of settler colonial geographies
Normative PowerEurope and the Power of the Local
In this article, the unfolding events surrounding the publication of theEUGuidelines prohibiting the allocation of funds to Israeli entities in the Occupied Territories are used to offer three observations about the impact of ‘the local’ on ‘Normative PowerEurope’ (NPE). First, the case study reveals the growing influence of the power of ‘the European local’ on the decision of whether or not to deploy normative power. Second, it underscores the f…
On Visibility and Power: An Arendtian Corrective of Foucault
From Colonization to Separation: Exploring the structure of Israel's occupation
Much has changed during Israel's 40 years of occupation of Palestinian territory. Within the past six years Israel has, on average, killed more Palestinians per year than it killed during the first 20 years of occupation. Those who help manufacture public opinion within Israel claim that the dramatic increase in Palestinian deaths results from the fact that the Palestinians have changed the methods of violence they employ against Israel, and that…
Human Rights Discourse in Domestic Settings: How does it Emerge
Building on the literature that analyzes the impact of norms and ideas on international and domestic politics, it is our assumption that the widespread introduction and dissemination of a human rights discourse enables oppressed groups to translate events into rights language and to appeal to courts, politicians and media in order to seek remedies for their grievances. In so far as human rights discourse actually helps introduce more ethical poli…
The Political Economy of Transnational Regimes: The Case of Human Rights
Focusing on the flow of funding to human rights non-governmental orga-nizations (NGOs), we begin in this article to broach one of the least studied issues pertaining to transnational regimes—namely, their material under-pinnings. Through an analysis of the patterns of donor funding to human rights NGOs, we underscore the triangulation between states, donors, and rights NGOs, whereby states have an impact on donor preferences, which, in turn, infl…
Is the struggle for human rights a struggle for emancipation
(2000). Is the struggle for human rights a struggle for emancipation? Rethinking Marxism: Vol. 12, No. 3, pp. 1-22
Outsourcing violations: The Israeli case
Using the Israeli case as a point of reference, this paper suggests that the term outsourcing, borrowed from economic discourse, can serve as a powerful explanatory device that facilitates the conceptualization of existing processes pertaining to human rights violations. It allows us to draw a connection among several phenomena that are usually conceived to be independent and unconnected, while disclosing and capturing some of the predominant fea…
Antisemitism and Zionism: The Internal Operations of the Ihra Definition
In this paper, I focus on the cultural and political work the IHRA definition of antisemitism carries out to explain why it has been adopted by hundreds of actors.I offer three key reasons to explain its effectiveness: First, it operates on an affective level, interpolating people who identify as Jews to also identify with Israel and Zionism; Second, it ties the right to Jewish difference with a Jewish State and Jewish sovereignty; Third, the def…
Western Interests, Israeli Unilateralism, and the Two-State Solution
This essay analyzes the impact of Israeli unilateralism—specifically that of its settlement project—on the two-state solution. After exploring the relationship between unilateralism and power, the authors show, inter alia, that in-migration has accounted for about half the settlement growth since the international embrace of the land-for-peace formula in 1991, that the level of in-migration does not fluctuate according to government composition (…
The politics of human shielding: On the resignification of space and the constitution of civilians as shields in liberal wars
In this paper, we use Israel/Palestine as a case study to examine the politics of human shielding, while focusing on the epistemic and political operations through which the deployment of the legal category of human shield legitimizes the use of lethal force. After offering a concise genealogy of human shields in international law, we examine the way Israel used the concept in the 2014 Gaza war by analyzing a series of infographics spread by the …
Human Rights, Social Space and Power: Why do some NGOs Exert More Influence than Others
Employing Pierre Bourdieu's notion of ‘social space’, this paper attempts to lay bare how human rights NGOs attain the power needed to bring about social change. The paper argues that the strategies NGOs employ cannot explain their social and political impact for the basic reason that many NGOs use the same strategies and yet there is a large power differential among them. Using the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) as a case study, I…
Foucault's Subject: An Ontological Reading
From the mid-1970s until his death, Michel Foucault sought to develop an account of the subject that would avoid both regarding the subject as merely the passive product of power relations and regarding it as entirely self-creating. Following Foucault's final cues focused on his discussion of the ethics of the self and rooted in a conception of freedom as an ontological condition of possibility rather than as human will drawn mainly from Heidegge…
State Crime, Structural Violence and Covid-19
Distinction and the Ethics of Violence: On the Legal Construction of Liminal Subjects and Spaces
This paper interrogates the relationship among visibility, distinction, international humanitarian law and ethics in contemporary theatres of violence. After introducing the notions of “civilianization of armed conflict” and “battlespaces”, we briefly discuss the evisceration of one of international humanitarian law's axiomatic figures: the civilian. We show how liberal militaries have created an apparatus of distinction that expands that which i…
The European Union and Israel's Occupation: Using Technical Customs Rules as Instruments of Foreign Policy
This article describes the rules of origin dispute between the European Union and Israel, and argues that these technical customs rules are also instruments of foreign policy. Although the rules have had no direct impact on Israel’s industry in the Occupied Territories, they have bolstered the European Union’s self-identification as a “normative power” while constituting an important legal precedent that has served to legitimize other actions aga…
Medical Lawfare: The Nakba and Israel’s Attacks on Palestinian Healthcare
in this article, the authors coin the phrase medical lawfare to describe how israel has been justifying its systematic attacks on healthcare facilities in the Gaza Strip during its five military assaults on the besieged enclave between 2008 and 2023.they show how israel mobilizes the laws of armed conflict dealing with human shields and "hospital shields" to securitize lifesaving and sustaining infrastructures and legitimize their destruction.the…
The Geography and Political Context of Human Rights Education: Israel as a Case Study
Studies have shown that human rights education (HRE) can help promote democracy and social progress by empowering individuals and groups and pushing governments to fulfill their obligations towards residents. Assuming that such assessments are accurate, I argue that the successful application of human rights education requires much more than what is generally discussed in the scholarly literature: adjustments to curriculum, additional resources, …
A Villa in the Jungle: Th e Arab Awakening through the Lens of the Israeli Media
In the Israeli media, the message conveyed to Hebrew-speaking audiences has been that the uprisings in the Arab world are clashes between ethnic, religious or tribal groups. Th is depiction fi ts well within the representational framework of Israel as an island of civilization surrounded by savages. Th is conceptual framework serves to determine Israel’s regional policies, both with many of its neighboring countries and with the Palestinians. Th …
Zionism, Translation and the Politics of Erasure
This paper examines the translation of classic political philosophy into Hebrew, arguing that a variety of ideological positions can be disclosed simply by examining the erasure process employed during translation. Exploring the connection between translation and nation-building, I claim that segments from John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, John Locke's Two Treaties of Government and Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan were excised in the service of a Zionist …
Arendt and social change in democracies
This article explores Hannah Arendt's insights into the forms of social control operating especially in democracies, together with the possibility of resistance to such control. Since the way in which one defines freedom informs one's understanding of the techniques that suppress, regulate, and modify behaviour, the article begins by sketching Arendt's notion of freedom, and compares this to its liberal counterpart. That discussion leads to Arend…
Differentiated Decoupling and Human Rights
One of the major issues attracting the attention of scholars studying global norm regimes, especially the human rights regime, is their impact on domestic settings. Borrowing from organizational studies, some of these scholars have used the term decoupling to conceptualize the widespread phenomenon of states that sign conventions but do not implement these conventions’ norms. In this article, we introduce the concept of differentiated decoupling,…
Rationalising extra-judicial executions: The Israeli press and the legitimisation of abuse
Focusing on the representation of Israel's policy of extra-judicial executions, which is a blatant violation of human rights, this article discloses how Israel's three major newspapers, Yedioth Ahronoth, Ma'ariv, and Ha'aretz have helped produce, disseminate and reinforce both the rationality and the morality of executions. The article employs the insights of theorists like Michel Foucault and Hayden White to argue that the rationalisation of the…
On antisemitism and human rights
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was drafted, in part, as a response to the horrific antisemitism leading to the extermination of millions of Jews in World War II. Yet, today, organisations that utilise human rights instruments to criticise Israel’s laws, policies and practices are themselves being cast as antisemitic. How has the contemporary human rights regime come to be charged with antisemitism? The ostensible answer is that the mea…
Foucault's Subject: An Ontological Reading
From the mid-1970s until his death, Michel Foucault sought to develop an account of the subject that would avoid both regarding the subject as merely the passive product of power relations and regarding it as entirely self-creating. Following Foucault's final cues focused on his discussion of the ethics of the self and rooted in a conception of freedom as an ontological condition of possibility rather than as human will drawn mainly from Heidegge…
Is the struggle for human rights a struggle for emancipation
(2000). Is the struggle for human rights a struggle for emancipation? Rethinking Marxism: Vol. 12, No. 3, pp. 1-22
Arendt and social change in democracies
This article explores Hannah Arendt's insights into the forms of social control operating especially in democracies, together with the possibility of resistance to such control. Since the way in which one defines freedom informs one's understanding of the techniques that suppress, regulate, and modify behaviour, the article begins by sketching Arendt's notion of freedom, and compares this to its liberal counterpart. That discussion leads to Arend…
Human Rights and Global Capitalism: A Roundtable Discussion with Human Rights Watch
Dahl's Procedural Democracy: A Foucauldian Critique
Using Michele Foucault's insights into the operations of power, this paper assesses the theoretical strength of Robert Dahl's procedural democracy. I assume a perfect procedural democracy that functions according to the ideal standards (five criteria) that Dahl introduces. Insofar as this imaginary democracy is perfect it will, according to Dahl, ensure a variety of goods such as equality and freedom. Theoretically speaking, then, the controlling…
Multiple significations: Territory, property and self-determination
Outsourcing violations: The Israeli case
Using the Israeli case as a point of reference, this paper suggests that the term outsourcing, borrowed from economic discourse, can serve as a powerful explanatory device that facilitates the conceptualization of existing processes pertaining to human rights violations. It allows us to draw a connection among several phenomena that are usually conceived to be independent and unconnected, while disclosing and capturing some of the predominant fea…
On Visibility and Power: An Arendtian Corrective of Foucault
Zionism, Translation and the Politics of Erasure
This paper examines the translation of classic political philosophy into Hebrew, arguing that a variety of ideological positions can be disclosed simply by examining the erasure process employed during translation. Exploring the connection between translation and nation-building, I claim that segments from John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, John Locke's Two Treaties of Government and Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan were excised in the service of a Zionist …
The Israeli Peace Camp in Dark Times
Between Universalism and Particularism: The Origins of the Philosophy Department at Hebrew University and the Zionist Project
In 1946, the Vaad Leumi (Jewish National Council) declared a general strike to protest the Mandatory restrictions denying access to Nazi victims who sought refuge in Palestine. Philosophy professor Leon Roth decided not to comply with the Vaad's call, thus infuriating the striking students who began banging on his class door in order to interrupt his lecture. Roth cried out to them: "Gentlemen...let me just ask you what you think is more likely t…
Rationalising extra-judicial executions: The Israeli press and the legitimisation of abuse
Focusing on the representation of Israel's policy of extra-judicial executions, which is a blatant violation of human rights, this article discloses how Israel's three major newspapers, Yedioth Ahronoth, Ma'ariv, and Ha'aretz have helped produce, disseminate and reinforce both the rationality and the morality of executions. The article employs the insights of theorists like Michel Foucault and Hayden White to argue that the rationalisation of the…
Prophets Outcast: A Century of Dissident Jewish Writing about Zionism and Israel and Wrestling with Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
(2005). Prophets Outcast: A Century of Dissident Jewish Writing about Zionism and Israel and Wrestling with Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. Journal of Palestine Studies: Vol. 35, No. 1, pp. 103-105
Hamas and the Destruction of Risk Society
In this paper we employ risk theory to examine key social processes that have been unfolding in the West Bank and Gaza Strip since the outbreak of the second Intifada. Using the Palestinian health services as a case study, we argue that the system of securities in the Occupied Territories has collapsed and that endemic uncertainty currently informs Palestinian society. This, in turn, has led to a radical transformation of the very rationality of …
Human Rights as a Contingent Foundation: The Case of Physicians for Human Rights 1
If one were to compare two human rights organizations, Physicians for Human Rights USA (PHR USA) and its Israeli counterpart, one would expect to find that their activities were similar. Surely the
Human Rights Discourse in Domestic Settings: How does it Emerge
Building on the literature that analyzes the impact of norms and ideas on international and domestic politics, it is our assumption that the widespread introduction and dissemination of a human rights discourse enables oppressed groups to translate events into rights language and to appeal to courts, politicians and media in order to seek remedies for their grievances. In so far as human rights discourse actually helps introduce more ethical poli…
Of Dowries and Brides: A Structural Analysis of Israel’s Occupation
In this article I attempt to uncover some of the causes leading to the dramatic changes that have taken place over the past four decades in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Drawing attention to the way in which the Palestinian inhabitants have been managed, my central thesis is that the occupation’s very structure, rather than the policy choices of the Israeli government, has led to the shifts in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. More specifical…
Israel's occupation
Israel's Occupation
This first complete history of Israel's occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip allows us to see beyond the smoke screen of politics in order to make sense of the dramatic changes that have developed on the ground over the past forty years. Looking at a wide range of topics, from control of water and electricity to health care and education as well as surveillance and torture, Neve Gordon's panoramic account reveals a fundamental shift fro…
Human Rights, Social Space and Power: Why do some NGOs Exert More Influence than Others
Employing Pierre Bourdieu's notion of ‘social space’, this paper attempts to lay bare how human rights NGOs attain the power needed to bring about social change. The paper argues that the strategies NGOs employ cannot explain their social and political impact for the basic reason that many NGOs use the same strategies and yet there is a large power differential among them. Using the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) as a case study, I…
From Colonization to Separation: Exploring the structure of Israel's occupation
Much has changed during Israel's 40 years of occupation of Palestinian territory. Within the past six years Israel has, on average, killed more Palestinians per year than it killed during the first 20 years of occupation. Those who help manufacture public opinion within Israel claim that the dramatic increase in Palestinian deaths results from the fact that the Palestinians have changed the methods of violence they employ against Israel, and that…
The Political Economy of Transnational Regimes: The Case of Human Rights
Focusing on the flow of funding to human rights non-governmental orga-nizations (NGOs), we begin in this article to broach one of the least studied issues pertaining to transnational regimes—namely, their material under-pinnings. Through an analysis of the patterns of donor funding to human rights NGOs, we underscore the triangulation between states, donors, and rights NGOs, whereby states have an impact on donor preferences, which, in turn, infl…
Academic Freedom and the Remaking of the University as a Corporation
Democracy and Colonialism
For some time now I have been pondering closely knit relationship between democracy and colonialism. Notwithstanding widespread conception among democracy theorists that there is a contradiction between two, in this paper I contend that colonialism has served as a crucial component in historical processes through which modern democracies were created and sustained. Focusing on production of the – namely, those who are acknowledged as citizens and…
A Villa in the Jungle: Th e Arab Awakening through the Lens of the Israeli Media
In the Israeli media, the message conveyed to Hebrew-speaking audiences has been that the uprisings in the Arab world are clashes between ethnic, religious or tribal groups. Th is depiction fi ts well within the representational framework of Israel as an island of civilization surrounded by savages. Th is conceptual framework serves to determine Israel’s regional policies, both with many of its neighboring countries and with the Palestinians. Th …
Political science (47 works) · Law (41 works) · Sociology (39 works) · Law (33 works) · Politics (27 works) · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies (18 works) · Philosophy (18 works) · Human rights (16 works) · Law and economics (16 works) · Philosophy (15 works)