Event overview
War Against the People and the People's War: Palestine and international humanitarian law in the 1970s.
In May of 1974, just after the first session of the International Committee of the Red Cross Diplomatic Conference on the revision of international humanitarian law had come to a
close, Israeli war-planes obliterated much of the Nabatieh refugee camp in Lebanon, then home to around 3,500 Palestinian refugees. According to the standard account of the Diplomatic Conference, “the victims of wars were largely forgotten” during the drafting process (as a Red Cross observer put it at the time) as delegates from national liberation movements focused their energies on extending international status to wars of national liberation and securing privileged belligerent status for anti-colonial fighters.This paper challenges this standard story through a detailed account of the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s discourse, both within the conference and outside it. In particular, we focus on the PLO’s account of what was necessary to ensure what its delegate to the conference Chawki Armali called the “protection of the civilian population against the atrocities committed by colonialist and racist powers.”
The PLO’s account of civilian protection differed starkly from that put forward by the major military powers and Israel, who argued that only the principle of distinction and the codification of a proportionality standard would protect civilians from harm.
Rejecting the assumption that civilians were simply the collateral damage of contemporary conflicts, the PLO argued that the Palestinians were faced with a war against the people, to which the only response was a people’s war.
Dr. Jessica Whyte Senior Lecturer in Cultural and Social Analysis at the University of Western Sydney, Her work integrates political theory, intellectual history and political economy to analyse contemporary forms of sovereignty, human rights and humanitarianism.
Dr. Ihab Shalbak Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Sydney. He is currently working on a book project that traces the emergence of the think tank form.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 26 Nov 2018 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
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