Summary
“The full range of processes and mechanisms associated with a society’s attempt to come to terms with a legacy of large-scale past abuses, in order to ensure accountability, serve justice and achieve reconciliation” — the UN definition quoted in Chapter 6 of Rethinking Statehood in Palestine, which treats the concept as deeply contested in Palestine/Israel (Rethinking Statehood in Palestine, PDF p.173).
Details
- Transitional justice occurs when societies transition from regimes responsible for large-scale abuses towards accountable democratic regimes, through mechanisms such as truth commissions, criminal trials and apologies aimed at political reconciliation (PDF p.173).
- Its two kinds of justice are retributive (punishing perpetrators, as at Nuremberg) and restorative (public mediation between victims and perpetrators, as in South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which gathered 21,000 victims’ testimonies and received 7,112 amnesty applications, 849 granted and 5,392 denied) (PDF p.173-174).
- In the Palestinian camp it has gained appeal as a way to devise alternatives to the Oslo Accords: countering the fragmentation of the Palestinian people, reckoning with the Nakba, and providing venues for reconciliation with Israeli Jews (PDF p.172).
- Its reparations are wider than compensation: restitution, return, ending ongoing violations, accountability, commemoration, acknowledgment, public apology and prevention of recurrence (PDF p.178).
- Proponents in Palestine/Israel emphasise restorative over retributive mechanisms, primarily because of power: criminal trials of Israeli perpetrators will most likely never happen, so the mechanisms offer relative rather than absolute justice (PDF p.179).
Where sources disagree
- Nadim Khoury argues the concept is “an essentially contested concept” in Palestine/Israel: there is broad agreement on what it means but deep disagreement over whose historical injustice to address, with what mechanisms, and towards what ends, so it can devise alternatives to Oslo, justify Oslo-line measures, or even negate Palestinian demands for justice (PDF p.184).
- On temporal scope: Israel could delimit the Nakba to 1948-1949, while Palestinians see an ongoing Nakba — “the Nakba is a structure, not a single event” (PDF p.183, paraphrasing Patrick Wolfe) — and a limited acknowledgment could act “as a no-further-claims clause, vaccinating Israel against further Palestinian demands, foremost among them the right of return” (PDF p.183).
- On the destination: Ron Dudai’s version would be incremental and two-state — reconciliation as “learning to live side by side” rather than together (PDF p.183) — a corrective to Oslo rather than an alternative to it.
- Israeli public diplomacy has inverted the discourse, pitting a “Jewish Nakba” against the Palestinian one and demanding Arab responsibility, apologies and reparations — in the chapter’s words, “weaponizing the language of transitional justice against Palestinians” (PDF p.182).
Related pages
Rethinking Statehood in Palestine, Nadim Khoury, Nadim Rouhana, Nakba, Right of Return, Decolonisation, Zochrot, BADIL