Hedi Viterbo

Bio: Hedi Viterbo is an academic researcher from Queen Mary University of London. The author has contributed to research in topics: Torture & Human rights. The author has an hindex of 6, co-authored 10 publications receiving 131 citations. Previous affiliations of Hedi Viterbo include University of Essex.

The ABC of the OPT: A Legal Lexicon of the Israeli Control over the Occupied Palestinian Territory

Abstract: Israel's half-a-century long rule over the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and some of its surrounding legal issues, have been the subject of extensive academic literature. Yet, to date, there has been no comprehensive, theoretically-informed, and empirically-based academic study of the role of various legal mechanisms, norms, and concepts in shaping, legitimizing, and responding to the Israeli control regime. This book seeks to fill this gap, while shedding new light on the subject. Through the format of an A-Z legal lexicon, it critically reflects on, challenges, and redefines the language, knowledge, and practices surrounding the Israeli control regime. Taken together, the entries illuminate the relation between global and local forces - legal, political, and cultural - in Israel and Palestine. The study of the terms involved provides insights that are relevant to other situations elsewhere in the world, particularly with regard to belligerent occupation, the law's role in relation to state violence, and justice.

Rights as a Divide- and-Rule Mechanism: Lessons from the Case of Palestinians in Israeli Custody

Abstract: Critics have highlighted the complicity of human rights law in mass disempowerment and domination – a criticism equally applicable to child law. This article investigates this issue, as evidenced by three recent developments that Israel has justified by invoking these legal frameworks: an increased separation of Palestinian adults and children in Israeli custody; the Israeli legal system’s growing preoccupation with “rehabilitating” the now-segregated Palestinian children; and the Israeli authorities’ ever-diminishing interest in such rehabilitation for adult Palestinian prisoners. By canvassing the legal architecture, judicial rationalizations, adverse effects, and socio-political context of these developments, this article foregrounds their divide-and-rule logic and structure of driving a generational wedge between Palestinians and potentially weakening their political ties, solidarity, and resistance.

The Age of Conflict: Rethinking Childhood, Law, and Age through the Israeli-Palestinian Case

Abstract: Law tends to define the term ‘child’ solely as a matter of age, and yet age has remained relatively unexplored and undertheorized This article provides a contextualized investigation of the law-childhood-age triangle and some of its central complexities The context chosen for this study is the encounter between Israeli criminal law (domestic and military) and minors in the Occupied Palestinian Territories The first part of the article explains how Israeli law concurrently constructs two different childhoods along national lines – Israeli and Palestinian – in the same territory However, notwithstanding this contingency of childhood and age on nationality, the legal construction of childhood and age is much more complex than unequivocally echoing the dominant national imaginary The second part of the article illustrates this by pointing to the ways in which contrasting demarcations of childhood, different dimensions of age, various meanings assigned to age, and conflicting age norms – all render age and childhood elusive I identify and examine four manifestations of this elusiveness in Israeli military law (which applies to Palestinians): the ambiguity of legal age terminology; the legal conception of youth as aggravating; the punishment of minors according to their apparent (rather than chronological) age; and the simultaneous application of different ages to the same minor The third part of the article discusses the anxieties and confusion evoked within the legal system in cases in which law’s subjects, Israeli settlers or Palestinians, were seen as obscuring their age In conclusion I point, among other things, to the resonance of the issues in question with other settings outside Israel-Palestine In light of the significant commonalities among these different contexts, I argue that the Israeli-Palestinian case can be read as a ‘super experiment’, through which to rethink how age functions and is utilized in the legal fabrication of childhood

The Pitfalls of Separating Youth in Prison: A Critique of Age-Segregated Incarceration

Abstract: Age-segregated incarceration—the separation of youth and adults in criminal custody—has established itself as a legal and human rights norm. Contrary to conventional wisdom, I argue that it suffers from five acute pitfalls. First, it perpetuates age essentialism—the historically recent belief that certain age groups are inherently different and must therefore abide by constrictive (and questionable) age norms. Second, age-segregated incarceration sanctions harshness and apathy toward separated adults, whom it deems less vulnerable and less corrigible. Third, age segregation helps prison present itself as humane and effective while also entrenching its punitive fixation with blame. Fourth, in conflating protection with age segregation, this practice harms youth: it downplays the risk they face from their peers and the prison staff, overlooks the support some imprisoned adults can offer, and occasions harmful practices such as solitary confinement. Finally, age segregation, in and beyond prison, have a long and ongoing history of oppressing disempowered communities by severing their intergenerational ties. Alternatives such as non-segregated incarceration, age-specific penal reforms, or more refined segregation fail to address—and in some respects aggravate—these pitfalls. What is needed, instead, is to simultaneously undo essentialism and carcerality.

Rights as a Divide-and-Rule Mechanism: Lessons from the Case of Palestinians in Israeli Custody

Abstract: Critics have highlighted the complicity of human rights law in mass disempowerment and domination—a criticism equally applicable to child law. This article investigates this issue, as evidenced by three recent developments that Israel has justified by invoking these legal frameworks: an increased separation of Palestinian adults and children in Israeli custody; the Israeli legal system's growing preoccupation with “rehabilitating” the now-segregated Palestinian children; and the Israeli authorities' ever-diminishing interest in such rehabilitation for adult Palestinian prisoners. By canvassing the legal architecture, judicial rationalizations, adverse effects, and sociopolitical context of these developments, this article foregrounds their divide-and-rule logic and structure of driving a generational wedge between Palestinians and potentially weakening their political ties, solidarity, and resistance.

The New York Review of Books

Abstract: It comes as something ofa surprise to reflect that the New York Review ofBooks is now over twenty years old. Even people of my generation (that is, old enough to remember the revolutionary 196os but not young enough to have taken a very exciting part in them) think of the paper as eternally youthful. In fact, it has gone through years of relatively quiet life, yet, as always in a competitive journalistic market, it is the controversies that attract the interest of the reader and to which the history (especially an admittedly impressionistic survey that tries to include something of the intellectual context in which a journal has operated) must give some attention. Not all the attacks which the New York Review has attracted, both early in its career and more recently, are worth more than a brief summary. What do we now make, for example, of Richard Kostelanetz's forthright accusation that 'The New York Review was from its origins destined to publicize Random House's (and especially [Jason] Epstein's) books and writers'?1 Well, simply that, even if the statistics bear out the charge (and Kostelanetz provides some suggestive evidence to support it, at least with respect to some early issues), there is nothing surprising in a market economy about a publisher trying to push his books through the pages of a journal edited by his friends. True, the New York Review has not had room to review more than around fifteen books in each issue and there could be a bias in the selection of

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison:

Abstract: Contemporary Sociology 7(5) (September 1978):566—68. When the intellectual history of our times comes to be written, that peculiarly Left Bank mixture of Marxism and structuralism now in fashion will be among the most puzzlingofourideastoevaluate.Aliteral “archeology of knowledge” (the title of one of Foucault’s earlier books) will be required to sort out the valuable from the obvious rubbish. I suspect that in this exercise the iconographers of the present (like Barthes) will fare less well than those who have read the past. Of such “historians” (a description which does not really cover his method) Foucault is the most dazzlingly creative. Discipline and Punish (which, shamefully, has taken over two years to be translated into English) follows Madness and Civilization (1961) and The Birth of the Clinic (1971) as the next stage in Foucault’s massive project of tracing the genealogy of control institutions (asylums, teaching hospitals, prisons) and the human sciences symbiotically linked with them (psychiatry, clinical medicine, criminology, penology). His concern throughout is the relationship between power and knowledge, the articulation of each on the other. Here (as he makes explicit in an interview recently published in the English journal, Radical Philosophy) he opposes the humanist position that, once we gain power, we cease to know——it makes us blind—— and that only those who keep their distance from power, who are no way implicated in tyranny, can attain the truth. For Foucault, such forms of knowledge as psychiatry and criminology (with its “garrulous discourses” and “intermidable [sic] repetitions”) are directly related to the exercise of power. Power itself creates new objects of knowledge and accumulates new bodies of information. Thus to “liberate scientific research from the demands of monopoly capitalism” can only be a slogan. Placing such programmatic Big Issues on one side, though, a superficial first reading of the book mightstartatthelevelofitssubtitle, “The Birth of the Prison.” The key historical transition——at the end of the eighteenth century——is from punishment as torture, a public spectacle, to the more economically and politically discreet prison sentence. The body as the major target of penal repression disappears: within a few decades, the grisly spectacles of torture, dismemberment, exposure, amputation, and branding are over. Interest is transferred from the body to the mind; a coercive, solitary, and secret mode of punishment replaces one that was representative, scenic, and collective. Gone is the liturgy of torture and execution, where the triumph of the sovereign was symbolized in the processions, halts at crossroads, public readings of the sentence even after death, where the criminal’s corpse was exhibited or burnt. In its place comes a whole technology of subtle power. When punishment leaves the domain of more or less everyday perception and enters into abstract consciousness, it does not become less effective. But its effectiveness arises from its inevitability not its horrific theatrical intensity. The new power is not to punish less but to In Retrospect: 1978 29

The Dark Sides of Virtue: Reassessing International Humanitarianism

Abstract: The Dark Sides of Virtue: Reassessing International Humanitarianism David Kennedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004)