EUME
2024/ 2025

Suhad Bishara

Colonial Legalities: Jewish Territorial Domination in Palestine/Israel

Suhad Bishara holds and a PhD from King’s College School of Law in London, an LL.M. in Public Service Law from New York University's School of Law, and an LL.B. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She was also Palestine & Law Fellow at Columbia University Law School. Suhad has more than 23 years of experience litigating cases before the Israeli Supreme Court in major human rights cases regarding Palestinian citizens of Israel and international humanitarian law cases concerning Palestinians in the 1967 Occupied Territory. In the academic year 2024/25, she is a EUME Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien. 

Colonial Legalities: Jewish Territorial Domination in Palestine/Israel

This research investigates settler colonial legalities in Palestine-Israel. Since its establishment, Israeli jurisdiction has succeeded to maintain a Jewish racial territoriality of domination that transcends time and historical events, boundaries of legal frameworks, and formalities of territorial sovereignty. The research identifies and contextualizes the connecting legal structures that made Jewish territorial domination possible in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories (oPt). More specifically, it focuses on land expropriations, displacement, and legal manifestations of Jewish spatial domination. 

By extending its jurisdiction to all areas of Mandatory Palestine - Israel and the oPt - the Israeli Supreme Court became an important site that affects the intensity and scope of Israel’s racial territoriality, and an essential one to investigate Israeli settler-coloniality. During these adjudications, the Supreme Court became the interpreter of the law, and its judgments have an impact on how the law is manifested as a platform for racially transformative territoriality. It is thus a rich mine of knowledge through which to enhance our understanding of Israel’s colonial legalities and jurisprudence.