This talk will present my research into settler-colonial legalities and jurisprudence in Israel and Palestine. Since its establishment, Israeli jurisdiction has managed to sustain a racialized territorial regime of domination on both sides of the Green Line—within Israel and in the occupied Palestinian territories. Central to this project has been the Israeli Supreme Court, whose authority extends across both spaces and whose jurisprudence has played a decisive role in deepening and expanding Israel’s racial territoriality. Accordingly, the research focuses on the Court’s doctrinal developments and legal reasoning. By examining colonial jurisprudence in Israel and Palestine as a single geographic and legal formation, this research challenges fixed understandings of territory, territoriality, sovereignty, periodization, and temporality. It traces the legal structures and interpretive pathways that bind Jewish collectivity, as shaped under Israeli law, to Palestinian dispossession and displacement. Ultimately, this project offers new perspectives on colonial power, collective identity, and the jurisprudence of the ongoing Nakba.
Suhad Bishara holds a PhD from King’s College London School of Law, an LL.M. in Public Service Law from NYU School of Law, and an LL.B. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She was also a Palestine & Law Fellow at Columbia University Law School. She currently serves as the Legal Director at Adalah – The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, where she has worked since 2001. Suhad has led landmark constitutional and international humanitarian law cases before the Israeli Supreme Court, focusing on the rights of Palestinians. She is a EUME Fellow since 2024 and is currently working on her book manuscript “Colonial Jurisprudence: Land and Law in Israel/Palestine”.
Himmat Zoubi is an urban sociologist and feminist researcher. She is an Associate Researcher at Mada al-Carmel – Arab Center for Applied Social Research in Haifa, and a Senior Researcher at the Institute for Palestine Studies. Between 2018 and 2023, she held multiple postdoctoral fellowships, for instance with EUME at the Forum Transregionale Studien, the International Research Group on Authoritarianism and Counterstrategies (IRGAC), Freie Universität Berlin, and the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO). She holds a PhD in Sociology from Ben-Gurion University and dual MA in Criminology and Gender Studies. Her published work covers settler colonialism and urbanism, indigenous knowledge and resistance, and Palestinian feminist movements, with a current focus on cultural cities, colonialism, and neoliberal urbanism. Himmat’s current book project explores the remaking of Hayfa into Haifa (1948-1953) through the lens of displacement, spatial erasure, and survival. In the academic year 2025/26, she remains affiliated with EUME.
Pleaser register in advance via eume(at)trafo-berlin.de. Depending on approval by the speaker(s), the Berliner Seminar will be recorded. All audio recordings of the Berliner Seminar are available on SoundCloud.