Interim inequalities and features of the transition
This political opportunity structure is shaped by the contours of the interim agreements between Israel and the Palestinians and the conceptions of rights therein, as well as by the struggle over final status agreements.
The Israeli- Palestinian agreements make no reference to the existing legal framework of international humanitarian law which regulates situations of occupation, inter alia prohibiting such structural measures as Israel’s purported annexation of East Jerusalem and its settlement policy, as well as violations of the rights of civilians through collective punishment, torture, wilful killing and bodily harm, deportation and other prohibited measures. Nor do the agreements contain enforceable commitments to international human rights instruments. The fact that the interim agreements avoided the discourse of rights - and indeed that further arrangements may well do so - has a range of implications for rights-based legal reform. First, it weakens the legitimacy of the Authority and the upcoming state, and makes both the search for legitimacy paramount and an Islamist challenge based on assertion of rights (individual and national) credible. Second, the daily life of men and women has been deeply affected by a series of inequalities in mobility, resources and status. These dynamics of inequality without recourse weaken any social contract between state and citizen and erode the rule of law and the development of a public sphere of dialogue and advocacy. In an examination by Fadwa Labadi of the utilization of civil, shari'a and customary law by families seeking compensation and diya after a 1999 Hebron factory fire in which fourteen women workers lost their lives due to clear criminal negligence, described in the appendix to this case study, the weakness of both the rule of law and the public sphere is revealed, as families seek recourse in a heterogeneity of legal practices but find their greatest satisfaction in customary legal processes based on shari'a principles of diya but pursued outside the shari'a court system.The denial of rights caused by Israel’s continued role as an occupying power, its expansion of settlements during the transitional years and its repressive policies towards Palestinians, particularly in the extended closures of Palestinian areas, is easily traced in the eruption of the second intifada but was also a major influence on the transitional period as a whole. The almost seven years of interim rule by the Palestinian Authority were marked by contradictions between the Authority’s perceived mission of state formation and the severe limits imposed upon it. Along with internal features of Palestinian rule, these features illuminate both the constraints of law-making and legal reform during this period, and, in the particular focus of this case study, the positioning of Islam and Islamic law.