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From Cairo to Jerusalem: Law, Labour, Time and Catastrophe

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Abstract

Following the eclectic itineraries of ‘Near East’ expert, R. M. Graves, this article tells a story of an ongoing Nakba (catastrophe) of small and large legal decisions. Without reducing the human catastrophe of the event of the Nakba (the 1948 Palestinian forced exodus), it engages with it as a legal event that crosses (in this story at least) from Cairo to Jerusalem, from the League of Nations’ era (1920–1946) to the United Nations’ era (1945–), from the governance of labour and gender, to labour partition, and finally to the governance of municipalities through law and expertise. Graves’ relationship to both Cairo and Jerusalem was materialized through different forms of affective legal governance. Graves, who in his own dichotomous words was ‘neither a Zionist nor an anti-Semite’, managed Jerusalem across national lines in the wake of the UN Partition Plan (1947), and as the old empire was withdrawing right before Jerusalem itself became a site of the catastrophe—right before the Nakba.

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Notes

  1. Isma’il Sidqi Pasha was the Prime Minister of Egypt (June 1930–September 1933). He founded the Shaab Party (People’s Party).

  2. See generally the scholarship of Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), most notably Anghie (2007).

  3. The Mixed Courts of Egypt were created in 1867 as part of the reform of efforts of the Capitulations regime in the Ottoman Empire. The Courts, governed by a hybrid European law, had jurisdiction over cases that involved any foreign national, and later included cases that involved any foreign interest. The National Courts were created in 1883, only one year after the British occupation (Shalakany 2013).

  4. L.E. is the livre Égyptienne, or Egyptian pound.

  5. The ILO’s tripartite representative system means that each state is represented by trade unions, employers’ associations and government representatives. Through tripartism, the ILO preached class harmony under a reformed capitalism where workers, employers and governments have a voice in international labour policy.

  6. By 1948, the ILO sent a large mission to Iran, Iraq and Turkey (Regional Meeting for the Near and Middle East of the International Labour Organization 1948).

  7. The ILO’s mission to Egypt wanted to ensure that through the new labour legislation, trade unions, for example, would function as workers’ representatives on strictly industrial questions and to ‘eschew politics’, as Harold Butler had demanded (Butler 1932b; Taha 2016, p. 16).

  8. The commission was headed by William Robert Wellesley, the first Earl Peel, former Secretary of State for India.

  9. The Jewish state would start north from Tel Aviv along the Mediterranean coast and all of Galilee, while the Arab state would be in the central mountains and the Negev, including the Jaffa port, and it would merge with the Hashemite state in Transjordan. Britain would control the strategic ports of Haifa and Aqaba, but only on a temporary basis (Lesch 2004, pp. 1810, 1811).

  10. The Peel Commission, ‘with irresistible logic’ MacDonald claimed, had recommended that Palestine should be partitioned into Jewish and Arab areas, each enjoying self-government, while the holy place be kept ‘in an enclave … under mandatory control’ (‘Palestine’ House of Commons Debates 1938).

  11. Although ‘peaceful picketing’ was permitted by a 1927 ordinance, strikes of government employees in public service and utilities were declared illegal in 1936 (Taquu 1977, p. 8.3; Report of the Committee on Development and Welfare Services 1949).

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank participants at the Critical Legal Conference at Warwick Law School (2017), the Law and Society Association Conference in Toronto (2018), and colleagues who participated in the Law Department Faculty Workshop at the American University in Cairo (2018) for their generous engagement and feedback. I presented parts of this article at the ReVisions International Law Seminar (2019) at the University of Glasgow. Thanks to all those who participated, especially Charlie Peevers for her valuable reflections, and for the invitation.

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  1. Law Department, American University in Cairo, Cairo, Egypt

    Mai Taha

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Correspondence to Mai Taha.

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Taha, M. From Cairo to Jerusalem: Law, Labour, Time and Catastrophe. Law Critique 30, 243–264 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-019-09248-5

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