Jurisdiction as sovereignty over occupied palestine : the case of Khan-al-Ahmar

In the context of prolonged occupation, it has long been argued that the Israeli Supreme Court (ISC), in High Court of Justice (HCJ) formation, is facilitating the entrenchment of a permanent regime of legalized control by moving away from a model of exception to ordinary civilian jurisdiction over the West Bank. This was recently demonstrated in the Khan-al-Ahmar case, in which a group of settlers peti- tioned the ISC/HCJ demanding the execution of a pending Israeli demolition order over a school in a Bedouin village in Palestine. The court sided with the army, deferring to a political solution for the transfer of the entire Bedouin community elsewhere. Drawing on existing scholarship and the author’s first-hand impressions of the final hearing, this article interprets the Khan-al-Ahmar case as an illustration of how the exceptional military nature of the occupation has shifted to a permanent regime of legalized control overseen by an ordinary civilian court