Since 1967, the Israeli military court system has been charged with keeping the peace and security of the West Bank and Gaza, making it one of the few institutional settings where Israelis and Palestinians have had regular sustained contact with each other.
From 1991 through 2002, Lisa Hajjar, an associate professor of law and society at the University of California, Santa Barbara, studied the Israeli military court, exploring the identities, ideologies and practices of the people -- Israelis and Palestinians -- who make the court system work.
What she found is contrary to the starkly defined mutual antipathy one might expect.
Hajjar will share her findings in "Going Inside the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, or How I Learned to Love the Law," a UCSB Affiliates Town Forum lecture Wednesday, February 18 at 7:30 p.m. in the Anderson Lounge of the First Presbyterian Church, 21 East Constance Ave., Santa Barbara.
Cost is $10, or $8 for Affiliates and Chancellor's Council members. Advance registration is recommended and can be made by calling the UCSB Office of Community Relations at 893-4388.
Hajjar conducted about 200 interviews with people involved with the court system, who proved to be a comprehensive cross-section of Israeli and Palestinian populations.
She found the ways they think and speak of justice, rights, and the role of law in resolving their conflict of court to be surprising.
Hajjar came to UCSB as an assistant professor in 2001. She was selected the winner of the Harold J. Plous award in 2003, as the outstanding assistant professor of that year, and will give the Plous Memorial Lecture later this year. She was subsequently promoted to associate professor. She has a bachelor's degree in international relations from Tufts University in Massachusetts, a master's in Arab studies from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and a Ph.D. in sociology from the American University in Washington, D.C.
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