Kaunas to Khan Yunis: Aharon Barak’s Dissent, Ontologies of Partition, and the Cunning of Unintended Geography

The ongoing violence in Gaza is upending one reigning liberal exceptionalist justification after another. A poignant illustration of this is Judge ad hoc Aharon Barak’s dissenting opinion on the provisional measures requested by South Africa in its suit against Israel in the International Court of Justice for breaching the Genocide Convention. In his dissent, Barak illustrated his experience as a Holocaust survivor in Lithuania in a manner unusually personal as a matter of judicial opinion. This, I argue, reveals the stark limits of the liberal legalism championed by Barak while simultaneously demanding a more substantive excavation of the ideological structures that Barak sought to serve through adhering to said liberal legalism. On this point, I turn to a particularity of the Zionist project as the only extra-European settler colonial situation that existing powers sought to resolve through partition. In assessing how Zionism might be defended on the basis of liberal legalism, I argue that it is necessary to realise how the social effects of territorial partition, generally understood, creates grave challenges for liberal justification. In piercing the veil of abstraction that Barak’s liberal legalism enables regarding partition, I place the formative Lithuanian experience invoked in his dissent into the context of how said experiences were shaped by the long-term effects of partition. Turning to the longue durée of the rise, partitions, and legacies of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, I locate Barak’s Holocaust experience within this scheme of compounded social complexities. Here, the violence ongoing in Gaza can be viewed as part of the enduring structural logic of partition in Europe — despite the frequent Zionist invocation that these patterns of European violence were transcended through the creation of the State of Israel. Barak’s dissent thus provides an unexpected catalyst for making these broad temporal and spatial connections.