Rethinking Human Rights: Critical Insights from Palestinian Youth [Hardcover]

Palestinians have used the language of human rights to articulate their struggle against the Israeli occupation and internationalise the injustices they face. Palestinian young people learning about human rights at school experience a dissonance between the aspirational and internationalised framework of those norms and the layers of injustice of their own lived experience. Drawing on research in the occupied West Bank, this book explores the three layers of marginalisation faced by Palestinian young people  the Israeli occupation that denies them their humanity; the Palestinian pseudo-state that denies them a voice; and patriarchal structures that deny them agency  to show how these barriers influence their understanding of, and scepticism towards, human rights. Influenced by decolonial theories, this book illuminates how space needs to be created for the counter-narratives of the oppressed in human rights discourse, which may not align with more conventional representations of human rights. It contends that human rights and, by extension, human rights education in the Palestinian context (and beyond) needs to be critiqued, decolonised and ultimately transformed.Drawing on research undertaken in the West Bank, this book traces Palestinians' understanding of, and cynicism towards, human rights and how those rights need to be transformed.Erika Jim?nezisLeverhulme Early Career Fellow at the School of Law, and Mitchell Institute Fellow: Rights and Social Justice at Queen's University Belfast, UK.

Harrowingly timely & It is a well-written and insightful book that provides critical and timely insights into the shortcomings of international human rights law and the lived experiences of Palestinian young people. Human Rights Law Review

Erika Jim?nez's book is a necessary contribution to the fields of human rights education and Palestine studies. While not the first to examine HRE in the OPT, it brings something significantly new to the tló'