The Human Rights Lawyer's Existential Dilemma

Professor David Kretzmer s "The Occupation of Justice " analyses 35 years of Israeli Supreme Court jurisprudence in cases relating to the Israeli domination over the Palestinian occupied lands. This comment is an attempt to dig out the implications concealed in the analysis for Israeli lawyers who fight against human rights abuses through legal challenges to IDF activity, and ponder whether this type of litigation is worthwhile. The author of this comment, a lawyer involved in much occupation-related litigation, presents one possible moral lesson gained by Kretzmer's analysis: that which portrays human rights lawyers as the (naive) supreme collaborators of the Israeli occupation.