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31. The Virus, the Settler, and the Siege: Gaza in the Age of Corona

Author:
Ghassan Abu-Sittah
Publication Date:
06-2020
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
This essay explores the challenges and opportunities that the Covid-19 pandemic has afforded Israel as it broadens its settler-colonial objectives internally, in Gaza, and elsewhere. In particular, it sheds light on the heightened militaristic and economic approaches taken by Israel to further entrench its siege of Palestinians in Gaza and to export increasingly advanced technologies of surveillance and state control long deployed against the Palestinian people. This investigation thus offers an opportunity to probe settler colonialism’s strategic opportunism in the face of the historic pandemic.
Topic:
Public Health, Settlements, Pandemic, and COVID-19
Political Geography:
Middle East, Israel, and Palestine

32. Roundtable On Mental Health Amid COVID-19

Author:
Weeam Hammoudeh, Samah Jabr, Maria Helbich, and Cindy Sousa
Publication Date:
06-2020
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
The Covid-19 pandemic has laid bare the devastating and disproportionate effects of structures of violence that produce vulnerability in communities of color globally, including with respect to mental health-care provision. While coping and resilience are dominant mainstream frameworks to understand mental health in crisis—both in Palestine and elsewhere—the three contributors to this roundtable were asked to offer a rejoinder to that approach. They reflect on the pandemic as an opportunity to revisit how we understand and advocate for critical approaches to mental health in Palestine in the midst of prolonged crisis.
Topic:
Mental Health, Public Health, Pandemic, and COVID-19
Political Geography:
Middle East, Israel, and Palestine

33. The Poetics of Dispossession in Mahmoud Darwish’s “Exile”

Author:
Lucy A. Perry
Publication Date:
06-2020
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
This paper examines Mahmoud Darwish’s exploration of the political, geographical, existential, and metaphysical dimensions of displacement, banishment, and statelessness in his 2005 lyrical epic “Exile.” The paper offers an analysis of Darwish’s treatment of dialectic, heteroglossia, the juxtaposition of the national and the existential, and conflicting temporalities, as well as political uncertainty and metaphysical fear. With particular reference to the paradoxical portrayal of space in “Exile”—the juxtaposition of the near and far, real and illusory, localized and dispersed—I also examine the ways in which Palestinian identity, as narrated in this poem, is destabilized and dispersed by what Michel Foucault calls “heterotopic space.”
Topic:
Humanitarian Crisis, Identity, and Exile
Political Geography:
Middle East and Palestine

34. A Palestinian Statelet in Gaza

Author:
José S. Vericat
Publication Date:
06-2020
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
Fatah leaders routinely accuse Hamas of plotting to establish an “emirate” in the Gaza Strip. Gaza is in fact turning into a statelet separate from the West Bank, but it is Israeli policies that are driving the “Gaza is Palestine” option with a series of measures that have been implemented since the early 1990s to sever Gaza from the West Bank. This development has intensified under the administration of U.S. president Donald Trump. In the White House’s vision for Middle East peace, which turns the West Bank into a series of isolated Bantustans enveloped by Israeli territory and shorn of Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip becomes the centerpiece of any future Palestinian entity. The international community, laser focused on avoiding another war in Gaza, has prioritized the humanitarian over the political crisis, furthering the excision of the Palestinian territory. As aid flows directly into Gaza, bypassing Ramallah, and Israel and Hamas negotiate a long-term ceasefire, the Palestinian Authority (PA) finds itself increasingly marginalized.
Topic:
Territorial Disputes, State, Settlements, and Palestinian Authority
Political Geography:
Middle East, Israel, and Palestine

35. Fracturing Communities :Aid Distribution in a Palestinian Camp

Author:
Perla Issa
Publication Date:
03-2019
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
This article examines the practices of humanitarian aid distribution from the perspective of aid recipients rather than providers through an immersion in the daily home life of Palestinian residents of Nahr al-Barid refugee camp (north Lebanon) in 2011. It argues that in the name of distributing aid fairly, humanitarian aid providers put in place a pervasive system of surveillance to monitor, evaluate, and compare residents’ misery levels by relying on locally recruited aid workers. This regime of visibility was designed to be one directional; NGOs never disclosed how much aid they had available, nor when or how it would be distributed. The inclusion of local aid workers in this opaque framework turned a process that relied on community and neighborhood ties into an impersonal machine that fostered doubt and suspicion and ultimately hindered the community’s ability to engage in collective political action.
Topic:
Humanitarian Aid, International Security, International Affairs, and Occupation
Political Geography:
Palestine

36. From Haifa to Ramallah (and Back): New/Old Palestinian Literary Topography

Author:
Amal Eqeiq
Publication Date:
03-2019
Content Type:
Research Paper
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
This article explores border crossing and the Palestinian city as a literary metropolis—two major themes in the works of emerging Palestinian novelists in Israel. It looks at the “re-Palestinization” of urban space by writers who belong to a post-Oslo generation of Palestinian intellectuals that left villages and small towns in Israel to go and study, work, and live in the city. What distinguishes the literature of this generation is its negotiation of border crossing in a fragmented geography and its engagement with the city as a space of paradoxical encounter between a national imaginary and a settler-colonial reality. Based on a critical reading of their works, the article argues that Adania Shibli and Ibtisam Azem challenge colonial border discourse, exposing the ongoing Zionist erasure of the Palestinian city and creating a new topography for Palestinian literature. The article also traces the role of these writers in the “twinning” of Haifa and Ramallah starting in the late 1990s, and it examines how this literary and cultural “sisterhood” informs spatial resistance.
Topic:
International Affairs
Political Geography:
Palestine

37. Ibrahim Nasarallah's Palestine Comedies: Liberating the Nation Form

Author:
Nora Parr
Publication Date:
03-2019
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
Conceptually linked, noncontiguous, and undeniably national, Ibrahim Nasrallah’s book series Al-milhat al-filastiniyya (The Palestine Comedies) breaks conceptual ground. Told across twelve volumes, the Comedies represents the long-called- for Palestinian national novel, though in unconventional form. The series uses diverse literary devices, including intertextuality and the archetype of the twin, to demonstrate how formal innovations can redirect assumptions about what constitutes not only a national novel, but also a nation. The series reimagines relationships between space, time, and people, giving narrative shape to a community so often imagined as fragments. Abandoning the retrospective prerequisite of bounded sovereign space and homogeneous, linear time, the Comedies imagines a “nation constellation.” A close examination of two novels within the series, A‛ras amna (2004) and Tifl al-mimhat (2000), shows how Palestinian relationships can be imagined outside existing national logics. It reads the constellation as an alternative nation form that can both encompass colonial frameworks and free the delimitation of Palestine from the dominance of power structures that only begin with the nation-state
Topic:
International Affairs, Power Politics, and Linguistics
Political Geography:
Palestine

38. Richard Falk: "Citizen Pilgrim" In the role of UN Rapporteur

Author:
Mandy Turner
Publication Date:
03-2019
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
Richard Falk’s quest to combine academic scholarship with political activism is witnessed throughout his lifework, but perhaps especially so during his tenure as United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, a position he held from 2008 to 2014. Falk is a vocal critic of Israel’s occupation and a staunch supporter of Palestinian self- determination, positions that have drawn strong condemnation from Israel and its supporters, but praise from Palestinians and their supporters. There is little doubt that Falk’s work has had a huge influence on public debate and activism pertaining to this issue, both within Israel-Palestine as well as globally. This article outlines Falk’s scholarship and activism regarding Palestine, analyzes the post of UN special rapporteur in general, reviews both criticism of and support for Falk’s work, and assesses Falk’s concept of the “citizen pilgrim.” It concludes by reflecting on what this reveals about the experience of praxis for politically engaged academics.
Topic:
International Organization and International Affairs
Political Geography:
Palestine

39. U.S Recognition of Golan Heights Annexation: Testament to Our Times

Author:
Victor Kattan
Publication Date:
03-2019
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
On 25 March 2019, U.S. president Donald Trump signed a proclamation recognizing the occupied Golan Heights as part of Israel. The Golan Heights proclamation, which endorses Israel’s annexation of the territory captured from Syria in the 1967 war, was issued two weeks before the Israeli general election in a photo-op with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House. Undermining internationally agreed-upon norms prohibiting states from recognizing the annexation of territory by force, the proclamation could have detrimental consequences for the international legal order, providing a precedent for other states to take steps to annex territory they claim is necessary for their defense.
Topic:
International Political Economy, International Affairs, and Occupation
Political Geography:
Israel and Palestine

40. Palestinian Engagement with the Black Freedom Movement prior to 1967

Author:
Maha Nassar
Publication Date:
06-2019
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
This article examines early Palestinian engagements with multiple facets of the Black American struggle for freedom through a content analysis of influential Palestinian press outlets in Arabic prior to 1967. It argues that, since the 1930s, Palestinian intellectuals with strong anti-colonial views linked anti-Black racism in the United States to larger imperial and Cold War dynamics, and that they connected Black American mobilizations against racism to decolonization movements around the world. This article also examines Mahmoud Darwish’s early analytical writings on race as a social construct in both the U.S. and Israeli contexts. Understanding these early engagements sheds light on subsequent developments in Black-Palestinian transnational solidarity and on Palestinian Afro-Arab cultural imaginaries.
Topic:
International Affairs and Minorities
Political Geography:
Palestine