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11. National Identity in the Guest Room: The Palestinian “Duyuf”

Author:
Alessandra Gola
Publication Date:
12-2021
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
This article explores the manifold dimensions of Palestinian contemporary identity through the lens of the ghurfat al-duyuf (traditional guests’ room) and its design. It argues that against a backdrop of a decades-long military occupation, this domestic space devoted to social functions is the terrain where families spontaneously express the core features of their identity and their participation in Palestinian nationhood through the layout of meaningful objects. It further contends that the narratives that emerged from the ghurfat al-duyuf over a ten-year observation period necessitate the reframing of Palestinian identity as a nuanced complex of diversities. Using a combination of architectural and ethnographic methods, the article seeks to provide an alternative approach to the subject matter, based on empirical observation of small-scale, everyday realities and common practices in the guests’ room.
Topic:
Culture, Identity, Nationhood, and Duyuf
Political Geography:
Middle East and Palestine

12. The PLO and Communist Albania: Cold War Relations

Author:
Klejd Këlliçi
Publication Date:
12-2021
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
This article examines Communist Albania’s support for the Palestinian cause and the relationships Tirana cultivated with the various groups comprising the Palestinian national movement. It explores the latter’s motivation for cultivating relations with Albania, a tiny Communist country that refused the logic of the bipolar world, both in its alliance with China and, later, through its disengagement from the East-West conflict and retreat into self-imposed isolationism. The article shows that, following Albania’s break with the Soviet bloc in the 1970s, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and specifically Fatah, was a more natural and logical choice for Tirana’s support than other, more self-avowedly left-wing Palestinian organizations. This study is based on primary sources from the archives of the Albanian foreign affairs ministry and the Party of Labour of Albania, as well as secondary sources such as accounts by members of the Albanian military who trained Fatah guerrilla fighters.
Topic:
Cold War, Communism, History, and PLO
Political Geography:
Middle East, Palestine, Albania, and Baltic States

13. BDS: Nonviolent, Globalized Palestinian Resistance to Israel’s Settler Colonialism and Apartheid

Author:
Omar Barghouti
Publication Date:
06-2021
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
Despite its military, diplomatic, and economic power, Israel’s regime of military occupation, settler colonialism, and apartheid still views the nonviolent, Palestinian-led global Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement as a “strategic threat” to its system of injustice, waging a protracted war against the movement accordingly. This essay aims to contextualize Israel’s war on BDS by examining the movement’s origins, principles, impact, and theory of change. It analyzes the most critical challenges BDS is facing and its most promising strengths, especially its balancing of ethical principles with strategic effectiveness and its intersectional approach to the struggle for Palestinian freedom, justice, and equality.
Topic:
Sanctions, Israel, Occupation, BDS, and Palestine
Political Geography:
Israel and Palestine

14. Palestine—and Empire—Are Central to Arab American/SWANA Studies

Author:
Louise Cainkar
Publication Date:
06-2021
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
Taking the small number of ethnographic studies of Palestinian communities in North America as its problematic, this article situates that predicament in the larger context of decades of academic silencing of Arab American and SWANA (Southwest Asia and North Africa) studies, efforts that represent but one component of a larger political project to quash pro-Palestinian activism. Abetted by the absence of a racial category, scholars continue to face substantial hurdles at the institutional level, inhibiting the robust growth of the field and boding poorly for an expansion in community studies. Yet recent scholarship on Palestinians in North America— exemplified by the articles included in this special issue that center the complexities of identities; activism; and Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) solidarities—evidences real changes on the ground for Palestinian activism. Those changes, and continued advocacy for institutional change, are necessary to invigorate community studies, a critically important method of scholar-activist praxis because of their power to enhance a community’s access to resources, well-being, organizing capacities, and local-level power and solidarity building.
Topic:
Political Activism, Solidarity, Academia, Identity, Palestine, and BIPOC
Political Geography:
South Asia, Palestine, North Africa, North America, and West Asia

15. Disrupting Settler-Colonial Capitalism: Indigenous Intifadas and Resurgent Solidarity from Turtle Island to Palestine

Publication Date:
06-2021
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
This article explores the resurgence of Indigenous/Palestine solidarity during the Wet’suwet’en land sovereignty struggle in Canada that took place around the same time Donald Trump’s Middle East “peace plan” was released in early 2020. Historicizing this resurgence within a longer period of anti-colonial resistance, the article attends to the distinct historical, political- economic, and juridical formations that undergird settler colonialism in Canada and Israel/Palestine. It contends with the theoretical limits of the settler-colonial framework, pushing back against narratives of settler success, and shows how anti-colonial resistance accelerated economic crises that led both settler states to enter into “negotiations” with the colonized (reconciliation in one case, and peace talks in the other) as a strategy to maintain capitalist settler control over stolen lands. The analysis also sheds light on a praxis of solidarity that has implications for movement building and joint struggle.
Topic:
Political Activism, Solidarity, Conflict, Peace, Settler Colonialism, Indigenous, Reconciliation, and Israeli–Palestinian Conflict
Political Geography:
Canada, Israel, and Palestine

16. “A World of Tomorrow”: Diaspora Intellectuals and Liberal Thought in the 1950s

Author:
Hilary Falb Kalisman
Publication Date:
06-2021
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
This article contributes to Palestinian intellectual history by discussing the lives and writings of three diaspora intellectuals during the transitional period of the 1950s: Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Abdul-Latif Tibawi, and Nicola Ziadeh. I argue that they fused a conservative acceptance of state authority and avoidance of radical politics with a liberal understanding of nationalism and scholarship, including freedom, secularism, and objectivity. Without a Palestinian nation-state, their participation in the imagined futures of Pan-Arabism and decolonization meant avoiding radical leftist political movements. Instead, they advanced literature and history, surviving in the diaspora as liberals during Pan-Arabism’s transition from a revolutionary goal to a state ideology.
Topic:
Nationalism, Intellectual History, Liberalism, Secularism, Academia, and Freedom
Political Geography:
Palestine

17. Secularism and the Religious Shift in Palestinian Chicago: Implications for Solidarity and Activism

Author:
Loren D. Lybarger
Publication Date:
06-2021
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
This article analyzes transformations in Palestinian secularism, specifically in Chicago, Illinois, in response to the weakening of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the emergence of Islamic reformist structures since the late 1980s. Up until then, secular community organizations that aligned with the secular-oriented Palestinian political factions constituted the ideological center of this community. Beginning in the late 1980s, however, a discernible religious shift began to take place. The analysis draws from extensive fieldwork (2010–15) to show how secularism has not disappeared but rather transmuted into new, often hybrid forms whose lack of institutionalization reflect the attenuation of secularist structures and orientations. The weakening of the secularist milieu leaves individuals who have become disenchanted with the religious-sectarian shift (at the time of the fieldwork) with few alternatives for social connection, solidarity, and action. They forge their own idiosyncratic paths as a result.
Topic:
Islam, Secularism, and PLO
Political Geography:
United States and Palestine

18. Transnational Histories of Palestinian Youth Organizing in the United States

Author:
Loubna Qutami
Publication Date:
06-2021
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
This article explores the transnational histories that have conditioned Palestinian youth organizing in the United States from the 1950s to the present day. It examines the organizational vehicles of earlier generations of activists such as the Organization of Arab Students (OAS) and the General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS) to trace the formation of the U.S. chapter of the transnational Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM). It argues that in the Oslo and post-Oslo eras, which severed the Palestinian diaspora from the national body politic and the rich Palestinian organizational histories of the pre-1993 period, the lessons of their forerunners are instructive for PYM’s new generation of organizers. The article posits that transnational connections have profound implications for localized U.S. political organizing and that contemporary Palestinian youth organizing is part of a historical continuum. Drawing on oral history and scholar-activist ethnographic methods, the article situates contemporary youth organizing in its transnational and historical contexts.
Topic:
Transnational Actors, Students, Oslo Accords, and Israeli–Palestinian Conflict
Political Geography:
United States and Palestine

19. Resistance Literature and Occupied Palestine in Cold War Beirut

Author:
Elizabeth M. Holt
Publication Date:
01-2021
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
For the last decade of his life, the Palestinian intellectual, author, and editor Ghassan Kanafani (d. 1972) was deeply immersed in theorizing, lecturing, and publishing on Palestinian resistance literature from Beirut. A refugee of the 1948 war, Kanafani presented his theory of resistance literature and the notion of “cultural siege” at the March 1967 Beirut conference of the Soviet-funded Afro-Asian Writers Association (AAWA). Articulated in resistance to Zionist propaganda literature and in solidarity with Marxist- Leninist revolutionary struggles in the Third World, Kanafani was inspired by Maxim Gorky, William Faulkner, and Mao Zedong alike. In books, essays, and lectures, Kanafani argued that Zionist propaganda literature served as a “weapon” in the war against Palestine, returning repeatedly to Arthur Koestler’s 1946 Thieves in the Night. Better known for his critique of Stalinism in Darkness at Noon (1940), Koestler was also actively involved in waging cultural Cold War, writing the United States Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) Congress for Cultural Freedom 1950 manifesto and helping the organization infiltrate Afro-Asian writing in the wake of Bandung. Kanafani’s 1960s theory of resistance literature thus responded at once to the psychological dislocation of Zionist propaganda fiction and the cultural infiltration of Arabic literature in the Cold War.
Topic:
Cold War, Zionism, Literature, Arabic, and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
Political Geography:
Middle East, Israel, Palestine, and Lebanon

20. Gaza and the One-State Reality

Author:
Tareq Baconi
Publication Date:
01-2021
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
In contemporary conversations around Israel/Palestine, the Gaza Strip is construed as a state of exception, rendering the territory either hypervisible or entirely invisible. Through the prism of the Covid-19 pandemic and Israel’s possible de jure annexation of portions of the West Bank, this piece argues that rather than being exceptional, the Gaza Strip represents the very embodiment of Israeli settler colonialism in Palestine. Its isolation and de-development constitute the endpoint of Israel’s policies of land theft and Palestinian dispossession. This endpoint, referred to as Gazafication, entails the confinement of Palestinians to urban enclaves entirely surrounded by Israel or Israeli-controlled territory. The Trump plan, otherwise known as the “deal of the century,” along with the Covid- 19 crisis, have inadvertently exposed the reality of Gaza as an enclave of the one-state paradigm.
Topic:
State Violence, Settler Colonialism, Nation-State, and COVID-19
Political Geography:
Middle East, Israel, Palestine, and Gaza