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Begin New Search Publishing Institution Institute for Palestine Studies Publication Year within 25 Years

41. 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

42. 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

43. 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

44. 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

45. BDS Supression Attempts in Germany Backfire

Author:
Shir Hever
Publication Date:
03-2019
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
German organizations are among the last Palestine solidarity groups in Europe to have embraced the call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS), launched in 2005. Pro-Israel German groups have been quick to respond with aggressive rhetoric equating a BDS-favorable stance with Nazism. The vilification of the movement has had the unintended consequence of inserting BDS into German politics, both at federal and local levels. Select case studies show that the BDS debate in Germany has developed somewhat differently than in other European countries, and that religious discourse is significant in shaping attitudes to Israel and Palestine. While the Palestine solidarity movement tends to single out the “Anti-Germans”—a pro-Israel formation that grew out of the Left after the reunification of Germany—as the major culprit, it is in fact conservative Christian, mostly Evangelical, organizations that are largely responsible for discouraging BDS activism.
Topic:
International Political Economy and International Affairs
Political Geography:
Israel

46. 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

47. “To Build a New World”: Black American Internationalism and Palestine Solidarity

Author:
Russell Rickford
Publication Date:
10-2019
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
This essay traces the arc of Black American solidarity with Palestine, placing the phenomenon in the context of twentieth-century African American internationalism. It sketches the evolution of the political imaginary that enabled Black activists to depict African Americans and Palestinians as compatriots within global communities of dissent. For more than half a century, Black internationalists identified with Zionism, believing that the Jewish bid for a national homeland paralleled the African American freedom struggle. During the 1950s and 1960s, however, colonial aggression in the Middle East led many African American progressives to rethink the analogy. In the late 1960s and the 1970s, African American dissidents operating within the nexus of Black nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and Third Worldism constructed powerful theories of Afro-Palestinian kinship. In so doing, they reimagined or transcended bonds of color, positing anti-imperialist struggle, rather than racial affinity, as the precondition of camaraderie.
Topic:
International Organization, Race, and International Affairs
Political Geography:
Palestine

48. From the River to the Sea to Every Mountain Top: Solidarity as Worldmaking

Author:
Robin Kelley
Publication Date:
10-2019
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
This essay questions a key takeaway from the Ferguson/Gaza convergence that catalyzed the current wave of Black-Palestinian transnational solidarity: the idea that “equivalence,” or a politics of analogy based on racial or national identity, or racialized or colonial experience, is the sole or primary grounds for solidarity. By revisiting three recent spectacular moments involving Black intellectuals advocating for Palestine—Michelle Alexander’s op-ed in the New York Times criticizing Israeli policies, CNN’s firing of Marc Lamont Hill, and the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute’s initial decision to deny Angela Davis its highest honor—this paper suggests that their controversial positions must be traced back to the post-1967 moment. The convergence of Black urban rebellions and the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war birthed the first significant wave of Black-Palestinian solidarity; at the same time, solidarities rooted in anti- imperialism and Left internationalism rivaled the “Black-Jewish alliance,” founded on analogy of oppression rather than shared principles of liberation. Third World insurgencies and anti-imperialist movements, not just events in the United States and Palestine, created the conditions for radically reordering political alliances: rather than adopting a politics of analogy or identity, the Black and Palestinian Left embraced a vision of “worldmaking” that was a catalyst for imagining revolution as opposed to plotting coalition.
Topic:
International Affairs, Popular Revolt, anti-capitalism, and Solidarity
Political Geography:
Palestine

49. Trumps Dangerous Vision for Palestine

Author:
Khaled Elgindy
Publication Date:
10-2019
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
The Bahrain workshop and its associated economic plan are little more than elaborate smokescreens for U.S. president Donald Trump’s political vision centered on the broader goals of normalizing Israeli occupation, consolidating the “Greater Israel” agenda, and effectively foreclosing Palestinian political aspirations. By working together with the government of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to redefine the conflict and do away with the traditional ground rules of the peace process, including the two-state solution, Trump is attempting to turn back the clock to the pre-1967 era when Palestinians were viewed mainly as an economic, humanitarian, and security problem rather than a political one. For Palestinians to effectively confront this unprecedented challenge, they will need to put their political house in order, including ending the debilitating political division between Fatah and Hamas, reviving institutional politics, and working to build a national consensus around a new strategy.
Topic:
International Security, International Affairs, and Populism
Political Geography:
Palestine

50. The Kushner Plan: Keeping Israeli-Palestinian Peace out of Reach

Author:
Paul R. Pillar
Publication Date:
10-2019
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
The U.S. administration’s Israeli-Palestinian “peace plan,” under President Donald Trump, has so far yielded only an inconclusive talkfest about economic development. The underlying rationale of the plan—that economics must come before any addressing of core political issues—is fundamentally flawed for several reasons. The biggest impediments to Palestinian economic development stem from aspects of the Israeli occupation that would continue under the plan, which rejects a two-state solution and is a slightly revised and renamed version of the current arrangement of limited Palestinian autonomy under Israeli domination. The plan flows directly from the Trump administration’s policy of acquiescing in the preferences of the right-wing government of Israel. Accordingly, the political portion of the plan is indefinitely delayed and might never be announced. Keeping the full plan under wraps serves the Israeli government’s purpose of holding out the promise of—but never delivering—peace with the Palestinians, while more facts are created on the ground
Topic:
International Relations, International Affairs, Fragile States, and Populism
Political Geography:
Israel and Palestine

51. Bedouin Sumud and the Struggle for Education

Author:
Michal Rotem and Neve Gordon
Publication Date:
06-2017
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
The struggle between Zionists and Palestinian Bedouin over land in the Negev/ Naqab has lasted at least a century. Notwithstanding the state’s continuing efforts to concentrate the Bedouin population within a small swath of land, scholars have documented how the Bedouin have adopted their own means of resistance, including different practices of sumud. In this paper we maintain, however, that by focusing on planning policies and the spatio-legal mechanisms deployed by the state to expropriate Bedouin land, one overlooks additional technologies and processes that have had a significant impact on the social production of space in the Negev. One such site is the struggle over the right to education, which, as we show, is intricately tied to the organization of space and the population inhabiting that space. We illustrate how the right to education has been utilized as an instrument of tacit displacement deployed to relocate and concentrate the Bedouin population in planned governmental towns. Simultaneously, however, we show how Bedouin activists have continuously invoked the right to education, using it as a tool for reinforcing their sumud. The struggle for education in the Israeli Negev is, in other words, an integral part of the struggle for and over land.
Topic:
Human Rights and International Affairs
Political Geography:
Palestine

52. Olive Cultivation in the Galilee, 1948–1955: Hegemony and Resistance

Author:
Jeffrey Reger
Publication Date:
06-2017
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
Drawing on Arabic, English, and Hebrew language sources from the British and Israeli archives, this article seeks to bridge the catastrophic rupture of 1948 to the early 1950s and to trace the changing relationship between ordinary Palestinian olive cultivators in the Galilee and the newly established Israeli state. In contrast with studies that center on the continued expulsion of Palestinians and extension of control over land by the state and state-supported actors in the aftermath of the Nakba, this study examines those Palestinians who stayed on their land and how they responded to Israeli agricultural and food control policies that they saw as discriminatory to the point of being existential threats. Beyond analysis of Israeli state policy toward olive growers and olive oil producers, this article brings in rare Palestinian voices from the time, highlighting examples of Palestinian resistance to the Israeli state’s practices of confiscation and discrimination.
Topic:
Human Rights, International Political Economy, and International Affairs
Political Geography:
Israel

53. Gendered Violence in Israeli Detention

Author:
Sahar Francis
Publication Date:
06-2017
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
Women have been instrumental to the Palestinian liberation struggle from its inception, and the role they have played in political, civil, and armed resistance has been as critical, if not as visible, as that of their male counterparts. In addition to experiencing the same forms of repression as men, be it arrest, indefinite detention, or incarceration, Palestinian women have also been subjected to sexual violence and other gendered forms of coercion at the hands of the Israeli occupation regime. Drawing on testimonies from former and current female prisoners, this paper details Israel’s incarceration policies and examines their consequences for Palestinian women and their families. It argues that Israel uses the incarceration of women as a weapon to undermine Palestinian resistance and to fracture traditionally cohesive social relations; and more specifically, that the prison authorities subject female prisoners to sexual and gender-based violence as a psychological weapon to break them and, by extension, their children.
Topic:
Gender Issues and Human Rights
Political Geography:
Israel

54. Rasmea Odeh: The Case of an Indomitable Woman

Author:
Nehad Khader
Publication Date:
06-2017
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
In this profile of Rasmea Odeh, JPS examines the case of a Palestinian woman who has been incarcerated in both Israel and the United States. After a decade of confinement in Israel, Odeh was freed in a prisoner exchange in 1979. Following deportation from the occupied Palestinian territories, she became a noted social justice and women’s rights organizer, first in Lebanon and Jordan, and later in the U.S., where she built the now over 800-strong Arab Women’s Committee of Chicago. In April 2017, Odeh accepted a plea bargain that would lead to her deportation from the United States after a years-long legal battle to overturn a devastating conviction on charges of immigration fraud. Observers, legal experts, and supporters consider the case to “reek of political payback,” in the words of longtime Palestine solidarity activist, author, and academic Angela Davis. Odeh’s generosity of spirit, biting wit, and easy smile did not desert her throughout the years that she fought her case. To know Odeh is to be reminded that the work of organizing for social justice is about the collective rather than the individual, and that engagement, relationship building, and trust are the foundations of such work.
Topic:
Gender Issues, Human Rights, International Affairs, and Prisons/Penal Systems
Political Geography:
Palestine

55. The Idolatry of Force: How Israel Embraced Targeted Killing

Author:
Paul Aaron Gaston
Publication Date:
06-2017
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
Not until the Second Intifada did assassination emerge as an explicit, legally codified, and publicly announced doctrine of so-called targeted killing in Israel. This study, the first of a two-part series, explores the doctrine’s historical roots and ideological lineage and tracks its rise under the premiership of Ariel Sharon. Targeted killing became institutionalized not just to reduce direct and imminent threats against Israelis but also to mobilize electoral support, field- test weapons and tactics, and eliminate key figures in order to sow chaos and stunt the development of an effective Palestinian national movement. The study frames the analysis within a wider meditation on Israel’s idolatry of force. As much symbolic performance as military technique, targeted killing reenacts and ritualizes Palestinian humiliation and helplessness in the face of the Zionist state’s irresistible power, making this dynamic appear a fact of life, ordained and immutable.
Topic:
International Organization, International Affairs, Armed Forces, and Border Control
Political Geography:
Israel

56. A Newer Hamas? The Revised Charter

Author:
Khaled Hroub
Publication Date:
06-2017
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
On 1 May 2017, Hamas released its “Document of General Principles and Policies” following years of periodic speculation that the movement was working on a new political platform. Heralded by some as a significant milestone in Hamas’s political thought and practice, the document reiterates longstanding positions but also lays out some new ones. Given the timing of its release, as well as its contents and possible implications, the document could be considered Hamas’s new charter: it details the organization’s views on the struggle against “the Zionist project” and Israel and outlines its strategies to counter that project. This essay aims to provide a fine-grained analysis of the substance, context, and ramifications of the recently released document. The discussion starts with an overview highlighting aspects of the document that could be considered departures from Hamas’s original 1988 charter, and pointing to changes in the movement’s discourse, both in form and substance. A contextual analysis then probes the regional, international, and internal impetuses behind the issuance of the document. Finally, the discussion concludes with a look at the possible implications for the movement itself, as well as for the Palestinians and for Israel.
Topic:
International Security, International Affairs, Border Control, and Geopolitics
Political Geography:
Palestine

57. Criminalizing Resistance: The Cases of Balata and Jenin Refugee Camps

Author:
Alaa Tartir
Publication Date:
11-2017
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
The Palestinian Authority (PA) adopted donor-driven security sector reform (SSR) as the linchpin to its post-2007 state-building project. As SSR proceeded, the occupied West Bank became a securitized space and the theater for PA security campaigns whose ostensible purpose was to establish law and order. This article tackles the consequences of the PA’s security campaigns in Balata and Jenin refugee camps from the people’s perspective through a bottom-up ethnographic methodological approach. These voices from below problematize and examine the security campaigns, illustrating how and why resistance against Israel has been criminalized. The article concludes by arguing that conducting security reform to ensure stability within the context of colonial occupation and without addressing the imbalances of power can only ever have two outcomes: “better” collaboration with the occupying power and a violation of Palestinians’ security and national rights by their own security forces.
Topic:
International Security and International Affairs
Political Geography:
Palestine

58. Special Feature on Palestinian Migration, 1870–1940

Author:
Cecilia Baeza
Publication Date:
11-2017
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
THE THREE PAPERS that comprise this dossier explore the intraregional and intercontinental mobilities of Palestinians during the late Ottoman period and the British Mandate. While several studies have focused on both the processes of integration and diasporization of Palestinian migrants in their host countries,1 the papers in this dossier address the political and cultural implications of this migration for Palestinian society in Palestine, from the 1920s until the establishment of Israel in 1948. Although emigration from Ottoman and Mandate-era Palestine was proportionally much smaller than that from Lebanon and Syria, the three articles provide an insightful contribution to Palestinian social history, in particular for the pre-1948 period, which has aroused unabated interest in Palestinian historiography since the 1990s.2 The authors—all historians—have carried out groundbreaking research that sheds light on the Palestinian nation- building process from an original and lesser-known point of view, that of migrants. This decentered observation lens proves remarkably relevant to thinking about the political, social, and cultural changes that supported the construction of a modern national consciousness in Pales
Topic:
International Affairs
Political Geography:
Palestine

59. Claiming Identities in Palestine: Migration and Nationality under the Mandate

Author:
Lauren Banko
Publication Date:
11-2017
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
In the decades just prior to the end of World War I, residents of the Ottoman Empire’s provinces alternated with ease between a variety of personal identities and affiliations. Overlapping imperial, supranational, and localized identities could all be claimed with flexibility by Arab travelers and migrants in the region and in the wider diaspora. Arab, and later Jewish, inhabitants of Palestine conceived of nationality as a choice based on personal understandings of identity that were not necessarily tied to domicile in a particular territory. This article traces the demise of such a notion of nationality, and its practical repercussions after 1918, showing how Palestine’s emigrants and immigrants did not immediately understand or reimagine themselves as part of the more rigid nationality system imposed by the British Mandate. Analyzing regional migration into and out of Palestine during the interwar period, the study seeks to explain the ways in which a system of flexible national affiliation transformed into a rigid system of nationality based on domicile.
Topic:
Migration and International Affairs
Political Geography:
Palestine

60. Legislating Exclusion: Palestinian Migrants and Interwar Citizenship

Author:
Nadim Bawalsa
Publication Date:
11-2017
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
This article explores the British Mandate’s legal framework for regulating citizenship and nationality in Palestine following the post–World War I fragmentation of the Ottoman Empire. It argues that the 1925 Palestinian Citizenship Order-in-Council prioritized the settlement and naturalization of Jews in Palestine, while simultaneously disenfranchising Palestinians who had migrated abroad. Ultimately, the citizenship legislation reflected British imperial interests as it fulfilled the promises made in the Balfour Declaration to establish in Palestine a homeland for the Jewish people, while it attempted to ensure the economic viability of a modern Palestine as a British mandated territory. Excluded from Palestinian citizenship by the arbitrary application of the Order-in- Council, the majority of Palestinian migrants during the 1920s and 30s never secured a legal mean
Topic:
Migration, International Security, International Affairs, and Diaspora
Political Geography:
Palestine