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1. Toward the Consolidation of a Gazan Military Front?

Author:
Camille Mansour
Publication Date:
03-2022
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
This essay considers the place of the Gaza Strip in the broader Palestinian context. Israel’s determination to separate Gaza from the West Bank since the signing of the Oslo Accords and its subsequent withdrawal from the territory in 2005 resulted in a process that culminated in the buildup of a Palestinian military front reminiscent of that established by the Palestine Liberation Organization in south Lebanon in 1975–82. In both instances, the military front appears to serve as a Palestinian counterstrategy to achieve linkage. Palestinians demonstrated their determination to break the isolation of Gaza in the war of May 2021 that was accompanied by mass mobilization across and outside Mandate Palestine. The essay probes the question of whether we are witnessing the consolidation of a Gazan military front and points to the minimal political conditions necessary for such a development to advance the liberation struggle.
Topic:
Non State Actors, Civilians, Hamas, and 2021 Gaza War
Political Geography:
Middle East, Israel, Palestine, Gaza, Lebanon, and West Bank

2. Palestine Solidarity Conferences in the Global Sixties

Author:
Sorcha Thomson, Pelle Valentin Olsen, and Sune Haugbolle
Publication Date:
03-2022
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
This article maps the internationalization of the Palestinian cause by studying the participants, groups, and themes at Palestinian solidarity conferences held in 1969–70. Examining such conferences reveals the extent of communication and ideological debate between the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and international solidarity activists at an important juncture in the internationalization of the Palestinian liberation movement. The article makes the methodological point that international conferences organized by the PLO and other Palestinian institutions can function as an alternative archive that complements the traditional archives of diplomatic and intellectual history. Read in tandem with extant Palestinian sources, the paper trail left by international conferences mitigates the scattered and precarious status of Palestinian archives.
Topic:
History, Solidarity, Archive, Conference, PLO, Internationalization, and Anti-Colonialism
Political Geography:
Middle East and Palestine

3. Cultivating Credit: Financialized Urbanization Is Alienation!

Author:
Tareq Radi
Publication Date:
03-2022
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
Since 2007, the Palestinian Authority has implemented a strategy of financialized urbanization in response to economic crises precipitated by Israel’s settler-colonial stranglehold on the Palestinian economy. This article argues that financialized urbanization operates as a mechanism to expand the local banking sector and as a modality of settler-colonial alienation. Examining the joint-ownership structures of companies whose activities straddle real estate and financial markets, the article shows where land ownership in the West Bank ultimately lies. The study highlights qualitative changes in money lending and the extended reach of finance to emphasize the risks of financial collapse. Understanding finance capital and settler colonialism as systems predicated on managing risk for maximum returns, the discussion draws their relation to each other into a single analytical framework to center the question of land dispossession and racialization at the heart of financialized urbanization.
Topic:
Development, Urban, Settler Colonialism, Indigenous, Geography, Property, Financialisation, and Native Americans
Political Geography:
Middle East and Palestine

4. Israeli Law and the Rule of Colonial Difference

Author:
Rabea Eghbariah
Publication Date:
03-2022
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
Israeli law is an important medium that maintains, perfects, and facilitates the fragmentation of Palestinians. Israeli citizenship figures in this structure of fragmentation as an exceptionalizing legal status that blurs “colonial difference” between Palestinian citizens in Israel and Jewish Israelis. The May 2021 uprising and its aftermath not only highlighted the counter-fragmentary forces present among Palestinians across different legal statuses, it also brought into clearer view a rule of “colonial difference” that crisscrosses the Israeli legal system and pertains to all Palestinians under its control. This essay explores the concept of “colonial difference” as applied to Palestinians through the law, and how this rule has been employed in the context of the May 2021 uprising against Palestinian citizens in particular.
Topic:
Law, Citizenship, Colonialism, Settler Colonialism, Police, Unity, Uprising, and Fragmentation
Political Geography:
Middle East, Israel, and Palestine

5. The ICC and Palestine: Breakthrough and End of the Road?

Author:
Pearce Clancy and Richard Falk
Publication Date:
09-2021
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
The recent ruling of the International Criminal Court (ICC) affirming territorial jurisdiction over the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip may at first appear to be a mere procedural decision outlining the court’s authority to investigate Israeli criminality. Upon closer scrutiny, however, it is clearly much more: an indirect, yet far-reaching vindication of Palestinian resistance and struggle in the ongoing “legitimacy war” with Israel. These legal proceedings have momentous potential implications for broader accountability efforts, which could be significant over time, even if attempts to prosecute Israeli perpetrators are ultimately frustrated. This legal event already sheds light on both the limitations of the court and the legal and geopolitical challenges it faces in cases where suspected perpetrators wield significant influence in international political arenas. As of now, the ICC has gained credibility precisely because it has the institutional courage to take on the architects of Israeli criminality.
Topic:
Human Rights, International Law, Geopolitics, Accountability, International Criminal Court (ICC), and Oslo Accords
Political Geography:
Middle East, Israel, and Palestine

6. Palestinian Refugees of the Oslo Generation: Thinking beyond the Nation?

Author:
Sophie Richter-Devroe
Publication Date:
09-2021
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
This article analyzes the political narratives and critiques of young Palestinian refugees who have grown up in the bleak post-Oslo period. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews conducted with refugee youth in Jordan and the West Bank between 2009 and 2014, I show that this generation of refugees endorses a collective Palestinian identity and peoplehood with claims to the (home)land while also narrating their identities and relations to land, nation, state, and rights as complex, multifaceted, and fractured. Their political imaginaries do not limit the political and epistemic project of decolonizing Palestine to the classic paradigm of a territorialized nation-state as enshrined in the Oslo two-state agenda. Rather, they point to a creative and radical, post-nation-statist, translocal politics for Palestine.
Topic:
Sovereignty, Refugees, Decolonization, Nation-State, Territory, Oslo Accords, Generation, and Translocality
Political Geography:
Middle East, Palestine, Jordan, and West Bank

7. The Journal of Palestine Studies in the Twenty-First Century: An Editor’s Reflections

Author:
Rashid Khalidi
Publication Date:
09-2021
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
The Journal of Palestine Studies is celebrating fifty years of uninterrupted publication as the journal of record on Palestinian affairs since its founding in 1971. Historian, book author, and Columbia University’s Edward Said Chair of Middle East Studies, Rashid Khalidi, has been at the helm as editor for almost two decades. In this article, he reflects on the Journal’s role in knowledge production on Palestine from a number of vantage points: the situation that obtained at the Journal’s founding when Palestinians simply did not have “permission to narrate” their own story in the Western public sphere; the evolution of the academic universe in the United States and its eventual embrace of disciplines, such as race, gender, Indigenous, and Palestine studies, once considered marginal or fringe; and the concomitant and virulent Zionist campaign to tar speech critical of Israel and the Zionist project with the brush of anti-Semitism, whether in the media, politics, or academia.
Topic:
BDS, Academia, Progressivism, Publishing, and Knowledge Production
Political Geography:
Middle East, Palestine, and United States of America

8. The Anthropological Rise of Palestine

Author:
Sa'ed Atshan
Publication Date:
12-2021
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
This article traces the rise of anthropological scholarship on Palestine and/ or Palestinians from 2011 through the present, providing readers with a comprehensive bibliography of anthropological publications related to Palestine over that period. Drawing upon the author’s experience as a scholar of Palestine and a publicly engaged anthropologist, it accounts for the factors fueling the proliferation of this domain of knowledge production and the implications this has for representations of individual and collective Palestinian human conditions. The article argues that contemporary anthropological research and writing provide Palestinians with intellectual tools for discursive enfranchisement. Such anthropological engagement also makes possible global solidarity wherein Palestinians are recognized as epistemic equals, rendering legible the heterogeneity and complexities of Palestinian lived experiences.
Topic:
Research, Solidarity, Anthropology, Ethnography, Academia, Epistemology, and Palestinians
Political Geography:
Middle East and Palestine

9. 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

10. 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