Palestine/Israel Review

10/13/2024

Tomorrow!

The Department of History and Palestine/Israel Review invite the public to Prof. Rashid Khalidi's presentation on October 14 at 5:30 pm. The event is in person and will not be recorded.

10/10/2024

NEW ARTICLE ALERT: Eli Osheroff, "Settling a State—Settling for a State: Reinterpreting One Hundred Years of Zionist–Arab Relations"

In recent years, a more coherent, widespread critique of Zionism as a form of settler colonialism has developed in Western academia. Despite its critical assumptions regarding Zionism, this conversation has yet to influence one of the core images of the Zionist-Arab encounter, mainly that of Palestinian intransigence versus Zionist political flexibility. According to this stereotypical image, these contrasting political characteristics played a central role in allowing a Jewish state to be established in a large part of historical Palestine, while an Arab one did not materialize. By examining political encounters between Zionists and Palestinians over the course of more than a hundred years, this article shows that, in fact, Palestinian leadership and Palestinians generally were willing to settle for an internationally recognized Arab-Palestinian state at key points. By contrast, Zionists usually exhibited greater ambivalence toward the idea of a recognized state, preferring to settle for something else, mainly expansionism. By adopting a counterintuitive approach, this article seeks to contrast the colonial dimension of Zionism with the more flexible and ultimately more state-and norm-oriented quality of Palestinian nationalism.

Read the full article here: https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/psup/pir/article/doi/10.5325/pir.1.2.0005/390093/Settling-a-State-Settling-for-a-State

10/08/2024

Just published: "Who Gets to Talk When “WE” Talk about Israel: An Intersectional Meditation on Inclusivity."

Occasioned by a recent article by Jill Jacobs criticizing the underrepresentation of women in American Jewish debate about Israel and by a recently implemented policy by the Association for Jewish Studies (AJS) requiring gender diversity on panels at the association’s annual conference, this article explores the space where knowledge production, rhetorics of inclusivity, and disciplinary organization intersect: Despite its policies of inclusion, is the AJS able to avoid exercising a Jewish supremacy in its Israel/Palestine-oriented knowledge practices?

Read the full article here: https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/psup/pir/article/doi/10.5325/pir.2.2.0001/391388/Who-Gets-to-Talk-When-WE-Talk-about-Israel-An

10/07/2024

The second article from the special issue on Haifa: Maayan Hilel's "Screening Identity: Palestinian National Culture and Intercommunal Dynamics in Haifa's Cinematic Landscape."

Focusing on the vibrant cinema scene in Haifa during the Mandate period, this article looks into the city’s Palestinian cultural history and the dialectic intercommunal relations between Jews and Arabs. It analyzes the persistent struggle of Haifa’s Palestinian community to establish a new Arab-owned cinema as part of a broader effort to develop a Palestinian national culture. The article demonstrates how Palestinian entrepreneurs sought to use cinema as an essential means in the formation of a distinct national culture and identity in the context of the escalating national conflict. At the same time, it highlights how cinemas effectively functioned as a shared space of daily intercommunal encounters and cultural collaboration between ordinary Arabs and Jews in Haifa.

Read the full article:
https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/psup/pir/article/doi/10.5325/pir.2.1.0002/391393/Screening-Identity-Palestinian-National-Culture

10/06/2024

The Department of History and Palestine/Israel Review invite the public to Prof. Rashid Khalidi's presentation on October 14 at 5:30 pm. The event is in person and will not be recorded.

10/06/2024

Just out with Palestine/Israel Review and a part of a forthcoming issue about Haifa:

In this article, Amal Jamal explores the extent to which describing Haifa as an oasis of coexistence is truth or myth. The discourse of the city’s municipal officials and public figures is analyzed to verify their experiences and perceptions of the city’s identity, especially the rising Palestinian urbanism, the allocation of municipal resources to permit equality in individual and communal life, and the institutional division of labor to allow for just representation and participation. This study is framed within theoretical models of tolerance, arguing that Haifa is characterized by an asymmetric tolerance formula, which is enabled by the unequal political strength of the Jewish and Arab elites of the city. To illustrate this argument, a thematic analysis of twenty-five in-depth interviews with leading city figures is introduced. The themes emerging from the interviews not only describe how tolerance is manifested but also explore its positive normative potentials, translated into the ability to challenge the marginalization that individuals or groups experience and support their political struggle for equality, on the one hand, and fostering and managing inequalities, regulating prejudice and subordination, and masking domination and exclusion, on the other.
Read the full article here:
https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/psup/pir/article/doi/10.5325/pir.2.1.0001/391392/The-Cunning-Reason-of-Liberal-In-Tolerance

06/27/2024

The English version of Hillel Cohen's book "Enemies, a Love Story: On Mizrahi Jews, Palestinian Arabs, and Ashkenazi Jews from the Rise of Zionism to the Present" will be published by Penn State University Press. Meanwhile, I recommend reading Smadar Lavie's review essay about this book, published in issue 1.2 of Palestine/Israel Review. In this essay, Smadar uses Cohen's book as a point of departure for examining Mizrahi-Palestinian relationships through the optics of decolonial feminist theory (link in the first comment).

06/27/2024

Soon in issue 1.2

04/25/2024

While more countries recognize the State of Palestine, PIR editor, Sonia Boulos, co-authored an article with Xavier Abu Eid, in which they analyze the importance of this development and explain the conditions under which this could lead to positive outcomes (link in first comment).

04/08/2024

New in Palestine/Israel Review: Walid Habbas explores the Palestinian economic agency in overcoming the post-2005 spatial restrictions imposed by the illegal Israeli occupation in the West Bank with the aim of controlling Palestinians and facilitating settler expansion. As a result, the routing of Palestinian commercial freight through the segregation wall has escalated logistics costs, while settlement expansion in Area C has further impeded mobility between Palestinian self-rule areas. Using data from observations, interviews, and documentary sources, the study focuses on Palestinian furniture exports to Israel. It examines how Palestinians have leveraged colonial spatial variations to their advantage by forming partnerships with Israelis to export products (link in first comment).

04/07/2024

Call for papers for a Palestine/Israel Review special issue on "Imagining Palestine-Israel."

Guest Editors: Maurice Ebileeni and Shachar Pinsker.
In thinking about Palestine-Israel, to imagine is both problematic and crucial insofar as imagination might offer different and new horizons and futures, or further preserve the political impasse as well as diverge from the atrocities of the present into even more dangerous territories (as recent events are rendering disturbingly visible). The land continues to be the locus for religious imagination for the various monotheistic religions while also presenting the stage for competing utopic/dystopic visions, bringing into collision the Zionist myth of “a land without a people” and the call for “the greater Israel” with the Palestinian call for a liberated nation “from the river to the sea.” Moreover, today’s increasingly polarizing effects of social media are fundamentally changing our capacity for imagination, significantly amplifying the violent nature of the Palestinian-Israeli deadlock over diligent attempts at critical and creative imagination.

This co-edited special issue of the open-access journal Palestine/Israel Review aims to identify and analyze different efforts at imagining Palestine-Israel in cultural texts across languages, borders, and genres. We invite scholars to contribute original articles that engage with different forms of texts and sources, from literary texts (poems, stories, novels, plays) to media (journalism, films, digital media, artworks etc.) by scholars from a variety of disciplines. Articles can be on topics such as diasporic and exilic imagination of territory, deterritorialization and time, utopian/dystopian/futuristic imaginings of homeland or alternative variations of homelands and homes, as well as of specific spaces and the role of memory and forgetfulness in Palestine-Israel. The scope of this special issue is global and encourages contributions that examine a range of literary and cultural products from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries in Hebrew and Arabic, as well as in a variety of other languages.

Please send a title, a 500 words abstract, and a short bio to Maurice Ebileeni ([email protected]) and Shachar Pinsker ([email protected]) by April 30, 2024.

More details: https://psupress.org/journals/jnls_PIR.html

03/30/2024

On March 30, Palestinians commemorate Land Day, a day that has become a symbol of the struggle of Palestinians against land dispossession and injustice. In his biography of Tawfiq Zayyad, Tamir Sorek, PIR's co-editor, talks about the role of Zayyad in the adoption of the historic decision of 1976 on the part of the Palestinian political leadership in Israel to organize a general strike against the government's plan to expropriate thousands of dunams of Palestinian lands. The marches that were organized in Arab towns were met by the violent response of the security forces, leading to the killing of six unarmed Palestinian citizens of Israel, the injury of tens of protestors, and the arrest of hundreds. Link in the comments

03/27/2024

New in Palestine/Israel Review: The ongoing erasure of urban landscape in the Gaza Strip has a broader historical context, which could be found in Tawfiq Da'adli's article, “Walking with Ghosts along the Bazaar: Urban Life in Ludd, Palestine, at the Turn of the 20th Century.” Da'adli reconstructs the urban fabric of three neighborhoods in the Palestinian town of Ludd. “The destruction of old Ludd left practically nothing on the surface,” he writes. “Whoever visits it today faces a void that does not bear witness to its recent past. Thus, a person born in Ludd, say in 1930, was exiled from it as a teenager and returned to visit after half a century, cannot reconcile Israeli Lod with their memories of old.” Da’adli takes the readers on a journey accompanied by ghosts from the past, assisting us to see beyond the visible contemporary “Israeli Lod.” (link in first comment).

03/21/2024

New in Palestine/Israel Review: Eyal Clyne and Assaf David question the ability of Israeli Middle East studies to “decolonize.” As critical attention to Western colonialism and imperialism has been growing in Middle East studies (MES) globally, the Israeli branch of the discipline often narrates itself as a critical ally, with some going as far as suggesting it is “decolonizing.” Against this view, Eyal Clyne and Assaf David argue that the field’s actions testify to the contrary. Selective adherence to “political neutrality,” coupled with the overwhelming underrepresentation of Palestinians, effectively safeguards the “unity” of the field’s various Zionist elements over the possibility of solidarity and action, which results in persistent avoidance of explicit, meaningful, and concrete anti-occupation and decolonization practices (Link in first comment).

03/21/2024

Sonia Boulos, Palestine/Israel Review co-editor, and Lior Sternfeld, PIR's associate editor, wrote for Informed Comment on the recent suspension of the Palestinian-Armenian professor, Nadera Shalhoub Kevorkian from her position at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The link is in the first comment.

03/19/2024

Palestine/Israel Review's co-editor Sonia Bolous published a review of Michael Karayanni's "A Multicultural Entrapment: Religion and State Among the Palestinian-Arabs in Israel" in the International Journal of Constitutional Law. Check it out here:

A Multicultural Entrapment: Religion and State Among the Palestinian-Arabs in Israel is a recent book by Michael Karayanni, the Bruce W. Wayne Professor of Inte

03/19/2024

A new Palestine/Israel Review article has been published. In her reflective essay, Dorit Naaman discusses the public walks that she had guided in Jerusalem’s southern neighborhoods. The walks were conducted during the research and production of the interactive documentary Jerusalem, We Are Here, which digitally reinscribes Palestinians into the neighborhoods from which they were expelled during the Nakba. The walks constituted a deliberate intervention into the ways mainstream guided walking tours participate in (and sometimes manufacture) Israeli dominant narratives about the politically contested space and troubled history of Jerusalem. In the article, she outlines and analyzes the strategies she used to disrupt Israeli denial of the Nakba and to encourage accountability for it (link in the first comment).

03/09/2024

A new Palestine/Israel Review article by Ella Shohat, in which she develops her evolving undermining of the axiomatic ontology of the “Judeo-Arabic language” as a cohesive unit separate from ­Arabic. In this article, Shohat highlights the historical role Zionist academic institutions played in shaping this axiomatic status. The split between the “Arab” and the “Jew” as mutually exclusive categories has been a product of the combined Zionist aspiration to Judaize and de-Arabize Palestine (link in first comment).

03/03/2024

Knowledge about Palestine/Israel has long been produced and recruited for multiple contradictory political struggles. The emergence of distinct, counterposed scholarly associations, centers, and publications for Palestine studies and Israel studies reflects a certain set of contemporary political logics and agendas. What is the meaning of this separation? What are its implications for our scholarly understanding of dynamics in Palestine/Israel? Could this separation be justified, and could we imagine an alternative way of organizing our knowledge?

Read the introduction to our first issue by Tamir Sorek and Honaida Ghanim.

https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/psup/pir/article/doi/10.5325/pir.1.1.0001/384939/Palestine-Israel-Review-Carving-Out-a-New