New Texts Out Now: Helga Tawil-Souri and Dina Matar, eds. Gaza as Metaphor

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Feb 6, 2017 Israel
New Texts Out Now: Helga Tawil-Souri and Dina Matar, eds. Gaza as Metaphor

New Texts Out Now: Helga Tawil-Souri and Dina Matar, eds. Gaza as Metaphor

By : Helga Tawil-Souri and Dina Matar

Helga Tawil-Souri and Dina Matar, editors. Gaza As Metaphor (London: Hurst, 2016). 

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Helga Tawil-Souri and Dina Matar (HTS and DM): During and in the immediate aftermath of the Israeli attacks against Gaza in July 2014, we shared a sense of anger and a responsibility to respond to the ways in which Gaza was a target of both military and representational violence. We were struck by the disconnect between how mainstream media, for example, talked about Gaza, that was generally ahistorical, and our own experiences and realities of Gaza. We were equally struck by how the word “Gaza” came to substitute for processes such as asymmetric warfare, poverty, neoliberalism, surveillance state, terror, resistance, and humanitarian crisis on the brink of collapse, among others. While some of these seemed resonant and others not, the discursive strategy of positing Gaza as synonymous to different processes distanced a grounded and historical understanding of Gaza even farther away. Not only was Gaza locked up behind walls and military force, but also behind misunderstanding and misrepresentation. As such, the project also grows out of a broader concern that we both share as media and cultural studies scholars interested in and worried about the representations – of Gaza, of Palestinians, of the Palestine-Israel conflict, the Middle East region, as well as other parts of the world – and how representations form, their connection to political and economic power interests, their ability to veil historical and personal processes, as well as their ability to mobilize to different ends.

We reached out to colleagues, some of whom we already knew, and some of whom we didn’t, and asked if they wanted to contribute to the book, trying to keep a balance between people situated in different fields and writing in different styles. We did to not want to limit what our contributors wanted to write about, asking them to think through a metaphor and its relationship to Gaza. They could think of a metaphor as an entry point to interrogate the realities of Gaza, to excavate, contextualize and make visible the effect of Israel’s settler colonial project, among other forces, on Gaza and its people. They could conversely ask what Gaza could tell us about meta-moments of history that continue to shape what it means to be Palestinian, or simply, to be a human. Our goal was to interject the realities of Gaza into various metaphors while also figuratively asserting the world into Gaza, and in the process, convey an understanding about the mechanics of the world and the practices of the people within it.

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?

HTS and DM: The book addresses a multiplicity of topics and literatures, reflecting the background and intellectual interests of the twenty-one individual authors. Written by variety of writers, scholars, journalists, and ordinary people, the essays are eclectic in style, some are reflexive and personal, others are interpretive and discursive, some draw on humor, others on historical and comparative analyses. What they collectively share is an inter-disciplinary approach to addressing how metaphor, as a discourse and an image, can either help us understand complex issues or close down interpretations and further understandings of these issues. But metaphor symbolizes something else in this case: the ways in which it can refocus attention to aspects of relational power.

This volume is in conversation with other works specifically about Gaza, such as Mohamed Omer’s on-the-ground analysis, Shell Shocked: On the Ground Under Israel’s Gaza Assault (Haymarket Books, 2015), as well as journalistic and scholarly books such as Gideon Levy’s The Punishment of Gaza (2010), Ilan Pappe and Noam Chomsky, Gaza in Crisis (Haymarket, 2010/2013), and Sara Roy’s Failing Peace (Pluto, 2006). The book is also similar in scope to other edited volumes bringing together different voices analyzing the Palestinian predicament. Given the broad range of contributors, it should come as no surprise that some essays are located in specific academic fields such as anthropology, history, psychiatry, media and cultural studies, law, and literature. The topics thus range in scope as well: the ongoing effects of the Nakba, the political and spatial formation of “the strip” which was not a historically natural entity, everyday survival strategies, Gaza’s misrepresentations, the need to draw on anticolonial literature and redefine solidarity strategies, the limits of speaking about Gaza as a humanitarian disaster rather than an outcome of Zionist strategies of control, living through the 2014 military campaign, as well as love and children.

J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

DM: This work connects to my previous work on Palestine, most specifically, on narrative, politics and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and more broadly, to my interest in the role of narrative in helping us understand the world or in restricting our understanding the world. My interest in narrative began with the oral history project, which ended with the book What it Means to be Palestinian: Stories of Palestinian Peoplehood (2010) and continued with an edited collection titled Narrating Conflict in the Middle East (2013). However, the volume as a whole addresses areas of study well beyond the inter-disciplinary field of media and cultural studies.

HTS: Editing this volume on Gaza is a natural extension of my academic work on media, technology, infrastructure and territory in Gaza specifically and more broadly across the Palestinian context. But the project departs from what I have usually done for a number of reasons: to begin with it is a collaborative effort to bring together a range of voices on Gaza touching on areas beyond my or Dina’s areas of expertise – for example psychiatry, literature, and history. Second, it is written and edited with a non-academic audience in mind; and third, it is concerned as much with a grounded understanding of Gaza as it is with its representations. 

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

HTS and DM: We hope that students, scholars, journalists, politicians and human rights activists and agencies who are all interested in Gaza, in Israel/Palestine, in the Middle East, but also in the wider context of dispossession and survival, do read this book. We would like it to open peoples’ minds to the different ways in which power asserts itself, most noticeably and powerfully in metaphor. In explaining the diversity of metaphors used to talk about Gaza and Palestine in general, we hope to provide a larger, more contextualized, understanding of how Gaza, as a real and imagined spatiality, came to be discussed and understood. At the same time, we hope that readers will begin to see Gaza not as a far-away, exceptional place, but in connection to the workings of occupation, colonialism, resistance, and to questions specific to Palestine as well as pertinent the world over about refugees, the limits of humanitarianism, urban warfare, technologies of surveillance, and various ways in which inequalities are imposed and lived with.

J: What other projects are you working on now?

HTS: I’m finishing up some articles: a creative solution to the limitations imposed on Gaza’s telecommunications and internet infrastructure; the relationship between Israel’s territorial fragmentation of Palestine and Palestinians’ experiences of time, and how technologies of mapping re-imagine “Palestine” in ironically narrow ways. When done with those I plan to finish my book on digital infrastructure controls and borders in Israel/Palestine, before moving on to a long-term project about turnstiles – yes, those things we go through in subways and stadiums but also at checkpoints, prisons, and international borders. 

DM: I have just published a book chapter on narrative and agency with reference to the Syrian uprising and the use of digital platforms and finished an article on the PLO’s aesthetics of liberation through art and cultural production between 1968 and 1974, and working on a number of articles on communication, politics and conflict as well as on the dynamics of narrative and power relations in the context of Palestine/Israel conflict from the perspective of the Palestinians. I then will move on to a long-term project putting together a cultural history of the PLO between 1968 and 1993. 

Excerpts from Introduction:

No matter when, where, and to whom the word is uttered, ‘Gaza’ immediately evokes a plethora of metaphors: Open-air prison, Terror, Resistance, Poverty, Occupation, Siege, Trauma, Bare humanity. Conversely, a plethora of terms also invoke Gaza: Crisis, Grief, Exception, Refugees, Nationalism, Destitution, Tunnels, Ruin, Persistence. 

Metaphors pervade our lives and our thinking. They turn up everywhere, in stories, plays, films, news, politics and everyday life. Metaphors are figures of speech, sometimes standing for something abstract. A metaphor can serve as a symbol, a parallel, a relationship, a connection, an example. It helps us make sense of the unfamiliar and transfer meaning from what is a complex phenomenon to something more easily understood, or vice versa. A metaphor is also a question of distance, identifying something as being the same as some unrelated thing, perhaps for rhetorical effect, or for making clear a sense of continuity or proximity.

Gaza increasingly seems to also stand at a distance, territorially sealed, subsisting in conditions hard to comprehend, politically marginalized, subjected to ongoing forms of violence, segregated behind stereotypes and misunderstandings.

As Gaza becomes increasingly physically inaccessible, perhaps the easiest way to bring it closer – to grasp it, to humanize it, maybe even to change it – is through metaphors. Equally, the more life becomes unsustainable from within Gaza, the easier it becomes to think of it as a metaphor as well. As one author writes, while inside his house under the non-stop barrage of drone, warship, tank and F16 bombings in the midst of the Summer 2014 Israeli war: “[You] presume […] to be a microcosm of the trembling, boiling world outside.”[i]

……

Gaza – the city and the Strip – today is hermetically-sealed: the flow of people, goods, as well as medicines, fuel, and electricity is tightly controlled by Israel, all the while subjected to various forms of military and political violence. As any other place, Gaza’s changes are dynamic. But the conditions imposed on the territory and the people that live in it, are man-made.

         By thinking of Gaza through an allegory or a comparison, a metaphor can help bring Gaza’s lived reality closer into focus. Gaza is described along a spectrum of increasingly worsening conditions, from Israel’s backyard as a cheap labor pool and captive market to an open-air prison. However, as Ariella Azoulay explains in this volume there was no original crime committed by Palestinians when they were first corralled and locked-up in what became the Gaza Strip in order for the metaphor of a penitentiary to hold – although it is the term that the Israeli military has officially ascribed to the Gaza Strip since 2005. Or, as Darryl Li writes in this volume, Gaza has not only become “a space in which the ‘pure’ conditions of laboratory experimentation are best approximated,” but has also been transformed into a zoo. Said Shehadeh pushes the metaphor further as he expounds on the psychological impacts of the latest war: Gaza is not a zoo but a torture chamber. Glenn Bowman turns to bodily metaphors of disease to posit Gaza as a “cyst” which is quarantined into a life constantly exposed to death. Although they may focus our attention invariably on territorial, political, or psychological factors, these metaphors address the qualitative shift of Israeli policies and levels of violence since the mid-2000s. This beckons a question: Can Gaza keep being (re)produced and squeezed as something beyond, worse than what it already is? In fact, as the contributors who speak to the Palestinian – and originally Gazan – form of resistance, sumud, highlight, both the metaphors of prisons and torture chambers have historical purchase. However, as Sherene Seikaly and Haidar Eid note, also in this volume, Gazans’ original sin were to be born Palestinian, and over the years, to refuse, as would anyone, to be colonized, subjugated, and humiliated.

……

Despite the 2005 disengagement, Israel maintains direct control over Gaza. Israel continues to control Gaza’s air and maritime space, six of the seven land crossings (the seventh, along the border with Egypt, is the only one Palestinians are permitted to use, and is rarely open), and control the flow of trade, water, electricity, monetary currency, communication networks, identity cards and permits, medicine, building materials, and so much more. Israel continues to occupy Gaza through on-the-ground military incursions and through its technologies that seal Gaza: unmanned aerial drones, CCTV cameras, remote-controlled bulldozers and boats, F-16s and Apache helicopters constantly buzzing overhead, and, not only during times of heightened violence or explicit warfare. The limits and stunted mobility of Gaza are actively produced by Israel. Gaza is sealed with a buffer zone manned by military sensors, remote-controlled cameras mounted with made-to-kill artillery, and padded with electrified fences and concrete walls, created and enforced and expanded by the Israeli military, stretching as much as 3 kilometers into the Gaza Strip in certain areas, and encompassing, in total, 44% of Gaza’s entire land mass. Gaza is continuously and violently rendered smaller -- not only because one can’t get out, but because there is less and less space on the inside. But small here is not just a size, it is a condition. As Ilana Feldman writes in this volume, restrictions on Palestinian movement that have isolated the inhabitants of Gaza from the rest of the world, impeding their ability to live full lives, impairing the Palestinian political community, increasing distance, distrust, and ultimately division between the West Bank and Gaza (let alone the rest of Palestinians in Israel and beyond) are just part and parcel of the process of isolation that began with the creation of the “Strip” in 1948.

Concomitant to territorial, aerial, and maritime enclosure is the range of socio-economic and psychological impacts of the process of rendering Gaza isolated, impoverished, marginalized, always on the edge of collapse. As many of the contributors contend, this is not Gaza’s “natural” condition, nor a result of an abstract humanitarian crisis, but of policies practiced for decades to render Gaza marginal, to render its inhabitants, in the words of Haidar Eid, “unwanted Palestinians.” As importantly, each violent outburst on the part of the Israeli military is a moment in a much longer trajectory of colonialism and occupation. There is no doubt that Israel plays the lead role here, but by no means are others immune from blame, critique, and responsibility, both inside and outside the Palestinian nation: Egypt of course, but all other neighboring and regional countries, the entire international community of states and institutions, Palestinian elites, and, more recently, the Palestinian Authority.

………

If Gaza seems awash in apocalyptic metaphors, it is also, resolutely, a site of life and resistance. In the contributions by Helga Tawil-Souri, Khaled Hroub, and Selma Dabbagh, for example, the largesse of Gazan life is highlighted, focusing our eyes on Gaza as a site brimming with life and an insatiable will to survive, and even find new love. It is also a place where resistance to power and to processes of exclusion comes in different cultural forms, such as poetry, fiction, images and new historical critiques as Atef Alshaer, Dina Matar and Ilan Pappe write in this volume.

Discursive tools are, too, employed to keep a distance from understanding and unearthing this history. Metaphors, such as Gaza’s perpetual vulnerability, destitution, its need for the “drip-feed” of international aid and the “benevolence” of Arab states has also come to define Gaza, as have processes of structural and discursive externalization through which its Palestinian inhabitants have come to be treated as the Palestinian “other,” and through which it is seen as a negative space, or as a special kind of place that is, in essence, a problem.

Gaza has always been and remains a problem for Israel; as Tawil-Souri, Azoulay, Li, Bowman, and others write in this collection, Gaza will remain a “menace” to Israel, a blemish on its image, an eyesore it cannot keep hiding from the world – or, to turn an earlier metaphor on its head, it is that there are and continue to be Palestinians refugees (and so many of them) that remains evidence of a crime. Of course this menace is not simply one that arises out of the threat of Hamas rocket fire into Israeli areas, for example, which is the excuse Israel has been using more recently to justify its repeated violence and incursions. As is argued through the volume, Israel has used various forms of justification to isolate and quell Gaza for decades, all of which have had to do with, ultimately, preventing Palestinians from returning to their original homes, keeping them fragmented, in the hope that these processes would thwart – and eventually completely quell – the desire for return, liberation, or, quite simply, freedom. 

The history of Gaza’s resistance to occupation is well known and rehearsed in some of the essays in this volume. Gaza is the place from which the first Palestinian guerrilla operation inside Israel was mounted in 1955, resulting in an Israeli reprisal raid against an Egyptian military barracks north of Gaza City. From Gaza, too, came some of the key leaders of Fatah, the dominant faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Gaza is also the place from which the first Palestinian intifada of 1987 began and where Hamas and other Islamist factions first took root. In Gaza, as Atef Alshaer, Nimer Sultany, Ramzy Baroud and other writers in this volume attest to, resistance is a historical inevitability, an existential necessity. The everyday actions and practices to resist and exist have also come to define Gaza’s relationship with Israel, as Li, Matar, Shehadeh, Alshaer and others in this volume demonstrate, as has, of course, Israel’s violence against it.

[Excerpted from Gaza as Metaphor, edited by Helga Tawil-Souri and Dina Matar, by permission of the authors.]


[i] Atef Abu Saif, The Drone Eats With Me: Diaries from a City Under Fire. Comma Press, 2015, p. 45. 
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Oct 16, 2016 Lebanon
Mandy Turner By :
Mandy Turner

New Texts Out Now: Mandy Turner and Cherine Hussein, guest eds. "Israel-Palestine after Oslo: Mapping Transformations in a Time of Deepening Crisis." Special Issue of Conflict, Security & Development

Conflict, Security and Development, Volume 15, No. 5 (December 2015) Special issue: "Israel-Palestine after Oslo: Mapping Transformations in a Time of Deepening Crisis," Guest Editors: Mandy Turner and Cherine Hussein.

Jadaliyya (J): What made you compile this volume?

Mandy Turner (MT): Both the peace process and the two-state solution are dead. Despite more than twenty years of negotiations, Israel’s occupation, colonization and repression continue–and the political and geographical fragmentation of the Palestinian people is proceeding apace.

This is not news, nor is it surprising to any keen observer of the situation. But what is surprising–and thus requires explanation – is the resilience of the Oslo framework and paradigm: both objectively and subjectively. It operates objectively as a straitjacket by trapping Palestinians in economic and security arrangements that are designed to ensure stabilization and will not to lead to sovereignty or a just and sustainable solution. And it operates subjectively as a straitjacket by shutting out discussion of alternative ways of understanding the situation and ways out of the impasse. The persistence of this framework that is focused on conflict management and stabilization, is good for Israel but bad for Palestinians.

The Oslo peace paradigm–of a track-one, elite-level, negotiated two-state solution–is therefore in crisis. And yet it is entirely possible that the current situation could continue for a while longer–particularly given the endorsement and support it enjoys from the major Western donors and the “international community,” as well as the fact that there has been no attempt to develop an alternative. The immediate short-term future is therefore bleak.

Guided by these observations, this special issue sought to undertake two tasks. The first task was to analyze the perceptions underpinning the Oslo framework and paradigm as well as some of the transformations instituted by its implementation: why is it so resilient, what has it created? The second task, which follows on from the first, was then to ask: how can we reframe our understanding of what is happening, what are some potential alternatives, and who is arguing and mobilizing for them?

These questions and themes grew out of a number of conversations with early-career scholars – some based at the Kenyon Institute in East Jerusalem, and some based in the occupied Palestinian territory and elsewhere. These conversations led to two interlinked panels at the International Studies Association annual convention in Toronto, Canada, in March 2014. To have two panels accepted on “conflict transformation and resistance in Palestine” at such a conventional international relations conference with (at the time unknown) early-career scholars is no mean feat. The large and engaged audience we received at these panels – with some very established names coming along (one of whom contributed to this special issue) – convinced us that this new stream of scholars and scholarship should have an outlet.  

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures do the articles address?

MT: The first half of the special issue analyzes how certain problematic assumptions shaped the Oslo framework, and how the Oslo framework in turn shaped the political, economic and territorial landscape.

Virginia Tilley’s article focuses on the paradigm of conflict resolution upon which the Oslo Accords were based, and calls for a re-evaluation of what she argues are the two interlinked central principles underpinning its worldview: internationally accepted notions of Israeli sovereignty; and the internationally accepted idea that the “conflict” is essentially one between two peoples–the “Palestinian people” and the “Jewish people”. Through her critical interrogation of these two “common sense” principles, Tilley proposes that the “conflict” be reinterpreted as an example of settler colonialism, and, as a result of this, recommends an alternative conflict resolution model based on a paradigm shift away from an ethno-nationalist division of the polity towards a civic model of the nation.

Tariq Dana unpacks another central plank of the Oslo paradigm–that of promoting economic relations between Israel and the OPT. He analyses this through the prism of “economic peace” (particularly the recent revival of theories of “capitalist peace”), whose underlying assumptions are predicated on the perceived superiority of economic approaches over political approaches to resolving conflict. Dana argues that there is a symbiosis between Israeli strategies of “economic peace” and recent Palestinian “statebuilding strategies” (referred to as Fayyadism), and that both operate as a form of pacification and control because economic cooperation leaves the colonial relationship unchallenged.

The political landscape in the OPT has been transformed by the Oslo paradigm, particularly by the creation of the Palestinian Authority (PA). Alaa Tartir therefore analyses the basis, agenda and trajectory of the PA, particularly its post-2007 state building strategy. By focusing on the issue of local legitimacy and accountability, and based on fieldwork in two sites in the occupied West Bank (Balata and Jenin refugee camps), Tartir concludes that the main impact of the creation of the PA on ordinary people’s lives has been the strengthening of authoritarian control and the hijacking of any meaningful visions of Palestinian liberation.

The origin of the administrative division between the West Bank and Gaza Strip is the focus of Tareq Baconi’s article. He charts how Hamas’s initial opposition to the Oslo Accords and the PA was transformed over time, leading to its participation (and success) in the 2006 legislative elections. Baconi argues that it was the perceived demise of the peace process following the collapse of the Camp David discussions that facilitated this change. But this set Hamas on a collision course with Israel and the international community, which ultimately led to the conflict between Hamas and Fateh, and the administrative division, which continues to exist.

The special issue thereafter focuses, in the second section, on alternatives and resistance to Oslo’s transformations.

Cherine Hussein’s article charts the re-emergence of the single-state idea in opposition to the processes of separation unleashed ideologically and practically that were codified in the Oslo Accords. Analysing it as both a movement of resistance and as a political alternative to Oslo, while recognizing that it is currently largely a movement of intellectuals (particularly of diaspora Palestinians and Israelis), Hussein takes seriously its claim to be a more just and liberating alternative to the two-state solution.

My article highlights the work of a small but dedicated group of anti-Zionist Jewish-Israeli activists involved in two groups: Zochrot and Boycott from Within. Both groups emerged in the post-Second Intifada period, which was marked by deep disillusionment with the Oslo paradigm. This article unpacks the alternative – albeit marginalized – analysis, solution and route to peace proposed by these groups through the application of three concepts: hegemony, counter-hegemony and praxis. The solution, argue the activists, lies in Israel-Palestine going through a process of de-Zionization and decolonization, and the process of achieving this lies in actions in solidarity with Palestinians.

This type of solidarity action is the focus of the final article by Suzanne Morrison, who analyses the “We Divest” campaign, which is the largest divestment campaign in the US and forms part of the wider Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Through attention to their activities and language, Morrison shows how “We Divest”, with its networked, decentralized, grassroots and horizontal structure, represents a new way of challenging Israel’s occupation and the suppression of Palestinian rights.

The two parts of the special issue are symbiotic: the critique and alternative perspectives analyzed in part two are responses to the issues and problems identified in part one.

J: How does this volume connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

MT: My work focuses on the political economy of donor intervention (which falls under the rubric of “peacebuilding”) in the OPT, particularly a critique of the Oslo peace paradigm and framework. This is a product of my broader conceptual and historical interest in the sociology of intervention as a method of capitalist expansion and imperial control (as explored in “The Politics of International Intervention: the Tyranny of Peace”, co-edited with Florian Kuhn, Routledge, 2016), and how post-conflict peacebuilding and development agendas are part of this (as explored in “Whose Peace: Critical Perspectives on the Political Economy of Peacebuilding”, co-edited with Michael Pugh and Neil Cooper (PalgraveMacmillan, 2008).  

My first book on Palestine (co-edited with Omar Shweiki), Decolonizing Palestinian Political Economy: De-development and Beyond (PalgraveMacmillan, 2014), was a collection of essays by experts in their field, of the political-economic experience of different sections of the Palestinian community. The book, however, aimed to reunite these individual experiences into one historical political-economy narrative of a people experiencing a common theme of dispossession, disenfranchisement and disarticulation. It was guided by the desire to critically assess the utility of the concept of de-development to different sectors and issues–and had a foreword by Sara Roy, the scholar who coined the term, and who was involved in the workshop from which the book emerged.

This co-edited special issue (with Cherine Hussein, who, at the time of the issue construction, was the deputy director of the Kenyon Institute) was therefore the next logical step in my research on Palestine, although my article on Jewish-Israeli anti-Zionists did constitute a slight departure from my usual focus.

J: Who do you hope will read this volume, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

MT: I would imagine the main audience will be those whose research and political interests lie in Palestine Studies. It is difficult, given the structure of academic publishing – which has become ever more corporate and money grabbing – for research outputs such as this to be accessed by the general public. Only those with access to academic libraries are sure to be able to read it – and this is a travesty, in my opinion. To counteract this commodification of knowledge, we should all provide free access to our outputs through online open source websites such as academia.edu, etc. If academic research is going to have an impact beyond merely providing more material for teaching and background reading for yet more research (which is inaccessible to the general public) then this is essential. Websites such as Jadaliyya are therefore incredibly important.

Having said all that, I am under no illusions about the potential for ANY research on Israel-Palestine to contribute to changing the dynamics of the situation. However, as a collection of excellent analyses conducted by mostly early-career scholars in the field of Palestine studies, I am hopeful that their interesting and new perspectives will be read and digested. 

J: What other projects are you working on now?

MT: I am currently working on an edited volume provisionally entitled From the River to the Sea: Disintegration, Reintegration and Domination in Israel and Palestine. This book is the culmination of a two-year research project funded by the British Academy, which analyzed the impacts of the past twenty years of the Oslo peace framework and paradigm as processes of disintegration, reintegration and domination – and how they have created a new socio-economic and political landscape, which requires new agendas and frameworks. I am also working on a new research project with Tariq Dana at Birzeit University on capital and class in the occupied West Bank.

Excerpt from the Editor’s Note 

[Note: This issue was published in Dec. 2015]

Initially perceived to have inaugurated a new era of hope in the search for peace and justice in Palestine-Israel, the Oslo peace paradigm of a track one, elite-level, negotiated two-state solution is in crisis today, if not completely at an end.

While the major Western donors and the ‘international community’ continue to publicly endorse the Oslo peace paradigm, Israeli and Palestinian political elites have both stepped away from it. The Israeli government has adopted what appears to be an outright rejection of the internationally-accepted end-goal of negotiations, i.e. the emergence of a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital. In March 2015, in the final days of his re-election campaign, Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, visited the Jewish settlement of Har Homa in Palestinian East Jerusalem, which is regarded as illegal under international law. Reminding its inhabitants that it was him and his Likud government that had established the settlement in 1997 as part of the Israeli state’s vision of a unified indivisible Jerusalem, he promised to expand the construction of settlements in East Jerusalem if re-elected. And in an interview with Israeli news site, NRG, Netanyahu vowed that the prospects of a Palestinian state were non-existent as long as he remained in office. Holding on to the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt), he argued, was necessary to ensure Israel’s security in the context of regional instability and Islamic extremism. It is widely acknowledged that Netanyahu’s emphasis on Israel’s security—against both external and internal enemies—gave him a surprise win in an election he was widely expected to lose.

Despite attempts to backtrack under recognition that the US and European states are critical of this turn in official Israeli state policy, Netanyahu’s promise to bury the two-state solution in favour of a policy of further annexation has become the Israeli government’s official intent, and has been enthusiastically endorsed by leading ministers and key advisers.

[…]

The Palestinian Authority (PA) based in the West Bank also appears to have rejected a key principle of the Oslo peace paradigm—that of bilateral negotiations under the supervision of the US. Despite a herculean effort by US Secretary of State, John Kerry, to bring the two parties to the negotiating table, in response to the lack of movement towards final status issues and continued settlement expansion (amongst other issues), the Palestinian political elite have withdrawn from negotiations and resumed attempts to ‘internationalise the struggle’ by seeking membership of international organisations such as the United Nations (UN), and signing international treaties such as the Rome Statute, the founding treaty of the International Criminal Court. This change of direction is part of a rethink in the PA and PLO’s strategy rooted in wider discussions and debates. The publication of a document by the Palestine Strategy Study Group (PSSG) in August 2008, the production of which involved many members of the Palestinian political elite (and whose recommendations were studiously discussed at the highest levels of the PA and PLO), showed widespread discontent with the bilateral negotiations framework and suggested ways in which Palestinians could ‘regain the initiative’.

[…]

And yet despite these changes in official Palestinian and Israeli political strategies that signal a deepening of the crisis, donors and the ‘international community’ are reluctant to accept the failure of the Oslo peace paradigm. This political myopia has meant the persistence of a framework that is increasingly divorced from the possibility of a just and sustainable peace. It is also acting as an ideological straitjacket by shutting out alternative interpretations. This special issue seeks a way out of this political and intellectual dead end. In pursuit of this, our various contributions undertake what we regard to be two key tasks: first, to critically analyse the perceptions underpinning the Oslo paradigm and the transformations instituted by its implementation; and second, to assess some alternative ways of understanding the situation rooted in new strategies of resistance that have emerged in the context of these transformations in the post-Oslo landscape.

[…]

Taken as a whole, the articles in this special issue aim to ignite conversations on the conflict that are not based within abstracted debates that centre upon the peace process itself—but that begin from within the realities and geographies of both the continually transforming land of Palestine-Israel and the voices, struggles, worldviews and imaginings of the future of the people who presently inhabit it. For it is by highlighting these transformations, and from within these points of beginning, that we believe more hopeful pathways for alternative ways forward can be collectively imagined, articulated, debated and built.