Jane Hathaway, The Chief Eunuch of the Ottoman Harem: From African Slave to Power-Broker (New Texts Out Now)

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Oct 3, 2018 Region
Jane Hathaway, The Chief Eunuch of the Ottoman Harem: From African Slave to Power-Broker (New Texts Out Now)

Jane Hathaway, The Chief Eunuch of the Ottoman Harem: From African Slave to Power-Broker (New Texts Out Now)

By : Jane Hathaway

Jane Hathaway, The Chief Eunuch of the Ottoman Harem: From African Slave to Power-Broker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 

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

Jane Hathaway (JH): The inspiration for this book goes back to my dissertation research some thirty years ago. In those days, I was investigating administrative households in Egypt during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I spent a great deal of time reading mühimmes, i.e., copies of sultanic orders, in this case addressed to the governor and/or chief judge of Ottoman Egypt and other key officials in Egypt. To me it seemed that every other mühimme began, “The Ağa-yı Darüssaade [“Agha of the Abode of Felicity”] has submitted a petition to my imperial threshold.” I had no idea who this personage was. When I learned that this was the Chief Harem Eunuch, I was amazed that he knew exactly what was occurring in Egypt, and who the chief political and economic actors were. Ultimately, I included a chapter on the Chief Eunuch’s influence in Egypt in my first book, which was a substantially revised version of my dissertation. At the time, I decided that one day, I would write an entire book on the Chief Eunuch. However, other projects and issues intervened, and I am only now publishing the promised book.
My book attempts to integrate the “palace” part of the Chief Harem Eunuch’s career with the wider range of his influence and interactions.

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

JH: This is the first book-length study of the development of the office of Chief Harem Eunuch from its inception in the late sixteenth century through the Young Turk Revolution and the deposition of Sultan Abdülhamid II (r. 1876-1909), which brought the harem institution to an end. I try to demonstrate that the development of the office of Chief Eunuch paralleled the trajectory of the Ottoman Empire as a whole during this period. A key point is that the Chief Eunuch’s career was not limited to the palace or, indeed, to the imperial capital but extended throughout the entire empire. This circumstance resulted from the Chief Eunuch’s supervision of the imperial pious foundations for the Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina, which derived income and grain from endowed lands and properties throughout the empire. The office of Chief Harem Eunuch was officially created in 1588, when the sultan appointed the acting head of the harem eunuchs to this position.

At just this time, however, the empire was entering a dynastic crisis that dramatically increased the Chief Eunuch’s influence within the palace. In the early seventeenth century, a series of underaged sultans took the throne and died early, leaving no heirs or only young children. In this atmosphere, the harem, where underaged princes were raised, became a key locus of political authority, and the Chief Harem Eunuch, along with the sultan’s mother, became a force shaping imperial policy. The Chief Eunuch was also embroiled in the frequently ugly and violent struggles among competing palace factions rooted in the harem.

Things stabilized in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, as the empire emerged from the crisis and the Ottoman economy began to grow again. During this period, the Chief Harem Eunuch supported commercial relations with western Europe, above all France, and sponsored the expansion of the imperial capital and court consumption of European luxury goods. By the mid-eighteenth century, however, the Ottoman grand vizier and the bureaucrats around him were becoming increasingly professionalized and, in that capacity, presented a growing challenge to the Chief Harem Eunuch and similar palace officials whose duties were not so rigidly defined by their positions.

The westernizing reforms of the nineteenth century represented a turning point for the Chief Harem Eunuch, as they did for the entire empire. As a result of these reforms, the imperial pious foundations for Mecca and Medina were “modernized” into a Ministry of Pious Endowments, and the Chief Eunuch’s supervision of the endowments was abolished. Henceforth his influence was largely restricted to the harem. With the deposition of Abdülhamid II in 1909 and the dismantling of the harem, the institution of the Chief Harem Eunuch came to an end.

My book attempts to integrate the “palace” part of the Chief Harem Eunuch’s career with the wider range of his influence and interactions. One chapter explores his connections to Egypt, which informed his entire life and career. Another seeks to explain why the overwhelming majority of harem eunuchs came from East Africa by exploring the East African slave trade and East Africa’s relations with the Muslim world more broadly, from antiquity through the Ottoman expansion into the region. In this context, the details of the eunuchs’ enslavement and castration receive due attention. One of the final chapters broaches the subject of the Chief Eunuch’s self-fashioning as reflected in miniature paintings and in tombstone placement and inscriptions.

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

JH: As implied in my answer to the first question, the project derives, in some respects, from my earlier scholarship on Ottoman Egypt. The focus on the Ottoman palace, particularly in the book’s middle chapters, is, however, entirely new, as is the investigation of the harem eunuchs’ connections to East Africa. Chapter ten, focusing on the nineteenth-century reforms and the empire’s twilight, drew me decidedly out of my comfort zone. Likewise the emphasis on visual sources in Chapter eleven, “Memorializing the Chief Harem Eunuch,” is something of a departure, even though I have emphasized images and symbols in an earlier book on factionalism in Ottoman Egypt and Yemen.

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

JH: To be perfectly honest, I dare to hope that this book will become the definitive study of the Ottoman Chief Harem Eunuch. I hope, of course, that students and scholars of the Ottoman Empire will read it, but I also hope that it will be of some use to scholars of other Muslim empires and of non-Muslim empires that employed eunuchs. I would also like to believe that this book has something, however minute, to say to scholars of Africa, of comparative slavery, and of gender. Finally, I would be very pleased if the occasional non-academic finds it interesting.

J: What other projects are you working on now?

JH: I am preparing the second edition of The Arab Lands under Ottoman Rule, 1516-1800. The first edition was published by Pearson/Longman in 2008; the second edition will be published by Routledge.

For my next major research project, I plan to return to the Cairo Geniza, the massive collection of documents related to Cairo’s Jewish population over numerous centuries. I worked on the medieval Geniza very briefly at the beginning of my Ph.D. studies. While the focus of most Geniza research is the documents from the tenth through the thirteenth centuries, the not insignificant materials from the Ottoman period have remained virtually unstudied. This will be a return not only to the Geniza but to the kind of social history in which I was trained as an M.A. student many years ago.

J: Why should general readers care about eunuchs?

JH: Today, most people think of eunuch-ism as a wildly outlandish and even barbaric institution.  Castration, they believe, must have been a dastardly punishment for which the victims ceaselessly sought revenge. Yet from at least the tenth century B.C.E. until some 300 years ago, the eunuch institution was ubiquitous in much of the Old World outside western Europe. Many of these regions belonged to empires whose absolute rulers were strictly secluded from the mass of their subjects.  Under these circumstances, eunuchs were the ideal servants of the ruler’s inner sanctum:  enslaved and removed from their home territories and (at least in the case of East Africans) from their families of origin, and unable to produce offspring, they had no “grass roots” ties that would dilute their loyalty to the rulers and dynasties who employed them. Castration, in this context, functioned as the pre- or early-modern equivalent of a security clearance. Operating around the margins of the major institutions of absolute empires, eunuchs made it possible for these institutions, and more broadly for the empires of which they were a part, to function. In sum, they were an important part of human history.

 

Excerpt from the Book:

Chapter 12: Conclusion (pp. 276-279):

What allowed the Chief Harem Eunuch to exert such a degree of influence over the 252 years between 1574 and 1826?  The critical factor was the essential role that he played in dynastic reproduction in an era when Ottoman princes were borne by concubines and raised in the harem.   Generally speaking, in absolutist empires such as the Ottoman, Mughal, Ming, and Qing, the harem or inner sanctum was the site of dynastic reproduction, where the emperor’s wives and/or concubines bore and reared the successors to the throne.  The Chief Eunuch was an integral part of this process because of his status as the quintessential guardian, remarked at the end of the last chapter.  His was a “life in-between,” literally marginal, policing the boundary that separated the harem from male-gendered spaces even as he policed the sexuality of its inhabitants.

It was this liminality that enabled him to perform this function.  His inability to procreate, combined with what we might call his permanent state of pre-pubescence and the “otherness” of his color and geographical origins, removed any threat he might have posed to the space occupied by imperial women and children.  At the same time, his outwardly male gender enabled him to function in the space inhabited by the sultan and his pages, on the one hand, and the grand vizier and his bureaucrats, on the other.  His could thus mediate among all these spaces while never belonging to any of them. 

Thus empowered, the Chief Eunuch helped to reproduce the Ottoman dynasty literally by guiding concubines, often selected by the sultan’s mother, to the sultan’s bedchamber.  Perhaps more importantly, though, he aided dynastic reproduction figuratively by overseeing the princes’ education, on the one hand, and by aiding the sultan’s mother, grandmother, or favorite concubine in her political struggles, on the other – whether with other harem residents, with the sultan and his pages, or with the grand vizier. 

But this concern for reproduction and generational continuity extended far beyond the palace harem.  Through the various educational institutions that he founded throughout the empire by means of pious endowments – Qur’an schools, madrasas, schools for the study of hadith – the Chief Eunuch achieved intellectual and religious reproduction by shaping a new generation of Sunni Muslims.  In eunuch-founded Qur’an schools, these newly-educated young Muslims were usually orphans, meaning that the Chief Eunuch really did help to give definitive confessional shape to a mass of unformed human raw material.  These institutions by at least the early eighteenth century came to stress indoctrination into the Hanafi legal rite, which had become a key marker of Ottoman confessionalization.  This was in line with a hardening of attitudes toward the Twelver Shi‘ite Safavid dynasty and its self-proclaimed savior, Nadir Shah, in Iran and with a desire to emphasize the Hanafism of the imperial court against that of provincial notables.  Through these endowments, then, the Chief Eunuch’s doctrinal and intellectual goals meshed with his provincial and foreign policy aims.

The Chief Eunuch’s concern with ensuring generational continuity applied not simply to the Ottoman dynasty nor even to the Sunni Muslim community at large, but to the community of harem eunuchs, as well.  An astute Chief Harem Eunuch cultivated protégés among the younger “generation” of eunuchs.  He was in a position to promote their careers and, through canny use of vakıf [pious endowments] and networks of clients in places such as Cairo, to pass along houses, books, and even commercial enterprises.  In this way, the Chief Harem Eunuch helped to reproduce the harem eunuch establishment, too.

For most of its history, the office of Chief Harem Eunuch was linked to supervision of the Evkafü’l-Haremeyn [the pious foundations serving Mecca and Medina].  These foundations enabled the Chief Eunuch to make major contributions to the Ottoman Empire’s urban infrastructure, some of which are still apparent today.  These infrastructural projects in turn served as vehicles for the Chief Harem Eunuch’s religious, educational, and economic influence. 

Physical infrastructure in numerous Ottoman cities and along the pilgrimage route was transformed by the Chief Harem Eunuch’s endowments.  We can probably say that the early seventeenth-century Chief Eunuchs Osman Agha and el-Hajj Mustafa Agha, with the substantial help of the agent (vekil) Davud Agha, transformed Cairo, making it more of a hub for regional and international commerce than it had ever been before.  The very first Chief Eunuch, Habeshi Mehmed Agha, created the city of Ismail Geçidi (today Izmail) in the Danube delta in what is now Ukraine; his infrastructural projects were reinforced in the early eighteenth century by el-Hajj Beshir Agha.  And el-Hajj Beshir himself established commercial infrastructure throughout the Ottoman Empire’s territories, from Cairo to Svishtov in Bulgaria, from Chios to Aleppo. 

Commercial infrastructure was inseparable from religious and educational infrastructure, in no small part because of the way that the Muslim pious endowment (vakıf) expressed itself physically:  a mosque or madrasa, for example, would usually adjoin the shops, bazaar, or bath that provided its revenue, so that founding a major vakıf often resulted in a whole new urban neighborhood or, in the case of a rural area, a whole new village.  In every province of the empire, Chief Harem Eunuchs founded dozens of mosques, madrasas, Qur’an schools…, Sufi lodges, public fountains, libraries, and religious complexes combining all these elements.  Their effect on the empire’s urban infrastructure is thus incalculable, but so, too, is their effect on religious education and practice.  As we have seen, the stipulations of el-Hajj Beshir Agha’s many foundations in particular provided education in the Hanafi legal rite of Sunni Islam to orphans and other young boys in Cairo, Medina, and Svishtov; manuscripts of seminal works of Hanafi exegesis and law to students and ulema in Cairo, Baghdad, Medina, and Istanbul; and accommodation for Sufi orders in Istanbul and Cairo.  Collectively, these Chief Eunuch religious foundations promoted Sunni Islam, the Hanafi legal rite, tariqa [Sufi order] Sufism, and devotion to the Prophet Muhammad among the Ottoman population at large. 

Where the Muslim holy cities were concerned, the Chief Eunuch’s foundations facilitated the pilgrimage to Mecca and visitation of the Prophet’s mosque and tomb in Medina by providing roads, wells, and lodging along the pilgrimage routes and religio-educational institutions in the holy cities themselves.  These foundations reinforced the Ottoman sultan’s status as “servitor of the two holy sanctuaries” (khadim al-Haramayn in Arabic).  Both terms of this expression have connotations referring to eunuchs:  khadim, literally “servant,” as early as the ninth century C.E. was a euphemism for a eunuch, as it still is in modern Turkish, while haram refers to a sacred or taboo site, whether the mosque at Mecca or Medina or the sultan’s harem.  Under the circumstances, we can assert that the Chief Harem Eunuch was himself a khadim al-Haramayn in all senses of the phrase:  a servant and a eunuch who served both the holy cities and the palace harem.  In his case, Haramayn (Haremeyn), or “two holy sanctuaries,” can refer specifically to the Prophet’s mosque and tomb at Medina, on the one hand, and the imperial harem, on the other.

This religious patronage looms especially large in relation to the question of Ottoman “confessionalization” during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries:  that is, the adoption and public performance of an official religious identity.  The official religious identity that took shape in the Ottoman Empire during this period was Sunni, Hanafi, Sufi – meaning membership in one of three or four “mainstream” orders – and devotee of the Prophet.  Through his endowments above all, but, in the case of devotion to the Prophet, through service as chief of the tomb eunuchs and in his choice of burial site, the Chief Eunuch modeled official Ottoman orthodoxy and helped to reinforce and spread it, too.

These multiple roles that the Chief Eunuch played were facilitated by the lack of well-defined professional duties among the members of the Ottoman court in the pre-Tanzimat [westernizing reform] era.  Increasing professionalization and standardization of official roles, beginning in the eighteenth century, curtailed the Chief Eunuch’s influence, as well as that of other “informal officials,” such as the sultan’s mother and the silahdar, or sword-bearer.  The grand vizier, now more or less a prime minister equivalent, and the reisü’l-küttab [chief scribe], now a foreign minister equivalent, grew correspondingly more influential.  In other words, offices whose power had been enhanced by steadily increasing institutionalization and independence from the sultan’s household benefited, from the eighteenth century onward, at the expense of offices, very much including that of Chief Harem Eunuch, whose duties were still largely defined by personal relationships with the sultan and other members of the imperial family, as well as membership in their households.  Once supervision of the Evkafü’l-Haremeyn was removed from the office of Chief Harem Eunuch, in fact, that office became even more closely attached to the sultan’s household, and arguably suffered the consequences. 

 
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.