Donatella Della Ratta, Shooting a Revolution: Visual Media and Warfare in Syria (New Texts Out Now)

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Mar 25, 2019 Syria
Donatella Della Ratta, Shooting a Revolution: Visual Media and Warfare in Syria (New Texts Out Now)

Donatella Della Ratta, Shooting a Revolution: Visual Media and Warfare in Syria (New Texts Out Now)

By : Donatella Della Ratta

Donatella Della Ratta, Shooting a Revolution: Visual Media and Warfare in Syria (London: Pluto Press, 2018).

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

Donatella Della Ratta (DDR): A person known as Bassel Khartabil (aka Bassel Safadi) was the major source of inspiration for this book. Bassel was my best friend and working partner when I used to live in Syria. He was the Syria lead for Creative Commons, an international network that promotes digital sharing and gives the tools to do it legally on the Internet. Bassel had become an icon of the free Internet and sharing culture, as well as of civil disobedience and peaceful resistance in Syria’s 2011 uprising. He was brutally killed in 2015, leaving his friends and family in deep despair. At the time, I was already trying to work on a book on Syria, mostly drawing on the ethnographic work I had carried out for my PhD on the politics of Syrian TV drama. But I was appalled, distressed by the situation ongoing in the country, and I could not find the right focus for the book. Then I realized that the story I really wanted to tell was that of Bassel and of youths like him who gave their lives documenting, informing, and producing evidence of what was happening in their country. Shooting film at the risk of being shot at, shooting at all costs. This became my guiding question throughout the book. Why had Bassel died for this? Why did other people sacrifice their life for filming? And what were the implications of this act of shooting being turned into a continuous life activity, a labor of the everydayness, in which even violent factions, jihadis, regime supporters, etc. had become deeply involved?
It addresses the aesthetic and material implications of the act of “shooting” as a practice of everyday life, as a mundane activity carried on among other life activities.

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

DDR: The book focuses on the double movement of “shooting”—shooting as in filming and shooting as in killing; filming to (metaphorically) kill; and killing to film, for the sake of the camera. It addresses the aesthetic and material implications of the act of “shooting” as a practice of everyday life, as a mundane activity carried on among other life activities. A life activity that, yet, becomes labor within the infrastructure of the networks where both unpaid and under-paid work, whether produced by peaceful activists or by jihadis, indifferently becomes part of the “sharing” economy of platform capitalism. Shooting a Revolution takes Syria as an exemplary condition of this situation, for it is the first truly networked conflict of our times (post-YouTube, Facebook and all the most famous sharing platforms). Yet, what the book describes is an emerging mode of the visual and the violent nurtured by all the users who participate to the sharing process, indifferently: a state of emulsion, of permanent acceleration of both the conflict on the ground and the media narrating it, that, in my view, will mark future conflicts as well. Therefore, the book equally deals with literature from Middle Eastern studies, Arab media studies, and Syria-specific literature, and with Internet studies, with works that critically reflect on the political economy of digital networks and their dramatic consequences (not only on the actual content production, but specifically on the enactment and reproduction of violence).

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

DDR: This work is profoundly connected with my previous work, both academically and professionally. Academically, as it pushes forward the investigation of the in-depth connections between political power and cultural production that I started with in my PhD work and related publications on Syrian TV drama. Yet, the field is much broader now, and far more complicated than having to deal with an elite of cultural producers who are deeply enmeshed in the soft, seductive, and coercive communication mechanism of the authoritarian state (which I have called “the whisper strategy”). All the users are involved in Internet production, whether violent or peaceful; even we ourselves are involved, when we share, like, retweet, and/or repost Syria-generated content. The subject who comes into play here is more elusive, as it is global and corporate, and apparently not involved in the Syrian conflict, i.e., Internet platform capitalism. Professionally, my five-year long work experience with Creative Commons and the bright minds behind it—Lawrence Lessig, Joi Ito, its amazing community of geeks, bloggers, activist, and artists—deeply connects with the theoretical reflections offered by this book, giving them ground and a robust ethnographic basis.

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

DDR: I hope this book will be read by all sorts of people. That might sound too ambitious. It is an academic work, indeed, with endnotes, references, and literature being referenced. Yet, this does not mean that it is sanitized and impersonal. I am a media ethnographer who spent several years in Syria for my PhD research. I hung out with Syrians, made friends there, learned spoken Arabic there. I do not wish to conceal the deep emotional bond that I feel regarding Syria. In fact, it is precisely because of this bond that I was able to develop the theoretical reflections offered in this book into a broader discussion on warfare at the time of the networks. I hope this will be useful to those looking to frame a more informed debate on the current situation in Syria, and also to reflect on networked violence and hyper-visibility. More than anything, I hope this will contribute, even if just a little, to fight the oblivion to which the peaceful uprising risks to be relegated forever, now that Bashar al-Assad is being rehabilitated internationally. As Baudrillard once said, “Forgetting extermination is part of extermination.”

J: What other projects are you working on now?

DDR: I am currently enjoying the bliss of having this book out after so much hard work! The work and energy one puts into writing a book does not end when the book is published; the book is a fragile creature that needs to be accompanied out into the world; it needs to be discussed publicly and collectively. The first scheduled public presentations of Shooting a Revolution, in London, at SOAS on 17 January with Dina Matar, and in Berlin, at the Transmediale Festival on 2 February with Geert Lovink, were particularly important for two good reasons. First of all, Dina and Geert read the book in its early stages and gave me precious feedback. They are friends and mentors, and I am honored that the first public appearance of Shooting a Revolution happens under their blessings. Secondly, SOAS and Transmediale represent the “two souls” of this book and of my personal and professional journey: I am a media ethnographer working on the Arab world, but at the same time I am also deeply engaged with technology, both as a scholar of critical Internet studies and as an activist involved with different net communities, from Creative Commons to our SyriaUntold.

Beside discussing the book in “traditional” ways, through debates and panels, I am also working to present it in a performative format. Last year, together with visual artist Marco G. Ferrari and musicians Giacomo Ancillotto, Igor Legari, Ludovica Manzo, and Luca Venitucci, I created the live performance, The Vanished Image.  The Vanished Image offers a lyrical and poetic journey through the forgotten images of the peaceful phase of the Syrian uprising. The private archive donated to me by Bassel the last time I saw him alive offers the opportunity for a journey of poetry, sound, and music inside the forgotten visuals of 2011 (those that were removed by social media platforms, ignored by mainstream media, and that marked a phase in history unfortunately at risk of disappearing forever). My book contains a deep reflection on the tragedy of these once digital commons and on their fate of progressive erasure from public spaces or extreme commodification. Yet, every time we perform The Vanished Image, I find that the music, the visuals, the poetry all together go straight to the point, much deeper than any analysis or explanations. My wish for this upcoming year is to work more on this combination between academic and performative work, and I am hoping to have The Vanished Image featured together with Shooting a Revolution.

 

Excerpt from the Book:

The shot opens with heavy shootings. We see buildings burning in the distance, smoke rising. More shootings, an ambulance siren, a live-chat message notification are all heard in the background. The camera moves slowly towards a group of armed men dressed in black, probably police or security forces. The male voice behind the camera screams ‘peaceful, peaceful’, while the sound of the shootings gets closer. ‘No, no, I am peaceful, peaceful’, the voice insists. More shootings. The camera shakes, yet the man does not leave or stop filming. ‘The world must see!’, he shouts. We hear another male voice in the background, worried, probably trying to get the man behind the camera out of there: ‘Iyad, Iyad!’ The man filming screams even louder, addressing the armed men: ‘Shoot at me, shoot at me! The world must see what is happening.’

This video was allegedly shot in Daraa, a city in southwestern Syria where a popular anti-regime uprising sparked in March 2011. The anonymous filmer – Iyad? – embraces the camera to document the violence that unknown armed men are likely to inflict on his body, and no doubt on other disarmed bodies too. Yet the invisible man behind the camera would not move – like thousands of other anonymous citizens who have silently, fiercely, defiantly filmed the Syrian uprising. They would stand still, hiding behind the camera, shooting while being shot at, like in Iyad’s video.

In March 2011 Syrian protesters found themselves in this unprecedented situation of being simultaneously victims and heroes. Victims, as they faced repression with bare hands, at the mercy of the armed killers’ absolute will; heroes, as they bravely turned into first-person narrators of their own history, regaining agency through the self-documentation of the events they participated in, even when they took a violent, dangerous form. A defiant, extreme act of filming regardless, that pushed us as spectators to wonder why these anonymous filmers didn’t throw their cameras on the floor and run away when facing death in the shape of a sniper, a militia man, or a police officer. Such a gesture should not be dismissed as the psychotic, narcissistic behaviour of few isolated individuals, but rather understood as a collective endeavour with a large-scale dimension.

The act of filming has become so inherently connected to Syria’s post-2011 everyday life that it was appropriated by a wide spectrum of the country’s citizenry, including its violent components. Security agents, armed groups, torturers, jihadis, all indifferently turned into image-makers, employing the camera to live-document their brutal acts, while also producing the most extreme and obscene forms of violence for the sake of the camera. Every day, everyone films and is filmed in Syria, a country where the visual form has been turned into a device to perform violence, and the quintessential tool to resist it.

The parallel, dramatically intertwined movements of shooting and being shot at, of filming and killing, of filming to kill and killing to film, lie at the core of this book. Shooting while being shot at is the gesture of capturing life events on camera while dying live in front of it and for the sake of it, so as to grant an extension to existence in the immortal form of witnessing and crystalizing the self in the historical document. Meanwhile, it is also the fascination for violence, the pursuit of an ideal visual form for its enactment on the ground. For shooting as in killing shares with shooting as in filming a concern for the aesthetic performance, a preoccupation with the (re)presentation of the act, a compulsive attraction to any visual format offering visibility to the violence, whether in the spontaneous form of shaky pixels generated in moments of anxiety and fear – like in Iyad’s video – or in the orchestrated, cruel beauty of a static, surveillance-like shot properly fixed before the enactment of torture. Yet when filming disappears into everything and into the everydayness, becoming just another life activity among others, framing the question of the image around the aesthetic dichotomy between revolutionary, low-resolution, seemingly naive pixels and the self-declared objective form of ‘caught-on-camera’ torture videos risks divertingattention from the material conditions that allow these visual media to emerge, and from the power struggles they conceal.

Let us not be distracted, entrapped, mesmerized by the ‘pixelated revolution’ or by the ‘cinema of the murderer’. For as Ernst Jünger noticed already in the aftermath of the First World War, the production of the visual in the context of warfare relates much more to labour than to a mere narration or aesthetic representation. This is apparent, more than ever, in post-2011 Syria, where the parallel dynamics of shooting and being shot at, of filming and killing, of making images to preserve life and destroying life for the sake of the image, have invaded the domain of the ordinary and been converted into mundane forms of digital labour on networked communications technologies. The latter have added an unprecedented layer of complexity to the production of the visual and the violent in Syria, as the variety of immaterial labour – paid, unpaid, underpaid, volunteer – involved in generating, assembling and distributing content has fused with the plethora of material subjects – armed and peaceful, pro- and anti-regime, local, regional and international – engaged in the fight on the ground.

Never before in history have these dynamics of violence and visibility been so dramatically entangled, jointly captured and domesticated in the form of routine labour on the networks. Never before have forms of military conduct and forms of visual (re)presentation been equally rendered visible, shareable and ‘likeable’ for the sake of global circulation and consumption. Never before has the seemingly endless multiplication of media and its makers in the networked environment matched so astonishingly with the explosion and consequent disruption of subjects and meanings on the ground: a hyper-fragmentation of digital ‘me’ versions of national belonging and identity that mixes up and confounds with the raw materiality of the armed conflict.

[…]

This book maintains that is no longer possible to approach the question of image-making (shooting) or the question of violence (being shot at) in Syria – and more generally in contemporary warfare – without taking into consideration the technological and human infrastructure of the networked environment, where the ‘visuality’ of the conflict gets produced and reproduced as labour. Syria is the first fully developed networked battleground in which the technological infrastructure supporting practices of uploading, sharing and remixing, together with the human network of individuals engaged in those practices, have become dramatically implicated in the production and reproduction of violence. The entanglement of visual regimes of representation and modes of media production with warfare and modes of destruction has exploited and prospered from the participatory dimension of networked communications technologies. The networks have granted the utmost visibility and shareability to the most extreme violence, finally merging the physical annihilation of places with their endless online regeneration, producing a sort of onlife which gets renewed every time content is manipulated, re-uploaded, re-posted and shared, as meanings are combined and recombined in different, clashing versions.

I call this process ‘expansion’. Expansion brings to the surface the dark side of peer-production, sharing economies, remixing and participation, suggesting that these networked practices, as well as enabling creativity and self-empowerment, can also multiply terror and fear. Expansion hints at the participatory dimension of violence that thrives on networked subjects who are both the anonymous, grassroots users celebrated by cultural convergence and remix cultures, and the political and armed subjectivities active in the conflict – each probably overlapping with the other. The plethora of actors, local and international, military and civilian, peaceful and armed, involved in producing the conflict on the ground, is also the social workforce engaged (and exploited) in its reproduction on the networks, with military factions ultimately rendered into multiple forms of digital labour, and vice versa.

The explosion of personalized ‘me’ media, enabled by platforms deemed quintessentially progressive by techno-utopias and digital democracy frameworks, has been matched by an explosion of violence and the expansion of warfare. Everybody seems to claim a right to create and re-manipulate on the networks, as much as the freedom to conquer, occupy and destroy on the ground. Everybody is an active maker, an empowered subject, at the level of both creation and destruction, contributing to reproducing that very destruction for the sake of networked circulation. If it’s dead, it spreads – so Syria’s networked environment seems to tragically suggest, in a bitter remix of Henry Jenkins’ famous motto.

[…]

As media production accelerates – with more remixes, more sharing platforms, and the accumulation of layers in a permanent mode of circulation – so does war also accelerate and degenerate, involving more actors and interests at local, regional and global levels, expanding in time and space with no end apparently in sight. The mediated mimics the military, and vice versa. In the networked environment, media messages circulate rather than communicate, embracing a status of ‘constant emulsion’:  a permanent, entropic, circular movement that dramatically mirrors the ceaseless bombings, sieges, chemical attacks and humanitarian crises that have unfolded in Syria since 2011. We are far from the abstract media spectacles offered to international publics during the 1991 Gulf conflict: the ‘perfect’ war, marked by a precise beginning and end, carefully orchestrated and performed for the sake of media (re) production and (re)presentation.

The Syrian conflict hints at a new mode of warfare and visibility marked by a sort of ‘neverendingness’, which is also a quintessential feature of the networked environment.
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.