Sherine Hafez, The Women of the Midan: Untold Stories of Egypt’s Revolutionaries (New Texts Out Now)

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Jan 6, 2020 Egypt
Sherine Hafez, The Women of the Midan: Untold Stories of Egypt’s Revolutionaries (New Texts Out Now)

Sherine Hafez, The Women of the Midan: Untold Stories of Egypt’s Revolutionaries (New Texts Out Now)

By : Sherine Hafez

Sherine Hafez, The Women of the Midan: Untold Stories of Egypt’s Revolutionaries (Indiana University Press, 2019).

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

Sherine Hafez (SH): Writing this book was a privilege that I cannot overemphasize. There was never a doubt in my mind that this book had to be written. To me, it was imperative that the stories of these revolutionary women who occupied the Midan and front-lined a revolution had to be told. Recognizing the importance of this moment of history in Egypt and the Arab region, and the centrality of women’s roles in these events, had to be commemorated somehow—not to mention, problematized—from within the body of scholarship that we call gender studies in the Middle East.
What are the practices and processes through which the gendered body in the Middle East and North Africa is constituted, experienced, regulated, and represented?

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

SH: The book is based on women’s narratives of the revolution that began on 25 January 2011. It brings to light the experiences of women whose marginal social and educational status do not normally grant them access to the printed word or to public media. The ordinary women who left the comfort of their homes, their factory stations, or their rural villages to face the barrels of army guns and tanks. They were driven by various motivations and a myriad of revolutionary desires. Hoping to bring a better life for their families, to incite political change, to fulfill their feminist aspirations, or simply to see justice and equality for all—their hopes and their dreams fill the pages of this book. The stories they tell about their days in protest and resistance, their thoughts as they ventured into an unknown situation to join the mass protests, and the rich tapestry of their experiences are woven together in this book. It illustrates the tenacity and diversity of these women in the face of repression. Their testimonies bear witness to the drama of revolution as it unfolds. They counter ingrained constructs regarding gender, women, and sociopolitical action in the Arab region. 

Theoretically, The Women of the Midan foregrounds the gendered body as the point of intersection of sociopolitical, cultural, and historical investment. Scholarship on the Middle East and North Africa has tended to study the gendered body in relation to specific topics, for example: women’s dress and veiling practices; oppressive sexuality norms and rituals (often in relation to Islam); female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C); and reproduction and family planning. Few, if any studies have considered the body within contexts of protest and revolution in relation to the wider sociopolitical structures of power that discursively engage the corporeal form. With this in mind, the study aims at understanding gendered corporeality in the Middle Eastern and North African contexts by examining the relationship between governmentality and neoliberal transformations in Egypt, and the emerging forms of violence, dissent, and gendered identities in the region. Specifically, this book asks the following questions: What are the practices and processes through which the gendered body in the Middle East and North Africa is constituted, experienced, regulated, and represented? How do bodies intervene within these spaces of regulation? And how can we begin to articulate an analysis of the contours of corporeality in the region?  

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

SH: My previous work focused on the relationship between gender and religion in the Islamic context. I studied women’s Islamic activism in Egypt, looking specifically at the concept of subjectivity. This was also an ethnographically based work, but one that developed an epistemological critique of the binary assumptions implicit in the way we understand Muslim subjects.

However, I am not focused on religion this time; I am more interested in the full range of women’s affiliations in Tahrir square or the “Midan.” Instead of unpacking subjectivity, I was moved by women’s corporeal presence in public spaces and the impact of their intervention on the political and social context. 

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

SH: Most important to me is that the women of the midan read the book and catch a glimpse of themselves and their experiences in the pages between its covers. To me, that would be the ultimate satisfaction after having spent five years getting to know so many of them. I also would hope that young girls, students, and scholars might read it, as it is a collection of rememories (or embodied memories) that will hopefully be evoked again and again in the quest for freedom and social justice. 

If I can dare to think of an impact, I would hope that the book offers a gender inclusive lens to an important historical transformation in the region; that it helps us to understand gender and politics in a more nuanced way; that Arab women’s bodies can be seen beyond the usual scenarios of sexualized and victimized narratives; and that young women everywhere believe in their power to change their worlds.

J: What other projects are you working on now? 

SH: I am once again refocusing on women’s engagement with Islam, this time in Los Angeles, in order to develop a genealogical study of gendered Muslim difference across generations.

J: What was your experience writing this book like?

SH: An emotional roller coaster. As an Egyptian woman myself, I had my own frustrated political dreams; the beginning of the revolution brought me an elation and a giddy feeling of hope. I began writing, however, after the presidency of Morsi ended and the elections of the current president began. Seeing how things quickly unraveled in Egypt after that had a huge impact on my writing. Every word I typed on my computer conjured up the voices of the women in my head, the thoughts they shared, their laughter and optimism, but also their trauma and painful losses. Just going through my notes was enough to make my eyes well up with tears. It was the most painful experience I have had during this project. My only consolation is their reception of the book and it is my hope that, at least, it can give them some semblance of hope.

 

Excerpt from the book 

Telling the Stories of Revolutionary Women

“Ana mish nashita, ana thawragiyya,” I am not an activist, I am a revolutionary began Nevine. Like many others who took to the streets to protest the erosion of their rights indeed, she represents revolution in all of its glory. Since the first uprising in midan al tahrir, on January 25th 2011 women like Nevine have radically changed the political landscape of Egypt. They are at the center of this book that attempts to redress an androcentric imbalance in the accounts of revolution. It is not a book however, about setting the record straight—rather the pages that follow are tasked with examining how politics and gender are fluidly intertwined to the extent that they shape one another. At the core of this mutually creative process is the dissenting body. The protesting body is embodied in women’s narratives of the uprisings, in the social and political discourses that circulated during and after the protests and in the often brutal encounters with those invested in maintaining the status quo. Women’s bodies are central to the processes of citizenship-making post the so-called, “Arab Spring.” In Egypt, these processes that delimit women’s political participation are continuously being reconstituted through vociferous corporeal processes in the wake of a revolution, post an Islamic-styled state—under a current militaristic regime. As women’s bodies protest on the streets of Arab nations demanding democracy and social justice, they negotiate a variety of sociopolitical factors that both repress and discipline their bodies on one hand and become sites of resistance on the other. State control, Islamism, neoliberal market changes, the military establishment and sociocultural patriarchal systems act as intersectional forces that demarcate the boundaries of corporeal dissent while women’s resistance to them simultaneously forges new paths of sociopolitical transformation. 

Foregrounding the gendered body as the point of intersection of sociopolitical, cultural and historical investment is central to illuminating how it is at once produced while also acting as an agent in the construction of discourse. Scholarship on the Middle East and North Africa has tended to study the gendered body in relation to specific topics for example; women’s dress and veiling practices; oppressive sexuality norms and rituals (often in relation to Islam); female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C) and reproduction and family planning. Few, if any, studies have considered the body within contexts of protest and revolution in relation to the wider sociopolitical structures of power that discursively engage the corporeal form. 

In this account of women’s role in the Egyptian revolution, I am interested in fleshing out—so to speak—the conditions within which the gendered body comes to be a signifying agent of collective action and of transformation; how it can be (re)constituted in revolutionary narrative and in the (re)articulation of revolutionary desire and civil disobedience. This study aims at understanding gendered corporeality in the Middle Eastern and North African context by examining the relationship between governmentality and neoliberal transformations in Egypt and the emerging forms of violence, dissent and gendered identities in the region. Specifically, this books asks the following questions: What are the practices and processes through which the gendered body in the Middle East and North Africa is constituted, experienced, regulated and represented? How do bodies intervene within these spaces of regulation? And, how can we begin to articulate an analysis of the contours of corporeality in the region?  

By compiling Egyptian women’s accounts of the events of January 25th and beyond, my aim is to reconstruct their embodied revolutionary actions. Women’s narratives link corporeal practices to recollected knowledge where bodies become (re) imbued with revolution through narration. To refer to the potency of memory as a heightened form of remembering and as repeated experience, I use the term “rememory” from Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987). In her epic saga about the history of American slavery Morrison’s “rememory” illustrates how women experiencing the scars of trauma and slavery come to engage with their repressed memories. Her characters exhume their painful memories against an impulse to move on and forget, against a spiral of refusal and acceptance. These rememories become a powerful tool for them to restore their identities, histories and sense of community. In some ways, the revolutionary women interviewed here also continue through rememory to engage with their struggle to reconcile their revolutionary experiences with a difficult present and an unknown future. Acts of remembering can be visceral, since the body is the locus of memory. I use “rememory” in this work more as an ongoing process than a sporadic act of recollection, to emphasize the inseparability of the links between the corporeal and material with the narrative and discursive. Rememory and the body are inseparable in reconceiving the transformative potential of revolutionary historiography. This is because as-I-see-it, the process of writing on the body—of intextuating it with rebellion often takes place in the narratives of revolutionary women. By linking corporeal practices to recollected knowledge, Paul Connerton views this process as one that shapes subjectivities and identities through shared social memory. Societies remember through memory of action and how it reconstitutes the body, he asserts (1989). The rememories of protest collected in this volume are where bodies and narratives both take shape and where, I believe, lies their potential to reactivate revolutionary bodies.  

“Ana mish nashita, ana thawragiyya,” I am not an activist, I am a revolutionary, is a rememory of resistance and transformation. Nevine had never participated in furthering a political or social cause before 2011, never been to a protest nor carried a sign in a demonstration. Yet, on January 25th of that year, Nevine describes how she pushed with her body through the throngs of people attempting to cross Qasr El Nil bridge into Tahrir square. Nevine who drives her car everywhere, even a few blocks down the street, marched for hours that day. She recalled how she raised her voice with the crowd pushing her vocal cords beyond their limit to call for the regime to fall until her voice got so hoarse she could not speak for days. How she held her clenched fist high above her head, her face flushed and suffused with revolutionary fervor. And, weeks later how her hands wrapped themselves around the neck of Molotov cocktail bottles as she willed her arm to cast a wide circle in the air before it jettisoned the burning liquid as far as it could go in the direction of armed security forces. As she retold her story, her forehead creased against the effort to forget, still her words spilled out describing the popping sounds of bullets as they rained on the protestors and the muffled thud of bodies as they fell screaming in agony and the loss of life and limb that invariably followed. Nevine continued speaking against an impulse to silence the intensity of her emotions, to forget the fear and violence of the days and months of protest, embodying her material experiences as a revolutionary. Because bodies are mediums of transmitted knowledge, they archive information, convey meaning, they perform memory and become catalysts of social transformation. These embodied experiences are a rememory—one that she thoroughly inhabits as she told her story.  

Central to the process of (re)remembering the uprisings that began in the Arab world from 2011 to this day is the gendered revolutionary body.  It pivots at the heart of the multi layered, rapidly changing patriarchal power of a neoliberalizing system of an increasingly necropolitical state. Relying on first-hand accounts of the revolutionary women who protested in midan al tahrir and elsewhere in Egypt, the book delves into the socio-cultural dynamics behind the inclusion/dis-inclusion of women in the political sphere to question the role of gender politics in a revolutionary context in an Arab country like Egypt. It seeks to illuminate how marked and gendered bodies intervene within exclusive spaces to reassemble the complex weave of public space, state and government control, masculine politics, religious ideology and cultural and social norms. These forces in turn constitute the body, shaping individuals, their sense of self, their subjectivities and their political dispositions.  Through the act of rememory, women revolutionaries reconstitute themselves. They intextuate their bodies with recollections of repressed violence, pain, and intimidation, but also with the memories of place, community, belonging and strength. This work captures the mutually productive, fluid processes that characterize the body, the forces that act upon it, the inseparability of rememory and the body in narratives of protest to understand how gendered human subjectivity is shaped in a revolutionary context. It sheds light on women’s relationship to the state in the Arab world today and how practices of citizenship evolve in the region.                  

Recentering the Gender Narrative 

Neither the members of the “April 6th movement” nor those who belonged to the group, “We Are All Khalid Said” could have imagined that their protest on National Police Day on January 25th 2011, was to usher in an all-out uprising. At 28-years-old, Khaled Said was brutally beaten to death by two policemen. Pictures of Khaled’s disfigured face went viral acting as a catalyst for the protests against the police. The activists had hoped that people would join their neighbors and go out to protest around major cities. At best, they imagined that small protests could somehow converge into main squares like Tahrir. The organizers, who used Facebook to mobilize did not anticipate that tens of thousands would pour into the streets to answer their call for a “day of rage.” Cairo was not the only site of revolt. People rose up in protest in other cities all over Egypt, Alexandria; Beni Suef; Mahalla; Port Said and Suez as well as Mansura. By the end of that cold winter day on Tuesday, it became apparent that no one was budging—the protestors were in it for the long haul. In Cairo, makeshift tents and the beginnings of plans to make Tahrir square more sustainable as a site for prolonged protest, began to take shape. By the 28th of January the contours of a camp site began to appear and more and more people joined the throngs. Undercover police and hired thugs tasked with harassing and inciting violence and fear infiltrated the lines. The turning point came on the 2nd of February when an unimaginable scene unfolded as if from a tale from “A Thousand and One Nights.” Men on camel back, armed with swords and machetes came flying into the mass of people in Tahrir, brandishing their weapons, bent on creating mayhem. The protestors who lived these events and the ones who watched them across television broadcasts from their homes saw the end of the Mubarak regime unravel. The “Battle of the Camel” —named as such because armed thugs on camel back entered the square and began attacking the protestors—was considered a pivotal day in the history of the uprising. Finally, only a few days later on February 11th, Mubarak stepped down, thus marking the beginning and not the end of the uprising.

Among the thousands whose experiences of these pivotal days were noted and recorded, women were afforded only marginal attention despite their equal participation in the streets and squares. As an example, in an extensive bibliographic list published by the Project on Middle East Political Science (2015) only 16 articles were found to refer to gender in their titles and 26 referred to women with a total of 42 entries out of 888 articles, amounting to only a fraction, 0.2114%. I take this one example as a relative indicator of the dearth in scholarly articles that deal with women and gender-related issues and the marginal importance afforded them in the literature on the Arab uprisings. While singling out women has its own ramifications, the epistemic privileging of masculine politics results in an incomplete and skewed interpretation of events.  

Feminists have long since challenged the androcentric bias of knowledge production (Anderson 2004, Fricker 2009, Haraway 1988, Harding 1996, Hooks 1994 Moraga & Anzaldua 1983) yet local and global discourses unfailingly frame women’s sociopolitical backgrounds in ways that rationalize systems of dominance. In conventional representations of Middle Eastern women, this androcentric logic continues to be exacerbated by a history of colonialism, oil war agendas and the neoliberal capitalism of World Bank and the International Monetary Fund’s development imperatives. Persistent images of women from the developing regions of the world as monolithic, disempowered, victimized by culture and religion, still have currency today. Aside from a few notable exceptions (Abu Lughod 2013, Al Ali & Pratt 2009) feminist analysis that take into account Euro American military interventions in the Middle East and how neoliberal forces sustain a rhetoric that rationalizes specific social and economic transformations—are sorely needed. Examining issues of subjectivity and subject formation that are embedded within meta narratives of modernity, postcoloniality, nationalism and now, neoliberal economic shifts, are essential for a feminist trajectory that seeks to grapple not only with contexts and histories but also with the fluid issues of power and the impressions these leave on the subjectivities of gendered bodies. By taking the processes that shape human subjectivity and desire into consideration, the literature can be at once focused on context, cultural relativity and knowledge production as well as the formation of selves and persons whose desires and motivations lie at the nexus of these larger discourses of modern history. Chandra Mohanty (2003) tasks the scholar of gender in postcolonialist and Muslim majority countries in particular with the difficult job of undoing the dichotomous positioning of Muslim women vis-à-vis western women, of contextualizing the struggle of women everywhere but particularly in the global south, and eliding the specificity of these women to debunk homogenizing efforts that seek to lump all women of the developing world into one large, oppressed collective.

To tell women’s stories it is necessary to address these discursive tropes in knowledge production about “the other” woman (here understood as the Third World, Arab, Middle Eastern woman). Revolutionary women’s rememories produce a counter narrative to the dominant universalizing and androcentric coverage of western media and local official discourses about the revolution, its participants and its spectators. However, narrating these accounts of ordinary yet extraordinary women’s lives cannot be a task of direct translation nor does it purport to be more than reconstructive, imaginative and incomplete. After all, rememorying is necessarily dependent on one’s imaginative powers and ability to resurrect embodied past events. Nevertheless, in narrating these accounts I am attentive to how discourse reproduces power and power relations, that knowledge production is not arbitrary and that documenting lived experience is a praxis that is necessarily both ethical as well as grounded in a critique of knowledge. This research agenda, I believe is closely intertwined with what the ethnographic process in this contemporary, global and neoliberal world must contend with—an awareness that field research is ultimately intertwined with power dynamics embedded in issues of cultural representation. To begin examining these issues the next section will analyze the framing of the Arab uprisings from within a western media lens that shapes events and complex realities according to the grand narratives governing global conceptions of center and periphery. What news and events find their way into the international media and why? Who gets to be the players, the heroes and the villains? And how are women’s voices heard and silenced?
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.

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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.