Smadar Lavie, Wrapped in the Flag of Israel: Mizrahi Single Mothers and Bureaucratic Torture, Revised Edition with a New Afterword by the Author (New Texts Out Now)

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Jan 16, 2020 Palestine-Israel
Smadar Lavie, Wrapped in the Flag of Israel: Mizrahi Single Mothers and Bureaucratic Torture, Revised Edition with a New Afterword by the Author (New Texts Out Now)

Smadar Lavie, Wrapped in the Flag of Israel: Mizrahi Single Mothers and Bureaucratic Torture, Revised Edition with a New Afterword by the Author (New Texts Out Now)

By : Smadar Lavie

Smadar Lavie, Wrapped in the Flag of Israel: Mizrahi Single Mothers and Bureaucratic Torture, Revised Edition with a New Afterword by the Author (University of Nebraska Press, 2018).

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

Smadar Lavie (SL): Since I submitted the first edition of Wrapped in the Flag of Israel for publication in February 2013, I have continued to research the interrelationship between Mizrahi feminism and the Israel-Palestine conflict. Between the two editions, Mizrahi feminists were the germinating force behind Mizrahi social movements and other NGOs, most notable being Heart at East and the New Black Panthers (HaLo Nehmadim in Hebrew). For summer 2014, the New Black Panthers planned to flare up Israel’s ghettos and barrios. The 2014 Gaza War made this eruption impossible. The interplay between Gaza 2014 and these social movements is the root of the book’s second edition. The new edition’s afterword, published July 2018, dialogues with the first edition’s critics and offers detailed analysis of how the recurring wars on Gaza cannot be separated from Israel’s ever-resilient Mizrahi-Ashkenazi racial rift.

Sderot’s Mizraḥi residents gather at dusk to watch bombings of Gaza Strip. Photo credit: Oren Ziv/ActiveStills, 2014.

A Palestinian family celebrates the feast of Eid al-Fiṭr during Gaza 2014 ceasefire. Photo credit: `Ali Ḥassan/Anadolu, 2014.

The second edition presents a new analytical toolbox by challenging assumptions that the domestic socioeconomic gender politics of intra-Jewish racism and the (inter)national aspects of the Israel-Palestine conflict are mutually exclusive. Wrapped argues that the plight of Israel’s Mizraḥim and the plight of the Palestinians are complementary. Both are subject to the state of Israel’s deployment of war as a unifying force to divert attention from domestic issues of racial and gender justice through the sanctity of the “chosen people” in their “chosen land." 

While Mizraḥi feminists stage protests against the neocon restructuring of Israel’s economy and society, this all but disappears when Israel undertakes a new cycle of violence against the Palestinians. They do not challenge their communities’ ultranationalism. As a result of the Jewish state’s unity against all goyim (non-Jews, Hebrew; enemies, colloquial Hebrew), the Mizrahim, Israel’s demographic Jewish majority—racialized and minoritized—increasingly vote for right-wing, authoritarian politicians. 
... my careful text had been sensationalized without permission. This would have transformed my poetic ethnography into garish radical chic.

J: What did the publication process of the second edition entail?

SL: Wrapped’s first edition saw print in April 2014 through a family-run press that has respected lists in cultural anthropology and Israeli studies. Because finalized pages to be indexed arrived as I was recovering from a car accident, and due in short order, I outsourced the task. 

I called the first indexer for an update, only to be told the manuscript went against everything she was raised to believe about Israel. Indexer number two used the index as a tool of censorship. Categories such as “apartheid,” “Zionism,” “Palestine,” and “race” were nowhere to be seen. She insisted her categorization improved the book, refusing to change them before sending me a pricey invoice via her attorney. It took the third indexer, who had no expertise in Middle East studies, to treat the manuscript with the professionalism it required. He sent me the finished product only seventy-two hours after receiving the pages. This man, and his work, were truly a gift. He said he found himself so engrossed in the book, so enraged at the previous indexer’s prioritization of her politics, that he worked around the clock. He even refused my offer to pay extra for the rush.

Promotion of the book was also a trial. After a year passed with only one JPS review, my colleagues suggested that I write to the major journals’ book review editors, to whom the publisher said they would send review copies. Many editors wrote that they had not received the book. Eventually, the publisher’s administrative assistant admitted that they hesitate to send review copies of books about Israel to periodicals that focus on the Arab world, my academic specialty, or to editors known for criticizing Israel. I used my author discount to purchase copies and mail them out to editors who were willing to consider the book for review.

Wrapped was eventually reviewed in top-tier journals such as American Anthropologist, Affilia, American Ethnologist, and Cultural Studies. The book won the honorary distinction of the Association of Middle Eastern Women’s Studies competition and was one of four finalists in the 2015 Clifford Geertz Book Award Competition of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion (thanks to copies submitted on my own dime). I was invited to many academic seminars and colloquia. Jewish Voice for Peace organized readings at independent bookstores that coincided with the book’s academic sojourns. It thus came as a surprise when the publisher signaled they might allow the book to fall out of print after its second run and sell the copyright back to me. Nevertheless, a third and final hardcover run was issued that was still not able to meet reader demands.

In July 2015, I received a letter reverting the rights back to me. My book was axed in a short, passive aggressive paragraph. Through the venerable tradition of pathologizing women of color without directly psychologizing them, the letter connoted trouble. Wrapped was on a roll and due for a paperback. By giving me back the rights like this, the initial publisher broke the book’s momentum. My colleagues once again stepped in and suggested a second edition, citing the significance of the data, and the book’s evident popularity. Second editions are reserved for enshrined classics or academic celebrities. But I was neither.

In February 1999, Israel confiscated my passports, issuing a stop exit order against me right as the wheels were in motion for my tenured full professorship at UC Davis. Due to my color and politics, I was prevented from gainful employment or any form of professional and academic life. In August 2007, when I was finally back in the United States, the tenure avenues were closed. Nonetheless, I had to give it a shot.

I presented the revised and expanded book to all major university presses with Middle East series. The many reviews of the book’s first edition indicated its textbook potential. Upon reading samples, however, they commented on the complicated nature of my empirical data. Anything that deviates from the Israel-Palestine binary does not sell. One university press requested sole review privileges, then held the manuscript for a lengthy period, further slowing the process.

In fall 2015, I received four progressive, non-university press contract offers for fast production. Anxious to get the book back into print, I chose what seemed to be the quickest. As the publication date drew near, it became clear that the publisher and I had irreconcilable differences of opinion. The line I had to draw was the publisher’s insistence on using a lopsided Star of David, a caricature of the Shoah’s Juden star, wrapped in shrouds of the Israeli flag on the back cover. Moreover, my careful text had been sensationalized without permission. This would have transformed my poetic ethnography into garish radical chic. The response I received from the publisher was bewildering: “Trust us on what sells. The Star of David is a religious symbol. You are Jewish, no? Are you antisemitic? We have read your suggestions. We rejected all of them. Such is life.” So, with real difficulty (and legal help), I extricated myself from that contract.

In fall 2016, I proposed the book to acquisition editors at the AAA, MESA, and NWSA. The University of Nebraska, Lincoln (UNL) Press offered me a good contract, placing the book in their Expanding Frontiers: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality series. I found myself starting over, once again, from scratch. Now, the paperback edition is finding its way into the classroom and does well on Amazon. To my surprise, reviews of the book continue to appear. Both Tikkun and E3W recently reviewed it. Perhaps the adventures of Wrapped are unique. After all, I live on the margins of academe, with no tenure to help bankroll my publications. But from my conversations with colleagues, I have learned that I am not alone. While what my book underwent in its entirety is novel, many of my Middle East studies colleagues have encountered similar difficulties during the publication process.

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

SL: Wrapped in the Flag of Israel’s point of departure is Israel’s vulnerable population of Mizrahi single mothers and their entanglements with the state’s labyrinthine bureaucracy. Since submitting the manuscript for Wrapped to the initial publisher, new ethnographies on bureaucracy under neoliberalism have appeared. The book’s analysis has resonances with these accounts. But the majority of these studies rely on a Weberian-Foucauldian perspective. Others employ Marxist approaches of historical materialism. Wrapped does neither. It follows a groundbreaking model of bureaucratic logic that draws on religion, ritual, and the phenomenology of transcendental essences to examine neoliberal bureaucracy in times of austerity. 

Through the lives and words of Mizrahi single mothers, Wrapped further challenges the Israel-Palestine binary and calls into question the viability of the Arab-Jew hybrid as a category in present day Israel. Most Mizrahim refuse to be termed “Arab Jews.” This category is hyped up by post- and anti-Zionist Mizrahi intellectuals, many of whom are first generation to the mass 1950s migration of Iraqis and Moroccans. Mizrahim, however, is a coalitional term. Moreover, Iranian or Balkan Jews are not Arab, and because of their non-Yiddish speaking origin, they identify as Mizrahim. Nevertheless, the concept of the Arab Jew has become palatable to contemporary academics of the Arab world. Decolonial anthropology, however, avoids the imposition of terminology—it cannot superimpose labels over its subjects, let alone when they refuse. A new generation of activists dare to challenge this Iraqi-Moroccan construct head-on.  “The Mizrahi intellectuals can jabber until tomorrow on ‘Arab Jews,’” writes Moran Habaz.

In my experience, it is possible to divide non-Zionist anthropologists on Palestine-Israel into three main groups:

(1) studying the effects of Israeli occupation on Palestinians in a colonial vein, (2) the unbalance co-construction of networks of operation between Israelis and Palestinians; and (3) the inner workings of Israeli society. How Israel’s intra- Jewish racism corresponds with the Palestine-Israel conflict.

Wrapped falls under category three, and fell between the cracks—unfit for the well-funded discipline of Israeli studies, nor benefitting from the welcome boom of publications on the Israel-Palestine binary or the historical construct of Arab Jews.

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

SL: My first book, The Poetics of Military Occupation: Mzeina Allegories Under Israeli and Egyptian Rule (1990) focused on the agency immanent in transnational identity politics. I studied the performances and ritualistic story-telling the Sinai Bedouin mounted as resistance to the Israeli occupation. Forty-five years have passed, and my relationship with the Mzeina Bedouin is not one of fieldwork but, rather, family.

After Poetics, in the early 1990s, I shifted my study to my own culture. “Hebrew as Step-Mother Tongue: The Lives and Works of Arabic Speaking Jewish and Palestinian Authors and the Rupture of Israel’s Eurocentrism,” was intent on examining the lives and words of Mizrahim and Palestinians who crossed borders by writing Hebrew literature and poetry even though their native tongue is Arabic. I argued that their agency sparks up at the border zones where identity and place grate up against each other and are forced into constantly shifting configurations of partial overlap. The theoretical framework of “Hebrew as a Step Mother Tongue” served as the basis for my collaboration with Ted Swedenburg on Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity (1996). The institutional racism I suffered in Israel made it impossible to complete this project in due time. It survives now as uncited fragments in my Mizarhi colleagues’ own publications.

Wrapped dissents from my old work by going against identity politics and the agency inherent in its enactment. Likewise, it challenges the feminist critique of binary logic as it analyzes how gender-race-class intersect with religion to form a space of primordial divinity. It follows Israel's clear line separating Jews from goyim. Integral to my discussion of Mizrahi single mothers is their distinct lack of personal and communal agency when dealing with the state bureaucracies they rely on for daily survival. The book delves into the process by which Israeli citizenship transcends the interstitial times and spaces that construct legal and experiential interactions around gender and race to become a debilitating essence.

The second edition illuminates the interplay between truncated Mizraḥi social protest, neoliberal economics, and heinous Israeli military violence in Gaza 2014. At the crux of these protests was the confluence of GendeRace—my neologism to analyze how the constructs of gender and race amalgamate into the foundation of Israel’s ethno-religious nationalism and citizenship. The failure of Mizrahi protests in times of military conflict demonstrates that strategic resistance to intra-Jewish racism cannot be separated from the Question of Palestine. Likewise, Wrapped’s second edition further explores the difficulties a Mizrahi ethnographer faces as she studies the Mizrahi victims of state racism, who, at the same time, espouse right-wing, chauvinistic ideologies and practices.

A Palestinian family celebrates the feast of `Id al-Fiṭr during Gaza 2014 ceasefire. Photo credit: `Ali Ḥassan/Anadolu, 2014.

Sderot’s Mizraḥi residents gather at dusk to watch bombings of Gaza Strip. Photo credit: Oren Ziv/ActiveStills, 2014.

Further illuminating the rift between the Mizrahi intelligentsia and Israel’s Mizrahi majority, Habaz argues: “At her journey’s end, the Mizrahi activist speaking in the language of the ‘Arab Jew’ stands in front of a broken square-one. On the one hand, she sits around the shabbat and holiday dinner table to witness the ultranationalist, messianic discourse of Arab hatred that has taken control over everyone around her. She knows and recites all the historical and class reasons for the Mizrahi identification with the right. On the other hand, she has no interest to educate her family through the deployment of the old Ashkenazi melting pot methods. After all, her family members are descendants of a grandiose Arab-Jewish dynasty, and such a pedigree excuses them from owning up to the meaning of their racist language. This is precisely the Mizrahi tragedy.”

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

SL: The second edition (in paperback) is written with the high-school and college classroom in mind. I was touched that the book was not only reviewed by Palestine/Israel experts, but by academics researching in other regions of the world whose scholarship dovetails with theoretical issues in Wrapped. All reviewers wrote that the book is ideal for teaching transnational feminism, neoliberal kinship, welfare policies, the performance of ritual and religion, and the budding field of right wing studies.

Other audiences who might be drawn to this book include welfare policymakers, US and European-based Middle East foreign policymakers, NGOs whose coalitional platform expands from Ferguson to Palestine, and general readership interested in Israel-Palestine. I was moved the most by letters from single mothers and their children.

How painful that Wrapped has not been translated into Hebrew. Most Mizrahim, Palestinian-Israelis, and even non-elite Ashkenazim avoid English texts due to inferior schooling. Mizrahi grassroots intellectuals often self-publish with small Mizrahi presses. Their books, shunned by the academy, enjoy circulation in our communities. To publish with a Hebrew press, I would need to front nearly twenty thousand dollars for translation, production, and promotion.

J: What other projects are you working on now?

SL: In 2011, I was in the midst of working on a book of essays, Crossing Borders, Staying Put: Mizrahi Feminism, Palestine, and the Racial Formations of the Israeli State. It focuses on the paradoxical relationship between Israel’s left-leaning Mizrahi feminists and their right-wing constituencies who propel the state’s political spectrum farther to the alt-right. Wrapped was originally a chapter in Crossing Borders, but my colleagues advised that it should be a stand-alone book. So, I am back at my desk, brow furrowed, continuing to work on Crossing Borders.

I started exploring the Mizrahi alt-right in the early 2000s while stranded in Israel as a welfare mother. My community consisted of anti-racist women of color who supported Israel’s alt-right. I ceased to register on my academic disciplines’ radar, liberated from the trendy agendas set by the dons of academia. In 2011, drafting the text on how the log-jam in the intersection of identity politics blocks agency, I was seen as loony. Now, back in the United States, I am glad that the trends are catching up with me. I hope to complete Crossing Borders before they shift again.


Excerpt from the book

From “Afterword(s): Gaza 2014 and the Mizrahi Predicament”

The media focus on HaLo Nehmadim (the New Black Panthers) came to an abrupt end on 12 June 2014. An extremist splinter of Hamas kidnapped three Israeli teenagers, Naftali Frankel, Gilad Sha`er, and Eyal Yifrah, while they hitchhiked in the West Bank. This was in response to a series of IDF atrocities in Gaza that followed the Hamas-PLO reconciliation agreement.

Right after the Hamas-PLO signing ceremony, the IDF air force launched two missiles at a motorbike driving through Gaza. Israeli intelligence assumed that the driver was a high-up Hamas leader. The effort failed. Instead, the missiles severely injured seven passersby. In early June, the IDF continued these attempts to target Palestinian guerrillas with heavy-duty bombs, but managed only to kill a seven-year-old Gazan boy. In addition, Israel tightened the Gaza blockade in its efforts to break the Hamas-PLO coalition (Landau 2014b).

How did the Hamas splinter cell choose its targets? The decision might have heeded the recommendations of the 2010 Hamas “Kidnapper’s Guidebook” (Channel 2 News 2010). The guidebook’s author explains that the preferred target bears an Ashkenazi, nonmuscular phenotype because the Israeli regime has historically proven more amenable to releasing prisoners in exchange for Ashkenazi, rather than Mizrahi, hostages. A long-time grassroots Mizrahi feminist leader put it to me over Skype: 

Yifrah, a classic Yemeni, he just looked it, and his last name. Make no mistakes about Frankel—it’s the last name and color. No wonder his mom was all over the press. Sha`er looked white. I guess they asked him his last name. It’s Arabic. Surprise, surprise. With two Mizrahim and one Ashkenazi you can’t negotiate much.

GendeRace yet again—that calcified amalgamation of gender and race that happens in the blink of an eye. This instant typecasting has been one of the main arguments of Wrapped in the Flag of Israel. In the case of Israel, a foundational classification. GendeRace is a primordial truism. It petrifies the amalgamation of “the intersection.” Rather than moving through it, people are stuck. They are therefore unable to construct racialized and gendered identities that lend themselves to enact political agency. Even the “Kidnapper’s Guidebook” stays faithful to the racial formations of Zionism. They seem to work. Hamas resumed its place at center stage.
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.