Raphael Cormack, Midnight in Cairo: The Divas of Egypt’s Roaring '20s (New Texts Out Now)

Raphael Cormack, Midnight in Cairo: The Divas of Egypt’s Roaring '20s (New Texts Out Now)

Raphael Cormack, Midnight in Cairo: The Divas of Egypt’s Roaring '20s (New Texts Out Now)

By : Raphael Cormack

Raphael Cormack, Midnight in Cairo: The Divas of Egypt’s Roaring '20s (Saqi Books and W. W. Norton & Company, 2021).

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

Raphael Cormack (RC): This book is an attempt to tell the story of Egypt’s nightlife in the 1920s and 1930s by interweaving the biographies of its most successful and important women. During the research for my PhD, I immersed myself in the early twentieth-century Egyptian entertainment press and the memoirs of the period written by actors, actresses, and singers. The stories of women’s lives in particular leapt of the page. Historians are often told that women’s perspectives are hard to find, but here they could not be ignored. Of course, this was not always straightforward; the voices were sometimes mediated through the male editors of magazines, the personal lives subject to prurient gossip, and their appearances picked apart. But they were unquestionably present. In Midnight in Cairo, I have tried to use their words and experiences to build a picture of Cairo’s nightlife and entertainment industry from the perspective of these fascinating women. 

I also wanted to show what history writing could look like if we take performance and popular culture seriously as objects of historical study. In this, I am building on books like Ziad Fahmy’s Ordinary Egyptians and Carmen Gitre’s Acting Egyptian, as well as work by Frederic Lagrange on the singers of this period, and Adham Hafez and the HaRaKa collective, who have helped give me the confidence to say that dancing, singing, and cabaret are art forms worthy of analysis.

There seems to be something deeply misogynistic built into the common way of telling a woman’s story...

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

RC: During the course of writing the book I, of course, had to think deeply about the writing of women’s lives. It was striking how many lives of exceptional women have been pushed into the same narrative pattern—rebellion, followed by independence, ending with sadness, loneliness, or tragedy. This is a common feature across the world, from Marilyn Monroe to Jean Rhys, Nina Hamnett, and more. In Egypt, for instance, one of the common tropes of these stars’ lives is that (after all their fame in life) nobody turns up to their funeral. There seems to be something deeply misogynistic built into the common way of telling a woman’s story: female independence is punished in the end, it seems to imply. Therefore, in the background of this book is a lot of work on the writing of pioneering and transgressive women’s lives and the construction of female celebrity—works like Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments and Sharon Marcus’ Drama of Celebrity—as well as literature on life writing by women, such as Marilyn Booth’s May Her Likes Be Multiplied

The book is structured around the lives of seven of the most prominent women in Egypt’s entertainment industry. Interweaving their lives together, the book tries to create as full a picture as possible of Cairo’s nightlife in the early twentieth century.

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

RC: In many ways, this work builds off work done in my PhD on Arabic translations and adaptions of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex in Egypt. For this, I looked at how Egyptians had engaged with the Ancient Greek past—either attempting to incorporate it into Egyptian national identity, or not. It also analyzed some of the more prominent theories of performance being formulated in Egypt in the twentieth century. Over the course of writing the book, I realized how shaped I had been by my PhD and my two supervisors, Olga Taxidou and Marilyn Booth, whose work on performance and women’s life writing (respectively) has been such a key part of my intellectual development.

This current book is set in the same time period and also looks at Egypt’s performance culture, but there are significant differences in focus, topic, and audience. Most importantly, this is a book written as much for a non-academic audience as for an academic one. This has been an interesting and sometimes difficult task. In particular, I have tried to let the narrative and amazing stories guide the book, without inserting my own analysis too explicitly. Also, attempting to address many different people at the same—both those who know quite a lot about the nightlife of Egypt, and those who perhaps may have heard of Oum Kalthoum—presents its own challenges. 

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

RC: As I say, this is a book aimed at a very wide audience. For some, I hope that it will be a revelation to discover that such a nightlife scene even existed in 1920s Cairo. There is an important gap to be filled in the popular literature market in anglophone countries on the culture and entertainment industry of the Middle East, moving away from books on war and politics alone. I also hope that for academic audiences the book will offer stories, sources, and events about which they may not have known previously. I spent a long time going over journals from the 1920s, some of which are very rare, and I hope my work there will be of use to others. 

J: Can you talk a little more about sources you used?

RC: One thing that I hope comes from this book is demonstrating the richness of the Egyptian press during the 1920s and 1930s. Archival sources about the nightlife and cabaret of Egypt are scant or hard to find. When Edward Said wrote about Tahiyya Carioca he lamented that so much of the history of this period was “unrecorded and unpreserved” and absent from archives—if the archives are even accessible. Said was left with “a sense of a sprawling, teeming history off the page, out of sight and hearing, beyond reach, largely unrecoverable.” 

I hope to have shown that magazines and newspapers are a rich source of material. Many of these magazines themselves are quite rare but there are significant collections in Egypt (at Dar al-Kutub in particular), in Beirut (at the American University of Beirut), and in America (Penn Library has many otherwise hard to find periodicals, but there are also good collections in Yale, Harvard, and elsewhere).

There has also been some excellent work done recently to make this material available online for free. I am a particular fan of the online Arabic periodical collection digitized by the University of Bonn, but others are also very useful. CEAlex has digitized many francophone journals, too. Particularly during the pandemic, such online collections have been a lifeline and show how much can be done with these early twentieth-century periodicals. 

J: What other projects are you working on now? 

RC: I am currently working on a history of the global trajectory of Spiritualism in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This might sound like a big departure from Cairo’s nightlife in the 1920s, but in fact there are many similarities. I am particularly interested in the way in which cultures travelled in the 1920s, a period of unprecedented connection in the world, which is a feature of both Spiritualism and nightclub entertainment. Also, the performative aspects of Spiritualism and summoning the spirits of the dead have many parallels to the entertainment world. Spirituals and “Fakirs” became celebrities in much the same way as singers and dancers. 

I am also working with some other scholars on putting together an edited collection that poses the slightly provocative question of what it would be like to see the Nahda as a popular cultural phenomenon.

 

Excerpt from the book (from the Introduction, pp. 1-9)

Introduction

In the late 1980s, the Egyptian writer Louis Awad looked back on his student days in Cairo between the wars. In particular, he remembered the nights he spent in the cafés of Cairo’s nightlife district, Ezbekiyya: 

All you had to do was sit in one of the bars or cafés that looked out onto Alfi Bey Street, like the Parisiana or the Taverna, and tens of different salesmen would come up to you, one selling lottery tickets, another selling newspapers, another selling eggs and simit bread, another selling combs and shaving cream, the next shining shoes, and the next offering pistachios. There were also people who would play a game ‘Odds or Evens’, performing monkeys, clowns, men with pianolas who performed with their wives, fire eaters, and people impersonating Charlie Chaplin’s walk. Among all these, there was always someone trying to convince you that he would bring you to the most beautiful girl in the world, who was only a few steps away.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the centre of nightlife in Ezbekiyya was Emad al-Din Street – long and wide, with a tram line down the middle running north to the suburbs of Shubra and Abbasiyya. The intersection with Alfi Bey Street, where Louis Awad used to sit in the bars and cafés, was at the southern end of the action. In its heyday, Cairo’s nightlife could rival that in Paris, London or Berlin. Any resident of Egypt’s capital city in the early twentieth century could have claimed, with justification, to be living in one of the great cities of the world, at the centre of many different cultures. 

[…] 

The city’s population had come from an amazing variety of places across Europe, Africa and Asia. Some people (mostly the Europeans) enjoyed pampered lives with lucrative jobs in Africa’s latest boom town. Others struggled, working in menial jobs or negotiating the growing criminal underworld, trying anything to stay afloat. People seeking better opportunities lived alongside refugees from Europe who came in the wake of the First World War. Spies and political agitators from as far away as Russia and Japan crossed the paths of sybaritic aristocrats, who whiled away their afternoons in hotel bars.

This history of cosmopolitan Egypt is memorably recorded in the novels, poems and memoirs of Europeans, most of them living in Alexandria. From the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy’s melancholy evocations of Mediterranean café life to the rich, chocolate-cake prose of Lawrence Durrell’s epic Alexandria Quartet, these writers created some of the most enduring images of twentieth-century Egypt.

But, far from the elite literary salons of Alexandria, another story unfolded – less well known but just as exciting – in the Arabic theatres, cafés and clubs of Cairo. In the transgressive nightlife of central Cairo, with all the freedom that came with performing for an audience of strangers, rigid identities and conventional barriers that separated different nationalities were more fluid than anywhere else. Even a cursory attempt to list the stars of this period reveals the huge variety of their backgrounds, whether religious, national or cultural. Some became legends, others have been forgotten, but they all played their part. There were Egyptians of all kinds. Many of the earliest star actresses, like Nazla Mizrahi or the Dayan sisters, were Jewish; others were Christian or Muslim. Some performers came from further up the Nile. One dance hall in the 1930s boasted a troupe of Sudanese dancers, and among the many young actresses trying to break into the big time in the 1920s was Aida al-Habashiyya, who, to judge from her name, must have been of either Ethiopian or Sudanese descent (Habasha is the Arabic word for that part of subSaharan Africa). Other dancers, singers and actors came to Cairo from all over the Arab world to perform on its stages.

Europeans, too, populated this primarily Arabic-speaking world. One of the most famous dancers of the 1920s was the Englishwoman Dolly Smith, who worked as a choreographer for the biggest theatrical companies in Cairo. Then there was the French Madame Langlois, the influential cabaret impresario and owner of Cairo’s Casino de Paris. The life of the stage proved a magnet for ambitious misfits of all kinds. They found ample possibilities in the nightlife district of Ezbekiyya, where the refined opera house and expensive hotels sat alongside smoky bars, hashish dens and nightclubs; where Greek waiters served their artistic patrons coffee, wine and zabib (a potent Egyptian version of arak); where singing and dancing lasted long into the night. 

[…]

In these disparaged music halls and theatres, women were defining their own place in the new century. They had a lot to fight against, from the disapproval of conservative society to men who thought they could do what they wanted with an actress or nightclub singer. But the lucky ones who managed to navigate their way through this world achieved significant personal and financial independence. Female singers commanded large audiences; actresses were in high demand; women owned dance halls, wrote and directed films, and recorded hit songs. In 1915, eight years before the founding of the Egyptian Feminist Union, the singer and actress Mounira al-Mahdiyya formed her own theatrical troupe. These women who did so much to create modern Egyptian culture were not part of the elite. They frequently grew up in poverty, and many had little formal education – often they had to learn how to read just to be able to understand the scripts for plays they were supposed to act in. Nonetheless, telling the history of Egyptian culture – of Egypt itself – would be impossible without them. They chose what to perform and the Egypt they wanted to show.

This is the story of a parallel women’s movement running alongside the conventional history of early twentieth-century Egyptian feminism, which runs through a list of prominent female activists, most (if not all) from middle- or upper-class backgrounds – Hoda Shaarawi, Nabawiyya Musa, May Ziadeh, Ceza Nabarawi, and the Egyptian Feminist Union. This movement happened in the demi-monde, late at night after the high-class critics had gone to bed. Despite their lack of respectability (or perhaps because of it), these women soon became the first modern Egyptian celebrities. In the 1920s a series of popular entertainment magazines came into being, all of them catering to fans obsessed with these female stars. Journalists dissected everything about them, publishing countless photos, interviews and articles, feeding the public demand for details of their favourite stars’ lives. Later in life, many of these women also published their own memoirs of this period, often casting themselves in the best light or settling old scores. In this celebrity story-mill, fuelled by gossip, romanticism and myth, tales often took on a life of their own – the more flamboyant the better. Yet at its core, this was a group of women demanding to be heard as they asserted their wishes, claimed their rights, and made space for themselves.

Women offered a perspective on this world that men could not – and it was one in which men often came across quite badly. In 1951 a veteran actress called Fatima Rushdi wrote an article explaining why she loved acting parts written for men. She argued that such roles as Romeo, Hamlet, Napoleon and Don Juan ‘suit a woman’s nature because they have a universal character. They have a certain subtlety and intelligence that only she can succeed in capturing.’ Women, she argued, with their sensitivity to the world around them, just make better actors – whether the part be male or female. ‘Men have been luckier than women in the acting profession, but women are better actors,’ she said, contending that ‘only a woman can really get to the depths of the characters’. She concluded that ‘to put it plainly, women can give a performance that is more complete and successful than any man’.

Excerpted from Midnight in Cairo: The Divas of Egypt’s Roaring ‘20s. Copyright (c) 2021 by Raphael Cormack. Used with permission of the publishers, Saqi Books and W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

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.