Anneka Lenssen, Beautiful Agitation: Modern Painting and Politics in Syria (New Texts Out Now)

Anneka Lenssen, Beautiful Agitation: Modern Painting and Politics in Syria (New Texts Out Now)

Anneka Lenssen, Beautiful Agitation: Modern Painting and Politics in Syria (New Texts Out Now)

By : Anneka Lenssen

Anneka Lenssen, Beautiful Agitation: Modern Painting and Politics in Syria (University of California Press, 2020).        

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

Anneka Lenssen (AL): The book is a study of artistic practices developed by Syrian painters over the period 1900 to 1965 in response to a political setting characterized by border disputes and the proximate threat of forcible displacement. As such, it is a study of how artists imagined their connections to others and activated these connections in their work without necessarily accepting or affirming official designations of belonging (such as citizenship in a nation-state defined by language or religion). Prior to the solidification of Ba`th Party rule in the mid-1960s, artists in Syria explored different schemes for expanding communal recognition and registering a plenitude of being. These became apparent to me once I started to access materials in family collections—private correspondence and sketchbooks—containing evidence of a dissonant and agitational quality that differed from the values touted by later Syrian critics invested in notions of Syrian Arab greatness. Because the documents reveal deep ambivalence about modern ideas of self-sameness and constancy, I decided I wanted the book to bear witness to how artists Kahlil Gibran, Adham Ismail, Fateh al-Moudarres, and others made work that destabilized rather than buttressed the heroic developmentalist narratives that became the norm.

My second, quite practical motivation in writing Beautiful Agitation had to do with making visual materials available to other researchers. During my fieldwork in Syria during the period 2007 to 2011, I enjoyed access to many drawings and paintings that had never been published in reproduction. For a variety of reasons, ranging from gross economic inequity to intellectual differences in critical focus, studies of Syrian modernism tend to feature only a small set of relatively low-quality image reproductions. This means that anyone interested in giving credit to Syrian artistic practices as bearers of meaning always starts from a disadvantage because the available images look poor and insubstantial. Quite early in the project I came to the conclusion that I needed to gather sufficient resources to subsidize high-quality color reproductions. Later, I took the further decision to privilege drawings and other ephemeral records of creative process over framed oil paintings that more typically anchor studies of modern art in the SWANA region. A sketch rendered in ink or watercolor on paper might never appear in a public exhibition; it might instead circulate through an intimate circle of comrades. In the 1940s, Adham Ismail made drawings at secret Ba`th party gatherings and Fateh al-Moudarres practiced Surrealist ink techniques in café settings in Aleppo. When I encountered these drawings in person, some sixty years later, I was reminded of how the material dimension of the sketch can serve as a site of recalcitrance, subversion, and pleasure. By reproducing them in the book, I hope to make it possible for others to regard their dynamics of “manifestation” and consider my arguments about the tactical use of ambiguity in composition.

The book tries to take seriously how vitalist ideas could take on right-wing or left-wing guises ...

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

AL: On the art history side, the book addresses work in comparative avant-garde studies. A most important focus for me was the phenomenon of vitalism in art, literature, and political organization. By vitalism, I mean philosophies of life as a sustaining, procreative force that persists outside a singular body or bodily form. Thinkers as diverse as Henri Bergson, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Zaki al-Arsuzi (who in turn discerned core vitalist notions in the philosophy of Ibn Sina) all posed vitalism in opposition to positivist codes of civilization. To get a handle on the appeal of vitalist thinking in anticolonial and postcolonial conditions of struggle, I drew on brilliant studies by Donna V. Jones, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Pheng Cheah, Mark Antliff, and others. The book tries to take seriously how vitalist ideas could take on right-wing or left-wing guises, thereby engaging with the double movement of universalism and hypernationalism that characterizes much twentieth-century politics and produces recurring slippages in identification(s).

In terms of the politics and histories of political formation, I engage most closely with critical studies of the so-called “Wilsonian moment” and of international politics based upon principles of self-determination and territorial sovereignty. I first entered this literature through studies of the Alexandretta Crisis of 1936 to 1939. Its violent negotiations of the identity categories of “Arab” and Turk” came to bear directly upon the life trajectory of artist Adham Ismail. His was a multilingual, middle-class Alawi family living in a semi-autonomous Alexandretta territory articulated by the French colonial government as upholding a doctrine of protection for minority language rights for Turkish-speaking subjects. But he emerged from the crisis as a displaced Arabic-speaking Syrian subject who left his home in Antioch so as to enroll in French Syrian preparatory schools. The experience left an indelible mark on his thinking about Arab identity as a creative impetus or “source” for the world. I was surprised by how challenging it was to fit the details of his family’s moving recollections of the conflict into the official story of the dispute. It is a challenge that repeats, in different ways, in my readings of the life of both Gibran and al-Moudarres.

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

AL: Beautiful Agitation evolved out of research for my doctoral dissertation at MIT. My initial fieldwork had a different focus. I was interested in finding a way to frame a modern art history without (implicitly or explicitly) assuming that a modern institutional triad of public museum, private gallery, and free press ought to anchor a fully realized art scene. I felt that the Syrian case had much to offer to broader studies of modern art because few Syrian artists ever accepted the autonomy of art. This put Syrian art history at meaningful odds with the foundational post-WWII liberal commitment to “art for art’s sake.” Even at the highpoint of Syrian abstract painting in the 1960s, which was accompanied by active and sophisticated discussions of artistic freedom, the resulting artworks drew interest not as things in themselves but rather as tools for honing the sensory capacities of Socialism’s “new men.” After interviewing artists and paging through scrapbooks of clippings, I wrote a dissertation that proposed four other art world institutions that structured different modes of Syrian experimental practice: the ideological political party; the foreign art academy; the literary journal and its complex mediation of print/image distinctions; and the national art school. 

Only later, once I defended the dissertation, did I realize that the institution of the political party had provided a consistent underpinning to these other institutional forms and formats. The record of Syrian aesthetic commentary shows everyone from literary editors to secondary school teachers to corrupt politicians engaging in vitalist rhetoric that can be traced to the youth-oriented, oppositional character of the early political parties. My writing process became one of inverting my dissertation, converting what I thought was a subtheme—the investment of youthful creators in the power of excitation as a basis of social transformation—into a primary object of investigation. This involved researching two new chapters to establish the earlier twentieth-century history of the vitalist formation: one recovering the oppositional quality of Gibran’s Romantic paintings and drawings in the wake of the “positivist” Young Turk Revolution, and another tracking how the French occupation of Syria (1920 to 1946) instigated new appeals to vital forces. 

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

AL: At present, many art historians who teach in universities in the United States, myself included, are working to update old courses on modern art in ways that contextualize changes of style, tactic, and meaning in a matrix of multiple sites of contestation. This represents a major shift away from the previous focus on developments in a handful of market centers (Paris, New York, and so on). I hope my book can contribute specific images and narratives to global modern teaching of this kind. For instance, I reproduce Surrealist drawings by al-Moudarres that respond to images by French refugee artists but also develop a distinct reading of archaeology and dreams that is conditioned by colonial excavations in Aleppo. These may now be incorporated into a lecture about automatism and displacement alongside work by figures such as Leonora Carrington and Cesar Moro. Equally, I hope my book can help to show that studying modern art in light of global contingencies is not a choice or a fad to be replaced by another method. It is hardly an option to be an isolationist art historian when we are the legatees of a history of American empire and policy interests that entangles modernist formations in the United States with those in Syria. 

J: What other projects are you working on now?

AL: My next book examines postcolonial art pedagogies in the socialist countries of the Eastern Mediterranean in the 1960s, with a focus on schools in Egypt, Syria, and Algeria. I am interested in a question I pose to undergraduate students in my courses at UC Berkeley: In the wake of hard-fought independence from European occupiers, after you break the plaster casts and throw out the stretched canvases imposed by foreign instructors, what do you make? Why? And with what effect on which audience?

 

Excerpt from the book (from Chapter 4, pp. 187-192)

In October 1962, a call went out from the artists of the AMI [Galerie Art Moderne Internationale, in Damascus]. At issue was a desire to bring the modern art movements of their region to a world stage once and for all. By making use of their connections at Syrian newspapers, the gallery was able to arrange to publish a statement addressed to Arab artists, writing, “We affirm that the Arab artist has been given his freedom, liberating him, and granting him responsibility for creating forms or tearing these forms down.” The resulting artistic goal, at least as it was framed that month in Damascus, was to express a version of man who was advancing toward an “eternal future.” The AMI’s group of intellectuals and promoters had begun to imagine plans for convening a conference of Arab artists and establishing a biennial exhibition, and this call—poignant in its desire for filiation to others—proposed a collective commitment to a modern art based on change over stasis. 

The previous year had been consumed, in part, by the dissolution of the UAR. Even though nationalist narratives of Arab restitution remained alive, enthusiasm for Arab state formation reached a kind of nadir. In many ways, the gallery had a front-row seat to faltering confidence. Because they occupied the fourth story of a building on a downtown square, they could witness how the crowds that assembled to cheer the breakup had cheered again once Abdel Nasser made a radio announcement that the union had been repaired, and yet again at later news of a final dissolution. Severing ties with Egypt seemed to offer some initial relief from the state’s claim to hold a monopoly on cultural activity, and many in the city made moves to cultivate a commercial arts sector. Two additional galleries opened, briefly, and the AMI reached out to a gallery partner in Beirut for the purpose of bringing Syrian painters to the Lebanese market. As Robyn Creswell has discussed, Lebanon’s central government had remained unusually limited in growth, which not only gave intellectuals room to maneuver but also ensured a deregularized economy and a powerful local community of financial and mercantile elites (an anomaly in the Arab world in this period). The AMI’s effort to forge ties to these buyers also benefited from the efforts of Chérif Khaznadar, a Beirut-based journalist and friend of the gallery. Writing for the Francophone paper L’Orient Littéraire, Khaznadar promised access to a vibrant scene that had developed in Syria away from all “clamor or publicity.” Painter Mahmoud Daadouch, who produced ugly concretions of dross and nebulae in pastels and gray pigments, was presented as the enfant terrible. And [Fateh] al-Moudarres was introduced as a cerebral artist who worked with codes, putting together strange “abstractions” through a delirious imagination and frustrating novice readers and facile interpretations.

[…]

[Abdul Aziz] Alloun, al-Moudarres, and Daadouch saw the exercise through to releasing a document they dubbed a “Plastic Arts Movement in Syria” in late May 1962. Although it was partly a promotional ploy in the tradition of Futurist manifestos, the text took pains to address the atmosphere of precarity following Syria’s abdication from the UAR, including consideration for the problem of maintaining an authentic (rather than imposed) responsibility to the self and to others, from both past and future. The authors often strike a mystical tone, ratifying an affinity with Sufistic metaphysics, suggesting that an artwork has a fourth dimension (that of cyclical time), and asserting that even inanimate material becomes “alive” once it is incorporated into a work of art. But their most provocative points arise from their responses to the key terms of social obligation that had begun to anchor national art policies. For instance, they suggest that authenticity is to be secured by art’s continued radiation and “growth in perpetuity.” Further, the artist’s responsibility to the collective is real but cannot be consciously seized at the moment of creation, and traditions are limits that a person may apply and abandon freely. And, in their point nine, the authors declare the right of artists to abdicate from positive arts of formation so as to pursue formlessness as a virtue—this latter being the “right” they eventually claimed for all Arab artists in the Arab countries.

Circa 1962, national art discourse in Syria was only just beginning to feature discussion of “form” and its relationship to national objectives, and the conversations typically occurred under the cover of skepticism about the ideological content of abstract painting. The notion that the task of the artist resided in acts of positive formation had been enshrined in the bureaucratic vocabulary in about 1958, when the creation of a Ministry of Culture during the UAR years prompted the recharacterization of the category of “fine arts” (al-funun al-jamila), a former province of the Ministry of Education, as “plastic arts” (al-funun al-tashkiliyya), which followed the UNESCO lexicon by highlighting individual acts of molding and making form. But al-Moudarres and Daadouch had both studied and worked in Italy during the years when existentialist versions of art informel began to fill the galleries, an ethos that was defined less by a commitment to negating form or structure than as a rejection of premeditated ideas that constrained earlier modern painting (including earlier geometric abstraction). The text of the Syrian manifesto would seem to tread a similar path, fumbling toward a dialectical position outside—or beyond—all kinds of coming binary thinking that would characterize acts of formation as humanist and declare the absence of fixed forms a recidivist position. 

The authors assert, “The formless is an established condition, like form, and is acceptable in the work of art.” Further, this condition of being unformed or without form is to be reached through movement. A truly formless painting cannot be achieved by withholding delineations of form, as an “abstract” painter might do, but entails obscuring even the loci necessary to track succession. To illustrate the idea, the three authors turn to imaginations of landscape, invoking the desert as an active yet boundless place. “The desert is a formless painting,” the manifesto reads, “because it is the unbroken movement of one grain of sand.” This imagination of timeless, contemporary, unformed practice challenged the presumptive scale of the artwork as matching the vision of a person, rewriting it as an embrace of a totality incorporating both the uncountably minuscule and the inconceivably vast. It also made the formless painting a product of Syria itself, with its huge desert interior as a connecting void between cities. 

Importantly, this declaration of the validity of formless arts coincides with al-Moudarres’s intensifying interest in sand as a component of his paintings. That very April, at the Spring Salon, he made a public debut of paintings incorporating sand in their gesso preparations. The innovation enjoyed brief yet informed coverage from the Ministry of Culture’s newly launched monthly journal, likely because the AMI had succeeded in fortifying ties to that sector. The journal explained to readers that al-Moudarres was interested in bringing the “background” of the picture into a continuum with his “colors” (lit. al-alwan, a term used interchangeably for pigment or colors). As such, the artist’s sand experiments constituted an update on the longstanding perceptual problem of figure and ground. To add sand to painting was to introduce desiccating properties to the mix, with the result that colors placed upon the canvas sunk into the space and never quite resolved on the surface as a standalone figure: 

 

Fateh al-Moudarres, Family in the Open Air (alt. The Last Supper), 1962. Mixed media on canvas, 60 × 90 cm. Collection of the Atassi Foundation for Arts and Culture, Dubai. URL: https://www.atassifoundation.com/artists/fateh-al-moudarres?view=slider#7


Al-Moudarres was not particularly interested in claiming the mantle of “abstract painter,” and his paintings make use of sand not only to ensure a quality of general irresolution but also produce shifts of narrative. For example, the sand in Family in the Open Air renders its titular reference to “open air” into contradiction, for earthen material fills the area designated as sky. Indeed, the presence of sand is not visible on the surface of the work, which, although thickly sedimented with pigment, exhibits almost no granular texture. Rather than telegraph a clear intention, the sand conveys an atmosphere of ambivalence to the “family” al-Moudarres assembles from his repertoire of figural parts. In this instance, the artist absurdly overarticulates the bodies, adding pairs of circular breasts that repeat in other orb shapes, as in round fruits on a table and the round trees in the landscape. These set up a contrast with the central character, who bears an X. Positioned against the repetition of circles, the X prompts readings of the figure as Christ (so much so that the painting later accrued the title The Last Supper). To the O of the female, the X is both cross and a sign of gender difference (that is, not O, or the negation of O). This play with signs of repetition and difference helps to establish a space of intertextual myth in the work, such that the accursed figure bearing an “X” may be an antihero, Christ, a messiah, or all three at once. 

Credit: Excerpted from Beautiful Agitation: Modern Painting and Politics in Syria by Anneka Lenssen, published by the University of California Press. © 2020 by Anneka Lenssen.

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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.