Leila H. Farsakh, ed., Rethinking Statehood in Palestine: Self-Determination and Decolonization Beyond Partition (New Texts Out Now)

Leila H. Farsakh, ed., Rethinking Statehood in Palestine: Self-Determination and Decolonization Beyond Partition (New Texts Out Now)

Leila H. Farsakh, ed., Rethinking Statehood in Palestine: Self-Determination and Decolonization Beyond Partition (New Texts Out Now)

By : Leila Farsakh

Leila H. Farsakh (ed.), Rethinking Statehood in Palestine: Self-Determination and Decolonization Beyond Partition (University of California Press, 2021).

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

Leila H. Farsakh (LF): The failure of the two-state solution to bring about an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is what motivated me to write this book and invite various young Palestinian scholars to contribute to it. The intensification of the Israeli colonial structure of domination in the West Bank and Gaza has shown that a Palestinian state within the confines of the occupied territories will not materialize, despite being admitted into the United Nations in 2012 and being recognized by 137 states. The continuous siege on Gaza, the fragmentation of the Palestinian people, and the intensification of Israeli settlements despite over nearly three decades of peace process made it clear that Palestinians need to rethink the process of decolonization outside the framework of partition or the two-states option. This book is an attempt to think through the challenges of any one-state solution from a legal, political, and economic perspective. Its various chapters help advance a new epistemology of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, one that sees the Palestinian struggle not solely through the prism of the nation-state or as confined only to Palestinians, but rather enables us to construct a new way of thinking about decolonization and political liberation that allows people to live in equality and dignity, irrespective of their ethnicity.

It is concerned with the issue of self-determination, decolonization, and equal citizenship.

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

LF: The book engages with the growing literature on the one-state solution and with works that question the notion of the nation-state as the telos of national liberation. It is concerned with the issue of self-determination, decolonization, and equal citizenship. In its first part, the book analyzes the political economy, and aesthetic, of state formation within the larger regional context Palestine finds itself in. It also sheds new light on the political costs of pursuing a state within the confines of UN resolution 242 to the various constituents of the Palestinian people. The second part of the book unpacks the meaning of decolonization today as the various contributors re-examine the relationship between law, nationhood, and political liberation, as well as explore the various Palestinian agencies pushing for change. The book thus pushes the literature on the one-state solution further by analyzing the difficult issues that need to be addressed in any attempt to articulate a viable political alternative to partition, namely how to reunify the Palestinian body politics, bring about justice, deal with international legal structure we are embedded in, and protect the individual and collective rights of all those living on the land. 

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

LF: This book connects to my previous works in various ways. It emphasizes the importance of a critical political economy analysis to understanding facts on the ground, as I did in my first book, Labor Migration to Israel: Labor, Land and Occupation. In that first book, I explained the economic impossibility of a viable Palestinian state by analyzing the pattern of Palestinian labor flows to Israel since 1967. I showed that Palestinian workers from Gaza were severed from the Israeli labor market, while West Bank wage earners continued to build Israeli expanding settlements, as part of an Israeli decision to separate the Gaza Strip from the West Bank while intensifying its colonization of Palestinian land, creating thereby a de facto Bantustan reality that emptied the Palestinian state project of any emancipatory potential.

Rethinking Statehood in Palestine also develops themes I tackled in my various articles and in the book I co-edited with Bashir Bashir, The Arab and Jewish Questions: Geographies of Engagement in Palestine and Beyond, which put the Arab and Jewish questions in conversation with one another. My focus in my new book, though, was on the Palestinian debates and their attempts to redefine the relation between the nation and the state to provide a viable political alternative to the failed Palestinian state project. By ensuring that it is an edited volume, I wanted to bring forth Palestinian voices who are articulating the meaning of decolonization and ways to achieve it in the twenty-first century. The analysis presented here delves into the different political, legal, and economic challenges and opportunities presented in thinking beyond partition to create a new political order that protects Palestinian rights and brings about justice.

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

LF: This book is intended for a wide public and to scholars interested in the Israeli-Palestinian struggle. It will also be of value to researchers working on nationalism, self-determination, citizenship, and statehood in the twenty-first century. It is my hope that the book will encourage further debates on the kind of political strategies needed to fulfill Palestinian rights and ensure equality outside the framework of the nation-state or the paradigm of partition. 

J: What other projects are you working on now?

LF: My next project is a memoir centered on the meaning of Palestine. In it, I weave the history of the Palestinian struggle for self-determination with the personal trajectory of becoming a female political scientist committed to the question of justice and living in and outside Palestine. It situates itself within a growing body of literature that attempts to provide a human dimension to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by highlighting the challenges that many migrant women face as they seek to position themselves within their country of origin and exiled from it. By exposing the difficulties of coming of age as a Palestinian woman born during the 1967 Six Day War, I shed new light on what Palestine means and why it matters, after nearly seventy-five years of Israel’s existence, to those born outside its borders. I interlace my training as a political scientist into the art of life narration to illustrate how a home can be created through multiple encounters that call into question nationalist and patriarchal definitions of self-determination and liberation.

 

Excerpt from the book (from the Introduction, pp. 2-4)

Rethinking Statehood engages with an emerging trend in Palestine studies that advocates for breaking out of national frames to understand the Palestine question. Its main contribution lies in examining the opportunities and costs of moving away from the pursuit of territorial sovereignty as a means to achieve political liberation. As this introduction argues, the quest for a Palestinian state was not in vain, but its historical role has come to an end. It is thus necessary to reexamine this role and explore how the failure of national independence enables us to rearticulate the relationship between self-determination and decolonization away from the telos of the nation-state. Such a rearticulation requires transcending the partition paradigm that has dominated all international attempts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It entails defining the elements of a political alternative that is democratic, viable, and economically feasible. It also must address the question of Zionism and explain how the political rights of Jewish Israelis can be reconciled with Palestinian rights in any attempt to decolonize the ongoing settler-colonial reality.

At the heart of the Palestinian struggle is a yearning to return home and for freedom—freedom from settler-colonialism, as much as from oppression and exile. Ever since they were expelled from their land during the 1948 war and the creation of the State of Israel, Palestinians have sought to fulfill their right of return which is enshrined in UN Resolution 194, issued on December 4, 1948. The establishment of the PLO by the Arab League in 1964 reaffirmed this right, as its charter called for the liberation of Palestine from Zionist imperialism. The PLO charter did not specify statehood as part of its mission, though, since it envisaged Palestine as part of a larger Arab collectivity. It was only in the aftermath of the 1967 Six Days War and the international consensus on UN Security Council (UNSC) Resolution 242 as a framework for peace in the Middle East that the Palestinian national movement made the project of an independent state the vehicle for decolonizing Palestine from Zionism and affirming the Palestinian right to self-determination.

In this regard, the Palestinian national movement was not much different from most anticolonial liberation movements of the twentieth century. Self-determination, a concept internationalized with Lenin’s defense of people’s right to national independence and reframed by Wilson’s Fourteen Points in 1918, laid the foundation of a twentieth-century world order composed of nation-states. By 1960, it became “the juridical component of international non-domination,” as Adom Getachew put it. Yet, as she and others have shown, self-determination was a concept used by imperial powers to reorganize their spheres of control, as much as it was claimed by every national liberation movement demanding freedom from colonialism. Imperial powers viewed it a principle that colonized people could exercise once they prove fit to do so, thus tying it to imperial racial and political considerations. Anticolonialists, on the other hand, defined self-determination as an inalienable right to achieve freedom from external domination. 

UN Resolution 1514, adopted in 1960 by the UN General Assembly (UNGA), affirmed the status of self-determination as a human right, one that is necessary in order to fulfill all other rights. It also declared colonialism a crime and specified that “all people have an inalienable right to complete freedom, the exercise of their sovereignty and the integrity of their national territory.” It thus inadvertently made self-determination synonymous with national territorial sovereignty, that is statehood. While many were aware of the inherent contradiction of the nation-state as a protector as well as violator of human rights, an international consensus had formed around the necessity of independent statehood as a first, if not sufficient, step towards political liberation. This is because the nation-state was conceived as the internationally recognized sovereign entity that ensures citizens their political rights, including their right to security and protection from external domination.

For many anticolonialists, though, the creation of an independent state was not the only, or optimal, means to guarantee people’s freedom and their national sovereignty. They considered the right to self-determination as a people’s right to define their political future and choose their political form, or system, of government and for managing their affairs. It did not need to be territorially bound, since sovereignty is enshrined in the people, or the nation, not in the state per se. Instead, it can be fulfilled through various political configurations, such as transforming empires into representative federations, or confederations, of equal citizens. As Wilder and Getachew have shown, anticolonial proponents of the right to self-determination envisaged its implementation as part of a larger project of remaking the world beyond the Westphalian order of sovereign states, one that required transforming political and economic structures, both domestically and internationally, in ways that would guarantee the freedom and equality of all people. They were cognizant of what revolutionaries from Toussaint Louverture to Fanon have warned against, namely that national independence does not guarantee liberation, for it can create new forms of domination that deny citizens their political and economic rights.

The Palestinian struggle for self-determination carried within it this ambiguity concerning the relationship between national liberation and statehood. As Edward Said put in 1978, the PLO never resolved “the question of whether it is really a national independence or a national liberation movement.” Since the arrival of Fatah at the head of the PLO in 1968, the Palestinian national discourse has tied return with liberation and conscripted the notion of self-determination to the right to establish an independent Palestinian state. In 1971, the eighth Palestinian National Council (PNC) convention adopted a unanimous resolution specifying that “the armed struggle of the Palestinian people is not a racial or religious struggle directed against the Jews. This is why the future state that will be set up in Palestine liberated from Zionist imperialism will be a democratic Palestinian state. All who wish to will be able to live in peace there with the same rights and the same duties.” What came to be known as the Palestinian version of a one-state solution was presented as the means to protect Palestinian political rights by affirming the right to an independent, decolonized nation-state. It asserted Palestinian political existence in the face of international denial, as best exemplified with UNSC Resolution 242. This resolution, adopted on November 22, 1967, acknowledged the right of each state in the region to “live in secure and recognised boundaries.” It did not, though, mention the Palestinians nor any of their UN-protected rights, such as those detailed in UN Resolutions 181 and 194. It simply referred to them as refugees in need of a humanitarian solution, not a national group with a right to self-determination.

From its inception, the Palestinian state project was thus a project of national self-affirmation as well as of political actualization. Its aim was to assert Palestinian “peoplehood”, which Zionism sought to eradicate, as much as to articulate a just political future inclusive of all those who live on the land. While many doubted the sincerity of its inclusive vision, which Israel outrightly rejected, Palestinian nationalists were clear about opposing Zionism as a racial colonial project of domination rather than rejecting Jews for their identity. The PLO’s diplomatic and legal efforts in this regard came to fruition in 1974 with UNGA Resolution 3236, which affirmed the legitimacy of Palestinian anticolonial struggle and right to “national independence and sovereignty.” In UNGA Resolutions 3236 and 3237, the international community—as represented by the UN—also recognized the PLO as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people and invited it to participate in the works of the General Assembly like any non-member state, such as the Vatican. The PLO, meanwhile, acted as a state in exile, with its various political institutions, electoral structures, and economic services, representing and providing for Palestinians in the diaspora as well as for those under Israeli occupation. 

Linking self-determination with statehood, in other words, gave the Palestinian revolution a concrete political meaning in an international system that recognized the legitimacy of decolonization struggles in the post-WWII era and bestowed on states the primary responsibility of representing and protecting the human and political rights of citizens. What remained contested within the Palestinian national movement was the content and shape of this state, as much as the extent to which its creation would be the means to, or the end of, decolonisation.

 

Rethinking Statehood in Palestine is available as an open source book and is downloadable for free here.

  • ALSO BY THIS AUTHOR

    • Searching for the Arab Spring in Ramallah

      Searching for the Arab Spring in Ramallah
      A year has passed since Arab youth took to the streets demanding freedom and dignity, unleashing a long-awaited revolution. As authoritarian regimes fell in Tunisia and Libya, were shaken in Egypt, a

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.