Brahim El Guabli, “Where is the Maghreb? Theorizing a Liminal Space” (New Texts Out Now)

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Jan 25, 2022 Maghreb
Brahim El Guabli, “Where is the Maghreb? Theorizing a Liminal Space” (New Texts Out Now)

Brahim El Guabli, “Where is the Maghreb? Theorizing a Liminal Space” (New Texts Out Now)

By : Brahim El Guabli ابراهيم الكبلي

Brahim El Guabli, “Where is the Maghreb? Theorizing a Liminal Space,” Arab Studies Journal, Vol. XXIX, No. 2 (Fall 2021).

Jadaliyya (J): What made you edit this special section?

Brahim El Guabli (BEG): This special section of the Arab Studies Journal (ASJ) is the result of two years of rigorous work to produce an interdisciplinary special section on the counterintuitive question of the location of the Maghreb. When I first conceptualized what would have been a special issue, I started by asking myself whether the place we currently call the Maghreb is to be taken for granted and at face value or not. My answer was that by simply re-localizing the Maghreb, North Africa, or Tamazgha in space and time we can revisit the theoretical ramifications of this palimpsestic, geographic, demographic, and intellectual space. My premise is that a critical reflection on emplacement and temporality can yield generative results that can help us renew our questions and advance our knowledge of this elusive entity. As we know, there is an abundance of strong scholarship about both the Maghreb and North Africa, but Tamazgha, the indigenized term for the region, fades into the background, thus begging for more engagement with the Maghreb’s location beyond the current post-colonial geographical and political borders. 

In continuation of a special issue I had co-edited in 2018, I invited a group of scholars to revisit the notion of the Maghreb through an approach that examines it from both “within” and “without.” While only a few articles passed ASJ’s rigorous peer review process and survived the vicissitudes COVID had wrought upon the authors, my initial proposal had a multifaceted number of contributions that covered Amazigh literature, Maghreb-Asia, Sufism, race, and music. The deconstructive effort that went into this special section offers some productive approaches that will shed new light on crucial conceptions, such as Tamazgha, Amazighitude, “transcontinentalism,” and linguistic dichotomies. The essays show the Maghreb for what it is—a multilayered space with indigenous and transnational significance the examination of which requires the mobilization of a multilingual and interdisciplinary scholarship. This is part of a “leftovers scholarship” that I have been constructing, by which I mean a methodical effort to revisit questions and sources that we might consider exhausted and overstudied in order to develop novel ways to approach them differently. Leftovers scholarship must be interdisciplinary and comparative. It involves questioning what might have been taken for granted and shining new light on it by engaging with new questions.
Each contribution engages multiple temporalities and multilayered spatial connections to make sense of the Maghreb...

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

BEG: Claudia Esposito’s contribution probes Amara Lakhous’s and Leonardo Sciascia’s use of the investigative genre in their novelistic output to question the unassailable truths and grand narratives in Italy and Algeria. Esposito places the Maghreb within Italian immigration and power politics, concluding that the Maghreb is “located in the art” or in a methodology instead of a geographical location. Sonja Hegasy teases out the significance of liminality in its personal and collective dimensions based on Abdellatif Laâbi’s book Un autre Maroc. Drawing on the history of the “Years of Lead” and the legacy of the Moroccan Marxist-Leninist Movement, Hegasy invites us to examine Maghrebi utopias and their discontents. Carlos Cañete and Gonzalo Fernandez demonstrate how the Maghreb is depicted as both “outer and inner to Spanish history and culture” by tracing the genealogies of the terms “Magreb” and “Maghreb” as well as the contexts of their deployment in Spanish historical literature. In her contribution, Paraska Tolan-Szklinik brings attention to the overlooked issues of race, sexuality, and hypermasculinity in the 1969 Pan-African Cultural Festival  in Algiers, shedding new light on this wedding of African nations and their diasporas by being attentive to sexuality and asymmetrical relationships. Each contribution engages multiple temporalities and multilayered spatial connections to make sense of the Maghreb as it has evolved across genres, historical trajectories, and in utopian or revolutionary endeavors. 

My own introduction to the issue revisits some of the current issues in Maghreb-related scholarship to foreground the fact that locating the Maghreb begs for new reading practices that take into account indigeneity, multilingualism, and interdisciplinarity. By focusing on the need to prioritize a “poetics of affirmation,” which accounts for Amazigh indigeneity and Tamazgha’s multilingualism—in lieu of the current “poetics of erasure,” which has relegated indigenous languages to something to be read for in dominant languages—I propose an “unlearning methodology” that calls attention to the absence of Amazigh language and culture in Maghreb-focused scholarship. This unlearning methodology requires that we pay attention to what has been absented for both objective and subjective reasons in order to “unlearn” the normalized acceptance of absence. In reality, we still continue to use the terms Maghreb and North Africa, including in this special section, whereas a significant number of indigenous scholars and activists in the region have renamed their ancestral homeland by using the neologism of Tamazgha. I am very interested in the methodological and conceptual ramifications of these names, which I believe capture Tamazgha’s intellectual, linguistic, literary, and demographic dynamism and vitality. It is by paying attention to this fluidity that the Maghreb’s liminality can be apprehended, and the conceptual potential of its imbrication with other spaces theorized. Finally, the Maghreb was conceived as a decolonial and revolutionary project by the generation of Maghrebi nationalists, particularly from the Rif (Morocco), Algeria, and Tunisia, who convened in Cairo in the 1940s, and reconciling this decolonialist Maghreb with the liberating potential of the indigenous Tamazgha could yield transformative results. 

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

BEG: In fact, this special section is deeply connected to my ongoing work. I see myself as an interdisciplinary scholar whose research interests span comparative literature, Francophone studies, Amazigh studies, and Arabic studies, among others. Addressing the linguistic, mnemonic, and intellectual complexity of the Maghreb is part of my broad research agenda. In my forthcoming book, Moroccan Other-Archives: History and Citizenship after State Violence, I use a multilingual, interdisciplinary, and trans-thematic approach to examine the significance of the cultural production that emerged in Morocco since the mid-1990s. Probing Amazigh activists’ literature and novelistic outputs about departed Moroccan Jews, which I call “al-kitāba al-dhākirātiyya” (mnemonic literature), and testimonial prison literature about political detention, this book foregrounds the civic and historiographical dimensions of the contemporaneous reemergence of these three topics in Moroccan cultural production. Faithful to this multipronged approach, this special section aims to chart a new path for the critical examination of categories, themes, approaches, languages, and methodologies from which and through which Tamazgha has been approached so far. The goal is to develop an approach that sustains the problematization of the Maghreb/Tamazgha while also affirming its indigenous dimensions.

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

BEG: This issue should be of interest to an interdisciplinary readership. All the contributions reflect a multilingual and interdisciplinary effort that will be appealing to different readers across disciplines, such as history, French and Francophone studies, Italian studies, Spanish studies, literary studies, post-colonial studies, and art history, among others. The Maghreb/Tamazgha requires this multilingual and interdisciplinary approach, and our readers will appreciate the rich analyses our contributors have furnished in their highly engaging essays.

J: What other projects are you working on now? 

BEG: I am currently working on two book projects. I am completing a book entitled Saharan Imaginations: Between Saharanism and Ecocare. The book theorizes “Saharanism”, which I have coined and defined as a discursive practice that underlies the universalizing imaginary and rhetoric about deserts. Saharanism takes several forms in cultural production, popular literature, film, and even academic studies, and Saharan Imaginations delves into its manifestations in different media and develops them into a theory of “Saharanism.” Saharanism has a devastating racial, environmental, spatial, and human cost that the book discusses at length.

The second project I am working on is provisionally entitled The Amazigh Republic of Letters. This work retraces the development of Amazigh literature across different temporalities, languages, and geographical areas, aiming to contribute to the ongoing construction of the field of Amazigh literary studies in English. The novelty of this work is that it engages in the close reading of Amazigh literary texts in Tamazight. Amazigh literary studies in English are a work in progress, and centralizing of the use of Amazigh sources in literary analysis is crucial for the sound construction of the field. Literary scholarship is primarily a reflection on language, and Tamazight deserves to be read and reflected upon as a literary language. Jadaliyya’s bilingual dossier on Tankra Tamazight (Amazigh Awakening) has shown the highly promising potential of the close reading of literary works in Tamazight. This work is particularly dear to me. Tamazight is my mother tongue and, as an indigenous scholar, I feel that it is a duty to use my Amazigh language skills to normalize the use of Tamazight as an academic language.

J: How do you assess the state of the field of Amazigh studies in Anglophone academia and what do you think should be done to develop it?

BEG: Amazigh studies are vibrant and ever growing in Tamazgha and Europe. In the United States, however, the discipline has yet to be built despite the significant scholarship that several colleagues have been producing about Amazigh issues. Until the 1990s, some universities, like UCLA and the University of Michigan Ann-Arbor, offered linguistics courses in Tamazight. Nowadays, it is mainly anthropologists and art historians who study and publish about Amazigh topics. Since Tamazgha is placed under Near Eastern and Modern Languages departments, other dominant languages have taken the place of Tamazight in departmental curricular and programmatic offerings. Therefore, the Maghreb or Tamazgha is studied without the language and literatures of its indigenous people. The disconnect between the profound rehabilitation of Tamazight in Tamazgha and its current absence in academic units in the United States is crystal clear. Tamazghan political regimes have reconciled themselves, albeit reluctantly, with their Amazigh heritage, but academic departments have yet to recalibrate their offerings to reflect this sea change in their curricula. In reality, academic departments, especially at universities that train graduate students who specialize in Maghreb/Tamazgha studies, can play a crucial role in supporting and expanding this indigenous field of study. This will benefit them in the short term because the current re-Amazighization of space, film, literature, and thought in Tamazgha is becoming a fundamental tenet of specialization in the area. Graduate students who can include Tamazight in their course of study now will contribute to unlocking the academic and curricular potential of this expanding body of knowledge in the years to come.

 

Excerpt from the article (from pp. 34 - 38)

Occupying an interstitial position between different continents and trans- national cultural formations, a variety of linguistic, ethnic, racial, religious, aesthetic, and other cultural elements constitute the Maghrib. This position as a space-between-spaces makes the Maghrib a hub for human hybridization, literary creolization, artistic miscegenation, and cultural cross-pollination. Most recently, the renewed influx of sub-Saharan African economic and ecological migrants combined with the intensified policing of the southern European shores have turned Tamazgha (broader North Africa) into a destination, rather than a transitory passage. In turn, there has been a significant “re-Africanizing” of the Maghrib.

A rhizomatic collection of geographic, human, and cultural continuities extend beyond the officially recognized borders of what constitutes the Maghrib. Yet the potential of exploring the Maghrib in cultural terms remains mostly undertheorized or in need of fresh perspectives that build on both close and transmedial readings of the local. In attempting to grapple with this challenge, the articles constituting this special section investigate the location of the Maghrib beyond the dominant binary of Arab vs. Francophone, the much-critiqued idea of the Sahara as a barrier, or the assumption of the Maghrib as an insular space. Recent scholarly investigations into the Maghrib's African, Mediterranean, and (even) Caribbean connections constitute the intellectual backdrop of our efforts to problematize its very location by looking both within and without.

In posing the counterintuitive question of the Maghrib’s location, this section draws on cutting-edge approaches to literature, music and art, emigration, and racial and linguistic politics to investigate the places from which the Maghrib is being rethought in light of human mobility, changing migration patterns, and the emergence of Maghribi aesthetics in Tamazight (the Amazigh language) or languages that have been hitherto unaccounted for. In this regard, Claudia Esposito’s contribution to this special section offers a comparative analysis of Algerian Amara Lakhous’s (b. 1970) and Italian Leonardo Sciascia’s (1921–89) uses of the investigative genre to question grand truths in their literary output. She thus places the Maghrib within Italian immigration history and power politics. The Maghrib, according to Esposito’s compelling argument, is located in a mode of reading—a methodology—rather than in a geographical location. 

Moroccan literary critic Abdelkebir Khatibi (1938–2009) claims that the Maghrib is “a crossroad that belongs to the Mediterranean tradition, to the Middle East and Africa, and is a geopolitical and civilizational area.” Much of his definition of the Maghrib still rings true. What Khatibi does not say is the fact that the Maghrib was a revolutionary concept that was born out of an ideology of armed struggle for national liberation. A constellation of Maghribi nationalist leaders who lived in Cairo, before and during Gamal Abdel Nasser’s rule (1954–70) conceived of “the Maghrib” as an umbrella term for the three North African countries that were under French colonial rule: Algeria (1830–1962), Murrakush, meaning Morocco (1912–56), and Tunisia (1881–1956). As such, the idea of the Maghrib was rooted in anticolonial thought; one which the machinations of colonial power and exigencies of postcolonial state building and border disagreements have stalled ever since. The nature of the Maghrib as a project is reflective of the contours of decolonization in North Africa. It is not only states that failed to concretize the Maghrib project. The Third-Worldist Marxist-Leninist Movement (MLM)’s failure to achieve the proletarian revolution empowered postcolonial nation-states to build “Maghrib al-duwwal” (the Maghrib of states) instead of the dreamed-of “Maghrib al- shu‘ub” (the Maghrib of the peoples). Sonja Hegasy’s contribution to this special section draws on Moroccan poet Abdellatif Laâbi’s (b. 1942) Un autre Maroc (Another Morocco) to tease out the significance of the Maghrib’s liminality in the intellectual sphere under the twin pressures of failure and optimism. The closure of the land border between Morocco and Algeria since 1994 seems to support some of Laâbi’s ideas, which echo historian Abdallah Laroui’s (b. 1933) argument that the Maghrib as an integrative project was an elitist endeavor that did not heed the diversity of opinions and tendencies within the region itself. Laroui is, albeit belatedly, right to allude to the fact that a top-down conceptualization of the Maghrib silenced other groups and erased their views. He thus recognizes, although indirectly, the claim that Imazighen (the Amazigh people, North Africa’s indigenous community), were never given a choice to decide the future of their homeland. Nor was their conception of geography and statehood ever taken into consideration. 

The Arab Maghrib Union, a trade agreement established in 1989 by governments of Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, and Tunisia, was neither representative of—nor attentive to—the diversity of the populations constituting the Maghrib. Its definition of the Maghrib as an “Arab” area is counterfactual. Although Arabs are an important and integral component of the current Maghribi sociocultural fabric, they remain just one of several cultural, linguistic, and ethnic groups that make up the area. Before the Arab conquests of the early Islamic expansion, Tamazgha—as indigenous Amazigh activists have chosen to call North Africa since the 1990s—was populated by Amazigh populations of Christian and Jewish faiths. The Arab conquests of the seventh century began the long-term processes of Arabizing and Islamizing a large number of Amazigh populations. These dynamics, however, neither eliminated Amazigh language and culture nor drove out the sizable Jewish populations that shared this Judeo-Islamic space. Rather, it was nineteenth- and twentieth-century European colonialism and the 1948 establishment and subsequent policies of the state of Israel that facilitated such emigration. Cultural production emerging from the Maghrib is only recently beginning to grapple with the memory of this Judeo-Muslim Maghrib. In fact, it was not until the creation of postindependence constitutions and the ensuing reforms that many of the postcolonial Maghrib states officially defined themselves as Arab-Muslim societies.

The definition of the Maghrib as an exclusively or primarily Arab space in spite of its historical, territorial, ethnic, and human makeup has had dire effects on the region’s indigenous people. Governments have either entirely silenced Amazigh language and culture, as was the case in Libya and Tunisia, or actively repressed them, as was the case in Algeria and Morocco. Nevertheless, a vibrant Amazigh Cultural Movement (ACM) has struggled to re-Amazighize the Maghrib by inventing traditions and refiguring toponymies. Tamazgha, which this ACM defines as extending from the Siwa Oasis in Egypt to the Canary Islands in the Atlantic Ocean, has replaced both “North Africa” and “the Maghrib” in activist nomenclature. Activists have thus reinscribed this consciousness of “al-dath al-amazighiyya” (the Amazigh self/subjectivity) in public spaces as well as in the markers of Maghribi geographies. Gone are the days when Amazigh people could be simply erased from the cartography of their native lands. Tamazight has acquired a constitutional status in Morocco and an official one in Algeria. Its speakers are working to have it recognized in Libya and Tunisia. Across all Maghribi countries, the language has in turn added a new level of complexity to the public sphere. The ubiquity of the Tifinagh alphabet (the Tamazight script) and the proliferation of Tamazight literary and audiovisual production has created a new cultural reality. Across short stories, novels, film, and music, Amazigh creators are reinventing the Maghrib and reconciling it with its indigenous past. Jadaliyya’s Arabic- English dossier on “Tankra Tamzight” (Amazigh Awakening) demonstrates that the once-hamstrung Amazigh voice is now pivotal to what the Maghrib is becoming. Especially significant is the fact that Amazigh literary history is “co-constitutive of the history of the movement for Amazigh people’s cultural and political rights.” Aesthetics and denunciation live alongside each other in Amazigh literature. 

The rise of taskla Tamazight (Amazigh literature) and cultural production is the single most transformative literary development in the last thirty years of the Tamazghan intellectual movement. Amazigh cultural production is the space where conceptions of geography, language, and indigeneity play a fecund role to redirect our attention to this new Maghrib. Amazigh cultural producers are not just rehabilitating their mother tongue. They also rehabilitate an erased geography, a sense of indigeneity, and the relation- ship between space and people. Shamal Iiriqiyya (North Africa in Arabic), Afrique du Nord (North Africa in French), or the Maghrib, are geographical and political appellations superimposed on the region in specific contexts of colonial invasion or decolonization. Alternatively, Tamazgha is a politically conscious name that is from the same root as Tamazight. Tamazgha means the land of the indigenous Imazighen, which reconfigures space, revisits history, and questions accepted toponymies. Unsurprisingly, the limited teaching of Amazigh language has constrained the range of scholarly works on this ever-growing Amazigh literature. Setting critical works that draw on field work to look into oral and artistic traditions aside, the close reading and analysis of Amazigh works is a very rare practice in literary studies. As a result, the ways in which Amazigh literature and music depict indigeneity and connections to land and other languages in Tamazgha remain to be studied. These questions will continue to invite scholars to broaden their linguistic and research scopes. Only when we recalibrate our scholarly lenses to think in terms of Tamazgha and its literary and aesthetic corpus, do we understand the significance of what has been silenced or left out even in the most attentive readings of the Maghrib.

The plurality of the Maghrib and its multilingualism will undoubtably acquire a different meaning when we read them from the perspective of indigenous authors in Amazigh languages. Immersion in the discourses of the ACM reveals that foundational ideas like le Maghrib pluriel (the plural Maghrib) may have found their first inspiration in conversations Khatibi had with members of the Association Marocaine de Recherche et d'Echanges Culturels (AMREC, est. 1967) and Jam‘iyyat al-Jami‘a al-Sayfiyya bi-Agadir (The Agadir Summer School, est. 1979). These organizations seeded and then advocated the idea of “al-wahda fi al-tannawwu‘” (unity in diversity). Rehabilitating the generative role Amazigh activists played in reindigenizing the Maghrib can also shed new light on trans-Tamazgha connections in music, film, and literature that underlie transnational Amazigh identity. Whether it is Algerian Kabyle musician Idir, the Moroccan band Izenzaren (Sun Rays), or Malian Tuareg band Tinariwin (Deserts), Amazigh melodies and poetry travel, cross boundaries, and reconnect Imazighen across the globe. This “traveling Tamazgha” complicates the Maghrib’s location and invites a constant mapping and remapping of the space and its aesthetics.
Oct 16, 2016 Lebanon
Mandy Turner By :
Mandy Turner

New Texts Out Now: Mandy Turner and Cherine Hussein, guest eds. "Israel-Palestine after Oslo: Mapping Transformations in a Time of Deepening Crisis." Special Issue of Conflict, Security & Development

Conflict, Security and Development, Volume 15, No. 5 (December 2015) Special issue: "Israel-Palestine after Oslo: Mapping Transformations in a Time of Deepening Crisis," Guest Editors: Mandy Turner and Cherine Hussein.

Jadaliyya (J): What made you compile this volume?

Mandy Turner (MT): Both the peace process and the two-state solution are dead. Despite more than twenty years of negotiations, Israel’s occupation, colonization and repression continue–and the political and geographical fragmentation of the Palestinian people is proceeding apace.

This is not news, nor is it surprising to any keen observer of the situation. But what is surprising–and thus requires explanation – is the resilience of the Oslo framework and paradigm: both objectively and subjectively. It operates objectively as a straitjacket by trapping Palestinians in economic and security arrangements that are designed to ensure stabilization and will not to lead to sovereignty or a just and sustainable solution. And it operates subjectively as a straitjacket by shutting out discussion of alternative ways of understanding the situation and ways out of the impasse. The persistence of this framework that is focused on conflict management and stabilization, is good for Israel but bad for Palestinians.

The Oslo peace paradigm–of a track-one, elite-level, negotiated two-state solution–is therefore in crisis. And yet it is entirely possible that the current situation could continue for a while longer–particularly given the endorsement and support it enjoys from the major Western donors and the “international community,” as well as the fact that there has been no attempt to develop an alternative. The immediate short-term future is therefore bleak.

Guided by these observations, this special issue sought to undertake two tasks. The first task was to analyze the perceptions underpinning the Oslo framework and paradigm as well as some of the transformations instituted by its implementation: why is it so resilient, what has it created? The second task, which follows on from the first, was then to ask: how can we reframe our understanding of what is happening, what are some potential alternatives, and who is arguing and mobilizing for them?

These questions and themes grew out of a number of conversations with early-career scholars – some based at the Kenyon Institute in East Jerusalem, and some based in the occupied Palestinian territory and elsewhere. These conversations led to two interlinked panels at the International Studies Association annual convention in Toronto, Canada, in March 2014. To have two panels accepted on “conflict transformation and resistance in Palestine” at such a conventional international relations conference with (at the time unknown) early-career scholars is no mean feat. The large and engaged audience we received at these panels – with some very established names coming along (one of whom contributed to this special issue) – convinced us that this new stream of scholars and scholarship should have an outlet.  

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures do the articles address?

MT: The first half of the special issue analyzes how certain problematic assumptions shaped the Oslo framework, and how the Oslo framework in turn shaped the political, economic and territorial landscape.

Virginia Tilley’s article focuses on the paradigm of conflict resolution upon which the Oslo Accords were based, and calls for a re-evaluation of what she argues are the two interlinked central principles underpinning its worldview: internationally accepted notions of Israeli sovereignty; and the internationally accepted idea that the “conflict” is essentially one between two peoples–the “Palestinian people” and the “Jewish people”. Through her critical interrogation of these two “common sense” principles, Tilley proposes that the “conflict” be reinterpreted as an example of settler colonialism, and, as a result of this, recommends an alternative conflict resolution model based on a paradigm shift away from an ethno-nationalist division of the polity towards a civic model of the nation.

Tariq Dana unpacks another central plank of the Oslo paradigm–that of promoting economic relations between Israel and the OPT. He analyses this through the prism of “economic peace” (particularly the recent revival of theories of “capitalist peace”), whose underlying assumptions are predicated on the perceived superiority of economic approaches over political approaches to resolving conflict. Dana argues that there is a symbiosis between Israeli strategies of “economic peace” and recent Palestinian “statebuilding strategies” (referred to as Fayyadism), and that both operate as a form of pacification and control because economic cooperation leaves the colonial relationship unchallenged.

The political landscape in the OPT has been transformed by the Oslo paradigm, particularly by the creation of the Palestinian Authority (PA). Alaa Tartir therefore analyses the basis, agenda and trajectory of the PA, particularly its post-2007 state building strategy. By focusing on the issue of local legitimacy and accountability, and based on fieldwork in two sites in the occupied West Bank (Balata and Jenin refugee camps), Tartir concludes that the main impact of the creation of the PA on ordinary people’s lives has been the strengthening of authoritarian control and the hijacking of any meaningful visions of Palestinian liberation.

The origin of the administrative division between the West Bank and Gaza Strip is the focus of Tareq Baconi’s article. He charts how Hamas’s initial opposition to the Oslo Accords and the PA was transformed over time, leading to its participation (and success) in the 2006 legislative elections. Baconi argues that it was the perceived demise of the peace process following the collapse of the Camp David discussions that facilitated this change. But this set Hamas on a collision course with Israel and the international community, which ultimately led to the conflict between Hamas and Fateh, and the administrative division, which continues to exist.

The special issue thereafter focuses, in the second section, on alternatives and resistance to Oslo’s transformations.

Cherine Hussein’s article charts the re-emergence of the single-state idea in opposition to the processes of separation unleashed ideologically and practically that were codified in the Oslo Accords. Analysing it as both a movement of resistance and as a political alternative to Oslo, while recognizing that it is currently largely a movement of intellectuals (particularly of diaspora Palestinians and Israelis), Hussein takes seriously its claim to be a more just and liberating alternative to the two-state solution.

My article highlights the work of a small but dedicated group of anti-Zionist Jewish-Israeli activists involved in two groups: Zochrot and Boycott from Within. Both groups emerged in the post-Second Intifada period, which was marked by deep disillusionment with the Oslo paradigm. This article unpacks the alternative – albeit marginalized – analysis, solution and route to peace proposed by these groups through the application of three concepts: hegemony, counter-hegemony and praxis. The solution, argue the activists, lies in Israel-Palestine going through a process of de-Zionization and decolonization, and the process of achieving this lies in actions in solidarity with Palestinians.

This type of solidarity action is the focus of the final article by Suzanne Morrison, who analyses the “We Divest” campaign, which is the largest divestment campaign in the US and forms part of the wider Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Through attention to their activities and language, Morrison shows how “We Divest”, with its networked, decentralized, grassroots and horizontal structure, represents a new way of challenging Israel’s occupation and the suppression of Palestinian rights.

The two parts of the special issue are symbiotic: the critique and alternative perspectives analyzed in part two are responses to the issues and problems identified in part one.

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

MT: My work focuses on the political economy of donor intervention (which falls under the rubric of “peacebuilding”) in the OPT, particularly a critique of the Oslo peace paradigm and framework. This is a product of my broader conceptual and historical interest in the sociology of intervention as a method of capitalist expansion and imperial control (as explored in “The Politics of International Intervention: the Tyranny of Peace”, co-edited with Florian Kuhn, Routledge, 2016), and how post-conflict peacebuilding and development agendas are part of this (as explored in “Whose Peace: Critical Perspectives on the Political Economy of Peacebuilding”, co-edited with Michael Pugh and Neil Cooper (PalgraveMacmillan, 2008).  

My first book on Palestine (co-edited with Omar Shweiki), Decolonizing Palestinian Political Economy: De-development and Beyond (PalgraveMacmillan, 2014), was a collection of essays by experts in their field, of the political-economic experience of different sections of the Palestinian community. The book, however, aimed to reunite these individual experiences into one historical political-economy narrative of a people experiencing a common theme of dispossession, disenfranchisement and disarticulation. It was guided by the desire to critically assess the utility of the concept of de-development to different sectors and issues–and had a foreword by Sara Roy, the scholar who coined the term, and who was involved in the workshop from which the book emerged.

This co-edited special issue (with Cherine Hussein, who, at the time of the issue construction, was the deputy director of the Kenyon Institute) was therefore the next logical step in my research on Palestine, although my article on Jewish-Israeli anti-Zionists did constitute a slight departure from my usual focus.

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

MT: I would imagine the main audience will be those whose research and political interests lie in Palestine Studies. It is difficult, given the structure of academic publishing – which has become ever more corporate and money grabbing – for research outputs such as this to be accessed by the general public. Only those with access to academic libraries are sure to be able to read it – and this is a travesty, in my opinion. To counteract this commodification of knowledge, we should all provide free access to our outputs through online open source websites such as academia.edu, etc. If academic research is going to have an impact beyond merely providing more material for teaching and background reading for yet more research (which is inaccessible to the general public) then this is essential. Websites such as Jadaliyya are therefore incredibly important.

Having said all that, I am under no illusions about the potential for ANY research on Israel-Palestine to contribute to changing the dynamics of the situation. However, as a collection of excellent analyses conducted by mostly early-career scholars in the field of Palestine studies, I am hopeful that their interesting and new perspectives will be read and digested. 

J: What other projects are you working on now?

MT: I am currently working on an edited volume provisionally entitled From the River to the Sea: Disintegration, Reintegration and Domination in Israel and Palestine. This book is the culmination of a two-year research project funded by the British Academy, which analyzed the impacts of the past twenty years of the Oslo peace framework and paradigm as processes of disintegration, reintegration and domination – and how they have created a new socio-economic and political landscape, which requires new agendas and frameworks. I am also working on a new research project with Tariq Dana at Birzeit University on capital and class in the occupied West Bank.

Excerpt from the Editor’s Note 

[Note: This issue was published in Dec. 2015]

Initially perceived to have inaugurated a new era of hope in the search for peace and justice in Palestine-Israel, the Oslo peace paradigm of a track one, elite-level, negotiated two-state solution is in crisis today, if not completely at an end.

While the major Western donors and the ‘international community’ continue to publicly endorse the Oslo peace paradigm, Israeli and Palestinian political elites have both stepped away from it. The Israeli government has adopted what appears to be an outright rejection of the internationally-accepted end-goal of negotiations, i.e. the emergence of a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital. In March 2015, in the final days of his re-election campaign, Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, visited the Jewish settlement of Har Homa in Palestinian East Jerusalem, which is regarded as illegal under international law. Reminding its inhabitants that it was him and his Likud government that had established the settlement in 1997 as part of the Israeli state’s vision of a unified indivisible Jerusalem, he promised to expand the construction of settlements in East Jerusalem if re-elected. And in an interview with Israeli news site, NRG, Netanyahu vowed that the prospects of a Palestinian state were non-existent as long as he remained in office. Holding on to the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt), he argued, was necessary to ensure Israel’s security in the context of regional instability and Islamic extremism. It is widely acknowledged that Netanyahu’s emphasis on Israel’s security—against both external and internal enemies—gave him a surprise win in an election he was widely expected to lose.

Despite attempts to backtrack under recognition that the US and European states are critical of this turn in official Israeli state policy, Netanyahu’s promise to bury the two-state solution in favour of a policy of further annexation has become the Israeli government’s official intent, and has been enthusiastically endorsed by leading ministers and key advisers.

[…]

The Palestinian Authority (PA) based in the West Bank also appears to have rejected a key principle of the Oslo peace paradigm—that of bilateral negotiations under the supervision of the US. Despite a herculean effort by US Secretary of State, John Kerry, to bring the two parties to the negotiating table, in response to the lack of movement towards final status issues and continued settlement expansion (amongst other issues), the Palestinian political elite have withdrawn from negotiations and resumed attempts to ‘internationalise the struggle’ by seeking membership of international organisations such as the United Nations (UN), and signing international treaties such as the Rome Statute, the founding treaty of the International Criminal Court. This change of direction is part of a rethink in the PA and PLO’s strategy rooted in wider discussions and debates. The publication of a document by the Palestine Strategy Study Group (PSSG) in August 2008, the production of which involved many members of the Palestinian political elite (and whose recommendations were studiously discussed at the highest levels of the PA and PLO), showed widespread discontent with the bilateral negotiations framework and suggested ways in which Palestinians could ‘regain the initiative’.

[…]

And yet despite these changes in official Palestinian and Israeli political strategies that signal a deepening of the crisis, donors and the ‘international community’ are reluctant to accept the failure of the Oslo peace paradigm. This political myopia has meant the persistence of a framework that is increasingly divorced from the possibility of a just and sustainable peace. It is also acting as an ideological straitjacket by shutting out alternative interpretations. This special issue seeks a way out of this political and intellectual dead end. In pursuit of this, our various contributions undertake what we regard to be two key tasks: first, to critically analyse the perceptions underpinning the Oslo paradigm and the transformations instituted by its implementation; and second, to assess some alternative ways of understanding the situation rooted in new strategies of resistance that have emerged in the context of these transformations in the post-Oslo landscape.

[…]

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.