Frances S. Hasso, Buried in the Red Dirt: Race, Reproduction, and Death in Modern Palestine (New Texts Out Now)

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May 27, 2022 Palestine
Frances S. Hasso, Buried in the Red Dirt: Race, Reproduction, and Death in Modern Palestine (New Texts Out Now)

Frances S. Hasso, Buried in the Red Dirt: Race, Reproduction, and Death in Modern Palestine (New Texts Out Now)

By : Frances S. Hasso

Frances S. Hasso, Buried in the Red Dirt: Race, Reproduction, and Death in Modern Palestine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022).

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

Frances S. Hasso (FH): In 2011, I started working on research for a book on contemporary Egypt. My second monograph, Consuming Desires: Family Crisis and the State in the Middle East, which substantially focuses on Egypt, was released a few weeks before the first Arab revolution erupted in Tunisia in December 2010.

During a 2014 five-week fieldwork trip in Cairo, however, I decided the situation was too dangerous to continue. That research became the basis of a series of journal articles on gender and Egyptian politics (the last is currently under review). Beyond the danger, I felt the ground was shifting so quickly and the situation was so opaque I was not sure I could produce a quality book-length work. I returned from Cairo to Palestine for the first time since 2000 to give an invited talk in mid-March 2014 at Birzeit University’s Institute for Women’s Studies on the occasion of its twentieth anniversary. The paper was titled “Reflections on Remembering, Forgetting, and Denial in Egyptian Storytelling.” 

Ironically, I had a decade earlier shifted my focus away from Palestine because I was so demoralized about the nature and purpose of academic work on Palestine. But I could not ignore the sense in 2014 that reorienting to a project on Palestine was deeply important and felt like I had in some senses returned home. Ultimately, I use many kinds of sources in the book to tell a story about Palestinian life, death, and demography in the twentieth century. The focus on death, broadly speaking, was shaped by the fact that when I visited Palestine again in early 2016 for a short exploratory fieldwork trip before my teaching semester began, I had death on my mind given the recent passing of a young family member. Shaped by my sense that I was more likely to learn new things and contribute to knowledge by studying the Palestinian past, I decided my focus would be on the Mandate. But even that historical endpoint shifted, as did my methodological orientations and empirical sources. 

This was an iterative book shaped by my intellectual concerns and political commitments, what I learned by talking to Palestinian scholars, friends, and acquaintances, and what I learned in field, reading, and archival work. In short, I allowed Buried in the Red Dirt to find its path, which not incidentally included a late realization in the manuscript that “race” was so central to my argument it required more research and explicit discussion.
... chapters are full of stories that bring to life understudied people and matters.

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

FH: Buried in the Red Dirt speaks to a broad range of literatures too numerous to elucidate here. It includes a substantial bibliography and is published Open Access Creative Commons by Cambridge University Press thanks to a fellowship from Duke University Libraries. It is already available as a beautiful hardback and will be available in paperback. Each chapter offers its own argument and analyzes particular material. Most chapters open with a story crafted from archival material. In fact, chapters are full of stories that bring to life understudied people and matters.

Chapter 1 shows that lack of British investment in healthcare for Palestinians was systemic and endemic to a colonial ecology segmented by nationality, religion, and race. Combined with colonial and settler-colonial extraction that produced poverty and hunger, the outcome was a Palestinian median age of death between two and three years old during the Mandate period. This contrasted dramatically with Jewish morbidity and mortality rates given the Zionist movement’s investment in Jewish healthcare.

Chapter 2 shows exactly how the British logic of “efficiencies and economies,” or fiscal austerity, limited healthcare provision for Palestinians in Mandate Palestine. Despite acknowledging the structural production of hunger, poverty, and disease, British officials often culturally condemned Palestinians for ignorance, lack of maternal care, parental inefficiencies, and backward foodways. Not surprisingly, gendered-racialized dynamics and material tensions were prominent in the archives as colonial authorities governed Palestinian-serving Infant Welfare Center nurses and midwives but provided little money for healthcare. Many scribbled notes in the archives relate to policing the boundaries of registered Palestinian midwives who dared to use specula to examine pregnant women, give injections to the ill, or independently set up shop. 

Chapter 3 engages with British and Zionist discourses and practices on demography, eugenics, and mothercraft, which overlapped substantially. British authorities frequently expressed concern with higher Palestinian birth rates, which they racialized from early in the occupation, and recognized that poverty and limited investment in Palestinian welfare and infant, child, and maternal healthcare produced higher mortality rates. The chapter discusses transnational maternalist and breastfeeding campaigns, which were motivated by classed and racialized eugenicist concerns to reduce infant mortality and increase fertility among “white” better-off married women, and the conditions of the appearance of these discourses in Zionist archival records in Mandate Palestine. 

Chapter 4 shifts the focus of the book to what I call non-reproductive desire in Palestine by comparatively examining relevant legal genealogies and co-existing layers of law on birth control, especially abortion, using a sweeping historical approach. The purpose of the chapter is to undermine simplistic reliance on "religion" or "culture" to explain birth control ideologies, practices, and restrictions in historic and contemporary Palestine. No other chapter like this exists, as far as I know. This and the following chapter show that contraceptive use was licit and available and abortion, while often "technically illegal," was always an important method of birth control for women in all communities.

Chapter 5 explores Palestinian Muslim and Christian as well as Jewish contraception and abortion practices during the British colonial period and since, despite legal restrictions. The first section analyzes abortion prosecutions reported in Hebrew-language newspapers during the Mandate period to illuminate public tensions and actual practices, including sex, that crossed religious and ethnic boundaries. The second section focuses on a failed application by a German Zionist sexology institute to the British censorship board to show a Swiss film advocating “medical abortion,” and examines Zionist pronatalist discourse for Jews during the Mandate and the status of birth control for Jews in the colonial Yishuv and early settler-colonial Israel. The final section focuses on Palestinian infant and child death, contraception, and abortion practices during the Mandate period and since, using archival sources and twenty-six interviews I conducted with elder Palestinian women and additional informants from all over historic Palestine and Jordan. 

Chapter 6, titled “The Art of Death in Life,” proposes that demographic competition with Jews has been largely irrelevant to Palestinian reproductive desires and practices since 1948, a year during which they viscerally and universally recognized the importance to Zionism of the double action of "Judaizing" and "De-Arabizing" the land. Representing Palestinians as hyperbolically reproductive has had at least three consequences. First, it projects and magnifies onto Palestinians what are, in fact, Zionist and Western pathologies and anxieties reflected in the policies and priorities of their governments, knowledge industries, and foundations, motivated by geopolitical, ideological, and material interests. Second, it misses the range of socio-economic, psychic, and contextual factors that have shaped Palestinian reproductive and anti-reproductive desires and practices. Third, it distorts our ability to see the emphasis on creative, political, and social struggle and regeneration in the face of social and political death in the futurities articulated after 1948. The chapter considers African American, African, Black feminist, and Western queer scholarship on death, futurity, reproduction, and liberation to further illuminate my investigation of Palestinian life and death. Queer inflected deliberations on optimism and pessimism invited me to push harder against the seam of Palestinian anti-reproductive desire by considering forms of flourishing and belonging that do not require heteronormative reproductivity.

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

FH: I hope everyone reads this book and I would like it to reset some discussions in different fields, including feminist, sexuality, NGO, and governmental. I hope “serious” scholars who disconnect quotidian life, sex, and reproduction from “politics” in Palestine also read it. 

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

FH: Buried in the Red Dirt obviously draws on my interests in gender and sexuality, and their relationships to power on multiple scales. My interests in race and racialization, as well as imperialism and colonialism, in relation to embodiment, gender, and sexuality are longstanding. The focus on health, medicine, and demography is new. I have a substantial oeuvre of publications on Palestine that are social movement oriented, including my first monograph, Resistance, Repression, and Gender Politics in Occupied Palestine and Jordan (Syracuse, 2005), which focuses on the history and demise of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine and arguably the Palestinian Liberation Organization as an independent revolutionary organization post-Madrid and Oslo, with comparative attention to internal gender dynamics in multiple political fields. The book is now available Open Access Creative Commons. I co-edited with Zakia Salime Freedom without Permission: Bodies and Space in the Arab Revolutions (Duke, 2016), for which I wrote an original chapter on the intersections of police-sex-sectarianism in Bahrain. And I already mentioned Consuming Desires, which examines the rise of new forms of marriage among Sunni Muslims in Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. The book considers Islamic jurisprudence vis-à-vis state law and explores the anxieties and desires of different kinds of subjects and institutions regarding marriage, sex, divorce, and citizenship since the late twentieth century. It challenges the too facile feminist reliance on modern state law and interventions as core solutions to “family crisis.” 

J: What other projects are you working on now?

FH: The fieldwork for this book opened up questions I could not address while keeping an already substantial book focused and coherent. I conducted tens of interviews with multiple generations of Palestinian nurses, midwives, and even physicians trained in different epistemologies of care. I would like to explore what I learned about how medicalization and litigation have changed Palestinian sensibilities to health, embodiment, and sex since 1948. I recently conducted archival research on the correspondence and papers of Christian Missionary Society medical workers in Palestine, since European missionary institutions (and to a lesser degree private Palestinian practitioners) provided most allopathic medical care to Palestinians during the British Mandate. I look forward to carefully analyzing this material.

 

Excerpt from the book (from the Introduction, pp. 31-36)

Colonial Palestine and the Global Color Line 

Race is central to the plot in Buried in the Red Dirt. I take as axiomatic that racial projects articulate with sexuality given their concern with biological and social reproduction or, in Michel Foucault’s terms, biopolitics: who people have sex with or marry, who has babies and how many, who deserves citizenship, who is worthy of health and life, and who merits illness and premature death (Foucault 1978, 138, 139, 140, 145). White racial and population anxieties and discussions of race more generally were increasingly prominent at global conferences by the turn of the twentieth century. Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds write that the “assertion of whiteness was born in apprehension of imminent loss” as colonized peoples continued to revolt (Lake and Reynolds 2008, 2). The racist dimensions of international politics were manifest and explicitly challenged during the many months of intensive meetings at the Versailles Peace Conference of 1919 – at which was established the scaffolding of postwar colonial and imperial arrangements, including the British Mandate over Palestine.

White powers often described the struggle for “world domination” as a “race war” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (93, 242). British imperialists distinguished between white and nonwhite (or “coloured”) peoples and assumed the former should rule and the latter should be ruled, defining “Syrians” and Afghans, for example, as “nonwhites” (9, 6). White supremacy and race consciousness informed national and international discussions about geopolitics, economics, birth and infant mortality rates, the nature of justice, and the social implications of “contact” between populations as Euro-American empires expanded and cross-continental migration became more feasible (e.g., 10–11). These debates among intellectuals, scientists, journalists, professionals, military leaders, and politicians translated into immigration and citizenship policies, international labor regimes, and geopolitical conflicts. 

Although white racial supremacy was a global concern in the first twenty years of the twentieth century and was absolutely relevant to Zionism and the workings of the Palestine Mandate, scholarship on the British and Zionist colonization of Palestine has rarely addressed these projects as racial and racist, with specificities, to be sure, but in alignment with other Western imperial and settler-colonial projects. Irrespective of anti-Semitism and the historically situated and to some degree malleable nature of whiteness as a social construct, Zionist settler-colonialism was understood by its advocates and their British and US allies to be a white socioeconomic project. Racism in Mandate Palestine expressed itself through civilizational discourse, extraction from the native population, the biopolitics of colonial categorizations and counting, and the systematic maldistribution of life, death, and wellbeing by investment priorities. Such maldistribution by priority is underplayed as a systemically racist dimension of settler-colonialism and colonialism in Palestine.

Racism and white supremacy have been “trans-statal” and “global” from their genesis (Jung 2015, 193, 194). In 1900, W. E. B. Du Bois famously termed as “the color line” that “belts the world” the ways “differences of race” were used to deny “to over half the world … opportunities and privileges” in presentations at the first Pan-African Congress in London and the third meeting of the American Negro Academy in Washington, DC (Du Bois 1900a, 625; Du Bois 1900b, 47–48). Black, brown, and yellow peoples, Du Bois argued, will be “beneficial” to “human progress” and influence “the world of the future by reason of sheer numbers and physical contact,” pointing to the global salience of racial comparative population discourse at the time (Du Bois 1900a, 625). The “color line” was always “plural,” argues Moon-Kie Jung, shaped by reigning systems of accumulation and extraction: slavery, colonialism, settler-colonialism, and imperialism (Jung 2015, 195).

Du Bois’s 1900 accounts reproduced Orientalist tropes of Asian “moral and physical degeneration” and “dumb submission” with the exception of Japan (Du Bois 1900b, 49). He commended British and Belgian imperialists for ending slavery and introducing “rapid development of trade and industry” in parts of the African continent. Instead of condemning US imperialism (“new ownership”) in Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Cuba, and the Philippines, Du Bois aspirationally called for “sympathy and alliance” with the “masses of dark men and women” as they are “united under the stars and stripes for an America that knows no color line in the freedom of its opportunities” (49–53). More critically in the same period, colonial subject and West African and Caribbean intellectual Edward Blyden, speaking before the 1903 meeting of the British African Society, called out the ignorance of Europeans who believed in “absolute racial difference [and] his own absolute racial superiority,” physically, intellectually, and psychologically (quoted in Tilley 2011, 222; also see 225–226).

By 1910, Du Bois harshly condemned white supremacy as a “religion” in his essay “The Souls of White Folk,” which he updated and published in Darkwater, informed by the brutality of World War I (Du Bois 1920, 1921). He analogized the “modern” white man to a thieving “Prometheus” “tethered by a fable of the past” and insisting on his divinity: “Neither Roman nor Arab, Greek nor Egyptian, Persian nor Mongol ever took himself and his own perfectness with such disconcerting seriousness as the modern white man” (Du Bois 1920, 497–501). Du Bois recognized that the extraordinary danger of white supremacy emerged from demographic, economic, and psychological senses of “threat,” including from “little Japan,” whose government’s “eventual overthrow … became a subject of deep thought and intrigue, from St. Petersburg to San Francisco” (504).

Substantial historical evidence indicates elite white defensiveness in the face of “colored” challenges to global power arrangements in the fin-de-siècle and early twentieth-century world. This was the case despite the fact that “racial thinking could take stronger and weaker forms” – for example, in colonized Africa – and colonial states “employ[ed] multiple and contradictory definitions of race, tribe, and ethnicity” (Tilley 2011, 220; Tilley 2014, 779). The 1911 Universal Races Congress at the University of London, a famous site of international elite exchange on race and racial amity, included multiple plenary sessions with more than fifty English-language papers submitted in advance by researchers and political leaders. Although the majority of papers challenged racial supremacy and the coherence of race as a category, the opening address by Sir Phillip Stanhope (Lord Weardale) expressed white global anxiety regarding the “remarkable rise of the power of the Empire of Japan, the precursor, it would seem, of a similar revival of the activities and highly developed qualities of the population of the great Empire of China” (quoted in Lake and Reynolds 2008, 252).

I am mainly concerned with discussion of Jewish settler-colonialism at the 1911 Universal Races Congress. Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Lake and Reynolds 2008) offers essential insights that invited my own race-specific questions about the two decades that preceded the British Mandate and intensified Zionist colonization in Palestine. Lake and Reynolds write that Du Bois was impressed with many participants at the 1911 Congress, including (in his words) “two Egyptian Feys” who “were evidently negroid, the Portuguese was without doubt a Mulatto, and the Persian was dark enough to have trouble in the South.” Among the presenters who deeply impacted Du Bois and, I contend, informed his ardent Zionism, was the British Jewish novelist Israel Zangwill (Lake and Reynolds 2008, 258, 257).

Zangwill’s paper, “The Jewish Race,” was rhetorically crafted to first make a case for Jews as a superior race that required “a territory” to “live its own life” (Zangwill 1911, 271). Expressing the eugenicist logic of the era, Zangwill wrote that in comparison to “the yet uncivilized and brutalized masses of Europe, when, for example, the lowest infant mortality or the healthiness of its [Jewish] school children is contrasted with the appalling statistics of its neighbours, there is sound scientific warrant for endorsing even in its narrowest form its [Jewish] claim to be ‘a chosen people’” (268–269, 275). In the second half of the essay Zangwill switched rhetorical gears to align with the racial constructionist orientation of most Congress papers (including by Franz Boas) and Jewish European anthropologists such as Maurice Fishberg (see Falk 2017, 71, 87). Zangwill asserted the “comparative superficiality of all these human differences,” that “every race is really akin to every other” (otherwise how could Jews so easily assimilate?), “every people is a hotch-potch of races,” and Jews were mainly “white” but included other ethnic groups and colors (Zangwill 1911, 276).

Given Jewish whiteness, Zangwill continued, Jewish religious difference is more important for “surviv[ing] the pressure of so many hostile milieux – or still more parlous, so many friendly” (277). Zangwill presented Jews as having limited options: they could assimilate, which in settings of lower “civilization” (such as Central and Eastern Europe) was a recipe for their “degeneration” to the level of the majority. In advanced settings, on the other hand, “emancipation” had brought “dissolution” of Jewish difference through assimilation. Zangwill concluded his essay in the white settler-colonial spirit of the times: A “Jewish State, or at least a land of refuge upon a basis of local autonomy,” was “the only solution left to address this dilemma” (279). Zangwill had in fact established the Jewish Territorial Organisation (ITO) in 1903 to acquire land for a Jewish settler-colony “under British protection,” especially for “refugees from Russian persecution,” somewhere other than Palestine given Ottoman resistance to such a project in “Zion.” Zangwill’s 1911 essay illustrates the importance of a kind of Jewish social-eugenic maintenance project as a driving impulse for Jewish settler-colonialism, not only anti-Jewish racism.

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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.

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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’.

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

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Taken as a whole, the articles in this special issue aim to ignite conversations on the conflict that are not based within abstracted debates that centre upon the peace process itself—but that begin from within the realities and geographies of both the continually transforming land of Palestine-Israel and the voices, struggles, worldviews and imaginings of the future of the people who presently inhabit it. For it is by highlighting these transformations, and from within these points of beginning, that we believe more hopeful pathways for alternative ways forward can be collectively imagined, articulated, debated and built.