Hasan Kayalı, Imperial Resilience: The Great War's End, Ottoman Longevity, and Incidental Nations (New Texts Out Now)

Hasan Kayalı, Imperial Resilience: The Great War's End, Ottoman Longevity, and Incidental Nations (New Texts Out Now)

Hasan Kayalı, Imperial Resilience: The Great War's End, Ottoman Longevity, and Incidental Nations (New Texts Out Now)

By : Hasan Kayalı

Hasan Kayalı, Imperial Resilience: The Great War's End, Ottoman Longevity, and Incidental Nations (University of California Press, 2021). 

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

Hasan Kayalı (HK): Historians widely acknowledge today that the Great War in the Middle East warrants analysis beyond the temporal confines of 1914 to 1918. The book was driven by my conviction that this perspective has nevertheless eluded monographic investigations. The Ottomans’ military conflicts that preceded the Great War, starting as early as 1911, and the concomitant social, political, economic, and geopolitical upheavals have in recent years been increasingly incorporated into broad narratives of a “long war” in the Middle East. On the other hand, despite the recognition that the military conflict that engulfed the world in 1914 continued to convulse the Middle East for another half decade after 1918, this period has received less integrated scrutiny within the “long war” perspective. The general premise of the precipitous dissolution of Europe’s timeworn land empires upon the armistices, on the one hand, and the punishing Ottoman military defeat and ensuing large-scale foreign occupation, on the other, have engendered a conceptual rupture that has befogged a relational ten-year-war frame of analysis. Even as definitive studies, such as those pioneered by Erik Jan Zürcher, have re-appraised the presumption of rupture, the Ottoman successor states have appropriated the post-World War I half-decade for their national histories and thus readily subscribed to the expiration of empire in 1918. In writing Imperial Resilience, I wanted to argue for the endurance of Ottoman imperial institutions, mentalities, and allegiances during the years that followed World War I and preceded the belated peace treaty in 1923. I interrogate over-deterministic explanations of geopolitical outcomes, including the foregone conclusion of the disassociation of Arabs and Turks, by investigating historical contingencies and alternative paths that presented themselves in this epoch.

The book explores the grey areas in the scholarly strictures by examining both Istanbul and Ankara’s perceptions of diplomatic developments...

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

HK: Studies on nationalisms, World War I, empire-to-nation transitions, and anticolonialism in the Middle East inform the narrative’s backdrop, as the book addresses some of the certitudes that these literatures have reinforced in the histories of the long-war period. Middle East scholarship has long presupposed an inveterate Turkish nationalism while assuming that other nationalisms—foremost Arab nationalism, which has been studied widely and debated rigorously—have crystallized in response. Recent studies on World War I, with new attention to the persecution of religious minorities, have further privileged the notion of the actualization of a Turkish ethnonationalist project undermining the vision of a multi-ethnic empire. Further, the historiography of the Turkish republic has subscribed to an exclusively ethno-nationalist depiction of the anti-colonialist movement in Anatolia premised at the same time on a sharp division between the geopolitical objectives of the Ottoman monarchy and those of the resistance movement. The book explores the grey areas in the scholarly strictures by examining both Istanbul and Ankara’s perceptions of diplomatic developments and by dissecting the evolving discourses on how to salvage the Ottoman patrimony under the contingencies of war, diplomacy, and internal struggles of power. In doing this, the book incorporates the diverse local military struggles and attendant political visions in Syria and Iraq into the mainstream of an anti-colonial struggle aimed at preserving the widest extent possible of the vestiges of empire. 

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

HK: Imperial Resilience is integrally related to my previous work on Ottoman policy in the Arab provinces and Arab-Turkish relations in the aftermath of the 1908 Constitutional Revolution. It is a logical sequel to Arabs and Young Turks (California, 1997), chronologically and thematically. I have generally been interested in complicating nationalist and nation-centric vantages in historical narratives, including interpretations that are shaped more by backward extrapolations of nationhood in the successor states than the growing salience and politicization of nationalism in the late Ottoman empire. My earlier work belonged to a succession of studies, which appraised nationalism among the Arabic speaking peoples of the empire by way of different conceptual approaches and methodologies. The recent book turns the focus to a critical assessment of an inexorable Turkish nationalism bursting forth with Ottoman defeat in 1918 (or alternatively after the Balkan Wars in 1913, or upon the outbreak of the World War in 1914, or with Mustafa Kemal “stepping foot on the soil of Anatolia” in 1919) and harboring a defined and methodically pursued set of ethnocentric geopolitical goals. 

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

HK: Many of us have in mind a cohort of scholars in our discipline and our general field of study when we develop research projects. As a book addressing subjects at the intersection of geopolitical upheaval and world historical transformations that have defined contemporary outlooks and categories in the Middle East, I would hope that the book will be read broadly by the students of the twentieth-century Arab world and Turkey. In addition, I expect that it will have an appeal to historians and social scientists concerned with the empire-to-nation upheavals and transitions. I have tried to write a book accessible to the general reader who is interested in exploring the historical background of contemporary themes that prevalently feature in the media, including the relationship between religion and nation, external versus indigenous agency in the formation of the modern Middle East, neo-Ottomanism, construction of historical memory, and so on. These themes have arisen in the context of systematic projects of regime legitimation and consolidation and such high-profile geopolitical developments as the ISIS political enterprise and civil conflict in Middle Eastern states. As I write these lines, for instance, anti-Arab sentiment in Turkey is on the rise aggravated by Syrian immigration, political malaise, and near economic collapse. I hope the book provides a historical perspective that calls into question the premises of such a nationalist backlash.

J: What other projects are you working on now? 

HK: I am engaging in projects at the confluence of my general interest in the empire-to-nation transition in the Middle East and my own family history. This is driven in part by the innate desire to recover the life stories of our forebears. I rationalize that in my case this endeavor neatly dovetails with my broader research interests. The historical profession has increasingly validated the experiences of ordinary people as well as methodologies like oral history. I regret not having pursued projects in this vein before the passage of time made their execution more problematic. I am now grappling with the biographical study a grandfather, who emerged as a public figure from the opportunity spaces of the very post-World War I years that are the focus of Imperial Resilience. His premature death and the dearth of personal papers that remained with the family pose challenges for a humbled historian.

J: How has the research and scholarly landscape in your field evolved during your career? 

HK: Archival research on the very late empire was encumbered well into the 1980s by political sensitivities and the institutional sensibilities of archive administrations, compounded by the practical limitations intrinsic to primary research in the pre-digital era. In the Ottoman archives in Istanbul, for instance, researchers who managed to gain admission after an extended application and vetting process were entitled to a total of only one hundred photocopied pages per major research project. Post-1914 holdings were strictly classified, which did not allow meaningful research on the last Ottoman decade. The easing of these restrictions in more recent decades has been nothing short of revolutionary. Meanwhile, auspiciously for those of us who work on the very late Ottoman empire, the past decade coincided with the centenaries of the momentous events of the 1908-1922 period. Newly catalogued and declassified Ottoman archival holdings have productively informed scholarly works produced on commemorations of these centennials and attendant academic events and projects. Imperial Resilience was the beneficiary of the confluence of declassification and dissemination of bodies of Ottoman documents and their assiduous utilization in the production of secondary works by an increasing number of scholars. While Arabs and Young Turks was a product of the research landscape of the earlier era, Imperial Resilience is the beneficiary of this richer scholarship. 

 

Excerpt from the book (from the Conclusion, pp. 175-81) 

Throughout the Great War, the Ottoman government devoted an extraordinary effort to the defense, retention, and regeneration of the Arab provinces, most notably in Greater Syria governed by Cemal Pasha. At the core of these efforts was the restoration of the authority and legitimacy of the empire. Ottoman policy in Syria during the war, informed by the oppressive stringency of Cemal’s enactments, signified a reversion of the center’s post-1913 proclivity to accommodate demands for decentralizing reform. Under the strains of the violence that Syria confronted on both the battlefronts and the home front and the destitution that permeated the society owing to exactions, deprivation, and pestilence, the objective to bolster the legitimacy of the state became unmoored from the increasingly dire realities on the ground and was severely challenged by Sharif Husayn’s revolt in Mecca in 1916. Toward the end of the war, the Ottoman government strove to redeem its authority and explored federative initiatives to reintegrate the empire with the Arab provinces intact. Expanding Allied occupation at the end and in the immediate aftermath of the Great War both complicated these efforts and, paradoxically, revived them as a platform upon which anti-colonial resistance was articulated across the empire by both elite and popular groups motivated by Muslim nationalism.

Just as the accommodation of long-standing Russian aspirations set the stage for the parceling out of the Ottoman imperium, Bolshevik Russia’s precipitate withdrawal from the war after the October Revolution in 1917 muddled the very project. The truce with Russia was followed by the Brest-Litovsk Treaty with its favorable terms for the Ottoman Empire, including the restitution of large swaths of occupied territory in eastern Anatolia and the abandonment of the Russian quest for Istanbul. Peace with Bolshevik Russia gave a new lease on life to the Ottomans in the last year of the war and strengthened the prospects for the state’s survival in tandem with a rejuvenation of the Central Powers’ war effort in Europe. By the fall of 1918, however, the tide had turned against the Central Powers everywhere and forced them to negotiate for peace. 

The path to the relinquishment of arms in October and November 1918, the “pre-Armistice agreement” and the armistices themselves, was paved by rhetoric to uphold the Wilsonian principles, which both resonated and vied with Lenin’s formal denunciation of imperialism. Istanbul’s appeals to the Wilsonian imperatives in its quest for peace would not find a sympathetic ear among the victors of the war. The Armistice of Mudros, negotiated and signed at the end of October 1918, was not predicated on the letter or the spirit of the Fourteen Points. It validated Allied military control of Ottoman territories that Britain and France had partitioned by secret treaty. Its provisions also included loopholes to expand the occupation and ensure the pursuit of territorial war aims not achieved in their entirety at the time of the signing. The Allies immediately took action to achieve these objectives, effectively nullifying the agreement and undermining the sovereignty of the Ottoman state. Their actions plunged the Middle East into renewed armed conflict, extending the warfare and mobilizing the Ottomans into a new phase of the struggle aimed at salvaging the state and redeeming territorial losses. In subsequent years, histories erroneously consecrated the Mudros cease-fire as having deliberately effected a separation of Turkish and Arab ethnonational populations.

Armed conflict remained endemic in the Middle East in the absence of a formal peace agreement. Allied military occupation expanded into different regions throughout the empire, the armistice notwithstanding. The resistance to occupation forces was local and isolated at first but became increasingly coordinated. Sequestered contingents of Ottoman forces continued the fighting in the Arabian periphery in Medina and Yemen. Once the utility of wartime alliances with local powerholders became moot, Britain left the Arabian Peninsula to the vagaries of internecine contestation, most significantly between Ibn Sa‘ud in Najd and the Hashemites. As a more unified political and military movement consolidated in Ankara, communal groups, including Circassians, Kurds, and Albanians, incited rebellions, jostling for power and influence in the wake of the seismic changes brought about by the events of 1914–1918. In the Caucasus, remnants of the Ottoman army under the command of Kazım Karabekir Pasha skirmished with forces of the Armenian Republic over contested Kars and its vicinity. Popular groups in Syria challenged Faysal’s attempt in Damascus to consolidate his authority under British auspices.

What is today known as the Turkish national movement (or the Turkish struggle for independence) developed as a series of local militia movements driven by the imperative to preserve the political rights of the Muslims. The “societies for the defense of rights,” which directed the local resistance movements, grew directly out of the local branches of the CUP. After the Greek occupation of Izmir and its environs in May 1919, these organizations coalesced on the regional level in a series of congresses. Even though the top leaders of the CUP had gone into exile, the secondary cadres of the Committee took the helm of the resistance movements availing of existing organizational structures in the provinces. As the local committees of defense became coordinated regionally, they articulated broader objectives for the resistance movement…. 

Clusters of resistance in the Anatolia-Syria-Mesopotamia nexus subscribed to a reconceptualized Ottomanism, namely a Muslim civic ideal. The resonance of an Ottomanism that accommodated the empire’s diverse religious groups had progressively weakened with the diminution of the numerical strength of the Christians. It received a fatal blow with the Armenian Genocide in the early years of the war. The understanding of the Ottoman political community as a civic Muslim one informed the re-integrationist policy of the CUP during the Great War. This concept of state and community prevailed in the immediate wake of the war, even as new governmental structures that impinged on the sultan-caliph’s sovereignty came into existence. The post-defeat vulnerability of the empire and the Allies’ support of the Armenians who survived the war to reclaim their domiciles and property further hardened the attitudes against the Christians. The Greek occupation of Izmir in 1919 in a manifestation of a clientage relationship between enemy powers and Ottoman Christians only exacerbated the anti-Christian sentiments. The project of setting up ethno-religious political entities at the Treaty of Sèvres heightened the existential concerns of the majority Muslims. The anti-colonial forces in Anatolia, northern Syria, and northern Mesopotamia maintained contact, collaborated, and kept alive the possibility of confederation. 

The Kemalist leadership was motivated by the same consideration that had motivated Ottoman governments since the onset of military reverses, namely the preservation of the maximum extent of the empire’s territory. Wielding military force and motivated by state patriotism, the Kemalists reversed the dictates of the Treaty of Sèvres with military victories and diplomatic acts to preserve a geopolitically and economically viable state that included some of the contested territories at the Anatolia-Syria frontier. The territorial gains were demarcated in the south by the railway line that had been built by the Germans, was now shared with France, and would subsequently be touted as circumscribing lands inhabited by Turks. The determination of the new border in northern Mesopotamia proved to be more protracted and contested. A swath of land that Mustafa Kemal identified in 1919 as unalienable, reaching deep into the Euphrates basin down to Dayr al-Zur and east to Sulaymaniya, remained within the Syria and Iraq mandates. This region and the lands to its south, the political future of which the Kemalists had declared to be contingent on the will of the inhabitants as to be determined by their free vote, came to be included in the mandates without plebiscitary procedures, except spurious exercises in Iraq in 1919 and 1921.

The territorial boundaries of the rump Ottoman state remained fluid and subject to the contestations of international diplomacy. The Kemalist quest to reintegrate the domains of the imperial state continued until the consummation of the two armistice agreements with a peace treaty at Lausanne in 1923—considered an honorable settlement in that it reversed the disastrous terms of the rejected Treaty of Sèvres. The Treaty of Lausanne solidified the southeastern boundary that had been agreed upon in the Ankara accord with France in 1921 as a tactical concession. The resolution of the state borders and the consolidation of political power in the hands of Mustafa Kemal and his associates were mutually dependent. Having acquired authority and prestige owing to successes on the battlefield and the conference table, Kemal avoided further military entanglements as he sought to institutionalize his powers. The borders in the Anatolia-Syria-Mesopotamia nexus ensued from the vagaries of war, diplomacy and contestation for economic advantage, with scant regard to geography or ethno-national identity. They unfolded as accomplished facts or remained as unfinished projects with a destabilizing effect in the region for decades to come. 

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.