Louise Cainkar, Pauline Homsi Vinson, and Amira Jarmakani, Sajjilu Arab American: A Reader in SWANA Studies (New Texts Out Now)

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Nov 1, 2022 Region
Louise Cainkar, Pauline Homsi Vinson, and Amira Jarmakani, Sajjilu Arab American: A Reader in SWANA Studies (New Texts Out Now)

Louise Cainkar, Pauline Homsi Vinson, and Amira Jarmakani, Sajjilu Arab American: A Reader in SWANA Studies (New Texts Out Now)

By : Louise Cainkar, Pauline Homsi Vinson, and Amira Jarmakani

Louise Cainkar, Pauline Homsi Vinson, and Amira Jarmakani, Sajjilu Arab American: A Reader in SWANA Studies (Syracuse University Press, 2022).

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

Louise Cainkar, Pauline Homsi Vinson, and Amira Jarmakani (LC, PHV & AJ): The driving motivation for the project of building a reader for the field arose from our desire to provide scholars with the reader that we wished had existed—to support our research and later our teaching—as we were entering academia. In both the more specific field of Arab American studies as well as in ethnic studies more broadly, there has long been a tremendous need for a comprehensive and multidisciplinary reader in Arab American studies. In developing the first comprehensive reader in Arab American studies, we also sought to collect some of the most foundational and visionary scholarship for the growing field of critical Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) studies in the Americas. 

The project had several other distinct goals, including to: position Arab American studies within critical race and ethnic studies; historicize and situate critical conversations on US imperialism in relation to the war on terror; summarize foundational conversations on race and the racialization of US Arab and US SWANA communities; provide some critical context for discussions of the racialization of US Muslims more broadly; and conceptualize “Arab American” as broader than the United States.
Our vision has been to shape a reader that did not aim to be canonical but that instead remained open to—and even invited—revision.

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

LC, PHV & AJ: Sajjilu Arab American: A Reader in SWANA Studies registers and reflects on major developments and central concerns within the field of Arab American studies and its intersections with the fields of US Muslim and SWANA American studies and in relation to fields such as Asian American, transnational, American, Middle Eastern, race and ethnic, and migration studies.

Our vision has been to shape a reader that did not aim to be canonical but that instead remained open to—and even invited—revision. While we do want to honor foundational scholarship in the field, we never wanted a “best of” collection, nor a teleological narrative that forces the idea of a single, clear beginning of the field, much less a current arrival point. We therefore immediately dismissed an organizational framework that would privilege linearity. Following our own multiple points of entry to the field as editors, we sought work that reflected the rich variety and overlapping points of inquiry within the field. Out of the resonances and tensions among them, we identified six themes: the advantages and pitfalls of naming (the field); migration and movement across borders; race and racialization; securitization, empire, and the war on terror; representation and orientalism; and cross-racial and cross-ethnic solidarities.

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

LC, PHV & AJ: Books are always the product of a series of thought collaborations; an edited reader takes such collective scholarly work to yet another level. This reader would not be possible without the years of work and the steadfast endurance of scholars in the field to carve space in the academy for Arab American and critical SWANA studies. In this sense, credit is owed not only to each of the contributors to the collection, but also equally to the many scholars—cited and not cited—whose work created and enriched our field/s. This work thus offers an extension of our previous efforts as scholars and editors working in conversation with others in the field of Arab American studies. 

One important extension of our previous work and departure from the established norm is the collaborative feminist approach we took to gather and frame the essays we collected about our field. In addition to compiling and editing the work of each of our contributors’ essays, we also, as editors, collectively wrote the introduction to the reader and the essays that framed each thematic part. Our process for co-writing was both intensive and adaptive—a process that evolved along the way. We took turns taking the lead on writing various thematic introductions; we collectively edited these introductions, rotated who rewrote each section introduction, and collectively edited the whole work again. In this way, we honored each of our areas of expertise while simultaneously making room for fresh perspectives on each topic. In the sometimes overwhelming (and constantly growing!) set of comments that spindled down the right-hand side of our shared google docs, we challenged, supported, and uplifted one another. Throughout this truly feminist and transformative writing process, we learned many things about the field, given our varied content-areas of expertise; we learned a great deal about writing and editing; we validated each other’s experience of being marginalized in the academy; and we learned a great deal about each other. Our hope is that at least some of this transformative process translates to the volume’s readers as well.

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

LC, PHV & AJ: We want the book to reverberate across different types of fields and to resonate with a wide range of readers. We would like it to be a game changer in discourses about Arab Americans in the United States and elsewhere. We hope the book will be adopted in undergraduate and graduate courses in Arab American studies, critical Muslim Studies, US Muslim studies, critical SWANA studies in the Americas, critical race and ethnic studies, diaspora studies, Asian American studies, American studies, and all adjacent fields/disciplines interested in incorporating this historically underrepresented perspective.

Given the burgeoning scholarship on anti-Muslim racism in a number of fields and disciplines—not all of which is in conversation with one another—we hope it offers a go-to reference for scholars of US imperialism, the war on terror, and policing of BIPOC communities, as well as those in US Muslim studies who are interested in some of the key scholarship that laid important groundwork for our overlapping fields.

As our section on solidarities highlights, we also hope that readers will find both resonances and inspiration for intersectional, coalitional, and solidarity work that considers Arab American/SWANA studies in relation to questions of space, geography, race, ethnicity, class, nationality, gender, sexuality, and abolition. Finally, considering the ways that Arab American studies has become weaponized in campaigns to thwart its integration into K-12 and college level ethnic studies curricula, we think the reader will provide helpful context for scholars and activists as well as high school teachers offering ethnic studies courses. 

J: What other projects are you working on now?

LC, PHV & AJ: The process of assembling this reader has provoked conversations among scholars about the potential for a critical SWANA studies journal, which ideally could germinate and support compelling directions in the field. 

AJ: My new project, Weapons of Mass Dissemination: Apprehending Anti-Muslim Racism in Cyberspace, is engaged with feminist surveillance studies and abolitionist data justice. I investigate viral digital culture, and the underlying algorithms that drive it, to ask after its impact on Muslim, Arab, and SWANA lives. How do such digital circuits of anti-Muslim racism serve as conduits for apprehending Muslims, where “apprehend” refers both to creating disinformation and to capture? I argue that popular perceptions about Muslims, as filtered through stereotypes and misinformation circulated in digital products like memes, can also spread anti-Muslim sentiment, reify disinformation about Muslims, and—perhaps most concerning—build the technical and representational structure to apprehend Muslims. The viral spread of gendered, anti-Muslim images, enabled by surveillance technologies, serve to normalize the type of domestic surveillance that can also lead to the capture and incarceration of innocent people, framed as terrorists or enemy combatants in the war on terror.

PHV: I am currently finalizing a book manuscript on the subversive potential of storytelling in Arab American writing, which is tentatively titled Transporting Tales: Echoes of the Thousand and One Nights in Contemporary Arab American Literature. The essay I have in our reader is related to this work. In addition, I will be focusing on teaching and institution building in Arab American studies. To that end, I have accepted a one-year visiting appointment at the University of Michigan-Dearborn (2022-2023) where I will be teaching courses in Arab American studies, including literature, and where I will serve as interim director of the Center for Arab American Studies, a role that dovetails very nicely with the collaborative work I have been undertaking with Louise and Amira on this reader. 

LC: I have a few projects underway. I am completing an article entitled “Racial Control under the Guise of Terror Threat: Policing of US Muslim, Arab, and SWANA communities” which is an investigation of the ways in which the state uses tactics similar in method but different in name to police Arab/Muslim/SWANA and other BIPOC communities. In other words, it puts the domestic war on terror in the context of programs such as the war on drugs, Jim Crow, Japanese interment, Native American removal, Operation Wetback, and so on. It further demonstrates with data that the state has little to show in results (i.e., capturing terrorists) despite spending hundreds of millions of dollars (perhaps more) on the domestic war on terror, suggesting why it needs to use unsavory informants and entrapment to show effectiveness. Another project focuses on resettling Afghan refugees in the United States, placed in the analytic contexts of the discourse of saving Afghan women, the twenty-year US occupation of Afghanistan, the male-oriented, patriarchal US refugee resettlement system, and the requisites of asylum stories. This project has both trauma-informed, restorative, community-engaged components and research components.

 

Excerpt from the book (from the Introduction, pp. 1-2; 29)

“Mostly my stories choose me, I do not choose them” (Majaj 2007, 406). The words of the Arab American scholar and poet Lisa Suhair Majaj resonate with the aims of this project—namely, to tell the story of Arab American studies not as a single defining account but as a narrative that reflects the complexity, tensions, and richness of the field. As the storytelling metaphor suggests, our process has been to engage the origin stories of the field, to think about the themes that dominate how those stories have been told, and to reveal the political and institutional contexts that have shaped Arab American studies. Insofar as origin stories operate as creative fictions, we have also sought both to disrupt and to build on the narrative logics that have so far framed the field, with the aim of stimulating conversation about the formation of the field of Arab American studies and also about the possibilities for its future directions.

From a young age, we are taught to understand stories through the narrative coherence of a beginning, middle, and end. The problem with such narrative neatness is that it obscures the messiness of a good story, smoothing over shifts in perspective and temporal anomalies, normalizing experiences, and heightening particular aspects over others for dramatic effect. In relation to the story about the field of Arab American studies, when the privileging of narrative coherence takes the shape of a chronological arc, it can flatten the sorts of tensions that make the field more interesting and vibrant. In our telling of the story of Arab American studies in this introduction, we aim to strike a balance between the coherence of a neat story and the generative potential of messiness in telling a complex and ever-expanding tale. 

At the same time, because linearity can have the benefit of providing an organizing structure on which to hang an overall understanding of what has been at stake in field formation, we begin this introduction with an overview of some of the dominant themes and narratives in Arab American studies. In other words, we describe some of the common stories about the field, and then we point to some of the problems with these sorts of origin stories and the ways they can inadvertently produce and solidify orthodoxies even as they also miss important strands within the field. We then describe our rationale for organizing the reader thematically, a structure that foregrounds our aim to bring attention to cyclical patterns, disruptions, continuities, and divergences in the process of field formation. 

In keeping with the spirit of storytelling with which we began this introduction, we round out our discussion by telling our own academic stories in relation to the field of Arab American studies. Our academic trajectories are inextricably bound up in the gradual formation of the field, and we tell our stories as a way of contextualizing three of the major obstacles that impeded field formation: struggles to render the field legible, resistance to framing Arab Americans as racialized, and a general climate of censorship in relation to work on Palestine and on Arabs more generally. The title we have chosen for this collection, Sajjilu Arab American: A Reader in SWANA Studies, speaks to these three obstacles in that it demands recognition for the field. From the Arabic word sijil, سجل, which carries the meanings of both “recording” and “registering,” the word sajjilu intentionally echoes the opening lines of Mahmoud Darwish’s poem “Identity Card,” or “Bitaqat hawiyyah,” which begins, “sajjil ana ‘arabi” (سَجّل انا عربي). Using the imperative form of the verb, the opening line means, “Register/Record/Write Down: I am an Arab.” First published in 1964 and composed while Darwish was in an Israeli prison, his poem replays an exchange at an Israeli checkpoint and gives voice to the Palestinian speaker’s defiant challenge to the absurdity of having to be registered by a state institution that would also erase his identity and deny his claim to the land. Choosing the plural imperative in place of a universal masculine singular, our title both echoes and expands on the opening words of Darwish’s poem. While the imperative demands recognition and simultaneously insists on the idea of having our histories recorded and recognized, the plural invites a broader coalition into that demand. Though our reader focuses on Arab American studies, our subtitle also locates this work within the broader umbrella of critical Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) studies, and it addresses the multiple conflations that affect the overlapping, contingent, and historically situated experiences of SWANA Americans. Our intent is to highlight our collective efforts to record our own stories in their multiplicity and variety, to foreground the importance of decolonizing geographies, and to acknowledge the historic invisibility of Arab American studies even as we have faced the hypervisibility of domestic surveillance and policing of our communities. These struggles of recognition, racialization through surveillance, and racialized exclusion affect everyone from the larger SWANA region—Arabs, Iranians, Turks, Assyrians, Kurds, Chaldeans, Imazighen, and Armenians, among others.

The cover image we have chosen further communicates the complexity of resistance and control that we signal in our title. The image is of two mirror halves of a passport photo of Elaine Hagopian, a central figure in the development of Arab American studies, who has donated her photos to the Arab American National Museum and has generously agreed to allow us to use her image on the cover. Resonant on multiple levels, this image evokes the refusal to be boxed in even as it directly references state efforts to control and manage us—for instance, in government registries, identity documents, FBI files, and border crossings. The image also invokes a symmetry that eludes closure, as one half is in color, and the other is in grayscale, suggesting a dichotomy that is unstable and inviting a refusal of sorts and an alternative within. Together, the title and cover image carry the force of an injunction to inscribe that which has been elided even as each captures a central tension between the constraints of institutional mechanisms and the possibilities for escaping them. Sajjilu Arab American: A Reader in SWANA Studies registers and reflects on major developments and central concerns within the field of Arab American studies, its intersections with the fields of US Muslim and SWANA American studies and in relation to fields such as Asian American, transnational, American, Middle Eastern, race and ethnic, and migration studies.

… 

As Lisa Suhair Majaj says in the interview with which we begin this introduction, “Language carries residues of meaning, and once we start allowing these subterranean layers to emerge and interact we discover that language has a movement of its own, like breath” (2007, 406). Like any scholarly field, Arab American studies should be understood as living, breathing, and constantly evolving. In crafting one narrative about it here, we also acknowledge the power and potential of language—like breath—to be life giving and to always hold open the potential of telling the story in a different way. We offer this reader as an invitation to conversation, debate, and, ideally, new and continued growth of the field.
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.