Muna Dajani, Munir Fakher Eldin and Michael Mason, The Untold Story of the Golan Heights: Occupation, Colonization and Jawlani Resistance (New Texts Out Now)

Muna Dajani, Munir Fakher Eldin and Michael Mason, The Untold Story of the Golan Heights: Occupation, Colonization and Jawlani Resistance (New Texts Out Now)

Muna Dajani, Munir Fakher Eldin and Michael Mason, The Untold Story of the Golan Heights: Occupation, Colonization and Jawlani Resistance (New Texts Out Now)

By : Muna Dajani, Munir Fakher Eldin, and Michael Mason

Muna Dajani, Munir Fakher Eldin and Michael Mason, The Untold Story of the Golan Heights: Occupation, Colonization and Jawlani Resistance (London: Bloomsbury, 2023).

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

Muna Dajani, Munir Fakher Eldin, and Michael Mason (MD, MFE & MM): The book is the result of a collaborative research project, Mapping Memories of Resistance: The Untold Story of the Occupation of the Golan Heights, involving the Department of Geography and Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science, the Israeli Studies MA programme at Birzeit University in Palestine, and Al Marsad—the Arab Human Rights Centre in the Golan Heights (Jawlan). This collaboration ran from September 2018 to April 2021, and featured Jawlani, Palestinian, and UK researchers. It studied the Syrians who remained in the Golan Heights after 1967, documenting their lived experience of, and resistance to, the enduring occupation by Israel.

We had not planned a book, but as the project developed, we had a growing body of original material that deserved publication in an accessible format. Even this book is not enough to capture all the important work carried out. As we look back over the edited volume, we are acutely aware of what remains missing or underdeveloped (for example, we could have said more on the politics of martyrdom in the Jawlan, and also on the larger Jawlan and its ethnic-cleansing in 1967); but we see the book as an invitation to further work—a collaborative, necessarily incomplete effort to speak truth to power about the Israeli occupation and to convey faithfully the ways of living of the Jawlanis.

Alongside this book, the project has also produced an online curriculum (in Arabic and English) for teaching about the Jawlan and is developing an online public database containing primary sources on the occupied Jawlan since 1967, including archival material, interviews, posters, photographs, and newspaper articles. So the book is one output of a research project that soon outgrew its initial parameters, but one that captures effectively, we think, the ethos and analytical insights of the wider project.

The Jawlani counter-geography marks out or “remaps” an inclusive and just future, disrupting the oppressive gridlines of Zionist settler colonization.

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

MD, MFE & MM: The book provides the first academic study in English on indigenous Arab—‘Jawlani’—politics and culture in the occupied Golan Heights. There are two conceptual themes informing the book—everyday colonization and the politics of the governed. Through the lens of “everyday colonization,” we examine the daily experiences of, and reactions to, the Israeli occupation as manifest in Jawlani society, culture, and land use. By “politics of the governed,” we mean the various ways in which the Jawlanis encounter the political field of settler colonial power. 

Several contributions across the volume reach back to the start of the Isreali occupation in June 1967, but the empirical focus is on events since December 1981, when the territory was annexed unilaterally by Israel under the Golan Heights Law. This move from military to civil administration provoked wide-ranging Jawlani resistance, including a General Strike in 1982 that lasted six months; in its diverse and everyday forms, the resistance to occupation continues to this day. The community-based mobilization of the Jawlanis has barely been acknowledged by the scholarly literature on anti-colonialism, though some activist groups have picked up on it, notably Palestinian solidarity groups. We were encouraged by the interest generated by Muna’s 2020 Jadaliyya article addressing recent Jawlani activism against Israeli wind turbine development. Through the politics of the governed lens, we offer a broad understanding of Jawlani resistance, including solidarity networks with Palestinians, covering also the politics of Jawlani art, the politics of Jawlani youth and education, and a Jawlani political ecology. A consistent narrative—and graphic—thread in the volume is the idea of the Jawlan as a counter-geography, by which we mean the material and imaginative construction of an ethno-geographic community that contests the current regime of Israeli rule. The Jawlani counter-geography marks out or “remaps” an inclusive and just future, disrupting the oppressive gridlines of Zionist settler colonization.

Academic literatures we engage with include settler colonial studies and indigenous and (post)colonial scholarship, as well as particular research (in Arabic, English, and Hebrew) on the Golan. We offer the book as a major academic contribution to the understanding of contemporary settler colonial regimes and political responses to them, but of course that significance depends in large part on how it is received! We hope scholars and other readers are interested in, and discuss, the volume. 

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

MD, MFE & MM: The book is a continuation of themes that we have developed, both individually and collectively, in other academic outlets. All of us have, in previous work, sought to understand the historical-geographic dynamics and patterns of Israeli settler colonization, including in the occupied Jawlan and Palestine. To be sure, we come from different disciplinary settings—the research of Muna and Michael is largely situated within critical geography and political ecology, while Munir has a background in history and Middle Eastern/Islamic studies. The book has allowed us to combine our various methodological and theoretical interests. We also have a shared interest in critical pedagogy, which is expressed both by the authorship and content of the book, as well as the curriculum development made possible by our research collaboration on the Golan Heights. 

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

MD, MFE & MM: The book is multi-disciplinary, so we hope it will be of interest to scholars across a range of academic fields—including Middle East studies, indigenous and (post)colonial studies, anthropology, cultural studies, and geography—as well as policy practitioners and other civil society actors seeking to understand the significance of the occupied Syrian Golan within wider Israeli-Arab politics. We had the intention also for contributors to write in a way that is accessible to non-academic readers. While that balance is not always easy to strike (including in Arabic to English translation), as editors we encouraged clear, engaging prose across the contributions to the volume.

J: What other projects are you working on now? 

MD, MFE & MM: Muna is working on research projects concerned with traditional water infrastructure—including in Palestine—and their contribution to decolonial thinking and knowledge production. Munir continues to develop his research on the politics of landholding and the transformative impact of British colonial rule in Palestine, as well as his research on Jawlani popular politics and resistance to Israeli colonization. Following his recent work on water infrastructure politics in southern Iraq, Michael is working on a research project looking at transboundary water politics in the Euphrates-Tigris Basin. We also plan to do more work together!

J: The book has a novel format, blending chapters with shorter contributions, and incorporating archival photos, artwork, and poems. What is the reason for this? 

MD, MFE & MM: We wanted a format that meaningfully included diverse voices from those subject to occupation/annexation in the Jawlan and Palestine. Much is being written about “decolonizing” research (and pedagogy), but relatively little seems to be breaking out of mainstream formats for academic publications, whether articles in scholarly journals or university press volumes. Even academic outlets publishing critical social science have tended to be conservative in their writing and citational practices.

Jawlani and Palestinian early career researchers were at the forefront of knowledge production for this book. At the start of the collaboration, five Palestinian Birzeit University students from the Israeli Studies MA programme, along with four Jawlani students, were involved in selecting and carrying out interdisciplinary research projects on aspects of Jawlani life under occupation. Their research training as co-investigators anchored the collaboration project, which then widened to include several other students and, through the generous interest and assistance of the Jawlani community, also encompassed the direct participation of activists, planners, and artists. True to the aim of inclusive knowledge production, much of the content of this book was originally written in Arabic.

So the innovative format—featuring shorter “reflections” by the early career researchers following longer chapters—was the means by which we could publish their work. This research remained subject to internal and external peer review, but the shorter format allowed more effective training and mentoring by more experienced project members. We then decided to mix up the format further to allow other means for conveying the imaginative geography of the Jawlanis; hence the use of archival photos, Jawlani artwork, and the powerful poetry (in Arabic and English) by Jawlani poet Yasser Khanjar. There is of course a cultural politics informing our editorial curation of this material—validating and valuing a way of life that faces systemic discrimination and marginalization. In this way, we also see the book as a social and political document expressing Jawlani self-determination.

 

Excerpt from the book (from 7. Conclusion, pp. 192-96) 

Mapping Jawlani futures

How to map a landscape or territory that exposes relations of domination? That historicizes and therefore denaturalizes settler colonial spaces? Against the overwhelming geopolitical weight of ‘facts on the ground’ – the settlements and settlement enterprises, the territorial grip over land, water and other natural resources; the infrastructure systems and services locked into national networks of control; the forbidding military zones and their charged embodiment in a Zionist narrative of Jewish nation-building – the Jawlani communities uphold a survival culture. The stubborn refusal of the great majority of the population in the occupied Golan Heights to adopt Israeli citizenship, or to be classified only in religious terms as a ‘Druze minority’, speaks to their lived experiences of the injustices of occupation, which flare up as grievances and antagonistic protests directed at the Israeli authorities. In this way, their assertion of a Syrian Arab identity is, regardless of the violent breakdown and fragmentation of Syrian state sovereignty, fed by the unceasing denial by Israel of their self-determination and dignity. 

counter-geography is already present, therefore, in the myriad ways across everyday life in which Jawlanis embody and emplace their own sense of community, performing a society, culture and ecology against the grain of the Israeli occupation. Of course, these daily practices of living are invariably compromised and fractured by dominant settler colonial interests, and there is currently greater freedom for imaginative work rather than the material flourishing of a Jawlani community. Counter-cartography, the production of spatial imaginaries that make domination visible, is one means to disrupt sovereign cartographies of calculation and control. At a first level of critical reflection, this can use conventional geographic coordinates to map networks of settler colonial power, such as Jewish settlements in the Jawlan, which we counter-map (Map 1.2) within the boundaries of Syria’s Quneitra Governorate alongside more familiar borders. It can also, still with standard spatial projections, visualize the effects of settler colonial violence, such as showing the Syrian villages and farms destroyed by Israeli forces after July 1967. Al Marsad’s seminal work mapping all Syrian localities pre-1967 (Map 1.3) is another example of Jawlani counter-mapping of a settler colonial geography. As the Palestinians developed maps as a necessity only after Oslo and their nation-state-building endeavour, we argue that the Jawlanis embarked on an endeavour to mark their territorial dispossession and remaining presence through maps and mapping. Needless to say, in both cases, the lack of mapping does not imply a lack of knowledge of the land but rather the urgency of mapping as a result of settler colonial territorial and geographical transformation. Such cartographic representations, while exposing settler colonial elimination, rarely show how an indigenous Jawlani presence can remap itself onto the colonized landscapes of the Jawlan – to show, following Elspeth Iralu, how indigenous collectives can reclaim recognition, not on the terms of the settler colonial logic but in a remapping that privileges kinship and memory in the representation of their landscape. Remapping has to serve the futurity desired by the communities themselves based on justice and equality. 

At a second level of critical reflection, indigenous activists and scholars have devised more subversive modes of mapping to deconstruct settler colonial geographies and reclaim those identities, place attachments and ecological relations erased or eroded by ethnic cleansing. These mapping projects seek to convey anthropological facets of the lived experience of a landscape rather than the abstract, objectifying gaze of a conventional state-centred cartography.

In her contribution in this volume, Jumanah Abbas shows some of the ways in which, counter to an Israeli cartography of spatial domination, there can be alternative visual representations of ordinary and insurgent Jawlani practices, including the mapping of memories. Jumanah draws from the extensive and rich experiences of Jawlanis, including their alternative educational practices to the ‘Druze curriculum’ imposed on their children. Counter-cartography can take multiple shapes and forms from oral history accounts to videos, murals, community events and actions with an objective of decolonizing cartography and spatial knowledge production. Can we produce a map that is situated in local knowledge, produced solely for collective purposes of documenting and narrating local histories and experiences and still deem it significant, relevant and useful to wider audiences? Figure 7.2 is an example of such a map, which moves to communicate a counter-cartography of Jawlani identity politics, both mixing Arabic and English and rightfully making demands on an Anglophone audience to make sense of visual iconography that may well be unfamiliar (e.g. ‘The March’ statue in Majdal Shams) – to have to learn more, with respect, to uncover the various layers of meaning that will be legible to a Jawlani audience.

Can we develop such emancipatory mapping, regardless of its legibility to outsiders and people less familiar with the Jawlan? Even at the risk of illegibility, the act of engaging with mapping, or unmapping indigenous spatialities, has in itself an emancipatory potential to challenge our perceptions on meanings and situated knowledges of indigenous existence in space, place and time. The Jawlan is a unique geographical formation that is rich in culture, political and social resistance embedded in quotidian daily acts of existing and persisting despite the ongoing settler colonial reality. 

It also pushes us to go beyond mapping as geographically bounded and invites us to include experiences and stories of places, people and memories transcending those borders. Counter-mapping as an act of resistance is also carried out by those who were expelled from the geography of the Jawlan: for example, in Adam Shapiro’s compelling documentary, Al-Joulan: A Guarded Palace (2011), in which Rasha Elass, a Syrian journalist and a descendant of a displaced Jawlani, takes us on a journey of return to her father’s village of Jubatha al-Zeit. Can counter-mapping create inclusive narratives of homeland and belonging that serve not just the Jawlanis that remain but also the families of those that were forced to flee? We can only hint at the forms and practices of such collective imagining, which is anyway properly part of the self-determination by Jawlanis of their social and political futures. Our hope is that this volume at least provides a resource for understanding, and critically engaging with, settler colonial practices that, for far too long, have written the Jawlanis out of their own history and geography.

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.