Mohamed Abdou, Islam and Anarchism: Relationships and Resonances (New Texts Out Now)

Mohamed Abdou, Islam and Anarchism: Relationships and Resonances (New Texts Out Now)

Mohamed Abdou, Islam and Anarchism: Relationships and Resonances (New Texts Out Now)

By : Mohamed Abdou

Mohamed Abdou, Islam and Anarchism: Relationships and Resonances (Pluto Press, 2022).

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

Mohamed Abdou (MA): Many reasons: pain, elegy, rage, squandered decolonial horizons within the “Arab Spring,” the “Black Spring” rebellion of 2020, and Indigenous resurgence during the Idle No More (INM) / #NoDAPL events, but also language, land, power, and the politics of (mis)translations relating to all of the above, given how liberalism has hollowed out words and their meanings. 

Most leftist social movements oppose racial capitalism but assume that the nation state is a neutral entity that can be instrumentalized towards revolutionary ends, despite the fact that, historically, capitalism and nation states grew up together and are as entwined as grapevines. Islam and Anarchism focuses on this question of authority and authoritarianism. Michel Foucault argued that the nation state as a modern European colonial form of governing, disciplining, and controlling populations is inseparable from racism, and similarly is the case with capitalism, as Cedric J Robinson, Ruth Gilmore Wilson, Mariame Kaba and Robin D G Kelley teach. Together, capitalism and nation states rule over and facilitate what Harsha Walia refers to as “border imperialism.”

Islam and Anarchism starts with Columbus’ invasion of the Americas in 1492, which coincided with the expulsion of Muslims and Jews from Andalusia. These communities were cast alongside Indigenous and transatlantic Black peoples as “savages” and “heathens.” My book contends that the “War on Terror” represents an ongoing crusade against Islam and Muslims, while arguing against the idea that “secularity” in the United States/Canada exists, given its Euro-American Christian anchoring in Protestant Ethics, common-law property rights, and anthropocentric conceptualizations of land and non-humxn life, as well as in Doctrines of Manifest Destiny and Discovery.

Instead, I propose “Anarcha-Islam.” It is deeply rooted in key Qurʾanic concepts and interdisciplinary textual sources, and draws on radical anti-statist BIPOC social movement discourses in an effort at connecting the fires of the Tahrir Uprisings with that of NoDAPL/INM, BLM, and Palestine from a land-based abolitionist social movement and political-theological perspective. The book philosophically, materially, and theologically challenges authoritarian and capitalist inequalities in the entwined imperial context of post-colonial societies like Egypt and settler-colonial societies (the United States/Canada) that never underwent decolonization and are symbolically, historically, and materially interrelated. 

The book draws on my two-decade participation in anti-hierarchical BIPOC, SWANA, and Palestinian social movement struggles.

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

MA: A central theme is how migrant SWANA settlers in the United States/Canada are content with liberal-progressive voting/electoral approaches and strive to become good law-abiding citizens, while in the process they reify what Saidiya Hartman refers to as anti-Black “afterlife to slavery” projects, facilitated by their participation in the United States/Canada’s settler-colonization of Indigenous peoples at the entwined expense of Afro-Indigenous futurities. This approach is one animated by what Charles Taylor, Frantz Fanon, and Glen Coulthard call a “politics of recognition,” which obscures genuine anti-statist revolutionary understandings of decolonization centered on the re-matriation of stolen Indigenous land and Black reparations. 

“Homonationalism” and “pinkwashing,” which Jasbir K Puar, Maya Mikdashi, and Sarah Schulman astutely identified, also constitute the geopolitical context informing Islam and Anarchism in so far as the militarization of feminist and queer rights as human rights in the United States/Canada and Palestine. Palestine acts as strategic ethical-political compass to Islam and Anarchism, given my Egyptian and North African Muslim background that includes being a settler of color living and working at the largest Grab University on Turtle Island—Cornell. I address why neither a one- nor a two-state solution to Palestine is feasible and build on the idea that the roads to Jerusalem and the Grand River are tied. 

Other topics Islam and Anarchism addresses include a critique of Euro-American Marxist-Leninists statist perspectives, Postcolonialism/Third Worldism (including Pan-Africanism and Pan-Arabism’s constraints as a liberatory paradigm of reference), and the tactical usefulness but also strategic limitations of modern identity politics. I also discuss Arab Supremacy, anti-Blackness (within SWANA communities), gendered/racialized Islamophobia, and the difference between anti-colonialism and decolonization as well as between Jihad (to struggle) and Qital (the actual Qur’anic term that means “to do battle”). The book also intervenes in Indigenous and settler-colonial studies debates—Bonita Lawrence, Enakshi Dua, Jodi Byrd, Eve Tuck, Jeannette Armstrong, Zainab Amadahy, and others—on the concept of indigeneity and who and what is a settler, alongside questions of complicity and privilege, in light of how most migrant-settlers uncritically embrace upward mobility and Euro-American civilizational paradigms that inform what Sara Ahmed calls “migrant orientations” in displacement.

Islam and Anarchism, using the methodology of anarchic-Ijtihad, engages Islamic fiqh (loosely translated as “jurisprudence”), Muslim and SWANA history, and political-philosophical works, including (pre-)modern Muslim works towards a hermeneutical analysis of the Qur’an and its interpretations (tafasir), as well as the ahadith (the Prophetic oral traditions) which are their own discipline (ʿilm al-ḥadith) and over which there is discrepancy that in turn influences Muslim’s practice itself (the Sunna). I intervene in (pre-)modern debates alongside—Wael Hallaq, Tamim Al-Barghouti, and others—over the legitimacy of terms such as the “Islamic State,” and unveil anti-capitalist, anti-statist, and anti-authoritarian egalitarian Muslim forms of governance and economic practices, given the constrained Leftist and Islamist general approach of seeking to seize state power to enact social change. Anarcha-Islam takes for its interpretative territory other facets that constitute the corpus of Muslim thaqafa and Islamic turath spanning literary, scientific, medical, sexual, social, economic, ritualistic, and land-based scholarly works and practices.

I also address the (pre-)modern evolution of the concept of siyasa (the Arabic term for “politics” or the “art of governance”) and modern uses of concepts like Wattaniyyah (nationalism/patriotism) and Qawmiyyah (pan-regionalism as in a Pan-Arabism), and contemporary Muslim and Arab mistranslations of the political concept of Dawla (mistaken to signify the modern state), as well as the Umma (often mistranslated as nation).

A last theme that I will note is local, regional, and transnational solidarities and what a biodiverse strategy of resistance involves. Drawing on Muslim discourses, but also Leela Gandhi, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, and others, I argue how “habitual” solidarity must entail what is referred to as an ethics of hospitality (in Islam, Usul al-Diyafa) and disagreements (Usul al-Ikhtilaf) and its application within Muslim, anarchist, or even spiritual and non-spiritual leftist movements in mitigating differences between us. The book draws on my two-decade participation in anti-hierarchical BIPOC, SWANA, and Palestinian social movement struggles. These include the post-Seattle anti-globalization protests of 1999 and the anti-Afghanistan and Iraq war protests, as well as the Tahrir Uprisings of 2011/2013, the Indigenous Zapatista movement in Chiapas and Oaxaca, and the Mohawks of Tyendinaga and community members from the sister territories of Kahnawake, Akwesasne, and Kanehsatake during their standoff with the Canadian federal government over the Culbertson Tract.

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

MA: The book represents a revising of my MA thesis titled “Anarcha-Islam,” completed in 2009. I returned to it following my ten-year historical archival and transnational ethnographic PhD on Islam, Queer Muslims, and Identity Politics: Race, Religion, Gender & Sexuality In the Contemporary. Through an engagement with queer Indigenous and Black studies as well as queer of color critiques, the doctorate involved interviews with a transgender sex worker in Egypt, a gay man in the Egyptian military, and queer-feminist Nubian and Sudanese Egyptians and others in post-2011 “Arab Spring” Egypt, as well as queer-feminist migrant SWANA Muslims in the American/Canadian settler-colonial context. Almost fifteen years since originally written, and numerous incarnations later, I wanted the book to remain faithful to the spirit and central anti-capitalist and anti-statist foundations of “Anarcha-Islam,” while also building on what I learned during my doctoral work and the organizational movement experiences I had. 

Both the doctoral work and book simultaneously engage settler-colonial, critical race, and queer-feminist works, but also political theology and psychoanalysis, Indigenous, Black, decolonial, Islamic and postcolonial studies. Both works are built on the premise of the inseparability of politics from religion as well as studies of race from religion and gender from sexuality. They also intersect in exploring how spiritual orientations/practices can inform non-racial conceptualizations of indigeneity and decolonially trouble contemporary leftist social movements that are animated by secular anti-global, anti-Capitalist and anti-statist aspirations. 

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

MA: Transnational interdisciplinary scholars and social movement activists (BLM, INM/NoDAPL, Tahrir, BIPOC elders, movements participants, and organizers, and so on). Everyone really, given the subject areas it touches on and the experiences that it strives to connect, unsettle, and convey. The book is written for members of the general public. Scholarship-wise, it is for Islamic studies scholars, particularly Muslim feminists, but also anti-racist, critical race, queer, women of color feminist, postcolonial (SWANA), decolonial, Indigenous, and Black studies, with which I am in dialogue and communing. 

I hope the book serves towards genuine material decolonial liberation and healing, nothing short of that.

J: What other projects are you working on now?

MA: I am building locally and globally with BIPOC and anti-statist social justice communities from where I am now located, on Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫʼ, Anishinaabe-Haudenosaunee territory. I recently published two articles from the PhD research. One is on Egyptian gender-sexual harassment and a queer-feminist abolitionist initiative that arose from the Tahrir Uprising in Al-Raida journal. The second article is on the revolutionary wonderings of queer-feminist Egyptians in Egypt and queer-feminist Muslims organizing globally in Feral Feminisms. I am currently revising the PhD for a university press who are interested in its publication.

 

Excerpt from the Introduction

When we talk about waking people up from complicity, is to say that we can’t be only upset with Trump because he’s not a politician who sells us his policies in the most perfect way. His policies are bad. But many of the people who came before him also had really bad policies. They just were more polished than he was. And that’s not what we should be looking for anymore. We don’t want anybody to get away with murder because they are polished. We want to recognize the actual policies that are behind the pretty face and the smile. 

Ilhan Omar, Politico Interview (March 8, 2019) 

The notion of reform is so stupid and hypocritical. Either reforms are designed by people who claim to be representative, who make a profession of speaking for others, and they lead to a division of power, to a distribution of this new power which is consequently increased by a double repression; or they arise from the complaints and demands of those concerned. This latter instance is no longer a reform but revolutionary action that questions (expressing the full force of its partiality) the totality of power and the hierarchy that maintains it. 

Gilles Deleuze (1972)

Much of the liberal controversy about Islam and democracy has really been about the West’s own antidemocratic imperial and domestic commitments (which denied, and in many cases still deny, rights to Native Americans, to blacks, to Catholics, to Mormons, to Jews, to Muslims, to women, to communists et al.), its “hatred of democracy”, its checkered history in relation to this much touted political system and its fantastical deployment as the very essence of Western culture which allegedly emerged from the very bosom of [Euro-American] Christianity. The liberal project is in effect a missionary project to convert Islam to the highest stage of Christian reigning in the West, even if this is carried out under the banner of a “reformed Islam”. 

Joseph A. Massad (2015, 106)

The Destructive Legacy of (Neo)Liberalism and Colonial Modernity in the Production of Neo-Orientalist and Neo-Fundamentalist Muslim Subjectivities 

On March 9, 2019, 37-year old Somali-American Ilhan Abdullahi Omar, the first hijābi-Muslim congresswoman, tweeted that news media outlet Politico had distorted her statements, given above, critiquing Barack Hussein Obama. Over the next 48 hours, both neoliberal news outlets, such as CNN, MSNBC, and CBC, and right-wing media outlets, such as Fox News, the Drudge Report, and Breitbart fixated on her comments that President Obama was a “pretty-face” responsible for “droning ... countries around the world” and the concentration camp practice of “caging ... kids.” Following the outcry, the former refugee Omar, who never shies away from retelling her hallmark success story as an affirmation of the “American Dream,” deleted her so-called controversial tweet. Omar – an institutionalized politician who has praised the mother of neoliberalism Margaret Thatcher as a role model as well as warmonger Madeleine Albright as an exemplary immigrant – then proceeded to insist she had become a victim of “fake news.” She proceeded to tweet, “[No] I’m an Obama fan! I was [just] saying how [President] Trump is different from Obama, and why we should focus on policy not politics.” Omar hardly stopped there. She continued to openly profess and affirm her “unwavering love for America” and proclaimed that as a country it “was founded on the ideas of justice, of liberty, of the pursuit of happiness.” Insisting on her unquestionable allegiance to America she decried the hypocrisy (nifāq) of how, “We export American exceptionalism ... The Great America. The Land of liberty and Justice ... But we don’t live those values here.” Then, on May 1, 2019, flanked by abolitionist Angela Davis, during one of many rallies in her defense, Omar asserted in typical contradictory fashion that settler-colonial America, or in other words, occupied Turtle Island (U.S./Canada), “was founded on the history of Native American genocide, on the backs of black slaves, [that] this is not going to be the country of white people.” 

But which is it, “genocide” or “justice, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”? 

Congresswoman Omar’s contradictory statements and their undergirding conceptions of positionality, history, and solidarity continue to simultaneously inspire and deeply trouble me. Her settler-colonial politics, as for many diasporic Muslims who exhibit these stances, speak to the struggles, irreconcilable loyalties, and identity crises that Muslims face globally. The identity crisis is a consequence of diasporic exile and displacement. Indeed, it is born out of having to contend with rediscovering a new homeland and meanings relative to the notion of “home” and “belonging,” while also engaging in the resettlement of Indigenous peoples who continue to struggle against their ongoing genocide, the theft of their land and calls for its repatriation and rematriation. The crisis is anchored in having to prove one’s loyalty to a nation that fetishizes and romanticizes its imperialist veterans that participate in expansionist adventurism elsewhere, while also assimilating and constructing a Euro-American identity and cultural formation ‘based on the territorial dispersal and political fragmentation’ of Muslims. This book argues that this identity crisis has pre-modern roots that have been heightened by modernity’s advent. 

Liberalism’s effect on a majority of diasporic Muslims in North America is to seek to achieve a multicultural-progressive humanitarian utopian vision of an “American/Canadian” belonging premised on interracial, gender, sexual, and class social solidarities and political justice pluralisms. However, in adopting liberal-progressive stances, at the expense of more decolonial/radical social justice trajectories, diasporic Muslims reinforce the problematic notion that there is a “moderate” Islām and that there is congruence between, on the one hand, patriotic allegiance to nation-states that structure gender, racial, and sexual power, and on the other hand, ethico-political Muslim and Qur’ānic ontological/epistemological commitments. The irony is that innumerable progressives like Rashida Tlaib, Omar Suleiman, Dahlia Mogahed, and Linda Sarsour, as well as more conservative Muslims like Hamza Yusuf and Sherman Jackson, and others in between such as Zaid Shakir, market themselves as supporters of Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali’s radical Black legacies, while neglecting the fact that Malcolm X, in particular, explicitly adopted an anti-American stance. 

Assimilation’s seductive lure, even when seemingly progressive, reifies the hollow mantra that diverse citizenship is an American/ Canadian value; an individualist slogan that ignores the fact that the very political institution of citizenship in settler-colonial North America is constructed upon continuing anti-Black foundations and Indigenous genocide and dispossession. This identitarian formation undermines core existential struggles involved in what W.E.B. Du Bois referred to as a “double-consciousness,” as in possessing “two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body.” Unlike much liberal-Muslim scholarship and its idealization of individualist choices, representative democracy, and a politics of rights, this book engages with Islamic anarchistic and radical Indigenous, Black and People of Color (BIPOC) social movement literatures and movements that argue for a politics of responsibility anchored in direct and horizontal forms of democracy that are more egalitarian and socially just, with regards to both our species and its relationships to nonhuman life. It argues that the civil rights project of reform of the nation-state and associated assimilationist agendas disregard the asymmetrical hierarchies between and within various segments of domestic populations and thus “perpetuate the dangerous illusion that liberal politics are a refuge from right-wing racism,” when the truth is that the former are “constructed of many of the same components and hence occlude continuities and similarities with the Islamophobia of liberal governments like Obama’s or Trudeau’s.” These reform-based political approaches ignore Indigenous and non-Indigenous critiques of settler-colonization and the need for decolonization in addressing what Jodi Byrd refers to as the geostrategic “cacophony of struggles,” which argue that the quest for inclusion normalizes the colonization of Indigenous nations and emboldens neocolonial/neoimperial assemblages acted upon predominantly Muslim societies elsewhere. In other words, the preoccupation with assimilation and civic rights in the U.S./Canada, and the insistence on the unapologetic congruency of American/Canadian identities, actively promotes the colonization and dispossession of Indigenous and Black peoples within and elsewhere upon people of color beyond white supremacist Empire. 

In contrast to these white-civilizational assimilationist strivings, liberalism’s reactive effect on orthodox Muslims is their infantilization such that they are driven towards impotent-violent strivings in the name of ushering in a totalitarian and exclusive puritanical “Muslim world.” This orthodox worldview informed by “con- version or death” narratives is one that we can see in Omar Mir Seddique Mateen’s case in which the Euro-American concept of sexuality is thrown into the mix. 

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.

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