NEWTON Bouquet – Marking 75 Years of the Nakba: 'Framing Narratives and Histories” (May 2023)

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May 15, 2023 Palestine
NEWTON Bouquet – Marking 75 Years of the Nakba: "Framing Narratives and Histories” (May 2023)

NEWTON Bouquet – Marking 75 Years of the Nakba: "Framing Narratives and Histories” (May 2023)

By : NEWTON Editors

Palestine NEWTON Bouquet 1: “Framing Narratives and Histories” (May 15)

Today, 15 May 2023, is exactly 75 years since the official date used to mark the Nakba. The 15 of May, 1948, is also the date of the official declaration of the state of Israel, built on the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, the erasure and destruction of Palestinian lives, homes, and villages, and the denial of narratives. This week, Jadaliyya offers two NEWTON bouquets to mark this 75-year milestone, curated from our scores of texts over the last thirteen years. Bouquet 1, below, showcases a selection of texts that offer broad overviews and narratives; the immediate pre- and post-1948 moment; and a trajectory of Palestinian experiences under occupation, as refugees, and in Israel, over the course of the ongoing Nakba.

1) Omar Jabary Salamanca, Mezna Qato, Kareem Rabie, and Sobhi Samour, Past Is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine 

“The framework of comparative settler colonialism offers important insights and interventions that, while not all new, provide productive scaffolding for thinking about Palestine. Comparative settler colonialism rejects the exceptionalism that is ascribed to Zionism and Israel, and to Palestine and Palestinians, and it opens the situation to comparison with other contemporary and historical settler colonial cases.”

2) Joel Beinin and Lisa Hajjar, Palestine, Israel, and the Arab-Israeli Conflict: A Primer

“The context of the operation is the continuing occupation and denial of Palestinian human and national rights with the full collaboration of the United States. We hope the primer helps people understand that.”

3) Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History – Unlearning Imperialism

“The book is an attempt to provide a potential history of five hundred years in which Palestine, but also photography and modern art, are late reiterations of imperialism’s major enterprise—the impairment of worlds and their replacement with standardized political structures that facilitate the implementation of disastrous political regimes.”

4) Sherene Seikaly, “How I Met My Great-Grandfather: Archives and the Writing of History”

“I detail Naim’s consumerism, his financial investments and property, his land dispute with his brother, and then trace his experience of dispossession after the Nakba, as a refugee in Lebanon. What happened to a man of capital who survived the catastrophe of 1948? What allows an archive to survive that event? What stories does it record, and what does it render invisible?”

5) Shay Hazkani, Dear Palestine: A Social History of the 1948 War

“The questions I ask about the interactions between elites and non-elites stem to a large degree from the rich collections of oral histories of the nakba that have been published in recent decades. These testimonies have this candor to them that we typically do not see from politicians, generals, or the various histories that have relied on their words.”

6) Rochelle Davis, Palestinian Village Histories: Geographies of the Displaced 

“By documenting and analyzing the work of these local historians and preservationists, and their knowledge of a disappeared landscape and way of life, I provide readers with a sense of the past and suggest how people today think of and write their own history.”

7) Orit Bashkin, Impossible Exodus: Iraqi Jews in Israel

“I wanted to challenge the notion that Israel served as a melting pot for Jewish communities and to illustrate instead how the adoption of Israeli citizenship was a long, excruciating and traumatic experience. I also wished to write a history that did not focus on the ways in which Israeli institutions discriminated against Jews who previously resided in Middle Eastern states (Mizrahim).”

8) Lana Tatour, “Citizenship as Domination: Settler Colonialism and the Making of Palestinian Citizenship in Israel” 

“An aspiration to challenge the exceptionalism of the Israeli case also informs my approach. Therefore, this article takes a comparative approach to the question of citizenship-making in Israel and situates it within the wider history of citizenship making in Anglophone settler-colonial contexts. I based this decision not only on theoretical considerations, but also on findings from the archives.”

9) Helga Tawil-Souri and Dina Matar, Gaza As Metaphor 

“We did to not want to limit what our contributors wanted to write about, asking them to think through a metaphor and its relationship to Gaza. They could think of a metaphor as an entry point to interrogate the realities of Gaza, to excavate, contextualize and make visible the effect of Israel’s settler colonial project, among other forces, on Gaza and its people.”

10) Lori Allen, A History of False Hope: Investigative Commissions in Palestine

“In a way, this book is an expression of my naïve astonishment at how Palestinians have been denied their freedom, so brazenly and brutally, for so long. I still ask, how can this be? A History of False Hope is another attempt to understand the intransigence of Palestinians’ unfreedom.”

11) Noura Erakat, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine

“Rather than emphasize the content of the law, the book pays particular attention to the historical context as well as the strategy of the legal workers to show how the law can have various meanings across time and space. On the whole, the book demonstrates that the law has been more beneficial in advancing Israel’s settler-colonial interests and insists that, for it to benefit the Palestinian struggle, and progressive causes more generally, it must be used in the sophisticated service of a political movement.”

12) Seth Anziska, Preventing Palestine: A Political History from Camp David to Oslo

“Broadening my perspective and spending time in Syria and Lebanon, while also returning to Israel and Palestine, helped me interrogate questions that had surfaced about the persistence of Palestinian statelessness and led to the research for this book.”

13) Michelle Pace and Somdeep Sen, The Palestinian Authority in the West Bank: The Theatrics of Woeful Statecraft

“In this book we challenge the existing literature on state-building and the apparent fixity on the state; instead, we shed light on how the discursively produced and constantly alluded to notion of “a Palestinian state” relies on endless acts of performance to call it into being. Our focus is therefore on how the nature of Palestinians’ statelessness has to contend with the rituals of statecraft that the Palestinian Authority (PA) and its civil servants/fonctionnaires engage in.”

14) Frances S. Hasso, Buried in the Red Dirt: Race, Reproduction, and Death in Modern Palestine

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

15) Julie Peteet, Space and Mobility in Palestine

“The book is concerned with mobility and space under the Israeli policy of closure and its mechanisms: the wall, checkpoints, the permit system (the paper wall), the identity card, and the segregated road system. I explore how a modern settler-colonial regime works to transform space to conform to a narrative of its desired demography and foundational history.”

16) Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins, Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine

“In asking how waste is worlding, I took my cue as much from anthropology as from the interdisciplinary discard studies. I wanted to understand how people live in arguably unlivable environments and what the materialities of unlivability have to do with sovereignty, with how people experience ethics, sociality, and temporality.”

17) Nadya Hajj, Protection Amid Chaos: The Creation of Property Rights in Palestinian Refugee Camps 

“Palestinian refugees engaged in an iterative process of creating and renegotiating property rights in camps, often bargaining with more (politically) powerful actors. Palestinians incorporated their communal traditions for enforcing rules into formal property right systems and protected the community from predation and total host state incorporation.”

18) Ilana Feldman, Life Lived in Relief: Humanitarian Predicaments and Palestinian Refugee Politics

“In all of my work, I strive to develop analytic frameworks that can capture the complexity and often contradictory features in people’s experiences, and that also grasp when they cohere into enduring formations. Distinguishing between the politics of life and the politics of living is one of the ways I have tried to do this in the humanitarian context.”
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.