Nadim Bawalsa, Transnational Palestine: Migration and the Right of Return before 1948 (New Texts Out Now)

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Jul 14, 2023 Palestine
Nadim Bawalsa, Transnational Palestine: Migration and the Right of Return before 1948 (New Texts Out Now)

Nadim Bawalsa, Transnational Palestine: Migration and the Right of Return before 1948 (New Texts Out Now)

By : Nadim Bawalsa

Nadim Bawalsa, Transnational Palestine: Migration and the Right of Return before 1948 (Stanford University Press, 2022).

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

Nadim Bawalsa (NB): This book started as a dissertation project. In 2011, I traveled to Jerusalem to conduct preliminary dissertation research at the Israel State Archive. My hope was to find autobiographical sources of Palestinians in the early twentieth century. I had been researching Khalil Sakakini’s diaries extensively as part of my MA thesis, and the idea was to expand on this work by locating more sources, whether Sakakini’s or others’, in order to construct an intellectual history of early twentieth-century Palestine. I spent a month at the archive, and while I managed to find some autobiographical sources, they were mostly disjointed thanks to very disorganized Israeli archiving; I would find one or two documents in a few mislabeled and messy boxes, but there was no coherence to the different correspondences or diary entries. They were unfortunately not significant finds.

About three weeks into the trip, a friend in the doctoral program, Fredrik Meiton, who was also researching at the archive, came to me with a document he found. It was hand-written in Arabic, and he could not make out what it said, but the printed letterhead was clear: Centro Social Palestino de Monterrey, Mexico, and the date was 1927. We were stunned. There were Palestinians in Mexico in 1927 and they formed a collective with its own letterhead? It took some time, but I managed to decipher the handwriting: it was a letter addressed to Musa Kazim al-Husayni, head of the Arab Executive Committee in Jerusalem. The authors were requesting his assistance in challenging recent British refusals to grant them Palestinian citizenship on arbitrary grounds. The implications, they explained, were serious, as it meant they would lose any legal connections to Palestine, including properties, inheritance, and residency. They were determined to defend their rights to Palestinian nationality as well as their right to return, as they phrased it.

I searched for other documents in the box Fredrik was examining, and managed to find a few more in English, Spanish, and Arabic from Palestinians in other parts of Mexico, but also from similar Palestinian collectives in Costa Rica, Haiti, Honduras, Cuba, Chile, and elsewhere in Latin America. Each document had a formal letterhead, they were all authored in the late 1920s, and the content was similar: challenging British Mandate authorities’ decision to deny them Palestinian citizenship. I immediately realized this was a critical topic and that it had not been written about before. The following year, I traveled to London to conduct research at the National Archives there, and two years after that, I visited the national library in Santiago, Chile. Document after document in London revealed British authorities’ carefully designed nationality law, legislated in 1925, through which they naturalized Jewish immigrants as Palestinian citizens and deliberately denied it to tens of thousands of Palestinian migrants in the diaspora. And in Santiago, I found over a dozen Arabic and Spanish periodicals published by early migrants there from Greater Syria. In issue after issue, they condemned British policies and called on one another to defend Palestinian migrants’ rights to their nationality. That Palestinians were migrating alongside Syrians, Lebanese, and other Middle Eastern travelers to every corner of the Americas starting in the late nineteenth century, that they developed collective political consciousness as Palestinians from afar, and that their forcible distancing from Palestine—and hence their right to return to it—started well before 1948 simply had to be written.
... the so-called liberal world order that emerged in Europe after WWI and that purported to secure liberation and self-determination for nations across the globe was never not colonial, imperial, and fundamentally unequal.

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

NB: Perhaps the most obvious topic is the Palestinian right of return to Palestine, and discovering that it has a longer historical trajectory than 1948, one that is rooted in colonization and the interwar international legal order. This is to say that the so-called liberal world order that emerged in Europe after WWI and that purported to secure liberation and self-determination for nations across the globe was never not colonial, imperial, and fundamentally unequal. British colonial authorities were committed to realizing the Zionist agenda in Palestine and that not only meant prioritizing Jewish settlement, naturalization, and sovereignty in Palestine, it also meant disenfranchising thousands of Palestinian migrants in the process. This contributes to literature critiquing and exposing the interwar legal order for what it was, including the works of Susan Pedersen, Mark Mazower, Antony Anghie, and others. 

The book also contributes to Middle Eastern migration and diaspora studies by including Palestinians in literature largely dominated by Lebanese and Syrian migrant narratives. A handful of scholars, including Akram Khater, Stacy Fahrenthold, Camila Pastor, and Sarah Gualtieri are among those leading the way in historical studies of the Lebanese and Syrian diasporas in the Americas. My book contributes to these very impressive works, and in doing so, it contributes to strengthening scholarly connections between the Middle East and Latin America, two regions worth studying together for a variety of reasons, including migrant networks and shared histories of settler colonization, liberation struggles, and much more.

Finally, I hope the book makes a significant contribution to the study of the development of Palestinian national consciousness in the twentieth century. Building on the works of Rashid Khalidi, Salim Tamari, James Gelvin, and others, the book examines the development of a distinct sense of Palestinian self and group understanding from a transnational perspective. That Palestinians across the Americas, as far away from Palestine as the Chilean Andes, were contributing to forging a collective national mode of identification, indicates that the historical study of Palestine and Palestinians must branch out of Palestine. What this means for historians and researchers of Palestine is that our documents and records are not only confined to often inaccessible Israeli and British archives; they are virtually everywhere, waiting to be found.

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

NB: As a Palestinian myself, I have always been interested in the stories of my people, both historical and contemporary. Choosing to build a career as a historian in Palestinian studies necessarily meant that I am committed to recording and preserving these stories. My previous work was largely focused on locating Palestinian autobiographical sources in order to tell our stories—and not only our stories of loss and dispossession. I have always wanted to reconstruct a record of who we are as a collective in spite of our exile and fragmentation, and in spite of any attempts to deny our existence and our past. When I found those documents in Jerusalem, I felt a strong urge to know who those Palestinian migrants were. While I did not find their diaries or photos, what I found in those periodicals in the microfilms of the national library in Santiago was very moving; there were stories to be told about these pioneering travelers and successful merchants who took on the British empire in hundreds of petitions for decades and from all over Latin America. These impressive people not only set a precedent for demanding our rights to be Palestinians and to be in Palestine, they also recorded their struggle for themselves and their children. I consider it an honor to be able to retell their stories and share them with Palestinians everywhere.

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

NB: My book is for Palestinians everywhere. Of course, I hope anyone interested in our history will read it, but it would be a dream if descendants of these Palestinian migrants across every corner of Latin America and beyond read the book. I would love for them to know their history, to know where they come from and what their great grandparents did to preserve their culture and connections to their homelands. I would also love for Palestinians in Palestine and across the Arab world to read the book and learn about their compatriots in Latin America and the long battles they waged to defend one another and who they are. And I would love for the book to bring us fragmented Palestinians closer to one another. I was able to experience this last year in Amman, Jordan. I was giving a book talk at the Columbia Global Centers, and during the Q&A, a young woman raised her hand to share that she was Mexican of Palestinian origin, and that she recognized her great grandfather’s name in one of the documents I displayed during the presentation. She said she had always known her family was Palestinian, but that she never knew the details of why they left Palestine, why they chose to settle in Saltillo, Mexico, and how they tried to return to Palestine. In fact, she said no one in her community in Mexico knew this history. She never imagined she would learn all this while attending a lecture in Amman, and she asked what I thought could be done to bring more Palestinians across the world together to learn who they are and about their connected histories. I was deeply touched. 

J: What other projects are you working on now?

NB: In keeping with my mission to record our stories, I began working on a novel loosely based on a few incredible stories I found and heard while conducting research in Chile and meeting with palestinos-chilenos. I could not include them in the book, so it is my goal to write them and share them with the world as stories. These are harrowing accounts of migration across oceans and continents over a century ago, of love and loss, of family scandals, and much more—stories that will shock and inspire, much like the brilliant novels of Isabella Hammad. If our historical record is interrupted, disjointed, and locked up in Israeli and British archives from which most of us are banned, why can we not imagine it? After all, these are our stories to tell. 

 

Excerpt from the book (from Chapter 4, pp. 119-123)

The Voices of Mexico’s Palestinian Petitioners

On 11 November 1926, the British vice-consul in Mexico City sent a letter to Mr. Antonio J. Dieck, then president of the Centro Social Palestino in Monterrey, explaining the reasons for rejecting several applications for Palestinian citizenship made by Palestinian residents of Monterrey earlier that year. The vice-consul explained that the applicants had all been “absent from Palestine for periods of from twelve to twenty-five years:” 

I beg to advise you that I have received a dispatch from H.B.M. Consule General in the City of Mexico, stating that the following applications for citizenship have been refused:

Salamon Canavati . . . Azize Marcos de Dieck . . . Zacarias J. Dieck . . . Espiridion Canavati and Salha Mansour Elias Freige. . . .

H.B.M. Consule-General sends me a dispatch from the Officer Administering the Government of Palestine, from which I quote the following in regard to the above applications:

“2” The Applicants have in every case been absent from Palestine for periods of from twelve to twenty-five years, and more and it is apparent that they have severed all connections with this country. In these circumstances I do not propose to accept their applications.

He added that they could reapply for citizenship before 1 August of that year if they fulfilled the six-month residency requirement in Palestine and if they could prove Ottoman nationality and birth in Palestine:

“3” It will, however, be open to them to apply for citizenship under Art. 4 of the order, provided application is made before the 1st. of August, next, and provided also that they qualify by residence in Palestine for a period of six months before the date of application and are able to produce satisfactory evidence of Ottoman nationality and birth in Palestine.

In response to this letter, members of Monterrey’s Centro Social Palestino, now under the leadership of Salamon Canavati, met throughout January 1927 and drafted a petition to send to the high commissioner. In their 5 February petition, they declared that the 1925 Palestinian Citizenship Order-in-Council contravened international law as it was prescribed by the League of Nations. Canavati, Secretary Kawas, and approximately 220 members of the Centro who signed their names to the petition explained further that excluding the migrants from citizenship—a legal requisite for self-determination—would constitute a disavowal of the British mandate’s purported responsibility, as dictated by the League of Nations, to the aspiring constituents of a Palestinian nation. If the migrants were to permanently be denied citizenship, the petitioners argued, their “personal statute would come to be fixed in such terms which in no way could agree either with the general principles of equity and justice or with the modern practices of International Law.”

Whether London or Jerusalem liked it or not, the disenfranchisement of an individual or community in a newly interconnected world would not go unnoticed if the individual or community petitioned the League of Nations. The process of petitioning the league for redress regarding a mandate’s behavior, questioning the mandate, and appealing rejections created a global space within which ordinary individuals and groups communicated with states, legal bodies, and international regimes. In this way, the “mandate system created ‘mandated peoples’ as figures in international law, granting them standing—a place from which to write.” Concomitantly, the more petitions were dismissed on arbitrary grounds, the more convinced petitioners were that they had the right to appeal the league using more strongly worded petitions. The Monterrey petitioners therefore felt vindicated and certain in their petition to Plumer when they declared: “We firmly believe we have a right to [Palestinian] nationality and to be held as citizens of Palestine.” Ultimately, this relational process between petitioners and their distant overlords cemented the authority of the league and the British mandate, as well as the practice of rejecting appeals, but it also contributed to strengthening networks of solidarity and collective identification among Palestinians in the diaspora.

As Canavati began convening with other members of the Centro Social Palestino de Monterrey to draft a petition, he also reached out to Jesus Talamas, president of the Comité Hijos de Palestina in Saltillo, a group established in 1917 that had secured significant economic and political leverage, especially with the British vice-consulate in Saltillo. A month prior, on 2 January 1927, Talamas submitted the first protest on behalf of the Comité Hijos de Palestina to Plumer. On 3 February, two days before Canavati’s petition, Talamas submitted another one to the minister of the colonies in London, of which he sent copies to Plumer and Musa Kazim al-Husseini, president of the Arabic Executive at the time and former mayor of Jerusalem between 1918 and 1920. In both, he affirmed his and his community’s Palestinianness, committing to protesting any attempts to deny it. With their considerable influence among Palestinian communities in Monterrey and Saltillo, two of Mexico’s larger urban centers in the north, Canavati and Talamas managed to collect signatures of support from palestinos in colonias palestinas throughout the northern corridor. The network of Palestinian jaaliyaat in northern Mexico stretched from the eastern towns of Linares, Monterrey, and Saltillo to San Pedro and Torreon in the center, and all the way to Chihuahua farther to the west. This chain of Palestinian collectives covered three of Mexico’s largest states: Nuevo Leon, Coahuila, and Chihuahua, which bordered the United States. Palestinian communities in Mexico thus formed an integral part of Mexico’s northern east-west corridor, and their flurry of activism in the early months of 1927 through petitions that reached British authorities in regional consulates in Monterrey and Saltillo, the Consulate General in Mexico City, the Foreign Office in London, the PMC in Geneva, and the Government of Palestine in Jerusalem reflects the economic and political clout of this diaspora collective. 

Throughout late January and February, Palestinians in Linares, Saltillo, San Pedro, and Chihuahua submitted telegrams in Spanish and Arabic to the Centro Social Palestino, pledging their support to the campaign to petition the high commissioner in Jerusalem. Each telegram included the signatures of those involved, which totaled approximately 135, excluding the original 220 signatures of members of the Centro Social Palestino. The telegrams written in Spanish were succinct and reflected the formal language used in the Centro’s petition. As an example, the jaaliya in Linares submitted the following telegram on 26 February 1927:

The undersigned, members of the Palestinian colony based in Linares, N.L., energetically protest against the decision of His Excellency Field Marshal Lord Plumer in charge of the English Government in Palestine to ignore our rights to citizenship for being absent from our country more than 12 years, and we support in all its parts the protest presented by the members of our colony in Monterrey, N.L. Mex.

On the other hand, on 10 February, Talamas and thirty-five members of the Comité Hijos de Palestina had sent a concise letter of support to Monterrey in Arabic and in a less formal register: “We, the sons of Palestine generally and those resident in this city, support the protests of our brothers in Monterrey.” Collectively, these telegrams signified the interconnectedness of northern Mexico’s Palestinian communities and their commitment to supporting one another in the defense of their rights to Palestinian citizenship.

For its part in representing these collectives in their joint protest, the Centro Social Palestino amended its 5 February petition and submitted a revised one on 23 February. Canavati and Kawas began the original petition by indicating that they were speaking on behalf of “all natives of Palestine . . . having been born there.” But on 23 February, the vice-president of the Centro, Abraham Masso, and Kawas began their petition with the following statement:

We, the undersigned native-born Palestinians, resident of the Cities of Monterrey, Saltillo, Chihuahua and San Pedro, Coahuila, Republic of Mexico, do hereby most respectfully beg to lay before you the following information and to solicit your aid in the solution of a problem, which for us is most serious. 

Similarly, the original petition ended with the signatures of Canavati and Kawas, but the revised one included the following statement: “Signed on behalf of the members of THE PALESTINIAN COLONIES.” Unmistakably, the new petition represented a larger collective, and below these words, Masso and Kawas added: “Attached are the signatures of more than three hundred of our compatriots,” the first of which was Salamon Canavati’s. Throughout January and February 1927, the Centro’s leadership thus managed to add more than one hundred signatures to the original petition from Palestinians residing between Chihuahua and Linares, two towns at the opposite ends of a corridor that stretches more than 900 kilometers across much of northern Mexico.
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.