NEWTON Bouquet – Palestine: Thirty years of Oslo (13 September)
On 13 September 1993, Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) signed the Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements, better known as the Oslo Accord. In the three decades since, this and a further series of Israeli-Palestinian agreements have redefined Palestinian politics, Israeli-Palestinian relations, and the struggle for Palestinian self-determination. As part of Jadaliyya’s marking of the thirtieth anniversary of Oslo, we offer this NEWTON bouquet that examines various Palestinian, Israeli, Israeli-Palestinian, and global dimensions of the new realities that developed in its wake.
1) Sunaina Maira, Jil Oslo: Palestinian Hip Hop, Youth Culture, and the Youth Movement
“One of the major political interventions of the youth movement is the call for a unified national identity linking the West Bank, Gaza, Jerusalem, and Palestinians within the 1948 borders of Palestine (“1948 or ’48 Palestinians”). This is not a new political narrative but it is significant because it challenges the Oslo paradigm that fragmented the nation by situating what could be Palestine only in the West Bank and Gaza and deferring the status of Jerusalem, within the degraded terms of sovereignty supplied by Israel.”
2) Seth Anziska, Preventing Palestine: A Political History from Camp David to Oslo
“I am struck by how the historical context of the 1970s and 1980s is so often missing from conversations about the “peace process” and how quickly we forget the recent past. Many of the concepts that have served to demarcate the extent of possible Palestinian political horizons—autonomy rather than sovereignty, for example—emerged at a particular moment and are recurring today.”
3) Mandy Turner, From the River to the Sea: Palestine and Israel in the Shadow of “Peace”
“I wanted to know how the “peace” and the supposedly “interim” framework had shaped the lives of the different communities of people involved, and what had been their coping strategies and political responses to it. Because this required a more anthropological focus, I drew together expert scholars who had a deep knowledge of the communities and issues I wanted to explore.”
4) Noura Erakat, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine
“Using five critical junctures between 1917 and 2017, the book demonstrates how the law has been a site of oppression as well as a site of resistance for Palestinians. By showing how the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine (1922) established a legal structure of exception, the book is telling a different history of the Palestinian struggle for freedom; one that has been responsive to this structure over a century-long arc.”
5) Noura Erakat and Mouin Rabbani, Aborted State? The UN Initiative and New Palestinian Junctures
“The book represents a compilation of articles and documents published by Jadaliyya during the Palestinian bid for statehood at the United Nations in 2011-2012. We felt this moment represents—for better or worse—a critical juncture in Palestinian history and the Palestinian struggle for self-determination, deserving of proper analysis and contextualization. It will either mark the moment at which Palestinians began to definitively disengage from the Oslo framework that has dominated their world for the past two decades and must, alongside the 1948 Nakba, be seen as the most catastrophic development in contemporary Palestinian history. Alternatively, it forms yet another attempt by a leadership lacking in strategic vision, tactical acumen, and political dynamism, to revive Oslo yet again.”
6) Perla Issa, The Endurance of Palestinian Political Factions: An Everyday Perspective from Nahr el-Bared Camp
“My research aimed to understand the dynamics at play. How are factions maintaining a monopoly over political representation and camp organization, even when they are delegitimized in refugees’ eyes? Officially, the different political factions in the camps are divided along broad political stances vis-à-vis the “peace process,” whether they support the Oslo accords or not, and whether they are Islamic or secular in nature.”
7) Amahl A. Bishara, Crossing a Line: Laws, Violence, and Roadblocks to Palestinian Political Expression
“Beyond the experiential level, recent decades have clarified how a politics of fragmentation has been a central mechanism of the Zionist project. The Oslo process rendered official Palestinian leadership complicit. As an ethnographer, I knew I could not investigate all dimensions of this dynamic, from Gaza to Lebanon to the Naqab and beyond, but I could look at the politics of expression in two neighboring locations.”
8) Gabriel Varghese, Palestinian Theatre in the West Bank: Our Human Faces
“By placing theories of abjection and counterpublic formation in conversation with each other, I have tried to argue that theater in the West Bank has been regulated by processes of colonial abjection and, yet, it is an important site for counterpublic formation.”
9) Mandy Turner and Cherine Hussein, “Israel-Palestine after Oslo: Mapping Transformations in a Time of Deepening Crisis”
“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.”
10) 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.”
11) Maryam S. Griffin, Vehicles of Decolonization: Public Transit in the Palestinian West Bank
“I noticed that public transportation in particular operated in such a way as to reject and overcome the attempted containment of Palestinian life in the post-Oslo shards of fragmented Palestinian territory. It is a mobile site where people collectively develop and negotiate mobility on their own terms, but of course it is a contested site. The collective movement of Palestinians is a target of Israeli control because denying self-determined movement to Palestinians is useful and necessary for Israel’s settler colonial drive to take Palestinian land and destroy the Palestinian people.”
12) Lara Sheehi and Stephen Sheehi, Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine
“By decentering settler-colonial logics and narratives, the book takes up an indigenous Palestinian psychoanalysis and the varied clinical networks—what we call the psychotherapeutic commons—that have been built. We see these commons as one of many methods of engaging in the communal practice of sumud (stalwartness) and the politics of refusal across Palestine.”
13) Alison Glick, The Other End of the Sea
“I think the book addresses a variety of issues, which I hope is one of its strengths. It provides a glimpse into the lived experience of Palestinians, as viewed through the lens of the non-Palestinian protagonist, Rebecca—occupation, settler colonialism, exile, state violence. But it also surfaces issues that are universal: loss, alienation, the cruelty of borders and who controls them, (re)building community and kinship in a world that is antagonistic to both, and my favorite—radical love.”
14) Rebecca L. Stein, Screen Shots: State Violence on Camera in Israel and Palestine
“Screen Shots is also a minor history of the digital present in Israel and Palestine, with a focus on the early years of widespread internet access and mobile networked technologies. I am interested in how political tactics shifted as communities and institutions in Israel and Palestine, from military institutions to anti-occupation activists in Palestine, began to gradually integrate these proliferating technologies and infrastructures into their political toolboxes.”
15) Norman G. Finkelstein, Knowing Too Much: Why the American Jewish Romance with Israel Is Coming to an End
“The book looks at the origins of the American Jewish relationship with Israel, and focuses on the historical, human rights, and diplomatic records on the Israel-Palestine conflict. It demonstrates that the authoritative scholarly treatments of these topics no longer support the Israeli narrative. The basic fact is that the formidable ideological façade Israel erected to deflect criticism of it has now more or less collapsed.”
16) Sara Roy, Unsilencing Gaza: Reflections on Resistance
“The core of the book analyzes the trajectory of Israeli policy toward Gaza (with the assistance of the United States, European Union, and certain Arab states) from 2007 to the present, which deliberately undermined Gaza’s economy, transforming Palestinians from a people with political rights into a humanitarian problem.”
17) 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.”
