Nadia Yaqub, ed., Gaza on Screen (New Texts Out Now)

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Jun 14, 2024 Palestine
Nadia Yaqub, ed., Gaza on Screen (New Texts Out Now)

Nadia Yaqub, ed., Gaza on Screen (New Texts Out Now)

By : Nadia Yaqub

Nadia Yaqub (ed.), Gaza on Screen (Duke University Press, 2023).

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

Nadia Yaqub (NY): Gaza on Screen grew out of a film festival that I was invited to curate for Columbia University’s Center for Palestine Studies in 2019. The book developed from the extensive research I conducted for the festival. However, given how moving images circulate these days, with films rubbing shoulders with news reports, personal videos, and other visual materials online, especially through social media, I knew from the beginning that the book would not just be about film. That breadth, and the fact that I have never been to the Gaza Strip myself, made it imperative that it be an edited volume rather than a monograph.

Although my contributors and I began working on the volume earlier, the 2021 Israeli attack on the Gaza Strip also shaped the volume. When violence first erupted that spring in Sheikh Jarrah and al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, people began posting films and other images on social media such that looking from afar, not just at the violence occurring at that time, but at an entire catalog of Palestinian film and photography stretching back to the Mandate period, was construed as an urgent act of solidarity. That invitation to a particular type of viewership became central to the theoretical frame of the introduction.
These chapters are framed by an introduction that critically engages scholarship on the humanitarian image and engagements with opacity ...

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

NY: Gaza on Screen addresses film, video, and television news media from and about the Gaza Strip. It includes a roundtable discussion by six Gazan filmmakers, moderated by Palestinian filmmaker Azza el-Hassan; essays about fictional, documentary, and experimental films; chapters on news media in Israel and Lebanon, on videos produced by the `Izz al-Din Qassam Brigades, on online videos of the 2018-19 Great March of Return, and on Mandate-era British newsreels. These chapters are framed by an introduction that critically engages scholarship on the humanitarian image and engagements with opacity and refusal to argue for an agential and relational understanding of Gazan image-making through the technology of the screen.

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

NY: Gaza on Screen grew out of nearly twenty years of research and writing about Palestinian cinema. Since 2005, I have been curating film festivals and series, organizing conferences, panels, and roundtables, and, of course, writing about Palestinian film. My last monograph, Palestinian Cinema in the Days of Revolution (University of Texas Press, 2018) focuses on Palestinian film of the long 1970s. Several articles and book chapters focus on more recent Palestinian film. Gaza on Screen differs from this earlier work both in its expanded focus on television and short videos that circulate primarily through social media, and its focus explicitly on the Gaza Strip.

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

NY: My books are academic but I strive to write for an educated general audience. Palestinian Cinema in the Days of Revolution has attracted interest from activists, artists, and curators, in addition to scholars of cinema and Palestine studies. Gaza on Screen was written for a similar audience, broadened, of course, to include those interested in media studies more generally. Towards that end I ensured that the book would be available open access from the start—anyone can read the entire book for free from the Duke University Press website.

J: What other projects are you working on now?

NY: My current major research project is a study of Arab cinema of the 1970s and 1980s, with a particular focus on emancipatory projects that rose, fell, transformed, and developed across the region during this time. I am interested in how individuals and small groups struggled under conditions of compromise and constraint to create films, publications, and gatherings related to film for the betterment of their communities and peoples. Cinema, especially from earlier decades and before the invention of digital technologies, is a particularly interesting lens through which to examine such impulses because it is almost always collaborative and requires considerable resources. These social and material aspects leave their imprints on both the people who make them and the films they create.

J: How has the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas and the genocide in the Gaza Strip affected your thinking about Gaza on Screen?

NY: Gaza on Screen came out in August 2023, just weeks before 7 October. The flood of images that filled our screens in the wake of the Hamas attacks on Israeli settlements in the Gaza Envelope, the unprecedented ferocity of Israel’s response, and the sharp differences between the images and stories that circulated through social media on one hand and most mainstream media outlets in the West on the other created a strong desire among viewers who were paying attention for a theorization of the act of viewing Gazan images. This is ironic, given how theory can only arise out of conditions of intellectual distance from events on the ground, and many of us, I think, have felt a desperate need to remain as close as possible to the ground as events have unfolded. That craving for a theory to understand our viewing anew arose, I think, because many of us outside the Gaza Strip have only been able to engage through images, because those images have been horrifying, and because we are intensely wary of consuming victimizing images. 

Because the book was written in the wake of several unusually violent attacks on the Gaza Strip (2004, 2008-9, 2012, 2014, and 2021), and because all its authors have a keen awareness of Palestinian history and how the current genocidal violence operates as a natural progression of historical processes put in place more than one hundred years ago, its analyses have held up well in the face of recent events. Having said that, I did not anticipate the utter destruction of Gazan society and built environment that began after 7 October. In November 2023, I was invited by Diana Allan to participate in a discussion of films by Oraib Toukan and Rehab Nazzal at McGill University. I was struck, on seeing Nazzal’s short film Vibrations from Gaza (2023) for the first time, by how knowing that the community and institutions featured in this very recent film had been destroyed affected my viewing. Suddenly, the films, videos, and photographs from and about the Gaza Strip that I had been studying had turned into a visual archive of a place that had disappeared and would never be the same; regardless of the outcome of this war, the Gaza Strip will be a fundamentally different place when the violence abates. That changes the role that this material will play culturally and politically for both Palestinians and solidarity activists.

 

Excerpt from the book (from the Introduction, pp. 1-6)

In early May 2021, demonstrations by Palestinians protesting planned evictions from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of Jerusalem spread quickly to al-Aqsa Mosque and other parts of East Jerusalem where Israeli authorities had engaged in several provocative actions throughout the month of Ramadan, including disabling the loudspeakers that broadcast the call to prayer, preventing worshippers from entering the mosque compound, and banishing Palestinians from gathering at the plaza in front of the Damascus Gate. In each case, Palestinian protests against these actions were met with police brutality and hundreds of arrests. On May 10, Hamas demanded that Israeli police and military leave Sheikh Jarrah and the mosque compound and that evening began to fire rockets into Israel from Gaza when Israel failed to do so. Israel immediately responded with airstrikes, initiating its fourth major military attack on Gaza since 2008. By the time a ceasefire was called eleven days later, 266 Palestinians and 13 residents of Israel had been. Thousands of Palestinians were wounded and tens of thousands displaced due to the widespread destruction of homes and other infrastructure.

My social media newsfeeds quickly filled up with news reports, cell phone videos and photos, and solidarity statements. Among the material disseminated to distant spectators of events on the ground there appeared information on accessing dozens of Palestinian films. Established Palestine film festivals, Palestinian and other Middle Eastern arts organizations, nongovernmental organizations (ngos), and individuals made works available online for free or for a small fee. Others created and circulated lists of films that were already available on YouTube or various streaming services….In this moment of crisis, people were invited not just to sign statements, contact representatives, attend protests, send money, and follow the news but also to virtually immerse themselves in Palestine in all its diversity through the dozens of visual works created over the course of more than seventy years…. 

What are we to make of this media cacophony, to borrow a term from Shaira Valadaria’s chapter in this volume? The films and other creative material offered up at this moment of crisis were the product of decades of work by Palestinians and others, including filmmakers, cultural ngos, and the Palestine film festivals that have proliferated globally since 2000. Palestinian filmmaking has always been an activist enterprise, one helping to sustain communities and serving to document and archive not only narratives and events but also particular structures of feeling. As a communicative act, the circulation of Palestinian films through various networks…has been motivated in large part by the desire to build relations with others.…Deploying this media archive was not just about sharing information or providing opportunities to “witness” the traumas and injustices that Palestinians have experienced, but to announce belonging and invite others to deepen their ties to a community of conscience. It was a call for a deeper type of engagement with Palestine (however one defined it) and Palestinians in all their complexity through works of contemplation, humor, fantasy, disaster, resistance, escape, melodrama, and other themes, genres, and modes.

Gaza on Screen is a collection of essays exploring the practice, product, and impact of films and videos from and about Palestine. Contributors to the volume assume a political, cultural, or psychological efficacy to Palestinian moving images and ask what that efficacy might be, even as they recognize how other local, regional, and global forces shape the lived experiences of Palestinians and their political possibilities. Palestine has long been associated with both resistance and urgent humanitarian need, associations that have generated a surprisingly complex and ever-shifting range of visual material that includes not only surveillance and military footage, amateur videos, and documentaries but also fictional features, experimental videos, and a variety of social media material. Gaza on Screen examines this material and its global and local circulation as a visual ecosystem in which different types of representation interact and inform one another.

The book focuses on the Gaza Strip as a Palestinian space and society that has come to be defined in the global imaginary by catastrophe, impending collapse, and violence. Gaza tests theories of representations of trauma and the power of narrative and aesthetics to process that trauma. Gaza has been instrumentalized, ignored, and magnified by regional and global actors, and its film and media production has played a central role in solidarity activism and militantism. As the global context for Gazan images has changed over time, so, too, have the narratives and ideologies underpinning its images, particularly on questions of collective identity and individualism. Technological developments and new media have led to the proliferation of films/videos and image-makers, even as prevailing narratives and ideologies have constrained the types of stories that are told and how they circulate.

Gaza on Screen also explores the role of screens, both large and small, in the circulation of visual representations of Gaza. Screens serve as a point of convergence for technological competence (to deploy screen media is to participate in contemporary modernity), as well as for global, regional, and local circuits of culture and information that have been increasingly dominated by screens since the advent of television in the mid-twentieth century. They are also an increasingly popular site for artistic and political expression. As Helga Tawil-Souri argues in the afterword of this volume, screens are both materially significant and contradictorily evocative of showing and hiding from view. The screen invites questions about the material conditions that allow certain representations to circulate, mediation, and the relationship of the virtual to lived experiences within the Gaza Strip, as well as the nature of connections sustained to the Gaza Strip through the virtual.

However, these technologies have developed within structures of power that have always delimited Palestinian images and their circulation both by discursive frameworks that exclude marginalized political and cultural expression and by an explicit campaign by Israel to suppress Palestinian images. The social media circulation of Palestinian images in 2021 arose from long-standing Palestinian understandings of the importance of images for the development of agential selfhood and collective identity. In 1968, when a group of young Palestinian photographers and filmmakers first began creating and disseminating images shot from a Palestinian perspective, they understood their work as a revolutionary intervention into the circulation of images about the region. In particular, they believed that the indexicality of the screened filmic image shot from a Palestinian perspective could communicate a revolutionary truth that eluded other types of representations. This material also allowed Palestinians to see themselves and their own aspirations reflected in the emerging Palestinian revolutionary movement, hence encouraging feelings of belonging. Similar concerns have informed the work of Palestinian filmmakers and other image-makers ever since. Screens, then, must be understood as sites of struggle and contestation, structured by what Nicholas Mirzoeff calls visuality and Jacques Rancière calls the police, but where it is nonetheless possible to show and see the world differently. The visual ecosystem of Gazan images operates both within that visuality and against it. Sometimes its images confirm the authority of existing power structures, and sometimes they undermine it, but its existence as an archive of Palestinian presence is always a challenge to a visuality predicated on their disappearance.

Screens are a form of mediation and thus define and facilitate relationships between and among Gazans and distant spectators. Communities are created, defined, and sustained through viewing practices. Large screens, before which people gather to watch Palestinian material together, create the potential for political engagement. Palestinian films circulate through elite film festivals, art house cinemas, and museum, educational, and gallery spaces where they are viewed and critiqued for their aesthetic quality and intellectual or artistic interventions. They more often circulate in politicized spaces such as Palestine film festivals and screenings organized by solidarity groups where gathering together to view a film is an expression of political belonging. Large-screen screenings of Palestinian material are often accompanied by postscreening discussions and so constitute a practice of Third Cinema. Large screens encourage a thoughtful viewing practice in which films are viewed in one sitting and audience members do not multitask. Small screens, particularly handheld devices, encourage quick viewing and the sharing of materials, sometimes even before they are examined or evaluated, simply because they appear to confirm a preexisting worldview. These are networked images, valued more for their virality than their representational qualities, but this form of viewing is also a way of maintaining a sense of community and can be particularly important in moments of crisis.

Most important, screens are relational in that they connect people across time and space—thinking about Gazan film and video through the screen encourages us to consider them not as representations addressed to everyone but rather as speech acts inviting viewers into a relationship with the filmed or photographed subject. Considered thus, the act of filming, viewing, and sharing is always agential even if its impact is uncertain. Framing the volume around screens allows contributors to consider not just images but also sound and other senses that are communicated through film and video. It opens the door to considerations of the promise and limitations of the virtual to questions of political voice, including the role of circulated images, sound, and the haptic effects they might evoke in creating and sustaining an Arendtian space of appearance.

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      Nadia Yaqub, Palestinian Cinema in the Days of Revolution (New Texts Out Now)

      I actually did not intend to write a book about Palestinian cinema from this period. I was researching the ways that Palestinian filmmakers have addressed the problem of the violent and victimizing image. I began to research the (Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) cinema in order to gain a historical perspective on the question.
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.