Alaa Tartir, Timothy Seidel, and Tariq Dana, eds., Resisting Domination in Palestine: Mechanisms and Techniques of Control, Coloniality and Settler Colonialism (New Texts Out Now)

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Jun 27, 2024 Palestine
Alaa Tartir, Timothy Seidel, and Tariq Dana, eds., Resisting Domination in Palestine: Mechanisms and Techniques of Control, Coloniality and Settler Colonialism (New Texts Out Now)

Alaa Tartir, Timothy Seidel, and Tariq Dana, eds., Resisting Domination in Palestine: Mechanisms and Techniques of Control, Coloniality and Settler Colonialism (New Texts Out Now)

By : Alaa Tartir, Timothy Seidel, and Tariq Dana

Alaa Tartir, Timothy Seidel, and Tariq Dana (eds.), Resisting Domination in Palestine: Mechanisms and Techniques of Control, Coloniality and Settler Colonialism (I.B. Tauris / Bloomsbury, 2024).

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

Alaa Tartir, Timothy Seidel, and Tariq Dana (AT, TS & TD): This is the second book we have edited together, and the third that Alaa and Tim have edited together. This project continues our work to understand power, domination, and resistance in Palestine. 

The study of power relations often involves an investigation into the concepts of domination and resistance. Both concepts, domination and resistance, are defined by a dialectical interplay entailing a myriad of contradictions and tensions that have captivated scholars across a range of intellectual backgrounds and throughout different historical contexts, ranging from Gramsci’s hegemony and Foucault’s power relations to Fanon’s politics of decolonization and postcolonial theories. On the one hand, domination is understood as a form of pervasive oppressive power that seeks to impose compliance and submission on individuals and groups by employing a spectrum of forceful and non-forceful methods. Resistance, on the other hand, entails actions of counter-power by individuals and groups that tend to deter, defy, and overcome the sources of domination. The approaches of resistance could be organized or disorganized, armed or peaceful, public or hidden, collective or grounded in everyday acts of resistance, or a combination of all. 

Domination and resistance are sometimes depicted as diametrically opposed forces and are commonly assumed to be distinct and separate processes. However, the aim of this edited volume is to emphasize the ways in which these seemingly opposing forces are, in fact, intertwined and interdependent. Such a perspective suggests that neither the power to dominate nor the counter-power to resist are all-encompassing but rather mutually inclusive and mutually enforcing practices and processes. The primary case study of this book accommodates this argument, whereby our understanding of Palestine has been constructed around the dialectical interplay of colonial domination and anticolonial resistance. As Israeli settler-colonial domination persists, so does Palestinian resistance. 

The settler-colonial paradigm serves as the foundational structure of the book, seamlessly integrating itself into the diverse themes and chapters. This is in line with the growing acknowledgment within critical academic circles that to truly comprehend the Israeli state and society, one must view them as a settler-colonial formation in their ideological, institutional, economic, and class dimensions. As a result, the settler-colonial paradigm has evolved into an essential analytical and interpretive framework for the study and understanding of a century of Israeli domination over the Palestinians, and the Palestinian myriad resistance to settler-colonial domination. The ongoing social, political, and conceptual (as well as narrative) struggles of Palestine against a settler-colonial regime reveal a dynamic interplay between increasingly sophisticated forms of domination and the emergence of novel modes of resistance. As a late settler-colonial formation that persisted through the global decolonization movements of the twentieth century and continued to endure into the first quarter of the twenty-first century with no apparent decline, Israel has systematically leveraged global trends to modernize its methods of colonization.
Through their analyses, they illuminate the power dynamics at play and reveal the mechanisms that sustain Israel’s settler-colonial regime.

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

AT, TS & TD: We present an assemblage of insightful and contemporary perspectives on how Israeli domination has been reproduced in new forms and means. The contributors to this book employ interdisciplinary approaches in their examination of the intricate functions, logics, and structures of domination that permeate Palestinian life while also shining a light on the resistance to those logics and structures that emerges in and about Palestine. Their collective expertise spans a wide range of disciplines, offering readers an opportunity to engage with various angles and nuances of the situation. Through their analyses, they illuminate the power dynamics at play and reveal the mechanisms that sustain Israel’s settler-colonial regime.

A closer look at these systems and mechanisms reveals the particular ways that Israel exerts control on Palestine, and how this control infiltrates different spaces or what we are referring to here as “sites.” This volume explores those systems by examining several “sites” of control and dominations and “sites” of resistance against settler-colonial policies and institutions that the Oslo Accords perpetuated, but whose histories can be traced back for over a century. This includes political (governmentality, institutions, and mechanisms of control), economic (exploitation, dispossession, and de-development), environmental (land, indigeneity, and settler colonialism), as well as epistemic (local knowledge and global norms) sites.

An important contribution this book makes is its emphasis on control, domination, and resistance in terms of both epistemic and material spaces. This signals our book’s commitment to a decolonial politics and characterizes its critical approach in that it challenges prevailing neoliberal and settler-colonial logics and structures. It offers critical perspectives as to how these various sites of control and domination—shaped by settler-colonial processes of accumulation by exploitation and dispossession from both Israel and global business, as well as from Palestinian elites—are also simultaneously sites of resistance and struggle for freedom.

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

AT, TS & TD: This new volume represents both a continuation and an expansion of the critical, interdisciplinary, and decolonial approach we have taken in our previous work. Our evolving scholarship strives to provide a comprehensive structural analysis of settler-colonial domination, while amplifying the decolonial-oriented knowledge production and anti-colonial praxis emanating from Palestine itself.

In many ways, Resisting Domination in Palestine is a natural evolution that zooms in on the specifics of how colonial power manifests, while continuing to uphold the interdisciplinary, decolonial, and decolonial-oriented foundations laid in our previous scholarship on Palestine. Anchoring our knowledge production mission in a decolonial framework allows us to strip away the mantles of legitimacy that imperial powers and settler colonialism drape over their oppressive projects. Our intellectual mission centers the Palestinian voices and lived experiences that are too often marginalized and erased by colonial narratives. This decolonial orientation is vital for restoring agency to the Palestinian people.

Even as we deconstruct these systems of control, our work uplifts the varieties of creative and defiant means through which Palestinians persist in resistance, be it through cultural production, economic initiatives, or political mobilization. We seek to equip readers with a nuanced understanding of the immense challenges Palestinians face under settler colonialism, while centering their agency and inspiring struggles for liberation.

By dissecting the multifaceted mechanisms of control and coloniality employed by Israel, as well as scrutinizing the role of domestic Palestinian structures, this new work aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the challenges faced by Palestinians in their struggle for liberation and self-determination. It seeks to equip readers with a nuanced and critical perspective on the complex dynamics of resistance, domination, and the perpetuation of settler-colonial structures in the Palestinian context.

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

AT, TS & TD: As scholars dedicated to decolonial, justice-oriented knowledge production, we hope this book reaches and resonates with a wide range of audiences. 

Firstly, we envision this work being a vital resource in the academic spheres—being taught in courses exploring settler colonialism, the Palestinian question, ethnic/racial studies, political economy, postcolonial theory, and beyond. Our interdisciplinary approach can enrich understanding for scholars across the social sciences and humanities. We aspire for it to be a formative text that guides new generations of scholars devoted to decolonial praxis.

Simultaneously, we hope this book finds its way into activists, organizers, and grassroots movements engaged in solidarity efforts and campaigns for Palestinian rights globally. By granularly mapping the structures, mechanisms, and techniques of Israeli colonial control, we aim to equip them with rigorous analysis and sharpened critiques to more effectively challenge oppressive narratives and advocate for meaningful change.

Moreover, we see immense value in this book reaching a general readership of people worldwide who seek to go beyond surface-level portrayals of the Palestinian struggle. By rendering legible the insidious and multifaceted ways colonial power pervades daily Palestinian life, we hope to cultivate a deeper solidarity, moral clarity, and motivation for struggle among a diverse public.

Ultimately, we hope this book can play a part in disrupting the normalization of Palestinian subjugation and Israel's settler-colonial enterprise. We aspire for it to be a catalyst for reinvigorated mobilizations—underscored by decolonial ethics—toward securing Palestinian self-determination, the dismantling of Israel's regime of occupation, settler colonialism, and apartheid, and the realization of a just peace for all.

J: Can you reflect on the methodological choices utilized in the edited volume?

AT, TS & TD: Contributions cover a range of methods, qualitative and quantitative, foregrounding the interdisciplinary approach of this volume. This approach is essential to understanding coloniality and settler colonialism in Palestine. The question of method is critical for our project’s attention to knowledge production, and signals the sort of politics of knowledge we endeavor to produce—one that points toward solidarity. It is a recognition that our intellectual work is always at the same time unavoidably political work, even struggle, for someone. This is based on fieldwork-driven scholarly exploration and research inquiries embedded in the realties on the ground. The purpose is not only to better explain these detrimental realities, but also to contribute to an emancipatory process of knowledge production that aims to change them.

This approach to knowledge, politics, and struggle follows Edward Said’s recognition that “All knowledge is interpretation, and that interpretation must be self-conscious in its method and its aims if it is to be vigilant and humane.” This methodological sensibility and reflexivity underlying every interpretation of politics and culture are attentive to what Said understood as “the choice facing the individual scholar or intellectual: whether to put intellect at the service of power or at the service of criticism, community, dialogue, and moral sense.” Attention to these choices is critical especially in this moment as we are witnessing a genocide in Palestine.

 

Excerpt from the book (from the introductory chapter “Resisting Domination in Palestine,” pp. 7-11)

This edited volume contains four sections, each exploring a particular site of domination and resistance. The first section focuses on political sites of control, domination, and refusal. Chapters elaborate the political aspects of settler colonialism, through an analysis on governmentality and institutions and mechanisms of control. The health and technology sectors are analyzed for the ways they reveal Israel’s control over access, life, and death. The structural violence manifest in occupied Palestine is also examined in terms of its governmentalizing effects and mechanisms of domination and control, including an intricate closure regime that renders movement a political act of refusal.

In his chapter, Tariq Dana explores Israel’s capacity to dominate and control Palestinians through a “Palestinian autonomy” practiced by the Palestinian Authority (PA) since the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993/4. Dana unpacks this form of autonomy as one designed to facilitate Israel’s quest for indirect colonial rule—only feasible by subcontracting a segment of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) leadership to oversee the autonomy functions on behalf of Israel—while simultaneously separating Palestinians from their land, legally and physically. And yet, as Dana explains, Israel’s relentless attempts to enforce this autonomy has often encountered effective resistance by the Palestinians.

Next, Yara M. Asi examines the structural violence of Israel’s medical permit regime. Due to the inadequate Palestinian health system, many Palestinians must receive care in Israel, the West Bank, or East Jerusalem, leaving them at the mercy of a system of medical permits issued by Israel. In her chapter, Asi analyzes available medical permit data from the Gaza Strip and West Bank for the years 2011-2019, assessing levels of conflict and security by evaluating the Israeli Global Peace Index (GPI) and Global Terrorism Index (GTI) scores and Israeli fatality and injury data from OCHA. She concludes that although Israel has arguably become more secure since 2011, the permit regime has grown more restrictive, disputing the claims that these permits and other movement restrictions imposed on Palestinians are necessary due to security concerns.

Nijmeh Ali explores digital expressions of domination and resistance. The digital era provides an open platform to practice freedoms in oppressive contexts. However, she argues, this view is incomplete, considering the counter-use of technologies as mass surveillance tools to spy, collect information, and restrict activities. Ali describes how Israel has become a leading exporter of this surveillance technology. And while this is particularly concerning for Palestinians, she points out that it is also dangerous for its potential to contribute more broadly to the shrinking global space for civil society organizations and the continued silencing of human rights defenders, activists, and organizations worldwide.

In the final chapter in section one, We’am Hamdan explores the lived experiences of workers in the information and communications technology (ICT) sector. Despite the settler colonial context shaped by fragmentation, international interventions reflect a broader trend of experimenting with tech solutions to political economic problems in line with the neoliberal paradigm. In her chapter, Hamdan interviewed digital freelancers working in the ICT field and/or aspiring to join the global digital workforce. She finds that they experience a contradiction between aspirations that are believed to be universal and recurring structural barriers of de-development in occupied Palestine. Her study identifies three common themes in ICT workers’ experiences: power relations resulting from the imposed Israeli occupation, capitalism’s influence on education, and social constructs of the patriarchal family.

The second section of this book focuses on economic sites of exploitation, dispossession, and de-development. Chapters explore critical issues related to banking and taxation examining the relationships between finance capital, aid conditionalities, and military occupation as (neoliberal) technologies of exploitation and dispossession that are shaped by imperial histories and a settler colonial present.

In the first chapter in this section, Heba Taha explores the theoretical and empirical connections between Israel’s economic and technical aid industry in African countries and colonial practices towards Palestinians in the decades immediately following Israel’s establishment. This geographic entanglement, she argues, relied on global economic circuits, moral imaginaries, and cultural representations pertaining to the principles, practices, and promises of development. Such plans highlight the production of Palestinians as subjects of both Israeli capitalism and colonialism while at the same time revealing the ways in which Palestinian dispossession becomes part of global developmental imaginaries in the 1950s. 

In his chapter, Colin Powers considers the interfacing between Israeli settler colonialism and endogenous Palestinian dynamics as pertains to matters of monetary policy, money, and finance, tracing the effects of this dialectical exchange from 1967 through the present day. His analysis establishes that the Palestinian Authority’s coerced adoption of the Israeli shekel curtails Palestinian development through a number of channels, and that the absence of independent payment and clearance systems keeps the Palestinian economy in a permanent state of vulnerability. He also finds that tendencies of credit intermediation in Palestine—which largely derive from the restraints imposed by the occupation—not only intensify macroeconomic distortions while heightening inequality, but render debt a sinew of social relations and foundation to the PA’s fiscal viability.

Anas Iqtait closes out section two with his chapter exploring the fiscal dynamics within the Palestinian Authority, shaped by the Paris Protocol and Israel’s economic system of control. It delves into the politics of the PA’s revenue mobilization, unpacks the influence of settler colonial structures on the PA’s operations, and highlights the formidable challenges in formulating a fiscal contract amidst external influences and structural constraints. Findings reveal that despite three decades of public revenue administration and tax collection, the PA has not developed a foundational fiscal contract, with numerous structural constraints including the external nature of the PA’s “institutions-building” process, its dependence on foreign aid and clearance revenue, Israeli extraction of taxes, and the proliferation of public service providers.

The third section of this edited volume explores environmental sites of domination and resistance and is situated within the settler colonial context. Chapters in this section focus on land, indigeneity, and space as critical elements to understanding settler colonialism, clarifying the context of racial capitalism in occupied Palestine.

In their chapter, Gabi Kirk and Paul Kohlbry make a case for approaching the study of rural Palestine through foregrounding the transnational forces that shape rural property, labor, and agriculture. After establishing some key concerns of this scholarship in Palestine, they sketch out the geography of how to study agrarian questions, distinguishing between studying Palestine and Palestinians, showing how what happens to and on rural land in the territory of historic Palestine must be comprehended by including Palestinian refugees, migrants, and exiles living abroad. Finally they show how framing local questions in Palestine through an international lens can productively approach long-standing concerns around class, gender, and space, as well as newer issues in the climate change era of commodity circulation and ecological resilience. 

Timothy Seidel and Federica Stagni’s chapter explores settler colonialism and Indigenous struggle in Palestine, emphasizing that a decolonial analysis not only gives attention to enduring indigeneity but also to the role of land in the struggle for autonomy, sovereignty, and self-determination. They examine “everyday” acts of resistance and popular struggle that take the form of sumud or steadfastness, that may not be about a pre-determined political economic telos per se but about existence, being, land, and a refusal of erasure and elimination. With this framework and understanding of popular struggle, they argue, we begin to hear and see a much larger and more powerful landscape of resistance to settler violence in occupied Palestine, for example in this case of Masafer Yatta in the occupied South Hebron Hills.

Finally, section four of the book explores epistemic sites of domination and resistance, highlighting the ways norms, narratives, and knowledge production itself can demonstrate a commitment to liberation and freedom or perpetuate control and domination. Chapters in this section examine the definitions, methods, and frameworks used to study and teach as well as analyze policies and norms about Palestine that challenge the liberal peace.

In the first chapter of this final section, Somdeep Sen looks at the adoption of the IHRA definition of antisemitism at institutions of higher education, analyzing IHRA and academic censorship in view of the wider ideology and politics of settler colonialism. Sen notes that the IHRA definition seeks to circumscribe scholarship and pedagogical approaches that recognize the legitimacy, existence and persistence of the Palestinian national cause as doing so undermines the myth of terra nullis – namely that Israel was built on a “land without a people for a people without a land.” Sen concludes that IHRA is an extension of the settler colonial urge to erase the evidence of Indigenous existence. And its adoption across universities in the global north is only evidence of the globalization of the politics of settler colonialism.

Next, Jeremy Wildeman traces how the intervention of Western liberal democracies has benefited Israeli settler colonial state-building, at the expense of Palestinian statehood and peace. His chapter explores how this process has unfolded, focusing on examples from three periods: the UN partition of Palestine (1940s), the Oslo Peace Process (1990s), and Western-led Palestine state-building after the Second Intifada (mid-2000s/2010s). This Western intervention has happened in an age of global decolonization and Western-driven global liberalism, where racist colonial ways of thinking remained inherent with how Western powers approached Palestine-Israel, demonstrably favoring the more “Europeanized” Israelis at the expense of the “Orientalized” Palestinians. The consistency with which Western states have prioritized Israeli perspectives and reinforced its illiberal settler colonial regime, raises questions if Palestinians can trust Western intervention in the region. 

In the book’s final chapter, Melanie Meinzer takes a close look at Palestinian popular education post-Oslo. Palestinian NGOs’ dependence on foreign aid during Oslo redirected civil society’s energies towards donor priorities and weakened Palestinian resistance movements. Meinzer argues that despite these obstacles, the spirit and pedagogies of the Intifada-era popular education movement is alive today and serves as a bulwark against cultural erasure under donor-enabled Israeli settler colonialism. Drawing on interviews and surveys, she shows how NGOs, community-based organizations, and educators have reconstituted the popular education movement by using political theater, visual arts, debate, and storytelling to conscientize and mobilize young people. She concludes that while aid dependence restricts Palestinian self-determination, popular education continues to be a vehicle for personal and collective liberation.
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.

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