[This is the Editor's Note and Table of Contents for the Arab Studies Journal Fall 2024 issue, which is now available for purchase. Click here to subscribe to Arab Studies Journal.]
ARAB STUDIES JOURNAL
VOL. XXXII, NO. 2
Editors’ Note
In this issue, we are proud to publish, “One Year Into the Genocide,” a collection of essays on an unfathomable year of genocide in Palestine, guest edited by Nour Joudah. The past year has prompted an entire spectrum of emotion, reflection, and analysis from a world coming apart at the seams. This genocide has left Palestinians reeling in new ways, grasping for expression, and treading in constant mourning at depths previously unknown.
This issue’s essay section offers critical insight, motivated by love and sumud, across the fields of education, geography, and anthropology. But much more than academic comment, Zena Agha, Hadeel Assali, and Amanda Najib call on us as readers and as individuals living in the empire to take seriously our responsibility to undermine the structures of power that fuel the hell we continue to witness. Agha’s essay evokes a landscape of Gazan resilience that rejects the genocide’s attempt at erasing Palestinian toponymy. Assali’s essay explores the act of tunnel-building as an intimate experience of the land that defies colonial logics. In the face of attacks on academic freedom led by university administrations themselves and mounting faculty complacency, Najib insists upon the classroom as a critical site to reject the erasure of Palestine. Although each of the three essays engage with and write from an array of perspectives and literatures, the authors all summon something connected and essential: Palestine lives. Our classrooms, the cities whose names we utter, the land under Palestinian feet . . . each present us with a choice as educators and researchers: will we center Palestinian life and the places that house it in their own right, or will we allow the abyss of memory to transform it?
Complimenting these essays, this issue features an article by Sara Farhan on the work of Jewish Iraqi doctors in building Iraq’s public health sector in the first half of the twentieth century. This cadre were critical architects of the Iraqi state, and their experience of navigating the intensification of anti-Jewish discrimination reveals key contradictions and ambivalences in the production of an Iraqi biopolitics. The issue concludes with a reviews section on major recent works that push the boundaries of temporal and geographic scope in studying revolution, political economy, and migration.
Table of Contents
EDITORS’ NOTE
ESSAYS: ONE YEAR INTO THE GENOCIDE
Guest Edited by Nour Joudah
"The Dis-invention of Gaza"
Zena Agha
"Opacity in Gaza: Intimate Relations as Resistance"
Hadeel Assali
"Educational Malpractice and the Palestinian Struggle: The Academic and Moral Obligation to Confront the Erasure of a People"
Amanda Najib
ARTICLES
"The Making and Unmaking of State Intermediaries: Modern Iraq’s Jewish Medical Community"
Sara Farhan
REVIEWS
Transnational Palestine: Migration and the Right of Return Before 1948 By Nadim Bawalsa
Reviewed by Reem Bailony
Staple Security: Bread and Wheat in Egypt By Jessica Barnes
Reviewed by Paul Kohlbry
Afterlives of Revolution: Everyday Counterhistories in Southern Oman By Alice Wilson
Reviewed by Laura Frances Goffman