Now Available! Arab Studies Journal Announces Fall 2024 Issue: Editors' Note and Table of Contents

Now Available! Arab Studies Journal Announces Fall 2024 Issue: Editors' Note and Table of Contents

Now Available! Arab Studies Journal Announces Fall 2024 Issue: Editors' Note and Table of Contents

By : ASJ Editors

[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

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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412