On Indigenous Refusal against Externally-Imposed Frameworks in Historic Palestine

Abstract

The article attempts to empirically identify how the concept of Indigenous refusal helps us understand growing Palestinian political discourse and practices. It aims to develop Critical Indigenous Studies’ potentialities vis à vis the study of historic Palestine. The article puts a particular emphasis on new visions of Palestinian resistance that take aim at the different ways the Global North has tried to impose specific models and narratives on the Palestinian cause through liberal politics of recognition. Those spatio-political arrangements are enmeshed in the so-called ‘Oslo paradigm’ but also concern the portrayal of Israel as a liberal multicultural society, as well as the neoliberal dynamics that continuously shape the different fragments of the Palestinian people. In this regard, Indigenous Palestinian refusal also presents an international dimension that has progressively led to the articulation of anti-racist, anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalist imaginaries that would contribute to shaping radical Palestinian – and transnational – futures.