History Of Palestine Research Articles

Escaping the Zionist Circle: Notes on Racial Capitalism and the Black Radical Tradition

From the 1947–8 Nakba to the 2023–4 Gaza genocide, the history of Palestine appears to be stuck in a vicious circle of violence from which escape seems increasingly elusive. This leads one to ask, can one ever escape the Zionist circle? The work of Cedric Robinson provides a potential path forward. Since his death in 2016, Robinson’s name has become synonymous with the study of racial capitalism. But while racial capitalism was the background of his work, his chief concern was the Black Radical Tradition. Unlike racial capitalism, this concept has remained under-theorised, but without thoroughly accounting for it, our understanding of racial capitalism remains incomplete at best, misguided at worst. In this article, I turn our attention to the Black Radical Tradition and attempt to define it. As Robinson argued, the Black Radical Tradition is not simply derivative of racial capitalism; it actually precedes it and subverts it. Returning to Palestine, I show how Robinson’s notion of the Black Radical Tradition can contribute to our understanding of the struggle for Palestinian liberation, and I suggest that at least in some sense, the Palestinians have actually been escaping the Zionist circle all along.

Rejecting Defeat and Approaching Liberation: Palestinian Prisoners’ Hunger Strikes

Hunger strikes have been central to the ways in which Palestinian prisoners confront the Israeli carceral regime; demand changes in the ways prisons are run; and demand their most basic rights. Indeed, the earliest documented hunger strike dates to as early as 1968, with demands that included refusals to address Israeli jailers with ‘sir', and having access to pens and notebooks. The recent martyrdom of Khader Adnan on his eighty-seventh day of a hunger strike against his detention highlighted both Palestinian prisoners' continuous resort to hunger strikes, and Israeli violent responses to this act of confrontation whenever it is used by prisoners. Hunger strikes have been analysed and discussed by multiple scholars to shed light on this practice both in Palestine and other global sites of carcerality. The literature on hunger strikes, however, is abundant with analysis that draws on the concepts of biopolitics and necropolitics. Applying these concepts involves conceptualising prisons as sites intended for the civil and social death of prisoners, or depicts prisoners as bare life and objects of modes of management over their life and death. Yet, an approach that centres the power over life and death, and that presents freedom or its negation as that of the moment of approaching death, falls into a trap that Palestinian political prisoner Walid Daka (2021) warns of in his brief discussion of hunger strikes [from a text read as part of a conference on carcerality, entitled ‘Control Through Time']. Such an analysis, for instance, views death as the sole space over which the captive body has power, as Achille Mbmebe argues in ‘Necropolitics'. My article, however, seeks to investigate and discuss Palestinian prisoners' recourse to hunger strikes in a different vein. To conceptualise hunger strikes and their history in Palestine, the article argues that one has to situate the practice as part of an ever-evolving repertoire of prisoners' responses aiming to constitute political subjectivities that reject defeat, that dream and work for liberation, and that constantly counter attempts at moulding consciousness. Hunger strikes offer yet another example of prisoners' attempts to smuggle freedom from the confines of their cells. The article will engage with the long history of Palestinian prisoners' hunger strikes (collective and individual), with prisoners' own descriptions of hunger strikes, and with several theoretical and conceptual understandings of hunger strikes to shed light on this practice’s political meanings. In doing so, the article hopes to situate hunger strikes within the broader sets of confrontation practices used by Palestinian prisoners, and which constantly dream, and work for, a liberated geography.

“Politics in Matter”: Concrete Expressions in Contemporary Palestinian Art of Resistance

This article examines the utilization of concrete as a medium for artistic expression in the art produced by contemporary Palestinian artists residing in the State of Israel. The author proposes that when considered through Eyal Weizman’s lens of "politics in matter," concrete emerges in contemporary Palestinian art as a significant material intersecting with the broader political fabric, an artistic medium intricately linked to the ongoing struggle for Palestinian identity, nationalism, and human rights. Within the geopolitical context of Israel/Palestine, concrete thus gives rise to multifaceted associations of struggle, violence, defense, and fear. Contemporary Palestinian artists actively engage with concrete, repurposing it as a tool for artistic, civic, and political resistance. They challenge dominant narratives, contest prevailing historical accounts, and confront oppressive structures. Their works reimagine shared spaces, contest the erasure of Palestinian history, and amplify marginalized voices. Concrete becomes a material embodiment of the complexities experienced by Palestinian artists residing and working within the State of Israel, its finally symbolizing resistance and catalyzing the reimagining of alternative futures. This article provides a comprehensive analysis of how concrete is employed and represented within contemporary Palestinian artistic practices, shedding light on its role in shaping Palestinian experiences and contributing to a nuanced understanding of the Palestinian/Israeli context. By exploring the politics of concrete, the article enhances our understanding of its significance in contemporary Palestinian art and its place in the broader discourse of art history.

الصدمة والنمو النفسي للذات في صباحات سوزان أبو الهوى في جنين

This study delves deep into the traumatic experience that almost all Palestinians have fallen prey to since the day Israel declared statehood in 1948 and how such tragic life characterized their psychic growth of the self and identity. It considers Susan Abulhawa's Mornings in Jenin in the light of two psychological notions, that is, Freud's ''the unconscious'' and McAdams's and Cox's ''narrative identity.'' Throughout the novel, Abulhawa unearths the unusual and less known depths in Palestinian history in an attempt to provide new versions of fictional writings. The novel dramatizes the Palestinian characters' inner world, their trauma and their repressed feelings and desires. The repeated incursion of trauma is considered harmful, giving rise to the characters' downfall and being the reason behind their tragedies. The study has shown that the world of the unconscious is clearly represented in the characters' attitudes, behaviors and feelings. It elucidates that some characters succeed in working through their traumas and the dynamics of the unconscious while the others are rendered to be psychologically traumatized. Furthermore, to serve a self-understanding function, Palestinians rely on the strategy of storytelling. Such strategy is used as an empowering device by which Palestinians write their past and guarantee their self-existence. It can also be therapeutic that they use it as a remedy against the displacement and alienation they experience in their permanent exile.

Remaining Palestinian

Palestinian filmmakers are largely dependent on foreign funding for production and on foreign festivals for publicity. Making a Palestinian film can seem as “impossible” as remaining Palestinian amid fragmenting effects of occupation/war and peace accords. Against such pressures, Palestinian filmmaker Annemarie Jacir tells stories with protagonists, who, for foreign funders, can seem like “unruly subjects” for remaining Palestinian. As a consequence, her films themselves can seem like “unruly subjects” to industry film critics. Her films like twenty impossibles (ka’inana ashrun mustaheel, 2003), Salt of This Sea (Milh Hadha al-Bahr, 2008), When I Saw You (Lamma Shoftak, 2012), and Wajib (2017) tell stories about Palestinians debating each other (rather than Israelis via US negotiators) during key moments in Palestinian history, including the Nakba (1948), the Naksa (1967), the Oslo Accords (1993), and Al-Aqsa or second Intifada (2000–05). Jacir’s protagonists refuse the limiting choices on offer. They demand to be recognized as Palestinian, as does Jacir as a Palestinian filmmaker against the efforts of Western industry critics, festivals, and funders to label her as an “Arab woman filmmaker,” often carrying colonial assumptions of “oppressed” or “exceptional” women throughout Southwest Asia (“the Middle East”). Her films do more than offer a glimpse of everyday life to “humanize” Palestinians; they are “unruly subjects” that unsettle assumptions to reframe the debates.

‘So dense a commingling of the improbable and the mundane!’: writing Palestinian history in a magical realist key

ABSTRACT This article reflects on writing a history book in the style of a magical realist novel. The book, The Lives and Deaths of Jubrail Dabdoub, employs classic techniques from magical realist fiction to narrate the transformation of the Palestinian town of Bethlehem in the 19th century. In this article, I describe the process of writing the book, using this as an entry-point into a wider discussion on how historians can productively engage with literary form and genre. Drawing on fictional writing in Spanish, Arabic and English, the article argues magical realist prose is particularly well suited to capturing a sense of the fantastical, the uncanny and the absurd – areas of historical experience usually neglected in academic writing. I discuss how I experimented with specific techniques to tap into Bethlehem’s arresting, often bizarre encounters with global capitalism in the 19th century, as well as explore my own relationship to this history as a British historian writing about Palestine.

Historiographic Metafiction: A Study of Susan Abulhawa’s The Blue Between Sky and Water

This article aims to show the application of historiographic metafiction in Susan Abulhawa’s The Blue Between Sky and Water (2016), highlighting the embodiment of historiographic metafictional characteristics in rewriting Palestinian history, exactly the Nakba (1948). Since Linda Hutcheon calls for revision of the past in order to rewrite history, Abulhawa’s work has granted her a place among postmodern literary authors since she does so. Such an aesthetic and resisting act aims at acknowledging falsity and prejudice practiced by both ends responsible of historical documentation: the winner and the looser. This study argues that metafictional techniques allow the author to re-visit the Nakba (1948), re-present the events and eventually allow readers to re-pen history. Simultaneously, the novel’s historiographic metafictional characteristics will be underscored including challenging one historical truth, blending history and fiction, using self-reflexive narration, narrating through an openly controlling narrator, and importing real and famous historical and political personalities. The findings show that historiographic metafiction is applicable in Abulhawa’s novel. Interestingly, this paper demonstrates how the author enlarges her scope of writing, by adding postmodern dimension to the political and historical issues she depicts.

THE CULTURE TRAUMA REFLECTED IN KANAFANI'S NOVEL RETURN TO HAIFA WITHIN THE GENRE OF PALESTINIAN RESISTANCE NOVELS

This study examined the portrayal of cultural trauma in Ghassan Kanafani's novel "Return to Haifa" through character analysis. The aim of this study was to investigate the extent to which the characters portrayed in the novel serve as a reflection of the cultural trauma that was endured during and in the aftermath of the Nakba, a catastrophic event that occurred in 1948. The investigation utilized Jeffrey C. Alexander's conceptualization of cultural trauma as a theoretical lens for examination. This study employed a textual analysis approach to examine the effects of trauma on the primary characters, Said and Dov, and their subsequent development of a collective identity. The analysis of data focused on the evolution of self-awareness throughout the narrative, revealing the impact of trauma on individual and collective identity. The findings suggested that the memories and experiences of Palestine diasporas like Said, who were forced to leave their homeland, contribute to their cultural trauma and shape their sense of identity; also illuminated the importance of the Nakba as a crucial occurrence in the history of Palestine and the lasting impacts it has on the communal awareness of Palestinians. The study contributes to the understanding of how literature represents and addresses cultural trauma and its implications for the Palestinian community.

Tourist, Pilgrim, Migrant, Settler: Rethinking the Modern History of Ashkenazim in the Levant Through Sites of Hospitality

This article looks at Ashkenazi-operated hotels in Tiberias, Beirut, Jerusalem, Jaffa, Cairo, Alexandria, and elsewhere, in the late Ottoman period and under British rule, to consider the confusing ambiguities that these stories reveal. Ashkenazi presence in Palestine is typically understood in terms of either the pious, zealot pilgrims, or the nationalist settlers. And yet the story of the hotel owners and operators could also fit into a different category, that of migrants, who sought to integrate within existing social, economic, and political structures. The tourism and hospitality industry, which relied on flows of people across borders and on a diverse customer-base, was to some degree at odds with the segregation associated with Zionist Yishuv. Such stories, which have been forgotten and erased by the history of Palestine in the twentieth century, prompt us to rethink our understanding of Ashkenazi history in the region.

Editar la Palestina

Introduction. The purpose of journalistic style guides is to provide media practitioners with guidance on language to convey a neutral and objective presentation of information. This paper investigates thematic style guides published with a focus on Palestine and analyzes how these style guides construct media bias. Literature Review. In the literature reviewed a structural media bias against Palestinians that favors Israeli narratives is documented in research as an integral part of anglophone mainstream media through the reproduction of Orientalism, Zionist narratives, and anti-Palestinian racism. Methodology. A comparative content analysis was conducted on four thematic style guides, sampling common terms through a grounded theory approach. Results. The results show similarities and differences in the style guides’ definitions, sourcing, and explanations of key terms related to Palestine and its historical, legal, and geographic contexts. Discussion. The style guides notably differ in their content with some perpetuating anti-Palestinian bias in various implicit and explicit ways, such as Nakba denial, questioning Palestinian history, and reproducing Israeli sources and narratives. Conclusions. Our analysis concludes that anti-Palestinian bias and racism are an integral part of some anglophone newsroom policies and practices as implemented in style and editorial guidelines. Thematic style guides on Palestine thus can further perpetuate colonial conquest and anti-indigenous violence.

Documenting the unarchivable: Minor Detail and the archive of senses

ABSTRACTThis article is a close reading of Adania Shibli’s Tafṣīl thānawī (Minor Detail), focusing on the novel’s poetic techniques of narrating Palestinian history. This article shows how, in order to break away from the reliance on perpetrators’ testimonies, Shibli creates a repository of unverifiable, seemingly negligible details that ultimately construct the historical event as a continuous phenomenon that lasts until today. Once accessible via present realities, the authoritative archive is rendered unnecessary. Privileging description over action, Tafṣīl thānawī turns minor, tangible details into indispensable pieces of the historical puzzle. This article illuminates why Tafṣīl thānawī does not simply embody the voice of the colonized, but challenges what we deem worth documenting and inserts into the historical discourse the sights, smells, and sounds of undocumented experiences. As such, Shibli provides an alternative method of documenting the past, one that classifies the unarchivable: sensory experiences and a vanishing landscape.

“Filling in the Blanks”: Jaffa's Oranges, an English Suit, and the Rememorying of Palestinian History

Like great port cities throughout history, Jaffa has always welcomed strangers; enough of them to earn its sobriquet “mother of strangers” (umm al-gharīb). The gateway to Palestine and the Levant since ancient times, Jaffa is not only the site of multiple events of biblical or broader religious significance. With the incorporation of Palestine in the late 18th century into the still developing modern world system, Jaffa became a city of culture and commerce, with winding casbahs and tree-lined boulevards, Turkish baths and Jewish bordellos, sand dunes and orange orchards—lots of them, as we'll see—and some of the most striking architecture, never mind coastline, of the Eastern Mediterranean. North African Jews, Haurani Bedouins, Afghan traders, rabbis from Beirut, troubadours from Jerusalem, divas from Mansoura, and more than a few European Christian and Jewish pilgrims, all made their way to and through Jaffa over the centuries, joining a local population that septupled to over 17,000 during the course of the 19th century. They were joined by tens of thousands of Jews for whom Jaffa was a port of entry to Palestine with the onset of Zionist colonization. Jaffa, in other words, is the perfect locale for a novel, especially when, as with award-winning architect and writer Suad Amiry's first novel, Mother of Strangers, most of it happens to be rooted in truth.

Forced Migration: The 1948 Palestinian Refugees

During the 1948 Palestine war, more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled from their homes, accounting for roughly half of prewar Palestine’s Arab population. The exodus was a central component of the Palestinian society’s cracks, disempowerment and displacement, known as the Nakba, during which between 400 and 600 Palestinian villages were damaged and others were exposed to the Hebraization of Palestinian place names, and it also relates to the wider period of the conflict itself and the subsequent oppression up to the present day. The main aim of this research is to define the causes of the 1948 Palestinian exodus, which led to the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem. It also seeks to show the ways that the Nakba has influenced Palestinian history. This study explores the work of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, a UN (United Nations) agency that supports Palestinian refugees’ relief and human development.

Reclaiming History from the Settler Coloniser: A Meditation on Nur Masalha's Palestine across Millennia: A History of Literacy, Learning and Educational Revolutions

In this wonderful book, Nur Masalha challenges and transforms world history, as did his earlier Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History (2018). In this meditation I recount some of Nur Masalha's argument — not all, given the extraordinary richness of the material he has uncovered, described, and analysed — but also offer my own reflections prompted by his book. As Masalha relates in his introduction, the work is a passionate response to Zionism's historical claim that Palestinians possess no history of literacy, education, and literary culture. He shows the falsity of such a claim through multiple examples. Masalha explores, for example, the multifaceted history of education in Byzantine Palestine (Third to Early Seventh Century), based on a philosophy of ‘civil society’. Palestine as a cosmopolitan and transnational world inhered in what Masalha refers to as Cities of Learning. There were famous intellectuals, such as in antiquity Josephus (AD 37-c.100) and Origen (AD 185–253). In modernity he highlights Khalil Sakakini (1878–1953), whose remarkable educational reforms, emphasizing a ‘philosophy of joy’, emerged at a similar time to A.S. Neill's Summerhill School in the UK. Women's education is featured, from the time of the Palestinian Madrasas under the Ayyubids and Mamluks (1187–1517) onwards, a powerful tradition which continues into the modern era. When press censorship was relaxed following the Ottoman Young Turk Revolution of 1908, there was a huge growth of newspapers, photography, and photojournalism, a remarkable figure here being the Palestinian photographer Karima ‘Abboud (1893–1940). Masalha draws attention to the importance of translation in Palestinian history, especially in the important figure of Khalil Ibrahim Beidas, a relative of Edward Said, who was interested in the works of Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Gorky. There is a fascinating chapter on the interactions of Palestinian scholars and the Crusaders, with free passages of ideas, goods and technologies; arabesque became a mainstream European decorative art. The result of these multiple explorations is a major transformation in how we think about the world.

Openings after the Last Sky

Openings after the Last Sky

تفنيد الروايات التوراتيّة الخاصّة ببدايات التواجد اليهودي "في مدينة القدس في التاريخ القديم"

Throughout the ages, the history of any country has not been subjected to forgery and distortion, as has the history of Palestine, with the city of Jerusalem at its heart, according to the whims of the researchers who dealt with it, whether they were politicians, Archaeologists, or educated, in the service of the Zionist project of the need for the Jews to return to what is they called it (the Promised Land), and the rebuilding of what they called (the Temple of Solomon). It seems that the writings of these researchers were based mainly on what was mentioned in the books of the Old Testament, especially the books that were added to the Old Testament after the death of Moses, peace be upon him, and which were codified by the priests of the Children of Israel several centuries after his death. In these books, especially the second book of Samuel and the first book of Kings, their writers baptized fabricated heroic deeds that were attributed to David and his son Solomon, peace be upon them. It was attributed to David taking possession of the city of Jerusalem and taking it as the capital of his rule, then it was attributed to Solomon that he built a temple to God in this city. But recent studies have refuted these allegations, and proved beyond a reasonable doubt that is unfounded.
 The study relied on two main approaches: the historical approach and the analytical descriptive approach, in order to show the value of refuting the narratives of the Jewish presence in the city of Jerusalem in the time of David specifically, and it proved that the beginnings of the Jewish presence in the Holy City were during the period of Persian rule of Palestine, although their presence during This period and what follows were no more than autonomy.

Not the Songs but the Singing: Sounding Sense in Colonial Films from British Mandate Palestine

This essay considers how Palestinian history and experience might be reclaimed from colonial films from British Mandate Palestine, and how sensory and synesthetic attention developed in experimental filmmaking might bear on archival footage. Analysis focuses in particular on the possibilities of sound. My reflections draw heavily on a current work in progress, Partition, which makes extensive use of found footage from Britain’s imperial collections and sound recordings made with Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and across the sites of their displacement. The film attempts to harness the disruptive potential of refugee voice to make visible the continuity of Palestinian presence in colonial archives and to deconstruct and reconstruct archival authority and colonial history.

Between Barkat and the Little Ibtisam: Feminine Memory and Thereby Narrative in Ibtisam Barakat’s Tasting the Sky: A Palestinian Childhood

This paper examines the idea of the feminine memory and its role in re/establishing a new dimension of Palestinian history in Ibtisam Barakat’s Tasting the Sky: A Palestinian Childhood (2007). The article draws on several core concepts in postcolonial studies, including diaspora narrative, trauma, and memory as well as Fatma Kassem’s study of the oral narratives of Palestinian women who witnessed the events of the 1948 War. Instead of being a mere memetic text that reflects historical incidents in literature, Tasting the Sky sheds light on the impact of traumatic experiences on both memory and the writing/narrative process. This feminine memory, focusing on traumatic experiences, seeks to construct a healing narrative that comes to terms with the traumatic past of the individual and the collective, and as a result, creates new realities. The novel demonstrates how memory and narrative can be encapsulated in a literary-political project, not merely to represent reality but to recreate it, recreating history from a countless number of scattered, traumatic, not-yet-graspable moments about a lost Home. We argue that this feminine memory is manifested through three perspectives: The domestic sphere, the female body and the female language.

Fadwa Tuqan's Anti-War Poetry: A Cry against Zionism

Modern Palestinian resistance poetry has, since the late 19th century, been an expression of the national culture of the Palestinian people and their historic self-determination and homeland battle. This study explores Palestinian poetry of Resistance written for the ten years after the June 1967 War that triple the territory of the State of Israel. The popular Palestinian poet, Fadwa Tuqan, has been translated into English, with commentaries on Palestinian history before 1967 and on the occupation of Palestine after 1977. Her poetry is a mirror to the historical struggle against Zionism. Through this study of the historical context of Palestinian resistance Fadwa Tuqan's poetry, readers can gain a deeper understanding of the ties between Palestinian national culture and their struggle for homeland. Keywords: resistance poetry, diaspora, Fadwa Tuqan, exile, attachment to the land, loss and hope.

Reviving al-Nabi Musa: Performance, Politics, and Indigenous Sufi Culture in Palestine

This article explores the revival of Palestinian indigenous performance practices that were part of the Sufi Nabi Musa festival. Focusing on the 2018 and 2019 government-sponsored performances, it examines how the different sociopolitical changes that took place in Palestinian society, following the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their land in 1948, have led to the marginalization, politicization, and eventual revival of indigenous performance practices, which are an important part of Palestinian theatre history. Exploring Sufi rituals as indigenous performance practices shows that theatre forms not based on appropriations of European-style theatre existed in Palestine in the twentieth century. It also raises important questions as to why many of them have been neglected by Palestinian non-governmental theatre organizations (NGOs). Dia Barghouti is the Arab Council for the Social Sciences Postdoctoral Fellow at the Abdelmalek Essaadi University in Morocco. Her research focuses on indigenous performance traditions in the Levant and North Africa. Her work on theatre and Sufism has appeared in New Theatre Quarterly and Jadaliyya.