Indigenous Palestinians Research Articles

Racial Capitalism: From British Colonialism to the Settler Colonial Apartheid State

This article explores the development of capitalism in Palestine under British colonialism and the Zionist settler colonial project. It examines first, Israel's internal and external capitalist dynamism, including its treatment of its non-European citizens, namely indigenous Palestinians, and non-Ashkenazi (Arab) Jewish settlers. Second, it explores the state's interdependent relationship with Western, especially US imperialism. The article argues that the British colonial state was crucial in enabling the Zionist project to materialize, leading to weakening the socio-economic fabric of the Palestinians in their own lands and homeland, creating a favourable condition for the Zionist project to gradually penetrate the land of Palestine and dispossess its population. As a European (Jewish) settler colonial movement, Zionism, founded on racism and racialization, aimed at establishing a new Jewish enclave separate and independent from the indigenous Palestinians. This separateness made it resemble apartheid South Africa, yet the historical specificity of Palestine, where the Zionist settlers did not just alienate, exclude and when needed, use and exploit the Palestinians, but also expelled the indigenous Palestinians and claim Palestine as a ‘pure’ Jewish state.

Spiritual and indigenous funds of knowledge: how Palestinian Muslim teachers reclaim Islam and citizenship education in Israel

ABSTRACT Scholars have argued for better integration of religion and citizenship education through overarching goals of interreligious tolerance and inclusive citizenship. Yet, such debates often neglect the political dimensions of these subjects. In this study, we explore how Palestinian Muslim teachers in Israel interpret the intersections of Islam and citizenship education and how they draw on this intersection in their teaching. Through qualitative interviews with 15 citizenship and Islam teachers, we found that most teachers ground this relationship in their spiritual Islamic and indigenous Palestinian funds of knowledge. In their teaching, these funds can serve as counterhegemonic tools to deconstruct dominant forms of citizenship and Islam as defined by the Israeli state. We argue that the hybridization of these funds of knowledge has important educational implications for conceptualizing more critical and culturally relevant forms of Islam and citizenship education.

The decolonial wor(l)ds of Indigenous women

ABSTRACT This article focuses on Indigenous women’s narrative and storytelling tradition and its relation to decolonial ecologies. It argues that Indigenous women’s narratives, both written and orally transmitted, constitute sites of defiance to the eco-social structures of settler colonialism and imperialism. Drawing on the case of Palestine, the article reveals that ‘zoocentric environmentalism,’ as represented by an Israeli installation at the Venice Biennale, incarnates the material and symbolic constituents of Zionist blooming enterprise. That is, such presumed forms of progressive ‘non-anthropocentric’ engagements with ecological calamities unveil the historical continuity of the Zionist project that aims to erase Indigenous Palestinians and their multigenerational, more-than-human place thought. To counter universalising environmental projects and their inherent colonial violence, the article engages with place-based stories of a Palestinian woman’s novella; more-than-human ancestral knowledge shared by Palestinian women elders; and a visual-media project showing Palestinian refugee women returning to their ancestral villages. The article’s overall aim is to advance an Indigenous situated approach to decolonising today’s environmentalism and to centre Palestine in the wider social and cultural geography debate on Indigeneity, decolonial ecologies, and storytelling.

The environmental semantics of rural and urban architecture standards in British Mandate of Palestine, 1920–1940

This paper analyses the 1940 exhibition catalogue, Twenty Years of Building: Workers' Settlements, Housing and Public Institutions, published by the Federation of Jewish Workers in Palestine to celebrate its twentieth anniversary. A cross-regional analysis of this publication in the context of Mandatory Palestine and its commonalities with the environmental German notion of ‘rootedness’ [Bodenständigkeit] forms the basis of this paper. It challenges previous scholarship viewing Jewish architecture as progressive, climatically adaptive, and correlating with the 1930s separatist stance of Labour Zionism vis-à-vis the Levant. It argues instead that the Federation's architects reflected a conservative agenda concerning ‘functional’ design. The paper reconstructs how their agenda adapted various rhetoric, from rooted rural buildings, colonial ruralisation, to new urban co-op environments in the 1920s and 30s. The paper also explores the historicist and settler-colonial stance of this agenda as it negotiated progressive building standards relative to the brief tradition of cooperative settlement history and indigenous Palestinian habitats. The paper, thus, identifies the environmental semantics of the Federation’s functional buildings, its structuralist logic, and its role in the legitimation of Zionist settler colonial institutions. In assessing this aesthetic-economic discourse, the paper contributes a missing prelude to the vernacularisation of post-independence development architecture in Israel.

On Indigenous Refusal against Externally-Imposed Frameworks in Historic Palestine

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.

Apartheid, Disability, and the Triple Matrix of Maiming in Palestine

As an indigenous Palestinian, born and raised in Gaza, I have lived most of my life under the Israeli occupation. Such an oppressive system has placed the Palestinian indigenous population into a l...

Zionist Frontiers: David Ben-Gurion, Labor Zionism, and transnational circulations of settler development

ABSTRACTThis article examines how settler colonial narratives, structures and relations constitute development. The article offers a new concept, settler development, to show how development, as a colonial template of liberal rule and economic improvement, and settler colonialism, augment and imprint each other. To understand how settler development works, I present a case study that analyzes settler texts that circulate between Zionists in the United States and in Palestine before 1948. In particular, David Ben-Gurion, leader of Jewish settlement in Palestine, and writers in the Jewish American magazine, Jewish Frontier, sought to justify settlement based on economic productivity to appeal to the British to hand over the Mandate to settlers, not indigenous Palestinians. These circulating discourses valorized the ‘pioneer’ as the quintessential subject of settler development who is assumed to have a right over indigenous land through their ability to improve economic productivity. The article combines settler colonial and critical development studies to suggest creative analyses of the way that development is epistemologically linked to the networks of settler colonialism.

Disability, the Politics of Maiming, and Higher Education in Palestine

Different pieces of a puzzle are put together to unpack the implications of biopolitical forms in relation to disability in Palestine. Tracing the political connections between Israel and the United States of America (the U.S.), both countries give themselves the right to maim the Palestinians in different forms. Israel maims the indigenous Palestinians in more direct ways, while the U.S. is the guard and supporter of Israel in the process of maiming the Palestinians. Yet, successful, disabled Palestinians have emerged from under the rubble in different fields and in academia and higher education in particular. In this paper, Critical Disability Studies (CDS) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) are used as theoretical frameworks to examine disability in Palestinian higher education in light of political implications. The paper also reveals a dearth of research on disability in Palestinian higher education

Israeli Settler Colonialism in Context: Celebrating (Palestinian) Death and Normalizing Gender and Sexual Violence

Feminist Studies 45, no. 2/3. © 2019 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 541 Rabab Abdulhadi IsraeliSettler ColonialisminContext: Celebrating (Palestinian) Death and Normalizing Gender and Sexual Violence The fifty-one-day Israeli military assault on Gaza in the summer of 2014 resulted in the deaths of 2,251 Palestinians, including 551 children , as well as 11,231 injured and at least 500,000 displaced. This event destroyed infrastructure and the livelihoods of an already impoverished and vulnerable Palestinian population.1 As the Israeli military intensified its aerial and artillery bombardment, rhetoric employing sexualized , racist, Orientalist and Islamophobic tropes also intensified in Israeli public discourse. This included images on social media such as the portrayal of Gaza as a half-naked woman in a niqab with a caption calling on Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to rape her. Public banners sponsored by the City Council of Or Yehuda declared, “Israel Defense Forces soldiers, Or Yehuda’s residents are with you! Pound ‘their mothers ’ and return safely to your own mother!” At the completion of their two-year military service, Israeli men printed T-shirts that depicted a bullseye pointing at a pregnant Palestinian munaqqaba (a woman wearing a niqab) with the caption, “1 shot, 2 kills,” implying that the Israeli soldier can kill both the woman and her unborn child. Such violent 1. United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), Occupied Palestinian Territory, “Key Figures on the 2014 Hostilities: Data Featured in the Report of the Independent Commission of Inquiry on the 2014 Gaza Conflict,” June 23, 2015, https://www.ochaopt.org/content /key-figures-2014-hostilities. 542 Rabab Abdulhadi Islamophobic discourse was not new to Israel nor exceptional among settler colonial regimes. However, the overt, public, and unapologetic audacity was new, especially when examined against Israel’s historically careful management of its public image, especially on the international stage.2 In this essay, I analyze this new climate of casually violent rhetoric , which includes Facebook and Twitter posts. This emerging discourse signals that the public space for oppositional expression in Israel has shrunk, turning it into even more of a police state—a reality that Indigenous Palestinians have experienced in both the past and present, but of which the majority of Ashkenazi Jewish Israelis are only recently becoming more aware.3 Since its inception in 1948, Israel has made the promotion of its image as an egalitarian and inclusive society a top national security priority . This task was historically assigned to the Israeli cabinet, Israel’s intelligence agencies—the Mossad and Shin Beit—as well as the Israeli military.4 More recently, Israel created the Ministry of Strategic Affairs and assigned experienced Mossad officials to the task.5 Furthermore, Israel’s Zionist supporters among US Republicans, Democrats, and the Christian right have raised tens of millions of dollars specifically to 2. David Reibstein, “Ido Aharoni: Why Brand Capital Is Part of National Security ,” Knowledge@Wharton Podcast, May 1, 2015, https://knowledge.wharton .upenn.edu/article/why-brand-capital-is-part-of-national-security. 3. By Indigenous, I refer to the totality of the Palestinian people, whether they became refugees after being expelled from their land by Zionist militias when Israel was founded in 1948 or they live under Israel’s colonial rule in the areas defined as such in 1948 and 1967. 4. Ali Abunimah, “Israel Using ‘Black Ops’ Against BDS, Says Veteran Analyst,” Electronic Intifada, September 5, 2016, https://electronicintifada.net/blogs /ali-abunimah/israel-using-black-ops-against-bds-says-veteran-analyst; Asa Winstanley, “Israel Reveals ‘Delegitimization Department’ to Spy on Boycott Activists,” Electronic Intifada, August 27, 2015, https://electronicin tifada.net/blogs/asa-winstanley/israel-reveals-delegitimization-department -spy-boycott-activists; Asa Winstanley, “Mossad Proxy Faked Violent Facebook Anti-Semitism,” Electronic Intifada, January 16, 2016, https://electronicintifada .net/blogs/asa-winstanley/mossad-proxy-faked-violent-facebook -anti-semitism; Jonathan Cook, “Did Banned Media Report Foretell of Gaza War Crimes?” Electronic Intifada, April 15, 2010, https://electronicintifada .net/content/did-banned-media-report-foretell-gaza-war-crimes/8788. 5. Itamar Eichner, “Government Creates Joint Program for Rapid BDS Response,” Ynetnews, December 29, 2017, https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L5063599 ,00.html. Rabab Abdulhadi 543 salvage Israel...

Romantic nationalism in the post-Ottoman era: a continued struggle of tension and unrest

Romantic nationalism involves peoples striving to live according to their heritage and traditions in lands under their control. This movement, originally emerging in the early 19th century West, exerted a significant impact during the final decades of the Ottoman Empire. After World War 1 President Woodrow Wilson of the US advocated policies that were friendly to selfdeterminism in the Middle East. Ignoring these recommendations, Britain and France divided up the former Ottoman Empire with little regard to the will of the people who lived there. Since then, the reactions of effected ethnic groups, including the founding of Israel and its impacts upon indigenous Palestinians, have often been similar to Romantic Nationalism. Viewing these tensions with reference to Romantic Nationalism provides a useful tool of analysis, reflection, and policy formation.

Space and Mobility in Palestine by Julie Peteet

Reviewed by: Space and Mobility in Palestine by Julie Peteet Livia Wick Julie Peteet, Space and Mobility in Palestine. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017. 252 pp. Julie Peteet has worked for years with Palestinians over a large geographical and social expanse—from the occupied Palestinian territories (oPt), through Jordan, to Lebanon and its refugee camps. She has now published a book dealing with the political and personal consequences of restrictions placed on movement in the West Bank. In it, she analyzes the most striking aspect of the Palestinian natural and human landscape: the closure which divides the land into small spaces chopped up by checkpoints, barriers, a system of unequal identity cards, the Wall, permits, and other bureaucratic and physical impediments to people's mobility. Her writing is the product of fieldwork conducted between 2004 and 2008, a time of continuing severe closure and repetitive clashes in villages near the Wall. In the introduction, she identifies her theoretical framework for studying Palestine as "a modern settler colonial context" (2). In the oPt, access to space, and therefore mobility, derives from racialized categories of ethnicity, religion, nationality, place of origin, and residency, as well as an expanding/contracting expanse (the former for newly installed Israelis, the latter for indigenous Palestinians). Zionism, she points out, is now ever more commonly seen as a form of settler colonialism in which land and water resources are expropriated for the use of the colonials while the indigenous population is either expelled or contained rather than, in classical colonial fashion, incorporated as a labor force. Indeed, the publication of this book and others in the field illustrates the shift in political and conceptual understandings of Palestine/Israel in the world academy from a "conflict" to a "settler colonial" focus. Endowed since 2011 with its own scholarly journal (Settler Colonial Studies), this classical field has [End Page 283] increasingly concentrated on contemporary examples, among which Israel/Palestine figures prominently. But what kinds of processes does the framework of settler colonialism make visible? This is the question Peteet endeavors to answer in her ethnography of mobility, for which she interviewed numerous local actors and Palestinian as well as foreign observers. She argues that her role as an anthropologist in the colonial present is, first, to compile an ethnographic archive of life under settler-colonial occupation and, second, to analyze the ever-changing spatial parameters and rules of contemporary forms of colonial power. Her goal is thus not simply to document the disciplinary effects of closure in a Foucauldian manner, but, perhaps like Michel de Certeau, to watch people in their everyday, as they actually move through the maze of obstacles. The first chapter, "'Permission to Breathe': Closure and the Wall," analyzes the regime of closures and the ever-present Wall as forms of immobilization, an escalation in the Israeli tactics of monitoring and entrapping the Palestinian population. In this form of segregation, the people are assigned particular spaces and constrained in their access to others. She traces segregation between Arabs and Jews to the beginnings of the Zionist agricultural projects in Palestine, through the policies of the Israeli state after its creation in 1948 and the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967. The issuing of identity cards, color-coded for quick assessment of the holder's rights to mobility and residency, distinguishes between Arab and Jew but also between Palestinians' places of origin. The hierarchy of identity cards is multiple: the right to mobility (i.e., to cross checkpoints and visit various parts of Israel and the oPt) differs for holders of Israeli citizenship, Jerusalem IDs, West Bank IDs, Gaza IDs, and those with Jordanian passports. The sequence of chapters following: "Mobility: Legibility, Permits, and Roads" (Chapter 2); "Geography of Anticipation and Risk: Checkpoints, Filters, and Funnels" (Chapter 3); and "Waiting and 'Stealing Time': Closure's Temporality" (Chapter 4) document the all-pervasiveness of a process of enclavization, with reduced space and expanded time. In Chapter 2, she shows how each Palestinian enclave (Nablus, Ramallah, Hebron, Gaza, Jenin, and so on) is granted a specific status, entailing its own particular right to mobility, whose parameters vary from day to day. These numerous enclaves, Peteet...

Enshrining Discrimination: Israel's Nation-State Law

In July 2018, the Israeli Knesset passed Basic Law: Israel – The Nation-State of the Jewish People (Nation-State Law). This article highlights three of the law's central premises: the entrenched supremacy of Jewish settlers; the erasure of indigenous Palestinians; and, with reference to borders, the effective annexation of those parts of historic Palestine that were occupied in 1967. The authors reflect on the passage of the law within a broader history of settler colonialism and in the current global context of growing authoritarianism and overt institutionalized racism. The passage of such a colonial piece of constitutional legislation in 2018 is a testament to the continued resistance of Palestinians and the growing movement for Palestinian rights. The authors argue that the alternative to the exclusionary Nation-State Law, a rights-based, people-centered framework, is a promising avenue to not only secure Palestinian rights, but also advance a universal struggle for equality and historical justice.

Rethinking Settler Colonialism: A Marxist Critique of Gershon Shafir

In recent years, the use of settler colonialism as an analytical framework to understand the Zionist-Palestinian conflict has become prevalent. Spurred by the works of such scholars as Patrick Wolfe and Lorenzo Veracini, critical scholarship has argued that Israel as a settler-colonial society sought to eliminate the indigenous Palestinians in a bid to create a Jewish settler nation-state. The grounds for understanding the Zionist-Palestinian conflict through the settler-colonial prism have been laid by the seminal work of Gershon Shafir. His work’s relation to the reality of Palestine/Israel is the focal point of this essay. By constructively critiquing his book Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882–1914, the essay demonstrates Shafir’s relative discounting of important processes of capitalist development within the settler-colonial divide he so masterfully describes.

Parents’ Perceptions of Risk for Children: A Case Study of Bedouin Parents from Unrecognized Villages in Israel

AbstractThis qualitative study of 50 indigenous Palestinian Bedouin parents from six unrecognized villages in the Naqab (Negev) Desert in southern Israel explores parental perceptions of risk for children in the context of structural oppression, cultural transition, conservative lifestyle, and ongoing political conflict. Data were collected through focus groups and semi-structured interviews and analyzed using thematic analysis. The findings demonstrate a wide range of perceived risks, including physical environment–related challenges, parental-related challenges, sociocultural-related challenges, and policy and political-related challenges. Despite these numerous risk factors, Bedouin families report coping and trying to prevent risk through maternal investment in child rearing, social cohesion and tribal support, spirituality and religion, and their collective history. This case study underscores the importance of giving voice to the voiceless, learning from parents about risks for children, understandi...

Human Rights and Domination

At the turn of the new millennium, a new phenomenon has emerged: conservatives who just decades before had rejected the expanding human rights culture began to embrace human rights in order to advance their own political goals. This accounts for how human rights - generally conceived as a counter-hegemonic instrument for righting historical injustices - are being deployed to subjugate the weak and legitimize domination. Using Israel/Palestine as its main case study, the article describes the establishment of settler NGOs that appropriate human rights to dispossess indigenous Palestinians. We outline the increasing convergences between liberal human rights NGOs, militaries, settler organizations, and extreme right nationalists, showing how radically different political actors champion the dissemination of human rights while mirroring each other’s political strategies. We demonstrate the multifaceted role this discourse is currently playing in the international arena: on the one hand, human rights have become the lingua franca of global moral speak, while on the other they have become a tool for enhancing domination.

Reflections of The National Narrative on The Indigenous Palestinian Minority in Israel : Patterns and Challenges

Reflections of The National Narrative on The Indigenous Palestinian Minority in Israel : Patterns and Challenges

Disrupting Development, Reclaiming Solidarity: The Anti-Politics of Humanitarianism

Originally developed for the Center for Development Studies at Birzeit University in 2011, this paper examines the humanitarian assistance that flooded the occupied Palestinian territories after the beginning of the second intifada (2000–2005). It provides a critical analysis of the international development aid that was directed at Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, where the Oslo process was territorialized, to the exclusion of the vast majority of the Palestinian people. Today, Palestinians are challenging the dominant development discourse and neoliberal economic model set in place by the Oslo Accords, wherein development recast Israeli settler colonialism as an externality, which the putative Palestinian state-building project would transcend. Returning to Yusif Sayigh's view that development cannot occur under settler colonialism, Palestinians are articulating alternatives to the Oslo post-conflict paradigm that emphasize self-reliance and resistance. The discussion that follows situates itself as a contribution to this process by interrogating the anti-political bias of humanitarianism and charting how indigenous Palestinians are building alternatives to food aid.

Mahmoud Darwish's Poetry as Sumud

This essay makes explicit the connection between Palestinian resistance to Israeli control and the principle of sumud. Drawing on Raja Shehadeh and Ismail Shammout, I define this concept and show its strategic role in the resistance. Arguably, critics have identified Darwish's constant pursuit of aesthetics and his deep commitment to the Palestinian cause without linking them to the narrative of sumud. I suggest that his contribution to the narrative is built on the ground that his aggressors lack the intrinsic tie to the land, which his people perennially possess. Whereas the Israelis produce mythical claims on the land, the indigenous Palestinians are like their olive trees – unswervingly there. In particular, the creativity of the people makes present their absented homeland. Darwish's exile renders the second phenomenon more comprehensible. Even though he was physically removed from his homeland at a young age, his imagination remained implanted there throughout his life, which resulted in a rich oeuvre.

Settler-Colonialism, Memoricide and Indigenous Toponymic Memory: The Appropriation of Palestinian Place Names by the Israeli State

Cartography, place-naming and state-sponsored explorations were central to the modern European conquest of the earth, empire building and settler-colonisation projects. Scholars often assume that place names provide clues to the historical and cultural heritage of places and regions. This article uses social memory theory to analyse the cultural politics of place-naming in Israel. Drawing on Maurice Halbwachs’ study of the construction of social memory by the Latin Crusaders and Christian medieval pilgrims, the article shows Zionists’ toponymic strategies in Palestine, their superimposition of Biblical and Talmudic toponyms was designed to erase the indigenous Palestinian and Arabo-Islamic heritage of the land. In the pre-Nakba period Zionist toponymic schemes utilised nineteenth century Western explorations of Biblical ‘names’ and ‘places’ and appropriated Palestinian toponyms. Following the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948, the Israeli state, now in control of 78 percent of the land, accelerated its toponymic project and pursued methods whose main features were memoricide and erasure. Continuing into the post-1967 occupation, these colonial methods threaten the destruction of the diverse historical cultural heritage of the land.

Exiled at Home: Writing Return and the Palestinian Home

Drawing on our personal histories navigating the violence of Israeli settler colonialism and militarization, we theorize the Palestinian home space as not only a physical, but also a psychological and epistemological space of yearning, of belonging, and of radical thinking and becoming. In light of the colonial state’s continued attempts to further fragment and dislocate indigenous Palestinians from their homeland, we posit an analytics of returning to our home/land as a space of reconstructing Palestinian socialities and identities, of re-rooting through a radical praxis of love that can give birth to new forms of resistance.