Palestinian Land Research Articles

Owning the Homeland: Property, Markets, and Land Defense in the West Bank

This article examines the formation of land defense in relation to changing legal and economic conditions in the occupied Palestinian territories. It argues that as a result of settler capital and law, Palestinian land defense should be understood as emerging through, rather than apart from, private property. Specifically, it explores how private property and market forces shaped agrarian land defense (1970s–1980s) and real estate land defense (post-2007). In the 1970s and the 1980s, land defense sought to protect agriculture against market forces that drew Palestinians off the land and into wage labor in Israel. Beginning in the 1990s, the exclusion of Palestinians from Israeli wage labor and new forms of West Bank governance created the conditions for real estate land defense to appear. Taking the real estate project TABO as a case study, this article details its political logic, unexpected market effects, and its social and economic limits.

Strategies for Grassroots Activism in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is an ongoing crisis originating from the ethno-religious struggle between the Palestinian Arabs and Zionist Jews over the land of Palestine. There have been several attempts to create peace in this conflict, including foreign intervention and aid. However, one of the most overlooked methods is grassroots activism: civilian movements that work for social and political change on a local, regional, or international level. While there have been sociological analyses and other studies conducted on grassroots activism in the conflict, there has been a lack of comprehensive approaches analyzing these qualitative studies and the effectiveness of this activism. Thus, the purpose for this project was to find which strategies were most effective for grassroots movements that focus on creating peace in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. It was hypothesized that nonviolent activism would emerge as most effective. A mixed methods approach incorporating both a qualitative meta synthesis and a quantitative frequency analysis was conducted through a thematic synthesis. Line-by-line coding was completed on six journal articles obtained from JSTOR, Academic Search Complete, and Sociological Collection; descriptive and analytical themes based on strategies for grassroots activism were created based on this coding. A statistical analysis was completed displaying the frequency of each strategy coded as low, medium, or high success. Joint activism emerged as the most effective strategy based on the coding completed with 57% coding under high success: this suggests that joint activism should be utilized most often for conflict resolution in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Ketokohan dan Sumbangan Sultan Abdul Hamid II Sebagai Khalifah Terakhir Dawlah Uthmaniyyah Berlandaskan Prinsip al-Quran dan al-Sunnah

The leadership and contribution of the final caliph of Ottoman, Sultan Abdul Hamid II are undisputable. A large number of innovations have been made during his 33 years of administration including economics, transportation, communications, education and more. Not to be overlooked is his greatest contribution to the Muslim world when he became the custodian of the first Qibla of Muslims that is al-Aqsa Mosque of the Palestinian land. This study examines the leadership and contribution of Sultan Abdul Hamid II as the last caliph of Ottoman before the fall of the Caliphate system in 1922 through historical method. His leadership is scrutinized in many aspects such as economics when he succeeded in reducing debt levels to just one tenth of total debt. Moreover, his policies in dealing with the Zionist Jewish conspiracy to control Palestine also put pressure on the enemy. Despite the fact that the Ottoman state was unstable, Sultan Abdul Hamid II was able to continue the caliphate legacy under his rule until 1909.

Israel’s Biospatial Politics: Territory, Demography, and Effective Control

Using Israel’s land-grabbing practices alongside its demographic classifications as a conceptual lens, this article advances two claims: one about biospatial strategies, including the construction of space as a racialized category, and the other historical. The article shows that the particular biospatial scaffolding underlying Israel’s colonial project has deployed similar strategies of dispossession and settling across the entire territory located between the Jordan Valley and the Mediterranean Sea. Simultaneously, it draws a connection between these strategies and statistical classifications and techniques of enumeration to delineate Israel’s efforts to racialize the appropriated space. Historically, the article identifies a boomerang trajectory, beginning with the massive confiscation and Judaization of Palestinian land in the wake of the 1948 war, then extending and duplicating many of the practices originally developed inside Israel to the West Bank in 1967, and finally turning back inward to solidify the racialization of land within Israel.

Reflections on BDS

Reflections on BDS

GIS-Based Factorial Ecology and Social Public Space of the Twin City of Ramallah and Al-Bireh, West Bank, The Palestinian Authority

In the present research, a factorial ecological approach using factor analysis was employed to evaluate the dimensionality of the urban social structure of the twin city: Ramallah and Al-Bireh, West Bank, the Palestinian Authority. Through factor analysis, the 41 variables were reduced to four factors with an eigenvalue > 1.0. These factors explain 77.07 percent of the total variables used in the study. Factor I contributes 28.419% of the total variance proportion of input variables, labeled as “family, housing, and public spaces factor”. Factor II accounts for 19.57% of the variance proportion, designated as” housing and urban public spaces”. Factor III is strongly correlated with variables referring to the characteristics of the head of the family, and the availability of public spaces, and thus, is designated as “head of the family and public spaces”. It explains 16.68% of the total variance. Finally, factor IV explains 12.406% of variance proportion, and is strongly associated with variables pertaining to a lack of public social spaces. Consequently, factor IV is termed “lack of public spaces”. The spatial distribution of factor scores related to factors I to IV was mapped using Arc GIS in order to analyze the spatial patterns of the recognized four factors. It is worth noting the factor IV, which refers to the lack of urban social space and, urban public space, which persists in the twin city, and will continue to persist in the future. The lack of urban open space and public social spaces is closely connected to migration, emerged housing pattern, and family status dimensions focused on factors I to III, continuous confiscation of the Palestinian lands, and the construction of Israeli settlements. Currently, the twin city is extremely overcrowded with stone/concrete buildings at the expense of public space which has declined continuously over the last three decades. Nevertheless, the analyzed spatial pattern of factor scores indicated the homogeneous character of the urban society of the twin city. Based on the urban eco-logical models which seek to characterize the Western, non-Western, Israeli, and Arab-oil producing (e.g., Kuwait) urban structures, it is difficult to elaborate a specific Palestinian urban ecological model with reference to the models developed elsewhere.

DEKLARASI BALFOUR, LAHIRNYA SEBUAH PRASANGKA 100 TAHUN

The Balfour Declaration was the official declaration of the United Kingdom of the status of the Land of Palestine announced by Foreign Minister Lord Arthur James Balfour on November 2, 1917. This declaration contains the support of the British Empire to make the Land of Palestine a place of state formation for the Jews. The existence of the declaration sparked great controversy and great suspicion, especially for the Muslim world about the evil conspiracy of Jews and Christians destroying Islam. This paper will explore the roots of the prejudices of hostilities by making the Balfour Declaration a central point. Based on historical search, it can be seen the nuances of conspiracy-scented conspiracy in this declaration. Although for the United Kingdom the Declaration was an attempt to win the war, but the feeling of being cheated already provoked a perpetual outrage toward the West for Muslims in the Middle East. This event is used as ammunition to inflame feelings of resentment and anger in many media publications in many Muslim countries. So the attention and reconciliation of Islam-West by lifting the 1917 incident is felt necessary to reduce the endless anger.

Taking the Land without the People: The 1967 Story as Told by the Law

This paper seeks to show how Israel has deployed Occupation Law in strategic ways to incrementally take the land of Palestine without its people. It argues that Israel has used UN Security Council Resolution 242 to retroactively legitimate those colonial takings in a political framework shaped by U.S. intervention. In themselves, the constituent pieces of the argument are not new and they have been extensively discussed in legal, political science, and historical literature. Rather than consider them as the sum of their parts, this paper attempts to view the issues that have been kept distinct and separate within disciplinary silos as a mutually-reinforcing whole, demonstrating that the United States' political position made an otherwise bankrupt legal argument effective and showing how the Security Council's deliberations gave Israel ample room for maneuver in spite of the drafting parties' original intent. In examining the relationship between law and political power, the article points to the ways in which the balance of power bears upon the meaning and significance of law in international conflict. Thus, the failure of Occupation Law to regulate the occupation of the Palestinian Territories ultimately reflects the outcome of a political, not a legal, contest: Israel's legal argumentation that the territories are merely under its administration would have no value were it not for the power politics that shape international relations in the region.

The “Right to Have Rights”: Partition and Palestinian Self-Determination

This paper reexamines the Palestinian struggle for self-determination and the extent to which a viable two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was ever truly possible. Such a reexamination seems all the more pertinent today on the hundredth anniversary of the Balfour Declaration. It is also seventy years since the UN partition plan to divide historic Palestine and fifty years since UN Security Council Resolution 242, which has been the basis for every peace agreement between Israel and its neighbors but makes no mention of or reference to the Palestinian people. The paper argues that the history of the past fifty years reinforces the claim that a State is central to any attempt to fight Palestinian erasure and ensure “the right to have rights,” as Hannah Arendt put it, but it argues that such an entity needs to be elevated above the nation, rather than made subservient to it if it is to protect the rights of Palestinians and all those living on the land of Palestine.

Heritage between Resistance and Government in Palestine

Heritage is a key site of politics in the Middle East. Recent episodes of the relentless destruction and construction of heritage in the region convey just how deeply intertwined it is with the making (and unmaking) of the postcolonial state. In Palestine/Israel, heritage has developed over a long history into an important site where both state power and resistance against it are produced, reshaped, and disseminated. A current proliferation of urban regeneration projects there is linked to the struggle against the ongoing occupation and colonization of Palestinian lands, as well as the incomplete, truncated emergence of a Palestinian state. Most of these heritage projects are carried out by semi- or nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). In this essay, I argue for the value of thinking about heritage in terms of government and state-making, or more precisely in terms of a Foucauldian understanding of governmentality, to reveal the kind of work it performs in Palestine and beyond. States govern also by heritage, and both states and the local communities they attempt to control mobilize the language of heritage for a variety of different purposes in a variety of different settings. What is distinctive about Palestine is the central role NGOs play in the institutionalization of a heritage field. In their work, they collapse the divide between mobilizing heritage to defend vulnerable communities and resist the encroachment of the (Israeli) state, and using heritage to develop institutions and help build the (Palestinian) state.

La poesía: un puente entre Palestina y nuestra América

Desde tiempos remotos, la poesía ha sido el género literario por excelencia para los árabes. Antes del Islam, se celebraba anualmente un Festival poético en la Meca. Se llamaba “Suq Uqaz”. Ahí competían los poetas. El poema ganador tenía como premio ser colgado en la Kaaba. Hasta ahora se estudian los Poemas Colgantes, considerados como lo mejor que se ha escrito en árabe.El fenómeno de la Poesía de Resistencia es el favorito de la mayoría lectora. Este fenómeno tuvo grandes exponentes, entre los que destacan Mahmud Darwish, Samih Al Qasem, Tawfiq Zayyad y Rashed Husein, quienes fueron parte del pueblo palestino que se quedó en su tierra palestina al ser ocupada por el movimiento sionista que estableció el Estado de Israel en 1948.

Out of Time: Jabrā Ibrāhīm Jabrā and the Politics of Palestinian Exile

This article analyses Jabrā Ibrāhīm Jabrā’s representations of Palestinian exile by focusing on his 1970 novel, al-Safīnah (The Ship, 1985). Critics have argued over whether Jabrā adequately connects his characters to “reality” on land. By attending to the Palestinian character Wadīʿ’s narrative in the novel, I argue that it is through this retreat from “reality,” or from realistic representations of Wadīʿ’s life in Palestine, that the novel shapes Palestinian exile as a dislocation in both time and space. Dream-like memories and utopic fantasies of return mirror the structure of that other fantasy, of returning in historico-political time. Thus the novel signals the time-space of Palestinian exile as both a separation from the historical land of Palestine, and an exile in history: an alienation not only from Palestine as a geographical area, but also from Palestine before the catastrophe of the Nakbah.

Neo-Zionism and Palestine: The Unveiling of Settler-Colonial Practices in Mainstream Zionism

This article examines the rise and key characteristics of Neo-Zionist political thought in Israel and its relationship with mainstream Zionist thought. It argues that despite the radical and repulsive discourses of Neo-Zionism and the critique expressed by liberal Zionists towards it, the former has always been embodied in classical Zionism. The justifications provided by Neo-Zionists are based on principles propagated by central leaders of mainstream Zionism. Utilising new perspectives in Settler-Colonial Studies, the article demonstrates how both strands encapsulate the Zionist continuum and continuous expansionist drive for new settlements in Palestine based on ‘Biblical right’ of Jews over the land of Palestine. Both advocate supremacist, exclusivist, and volkish rights for Jews with disastrous consequences for the indigenous people of Palestine. The convictions and practices of the Neo-Zionists in the post 1967 period help unveil the camouflaged motivations, justifications and practices of mainstream expansionist Zionism.

Practising social work in a ‘stateless state’; an exploration of the views, experiences and practice of children and family social workers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem

ABSTRACTIn over 65 years of conflict that followed the creation of Israel and the subsequent occupation of Palestinian land, the official international organizations representing the profession of social work have been in a state of avoidance with regards to dealing with crucial questions about social work under occupation. Until, last year hardly any relevant statement could be traced in the archives of the International Federation of Social Workers and the International Association of Social Workers referring to this issue. This article attempts to provide an initial exploration of the views and every-day professional lives of children and family social workers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The authors investigate and reflect on the challenges and opportunities Palestinian social workers face while working in the context of military conflict. There is a particular focus on the impact of the occupation of Palestinian lands and the experiences of trauma affecting children who seek the support of social services.

Atzma’ut 69, Occupation 50

Atzma’ut 69, Occupation 50

The United States and Israel

The United States and Israel

Why My Jewishness Compels Me to Stand for Justice in Palestine

Why My Jewishness Compels Me to Stand for Justice in Palestine

Israel's Creeping Annexation

A raft of legislative proposals introduced in the Knesset over the last several years has raised the specter of Israeli annexation of additional West Bank territory. One bill would provide for nearly automatic application of new Knesset legislation to Israelis residing in the West Bank. A second would authorize the expropriation under certain circumstances of privately-owned Palestinian land for incorporation into Israeli settlements, extending the Knesset's reach to the regulation of West Bank land use by non-Israelis. A third, entitled the “Maale Adumim Annexation Law,” provides for the full application of Israeli law in Israel's largest West Bank settlement, as well as in an adjacent twelve square kilometer area called the “E1 Zone,” one of the few remaining land reserves available for the development of Palestinian East Jerusalem.

Seeing through the Wall

Seeing through the Wall

Is Israeli Democracy in Danger?

Demographic shifts have contributed to an illiberal trend also fueled by five decades of occupation and settlement of Palestinian lands. The new right-wing majority is trying to stifle dissenting voices.