NAIS 1:2 FALL 2014 Editors’ Introduction 105 Special Forum PerspectivesontheIsraeli–PalestinianConflict fromIndigenousStudies JEAN M. O’BRIEN AND ROBERT WARRIOR Introduction: Indigeneity, Palestine, and Israel THE ONGOING POLITICAL and military conflict between Israelis and Palestinians has, over the past year, made academic politics matters of public scrutiny in the United States and other places in ways reminiscent of the “culture wars” of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Most prominently, in December 2013 the membership of the American Studies Association voted decisively to endorse its elected leadership’s resolution to support the call from Palestinian civil society to engage in boycotts and divestment campaigns against academic and cultural institutions supported by the state of Israel. The Asian American Studies Association had unanimously joined that same academic boycott campaign many months before, though it was ASA’s resolution that captured the attention of media in the United States, Israel, Middle Eastern Arab nations, and other places. Simultaneous with ASA’s decision , the elected council of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (the sponsoring association of this journal) announced its own resolution in support of the academic boycott of Israeli institutions, with NAISA’s resolution being the result of a multiyear process involving a group of members circulating a petition and requesting action from the council. The political ramifications of these academic associations and some others joining the boycott campaign have been debated and discussed in many forums. Indeed, whatever one’s position on the political stakes of the boycott campaign, the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands in the West Bank and Gaza has surely been more widely discussed inside and outside of the academy than ever before. In the midst of the sometimes heated discourse over the academic boycott campaign, NAIS received the two scholarly essays published here, and we have decided to present them in a special forum to highlight perspectives Editors’ Introduction NAIS 1:2 FALL 2014 106 that two scholars in Native and Indigenous studies are bringing to bear on the variegated scholarly issues indigeneity prompts in relation to Israel and Palestine . In his contribution to the forum, Eric Cheyfitz examines the parallels between exceptionalist nationalism in the United States and modern Israel, analyzing the ways in which indigeneity undergirds, but also troubles, the deployment of nationalist discourse. Steven Salaita, on the other hand, sets out a scholarly agenda in which he works through the process by which Palestine has come to prominence in some quarters of American Indian studies and, in similar ways, in Indigenous studies more generally. We know that many other perspectives on Israel, Palestine, Zionism, and related topics exist among scholars working in Native and Indigenous studies . The fact that these two essays came our way independently from each other and made it successfully through peer review made it compelling to us to present them together in this highlighted way. Salaita and Cheyfitz accepted our invitation to respond briefly to each other’s essays, and we appreciate their willingness to do so on short notice. Taken together, these essays and responses allow us to participate in the scholarly work we believe these issues demand. We think it says something salutary about our field, our association, and this fledgling journal that these accomplished scholars have found Native and Indigenous studies to be an academic location from which to address these vital and entangled topics. JEAN M. O’BRIEN (White Earth Ojibwe), University of Minnesota ROBERT WARRIOR (Osage), University of Illinois, Urbana–Champaign Note Please note that this forum went to press in March 2014 and has not been revised since August 2014, except to correct Steven Salaita’s affiliation. ...