Palestine Studies Research Articles

Palestine Studies, Knowledge Production, and the Struggle for Decolonisation

This article traces the evolution of Palestine Studies from its nascent stages in the 1960s to its current status as a recognized and integral part of global academic discourse. It highlights the field’s vital role in dissecting the multifaceted structures and functions of Israeli settler colonialism, and standing firm amidst well-funded and systematic counter-efforts to delegitimize it. The ensuing discussion foregrounds Palestinian scholarly achievements in advancing their narrative and countering marginalization, particularly within the academic institutions of the Global North. By examining the political dynamics shaping research methodologies in Palestine Studies, this article elucidates how the field has emerged as a legitimate academic discipline, offering new pathways in graduate education. In asserting that Palestine Studies is inherently linked to activism, aiming for transformative change, decolonization, and liberation, this article underlines the contribution of the field to challenging dominant colonial epistemologies and methodologies and reshaping power dynamics. Thus, Palestine Studies not only elucidates the realities faced by indigenous Palestinian populations but also vocalizes their struggles and aspirations, positioning itself as a critical lens to understand, and engage with, Palestinian scholarship and its broader anti-colonial implications.

Palestine/Israel Review: Carving Out a New Intellectual Space

Abstract Knowledge about Palestine/Israel has long been produced and recruited for multiple contradictory political struggles. The emergence of distinct, counterposed scholarly associations, centers, and publications for Palestine studies and Israel studies reflects a certain set of contemporary political logics and agendas. What is the meaning of this separation? What are its implications for our scholarly understanding of dynamics in Palestine/Israel? Could this separation be justified, and could we imagine an alternative way of organizing our knowledge?

“This Camp Is Full of Hujaj!”

Historically, Islamic sharia courts across the Ottoman empire used a document called a hujja for registering property transactions. In present-day Jordan hujaj are illegal, yet in Palestinian refugee camps hujaj continue to be used for inheritance, buying and selling houses, and demonstrating occupancy. This is particularly true in camps unrecognized by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East and deemed “squatter settlements” by Jordanian host authorities. This article contributes to the emerging study of property rights in Palestinian camps by focusing on the links between Ottoman property regimes, contemporary territorial claims, and legal pluralism. Using the case of a Palestinian camp built on land owned by the descendants of Ottoman Circassian refugees, the article illustrates how, on the one hand, Palestinians use hujaj to facilitate inhabitation of the camp; and how, on the other hand, private property rights intersect with the competing claims of refugees and the state, whose overriding power changed after the events of Black September in 1970. By historicizing the material processes of refugee land tenure and property creation, the article challenges the assumption that contested camps are part of the “informal” growth of Middle Eastern cities, thus, bringing so-called squatter settlements back into refugee studies, Palestine studies, and Ottoman studies.

Introduction: Infrastructure, Environment, and Health in Palestine

The Journal of Palestine Studies’ special issue on infrastructure, environment, and health in Palestine sheds new light on the conditions and possibilities of politics. Although it is commonly viewed as “an entity ostensibly separate from technology and other human constructions,” the environment is in fact a particular configuration of “socio-technical arrangements.” The special issue’s four articles and two reflection essays—by Nadi Abusaada, Leena Dallasheh, Samir Harb, Cristina Violante, Nimrod Ben Zeev, and Emily McKee—span historical periods from Ottoman-ruled Palestine to the contemporary era. Hailing from the fields of history, architecture, anthropology, and legal theory, the contributors draw on original archival, spatial, and ethnographic research to parse the realities, experiences, and lessons that Palestine offers beyond its status as a site of settler-colonial deprivation and toxicity. Together they demonstrate that infrastructure, environment, and health are fundamentally and irrefutably political.

Review: Palestine is Throwing a Party and the Whole World is Invited, by Kareem Rabie

Book Review| June 01 2022 Review: Palestine is Throwing a Party and the Whole World is Invited, by Kareem Rabie Palestine is Throwing a Party and the Whole World is Invited, by Kareem Rabie (Durham: Duke Press, 2021). US$99.95 (hbk), ISBN 1478011955 Jamil Hilal Jamil Hilal Independent Palestinian sociologist, who has been working as a senior research fellow in a number of Palestinian research institutions, including Birzeit University, the Institute of Palestine Studies, the Palestinian Institution for the Study of Democracy (Muwatin), among others. Email: jamilh@gmail.com Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Contemporary Arab Affairs (2022) 15 (2): 100–102. https://doi.org/10.1525/caa.2022.15.2.100 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Jamil Hilal; Review: Palestine is Throwing a Party and the Whole World is Invited, by Kareem Rabie. Contemporary Arab Affairs 1 June 2022; 15 (2): 100–102. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/caa.2022.15.2.100 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentContemporary Arab Affairs Search This book examines the changes in the West Bank during the post-Salaam Fayyad years. The author follows in great detail the case of the construction of the city of Rawabi in the West Bank. Rawabi, a housing complex founded near the city of Ramallah by the Palestinian entrepreneur Bashar Masri, is explored by the author as a case study to illustrate how private capital has increased the dependency of the Palestinian West Bank characterized by a settler–colonialist condition. This condition is not, regrettably, illustrated sufficiently or adequately here. The book documents very meticulously the emergence of this urbanized zone and how private capital restructured the public sector and subordinated the Palestinian Authority (PA) to the institutions of the occupying Israeli power. The author views the emerging city of Rawabi as a political–economic project occurring within a process of a Palestinian “state-building” endeavor that was envisaged, very naively as it turned... You do not currently have access to this content.

Sovereignty and Developmental Policies in Palestine and Eastern Kurdistan

Inspired by the scholarship on Palestine studies and particularly by Sara Roy’s “de-development” theory, this paper investigates how the sovereign ethno-nation in Iran instrumentalizes and distorts development to subjugate the minoritized Kurdish nation. Along with contextualizing de-development theory within the broader discipline of developmental studies and outlining how de-development works in practice, we compare the political-economic conditions of Rojhelat (Eastern Kurdistan/Iran) with those of Palestine to underscore the key similarities and differences between these two cases.

In the Shadow of War: The Journal of Palestine Studies as Archive

In this article, coeditor Sherene Seikaly examines the Journal of Palestine Studies’ first two decades as the premier English-language academic publication on the Palestinian question and what was once referred to as the Arab-Israeli conflict. Using the keyword “war” in article titles as a prism for a granular analysis of the knowledge produced in the Journal, Seikaly traces some of the trends that undergirded JPS’s evolution—its prescriptive, programmatic, and prognosticating approach that was deeply imbricated in the patriarchal paradigms of international relations and political science (Revolution with a capital “R,” the “great men” of history, the imperative to make one’s case before the colonizer), but also a capacious space to view the contested terrain of knowledge production. A close reading of seventeen articles and one interview over the arc of twenty years illuminates the Journal’s pivotal role as a repository of primary and secondary literature and as an archive of Palestine and the Palestinians.

The Journal of Palestine Studies in the Twenty-First Century: An Editor’s Reflections

The Journal of Palestine Studies is celebrating fifty years of uninterrupted publication as the journal of record on Palestinian affairs since its founding in 1971. Historian, book author, and Columbia University’s Edward Said Chair of Middle East Studies, Rashid Khalidi, has been at the helm as editor for almost two decades. In this article, he reflects on the Journal’s role in knowledge production on Palestine from a number of vantage points: the situation that obtained at the Journal’s founding when Palestinians simply did not have “permission to narrate” their own story in the Western public sphere; the evolution of the academic universe in the United States and its eventual embrace of disciplines, such as race, gender, Indigenous, and Palestine studies, once considered marginal or fringe; and the concomitant and virulent Zionist campaign to tar speech critical of Israel and the Zionist project with the brush of anti-Semitism, whether in the media, politics, or academia.

Introduction: History from Below; Lessons from Palestine

Journal of Palestine Studies coeditor Sherene Seikaly introduces a cluster of essays by Sreemati Mitter, Alex Winder, Charles W. Anderson, and Haneen Naamneh that examines Palestinian “history from below.” The focus of these essays is on the everyday losses endured and the community-based forms of resistance enacted by ordinary Palestinians. Seikaly explains how, through the struggle against financial dispossession, the journey into insurgent law, broad-based collective civil disobedience, and Arab futurity in Jerusalem, these four essays make space for new understandings in the way we narrate Palestine, its history, and its people.

JPS “Hidden Gems” and “Greatest Hits”: Capitalism in Palestine; A Historical Snapshot

In addition to selecting a “greatest hit” and a “hidden gem,” here, Sreemati Mitter provides readers with a broad overview of Journal of Palestine Studies (JPS) content on the topic of capitalism in Palestine. Mitter singles out Alexander Schölch’s classic, “The Economic Development of Palestine, 1856–1882” (1981) as a greatest hit and Peter Lagerquist’s haunting “Vacation from History: Ethnic Cleansing as the Club Med Experience” (2006) as a hidden gem. Read together, she argues, these two pieces help elucidate how powerful forces of global market capitalism converged on Palestine’s storied Mediterranean coast to shape its economy in the modern period.

JPS “Hidden Gems” and “Greatest Hits”: Fifty Years of Narrating Palestine

In 1971, the Journal of Palestine Studies (JPS) came into being. Published by the Beirut-based Institute for Palestine Studies, it soon became the organization’s flagship English-language publicati...

Introduction: Public Health and the Promise of Palestine

This introductory essay contextualizes the special collection of papers on the pandemic and seeks to map the terrain of extant public health research on Palestine and the Palestinians. In addition, it is a contribution in Palestine studies to a nascent yet propulsive conversation that has been accelerated by Covid-19 on the erasure of structures of violence, including those of settler colonialism and racial capitalism, within the discipline of epidemiology. Using public health as an analytic, this essay asks us to consider foundational questions that have long been sidelined in the public health discourse on Palestine, including the implications for health and health research of eliding ongoing settler colonialism. Rather than ignoring and reproducing their violence, this essay seeks to tackle these questions head-on in an attempt to imagine a future public health research agenda that centers health, and not simply survivability, for all Palestinians.

“What We Lost In Syria, We Had Already Lost In Palestine:” Uncovering Stories Across Generations of Palestinian Women Born in Syria

Knowledge about the stateless Palestinian population of Syria is limited, and the experiences of Palestinian women particularly remains uncovered. This paper argues that the loss of Syria as a safe home affects Palestinian woman born in Syria in several ways. The paper explores twelve constraints that bear an impact on women’s lives, including female experiences of statelessness, denial of “the right of return,” forced family separations and lack of access to uninterrupted family life, lack of freedom of movement, the inability to pass nationality onto children, denial of UNRWA services, lack of rights to political participation, unemployability, lack of access to protection as refugees, lack of rights to belong via citizenship, and experiences of racialisation. The structural constraints have disproportional implications with regards to the women’s age, education level, marital status, maternity status, and their current place of exile. The results presented here are based on women’s oral history as part of a decolonial intersectional feminist epistemology centralised in Palestine Studies. This paper illustrates a prolonged, transgenerational, and cross-continental marginalisation of Palestinian women from Syria, while also documenting their endeavours to speak up for their right to belong where they are, as well as to return to Palestine.

Permission to Narrate a Pandemic in Palestine

Permission to Narrate a Pandemic in Palestine

Palestine Unbound

Published each issue, this section strives to capture the tenor and content of popular conversations related to the Palestinians and the Arab-Israeli conflict, which are held on dynamic platforms unbound by traditional media. Therefore, items presented in this section are from a variety of sources and have been selected because they either have gone viral or represent a significant cultural moment or trend. A version of Palestine Unbound is also published on Palestine Square (palestinesquare.com), a blog of the Institute for Palestine Studies. Stories from this quarter (16 August–15 November 2019), which include a Palestine-based resistance movement to gender-based violence and a digital outpouring of respect for Palestinian grandmothers, deliver the unequivocal message that Palestinian women are determined to forge a just future where their voices are heard. Trending hashtags this quarter are #MyPalestinianSitty, #Kullna_Isra' al Ghrayyib (#WeAreAll_Israa_Ghrayeb), and #Tal3at.

The Right to Maim and Its Implications for Palestine Studies

This review essay is an attempt to read Jasbir K. Puar's The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability in Palestine studies. It argues that by revealing how settler power, colonial violence, and imperial havoc shape the mechanisms, structures, and systems that target resistance, The Right to Maim both contributes to and disrupts the field of Palestine studies. Exploring the implications of Puar's thesis about maiming as a tool of settler colonial violence within imperial frameworks, the book both disrupts the field of American studies and contributes to areas of inquiry around the study of Zionist violence against Palestine and Palestinians. This essay investigates the lines of Puar's argument in relation to Palestine and as a challenge to discrete conceptualizations of field studies.

Special Document File

A 2019 investigation by the Israeli NGO Akevot and Haaretz newspaper has uncovered official suppression of crucial documents about the Nakba in Israeli archives. The Journal of Palestine Studies is publishing print excerpts and a full online version of the buried “migration report,” which details Israel's depopulation of Palestinian villages in the first six months of the 1948 war, a document that clearly undermines official Israeli state narratives about the course of events. In methodical fashion, this report provides contemporaneous documentation of Israeli culpability in the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes and the systematic depopulation of so-called Arab villages in the first six months of the war. Alongside a discussion of key revelations in the newly available document, this introduction situates the broader pattern of erasure within historiographical debates over 1948 and questions of archival access. It examines how accounts of Israel's birth and Palestinian statelessness have been crafted in relation to the underlying question: who has permission to narrate the past?

Palestine Unbound

Published each issue, this section strives to capture the tenor and content of popular conversations related to the Palestinians and the Arab-Israeli conflict, which are held on dynamic platforms unbound by traditional media. Therefore, items presented in this section are from a variety of sources and have been selected because they either have gone viral or represent a significant cultural moment or trend. A version of Palestine Unbound is also published on Palestine Square (http://palestinesquare.com), a blog of the Institute for Palestine Studies. Stories from this quarter (16 May–15 August 2019) include the international boycott of the 2019 Eurovision Song Contest, held this year in Tel Aviv; the viral reaction to Palestinian American model Anwar Hadid's first music video, which was filmed in the occupied West Bank, and Palestinian's chagrin at the Israeli-sponsored visit Saudi influencer and Zionist activist Mohammed Saud. Trending hashtags this quarter are #DareToDreamTogether and #Motabi‘_saudi_fi_Filistin.

The First Intifada (Part II): The Road to Oslo

In the second instalment of this testimonial series, Khalid Farraj recounts his experiences as an active member of the uprising in the waning days of the First Intifada, and as a student organizer at Birzeit University during what was arguably the university's most contentious and significant student council elections. In the first instalment, published by the Journal of Palestine Studies in its autumn 2017 issue, Farraj described how the uprising was organized and how it fueled the hopes and dreams of an entire generation of Palestinians. Here, he recalls how the intifada wound down, evoking the new geopolitical context that formed the backdrop to the Oslo peace process; he also provides a granular account of the spring 1994 Birzeit student council elections and anecdotes from daily life that illuminate Oslo's false promises of freedom and self-determination for the Palestinians. This first-person account was translated by Anny Gaul and adapted for publication in English by Maia Tabet. It originally appeared in issue 115 (Summer 2018) of Majallat al-Dirasat al-Filastiniyya, JPS’ Arabic-language sister journal.

Abaher El Sakka. Gaza: A Social History under British Colonial Rule, 1917–1948. (Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 2018), 325 pp. US$12.00 (pbk). ISBN 978-614-448-040-3

Abaher El Sakka. Gaza: A Social History under British Colonial Rule, 1917–1948 . (Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 2018), 325 pp. US$12.00 (pbk). ISBN 978-614-448-040-3 The significance of this book is that it is one of the rare publications that examine the Gaza Strip from a precise and