Palestinian Culture Research Articles

Conceptualising mass death through Palestinian texts amidst Gaza events 2023/24

ABSTRACT Following the Gaza events of 2023/24, this study examines how Palestinians understand mass death and mass destruction, exploring how can such a humanitarian catastrophe be framed within a coherent narrative. The focus is on the concept of sacrifice, analysed through a theoretical framework that distinguishes between meaningful sacrifices and absurd, meaningless deaths that categorises the victims as homo-sacer. Hence, this study aims to investigate the language and literature of the Palestinian people that regards to the 2023/24 Gaza events, and the way it re-conceptualises the mass death and destruction and its victims, between the concepts of sacrifice and homo-sacer. A sample of 120 literary and creative texts from the cultural magazine ‘Fusha for Palestinian Culture,’, 1 was examined using the methodology of thematic analysis. Four primary themes emerged from the texts: the active documentation, the speed and intensity of death and destruction, the form of death, namely handling of bodies and burial rituals, and lastly the implementation of myths from various traditions, including the duality of mythologising and demythologising Gaza and its inhabitants. I conclude that these four themes were elemental in the rhetoric process of sanctification of the mass and random death and destruction.

Clashing Decolonial and Sociocultural Factors: Revisiting Palestinian Queer Liberation Using the Events of Summer 2019

ABSTRACT Starting in the summer of 2019, a series of events saw queer Palestinians taking to the streets and appearing in mainstream Palestinian culture and media at an unprecedented scale. Drawing on 53 interviews with queer Palestinians, activists and nonactivists, this article critiques the queer organizing around these events as it appears in the two largest queer Palestinian organizations alQaws and Aswat. Because most research and activism on queer life in Palestine centers either the decolonial discourse against “homonationalism” within the Israeli nation-state expansion project and the Palestinian queer opposition to it, or the anti-orientalist critique of Western interventionist internationalization of queer rights, participants’ opinions and lived experiences challenge the scholarly and grassroot organizing tendency to ignore queer lives and voices who believe that targeting the sociocultural aspects of their queerness is an equally viable strategy for creating change. In doing so, this article sheds a new light on the clashing sociocultural and decolonial approaches—whereby clash refers to the debates regarding the ideologies and practices Palestinian activists and scholars find most ideal for their queer liberation.

Between the Hammer of Tradition and the Anvil of Occupation: Men and Masculinity in the Palestinian Occupied Territories

The current study focuses on the notion of masculinity in Palestinian culture and the challenges Palestinian civilian men face while attempting to fulfill their traditional gender-based roles within the context of occupation. The core elements of Palestinian manhood and masculinity are established through an in-depth examination of a body of proverbs that are still in circulation in Palestinian society today. Drawing on recent discussions related to masculinity, this study is the first of its kind to illustrate how proverbs contribute to the sociocultural construction of ideas on manhood and promote patriarchal views and sexist ideologies, which are harmful to men, women, and the family as the core unit of the social fabric. Through exploring the current living situation of civilian men in the occupied Palestinian territories, we aim to highlight the fact that the entrapment between the anvil of rigid traditions and the hammer of the oppressive practices of a military occupation negatively affects the wellbeing of men and often leads to displaced aggression and violence.

Land, indigeneity and archaeological ruins in Ottoman Palestine: the people of Beit Jibrin and the Palestine Exploration Fund

ABSTRACT Palestinian nationalism and visions of Palestine as a nation have, since the loss in 1948 of 78% of Mandate Palestine to the newly founded State of Israel, focused on notions of rootedness and connection to the land. However, as a result of the disruptions to Palestinian culture stemming from the refugee lives of a large proportion of the population, and the loss or fragmentation of many personal and institutional archives, sources for the quotidian details of rural life and how the relationship between land and people played out in different parts of historic Palestine are often scarce. This article experiments with the use of accounts by Western archaeologists as potential repositories of such information. This derives, the author argues, not just from the descriptive features of such writings, which they share with other commonly used sources such as travelogues and the memoirs of missionaries and other temporary residents, but also from the nature of archaeology itself as an activity which intimately, if at times controversially and destructively, engages with land and soil, and in which local people were often hired to carry out excavation on their own lands. While fully acknowledging the many issues raised by the use of imperial documents to consider the lives of indigenous and subaltern peoples, I seek to employ techniques such as reading against the grain to investigate how such archives can contribute granularity and detail to our understandings of rural life in Palestine at the end of the Ottoman period.

Digital Narratives for Academic Success: Enhancing Student Achievement through Storytelling

This study looked at how Digital Story-telling (DST) affected high school students studying English as a second language in terms of their learning motivationm, critical thinking, and academic achievement. This year-long study included 48 10th-grade students from two English courses using a quasi-experimental design with pretest and posttest assessments. Information technology-integrated instruction at two levels—lecture-style (for the comparison group) and DST (for the experimental group)—was the independent variable. In order to assess how well DST improves learning outcomes, both quantitative and qualitative data were gathered. This included critical thinking and English language competence tests as well as questionnaire answers about learning motivation. The collected data underwent examination through descriptive analysis, analysis of covariance (ANCOVA), multivariate analysis of covariance (MANCOVA), and qualitative content analysis. Our findings show that participants in the DST group surpassed those in the lecture-style ITII group concerning critical thinking, learning motivation, and English proficiency. Insights gathered from interviews underscore the noteworthy educational impact of DST. Both the teacher and students expressed that DST elevated their understanding of course content, heightened their curiosity, and enhanced their critical thinking abilities—essential skills for equipping students for the dynamic challenges of the 21st century. Incorporating stories from Palestinian culture, rooted in the real-life experiences of students, has been successfully undertaken to enhance the cultural relevance of DST. This addition brings a valuable dimension to the research, providing a more comprehensive understanding of how DST impacts students' learning experiences. By integrating these authentic narratives, the study successfully captures the cultural richness and diversity inherent in the students' backgrounds, thereby enriching the overall research findings.

Representations of Palestinian Culture in the Digital Public Sphere: A Semiotic Analysis of the Thobe and the Keffiyeh

Palestinian cultural identity has always been the flip side of the Palestinian people’s political resistance. While many studies have examined Palestinian culture from political and historical perspectives, limited academic works have investigated how social media plays a role in providing opportunities for Palestinians to resist negative stereotypes and provide alternative representations of their cultural symbols, including traditional customs. In its attempt to fill a gap in the existing body of knowledge, this article examines the contemporary representation of Palestinian culture, in particular, national garments—the thobe and keffiyeh —in the digital public sphere. Through employing theories of representation, the digital public sphere and applying semiotic analysis, this article follows four main X (formerly known as Twitter) hashtag-based trends that highlight traditional Palestinian garments (thobe and keffiyeh): #MyHistoricalThobe, #TweetYourThobe, #WorldKeffiyehDay, and #KeffiyehDay. Forty tweets extracted from top 10 X accounts, which first appeared in a hashtag search and were tweeted using these hashtags, were selected and coded. Using a semiotic analysis, the article deconstructed the tweets into connotation and denotation elements to better understand what the thobe and the keffiyeh mean collectively in the context of Palestinian cultural narrative. This research contributes to the debate concerning the relationship between interactive digital platforms and contemporary cultural resistance. It pushes forth the argument that shared representations of national cultural symbols are noticed when examining, and collectively reading, particular social media-based campaigns.

Herzl’s Zionism and Settler Colonialism in Palestine

This article examines Zionist claims to colonize Palestine and the role of Great Britain and prominent European Zionist Jews in the effort to establish Israel. Theodore Herzl, his lieutenants, and supporters personify Hannah Arendt’s phrase “the banality of evil” while acting and appearing as respectable statesmen, scientists, journalists, and businesspeople who advocated for freedom, liberation, and combating antisemitism. They deliberately collaborated with known antisemites and worked to dismantle ancient Jewish communities, relentlessly removing Jews out of their countries of origin, colonizing Palestine for the creation of a Jewish state, ethnically cleansing the indigenous people of Palestine, fabricating history, erasing Palestine and its long history, demeaning and oppressing the Palestinian people, and suppressing and appropriating Palestinian culture.

Translation as an Ideological Practice in Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin

This paper adopts Mona Baker’s narrative theory to examine the translation of Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin. In her work in English, Abulhawa provides her autonomous account of the story of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. The paper uses narrative theory to explore how the translator reframes the conflict by accentuating the parts portraying Palestinians as victims and by changing certain aspects in the representation of the Palestinian culture in Arabic. The researchers detect some patterns of interferences that influence readers’ reception of the Israeli occupation following the 1948 events (The Nakba). The translator seems to bring the text back to its original homeland by making amendments compatible with her own views and with the norms of target Arab readers. Keywords: Translation; Narrative Theory; Reframing; Activism, Ideology.

Embroidering Palestine: Tatreez, cultural resistance, and female labour in Palestinian American graphic narratives

ABSTRACT This essay examines the use of tatreez, Palestinian embroidery, in two Palestinian American graphic narratives: Leila Abdelrazaq’s Baddawi and Marguerite Dabaie’s The Hookah Girl and Other True Stories. By including tatreez as a visual motif in their works and referencing it as a cultural practice, both authors demonstrate the importance of continuing the traditional practice of embroidery in order to create connections with Palestinian culture and Palestine as a homeland in the diaspora. However, they also emphasise the need for adapting tatreez to the twenty-first century by drawing it as a versatile and adaptable signifier. Braided together with different symbols of nationalism and resistance, tatreez becomes a critical visual space to unpack the complex relations that Palestinians in the diaspora have with Palestine as a homeland. Thus, Abdelrazaq and Dabaie show that tatreez not only establishes a connection with the past but that it equally functions as a conscious forward-looking approach to engage with Palestinian culture, an approach that draws attention to the materiality of female cultural resistance in its everyday forms and the significant role this type of resistance plays in defining Palestinian identities in the United States and the wider Palestinian diaspora.

CHALLENGING CULTURAL APPROPRIATION: PALESTINIAN CULTURAL IDENTITY IN RADHWĀ ‘ĀSYŪR’S NOVEL ATH-THANTHŪRIYYAH

This article aims to describe the cultural elements of Palestinian people in Radhwā ‘Āsyūr's novel, ath-Thanthūriyyah, which depicts Palestinian refugees' misery, Palestinian culture, and the struggle to defend Palestinian national identity as experienced by its main character, Ruqayyah. This study uses a literary anthropology perspective through the seven cultural elements defined by Koentjaraningrat. It employs a descriptive-qualitative approach with the data collected in the from words, phrases, sentences, and dialogues in the novel. According to the findings, there are seven elements of Palestinian culture, namely language, knowledge system, technology system, art, religious system, social organization, and livelihood system These cultural elements are presented as a form of resistance to cultural appropriation that happens because of the Israeli occupation.

"Tik Tok" Digital Platform and its role in cultural Cultivation: An analytical study

"Tik Tok" digital platform is considered one of the platforms that attracted the attention of followers, despite its recent establishment, as it collected the most important elements of attraction for followers, so it was distinguished from other platforms and obtained the follow-up of many groups of society in countries of the world. This study aims to analyze the visual posts on the "Tik Tok" platform, published by the most followed Palestinian accounts, to understand the cultural dimensions of these posts and discuss their role in contemporary cultural orientation. The study relied on the analytical descriptive approach, as it analyzed the visual posts produced and published during the specified study period according to several adopted analysis units. The study concluded that the most followed Palestinian accounts on the TikTok platform focus on providing comic content to their followers at a high rate, while interest in Purposeful content declines to a few percentages; this is reflected in the superficial and non-serious culture that followers receive. In addition, social content is the most popular form of content. The study found that colloquial language is used in the accounts that were studied. Also, the most followed accounts revolve around the Palestinian culture in the various videos, but the videos are far from values; most of them do not have meaning and significance, and their goal is laughter and entertainment only, besides their devoid of patriotism videos, although their publication coincided with important national events. Keywords: Cultural Cultivation, Digital Platforms, "Tik Tok".

Palestinian law to protect family and prevent violence: challenges with public opinion

The Palestinian Family Protection Law was submitted for ratification in November 2020 after much collaboration between advocates, attorneys and governmental officials, as well as community and international organizations. The draft bill addresses a myriad of social issues affecting vulnerable populations in the West Bank of Palestine, including: the legal age for marriage; gender inequality in inheritance; divorce; gender-based violence; and domestic violence. However, immediate feedback from local religious scholars, with increasing pressure from the general Palestinian population, was deeply divided, with negative perceptions relating to the perceived ‘foreign’ nature of the regulations and criticism that the law was not in accordance with Palestinian culture and Islamic Law. This criticism led to two years of inactivity regarding the bill. The current study sought to evaluate the attitudes, behavior and beliefs regarding the underlying human rights issues and assumptions concerning gender, marriage, and domestic violence that could be found in the codices of the proposed legislation as well as among the general population of Palestine. The data demonstrates that the population sampled viewed the underlying premise of the Family Protection Bill negatively. Individuals with a graduate degree or above tended to view the bill with less negativity, whilst females viewed the bill more positively than males. The results of this study illustrate that, with regard to legislation that relates to family life in Palestine, there is a wide gap between the points of view held by human rights advocates and NGO’s and those held by the general population. To further the agenda of family protection community education relating to social issues, the fundamentals of Sharia law and national sovereignty may be needed so as to clarify the core Islamic beliefs in relation to human rights and oppression, as well as to increase Palestinian ownership of the family protection agenda.

اإلبقاء على موسيقى أم كلثوم في الرحلة مع السندباد وأوليسيس في سفينة جبرا إبراهيم جبر

By drawing on recent approaches to music listening, spatial and postcolonial theories, this paper examines the significance of various instances of intertextuality in Jabra Ibrahim Jabra’s The Ship. It argues that intertextuality in the novel enables the characters to sustain a sense of community and national solidarity immune to closure and disintegration in exile. This paper shows that the intertexts in the novel are resources of power, strength and agency necessary to fend off alienation and loss, and the intertextual fabric functions as a transformational space from denial into presence, from helplessness into determination. The paper concludes that (inter)textuality in the novel reflects a creative mode of resistance in Palestinian culture.

Traduction des toponymes : Outils lexico-narratifs ou obligation sociopolitique ? Le cas de la traduction des toponymes dans The Times of Israël et WAFA

Translation of Toponyms: Lexico-narrative tools or sociopolitical obligation? Translations of place names in The Times of Israel and WAFA as a case study 
 Why is the city of al-Qods called « al-Qods » for the Palestinians and « Yerushalaim » for the Israelis, why is a street crossing this city called « Saladin Street » by the Palestinians and « Tsahal Street » by the Israelis, what happened at the top of the Temple Mount, or on the Esplanade of the Mosques/ al-Haram Ash Sharif? For more than 100 years, toponymy has become one of the criteria specific to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Through Mona Baker's narrative approach, the article investigates the specificity of the translation of conflicting designations and examines the consciousness of translators in relation to the narrative role of toponyms in the construction and circulation of Palestinian culture and identity and their legitimation on an international scale. We have therefore chosen the Israeli newspaper the Times of Israel and the Palestinian news agency WAFA to highlight these issues. Toponymy serves to preserve the collective memory, since a name contains information about the past of the place, about the people who live there, and its reputation. It is a springboard that takes us beyond the name itself as a linguistic sign. In this spirit and based on deep historical and religious links that link designations to a particular culture, place names serve to legitimize and/or delegitimize the stories that surround them. Translation is therefore far from being an apolitical act, which is why we will try to highlight the treatment given to conflicting toponyms in translation through the analysis of some examples taken from the media mentioned. We will adopt Mona Baker's approach to the analysis of translated passages. In other words, this article is an attempt to understand the narrative role of media translation when it comes to place names. The methodology is based on the potential relation between space, conflict and ideology. Multiple reflections are discussed, but we opted for the one that gives justice to the role of translators as resistants. We particularly mobilized Mona Baker’s strategy « framing by labeling » in an attempt to explain the initial narratives and the contribution of their translations whether to guarantee their continuity and/or repression beyond the linguistic borders. This is to finally try to bring answers to our main research question: What is the status of the translator / narrator specialized in media translation? Does he opt for domestication or foreignization in his translations of place names? Based on the observation of some selected passages and their respective translations in English and Arabic, the objective of our work of research is to highlight the semantic charge of the disputed double designations related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Through a comparative analysis of the strategies adopted in two different media outlets, we have demonstrated their preferences in their translations of place names, while explaining the narrative impact of these names on their readers according to the initial discourses they mobilize. In this spirit, we started with a brief introduction to explain the specificity of names translation then explained our research question accompanied with its source of inspiration. Then, we demonstrated the specificity of our case of study from a historical and political point of view, before we moved to a deeper explanation from a narrative point of view. To guarantee a better understanding of this aspect, we found it appropriate to represent the editorial line of each media as well as the identity issues behind place names. Finally, we moved to a thorough analysis of place names and their translations in The Times of Israel and WAFA before we represent our comparative analysis and the answers to our research question.

Paremiology of Palestinian Month-Related Proverbs: Inimitability and Translatability

Proverbs are deemed to be the products or by-products of the culture, a predominant type of which is, what we may term, Month-Related Proverbs (MRPs). The present article examines sociolinguistic (MRPs) utilised by the doyen(ne) of Palestinians, consisting of a corpus of thirty MRPs which are drawn from ṣaḥīfat al-Quds (Al-Quds Daily Newspaper), Dictionary of Palestinian Proverbs (1999) by Lubani and A Dictionary of Modern Lebanese Proverbs, with conflated Arabic proverbs with English translation by Freyha (1995). The article shows the functions of MRPs are mainly (1) to take great pride in their cultural heritage that seemed to have passed from one generation to the next; (2) to recapitulate various aspects of peasant life— memories of a bygone age; (3) to warn against unfavourable weather conditions over a year. The article examines the translations in view of Nord’s (1991 and 1997) documentary translation and instrumental translation. The findings of the article show that documentary translation seems to be considered the most appropriate translation method opted for to inculcate the values of Palestinian culture in Target Language (TL) audience.

A Semiotic Analysis of Novel Faces in Hot Water by Abdallah Tayeh

The aim of this study is to investigate the semiotics of the cover, title, characters and the settings of Faces in Hot Water (1996) by the Palestinian writer Abdallah Tayeh. The study shows how important is semiotics in aesthetically and cognitively shaping the novel. The study adopts a qualitative research method by applying semiotic analysis to create a new understanding of the literary text and its interpretations. Built on semiotic analysis, the writer embodies the prevailing norms, traditions and culture of the Palestinian society. The writer also reveals semantic signs that are not visible. He in fact captured the implied meaning behind the semiotic text. The research shows that Tayeh uses many semiotic signs to refer to the various concepts of issues related to the Palestinian culture, society and beliefs.

Palestinian Bereaved Mothers of Martyrs: Religious and National Discourses of Sacrifice and Bereavement

This article, which employs interviews as its central methodology, examines Palestinian mothers’ reproduction of, opposition to, the Palestinian culture of martyrdom. Palestinian nationalist discourses encourage mothers to produce fighters and to re-produce the religious and national discourses on martyrdom by receiving their sons’ acts of martyrdom with celebration which signifies their adherence to the hegemonic masculine model of bereavement based on emotional restraint and expressing the necessity of martyrdom. Based on this logic, religious and national discourses function as a defensive mechanism that helps mothers to cope with their loss. However, some mothers prefer the well-being of their families over the abstract ideals of heroism and sacrifice, opposing the religious and national discourses that shape the Palestinian collective identity. While the mothers who perpetuate the culture of sacrifice are promoted socially, politically and symbolically, those who express their grief and condemnation of this culture are deemed traitorous and un-Islamic.

Developing Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC) in English for Palestine (EFP) Textbooks for Grade Seven

This research aims to investigate Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC) in English for Palestine (EFP) textbooks A and B for grade seven. It adopts Byram's (1997) model as a theoretical framework for analyzing the content of grade seven textbooks. It also explores the categories and levels of cultural content to develop intercultural communicative teaching in English teaching. Further, it pinpoints different strategies to develop and promote ICC in teaching. In this qualitative research, the researcher uses content analysis. The findings show that the analysis of the Palestinian English textbooks for grade seven A and B develops ICC to a great extent. Moreover, many interactive strategies and pedagogical methods are used in these textbooks to develop ICC such as role play, poems, reports, emails, and conversations. Based on the research findings, English for Palestine textbooks for grade seven increase the awareness towards the Palestinian culture and deepen students' recognition of their identity, language and religion. It is concluded that these textbooks successfully enhance students' critical awareness and understanding of other cultures besides having a sense of pride of their own culture. In light of the research findings, the researcher recommends conducting empirical researches to measure the impact of ICC on students' language proficiency form the stakes holders' perceptions in the field of English language teaching.

Suppression of the Female Name in Contemporary Palestine

Palestinian female identity has been constructed and reconstructed as an amalgamation of patriarchal-oriented roles (daughter, wife, mother, sister, grandmother or even aunt), demonstrating women’s exclusion from the realm of men who have proper names to locate them within a family group. This article examines the suppression of the female name and the use of reference and terms of address as euphemisms for women in contemporary, non-urban Palestine. While the exclusion of the female name from the public sphere fuels feminists’ criticism of this patriarchal dehumanization, objectification and commodification of the female, we contend that the possibility of undermining Palestinian patronymic culture is shattered because women publicly advertise themselves as the sister, mother, daughter and wife of someone and, hence, their participation in the conventionally male-dominated sphere of politics upholds their subordination.

The Pro-Palestinian Transnational Advocacy Network in Malaysia

A powerful pro-Palestinian transnational advocacy network has emerged in Malaysia since the Gaza war of 2008–09. Taking the cooperation between the Palestinian Cultural Organization Malaysia, the Islamist Hamas, and the United Malays National Organisation as an example, I analyze the network and argue that the three actors are engaging there to promote the Palestinian struggle for an independent state but at the same time, each actor is using the network to pursue its own interests.