Palestinian National Movement Research Articles

The Impact of Factional Discourse On the Palestinian National Cause

AbstractWith the Israeli war on Gaza raging, the Palestinian national movement must overcome divides that have weakened the cause. This study delves into the ramifications of divisive discourse on factionalism in Palestine, focusing on the dynamic between Hamas and Fatah. To do so, it investigates the effects of polarization on the sense of collective consciousness among university students in the occupied territories. Through a questionnaire designed to elicit the perspectives of these young adults, this research sheds light on the extent to which rhetoric employed to provoke or incite aggressive behavior has affected cohesion in Palestinian politics and society, as well as individuals’ beliefs in the possibility of a national movement. The article finds that in all of these facets, young adults have a high degree of cynicism and see divisive discourse reducing faith in institutions and leaders, causing rifts among friends and neighbors, and even leading them to think about emigrating. While the study was conducted before the Israel‐Hamas war that began in October 2023, which may force some compromise between factions, the survey results indicate the immense amount of work required to unify the movement.

Palestinian Political Prisoners in Israeli Jails: Stories of Resistance

The Palestinian cause was brought one more time to the agenda of global politics after the Gaza 2023 genocide. At the heart of the ongoing genocide was the question of Palestinian prisoners. One of the motives of the October 7, 2023, Hamas’ al-Aqsa Flood Operation was to release Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails by taking Israeli hostages. Palestinian prisoners have played an important role in the Palestinian national movement. This commentary highlights the stories of some of these prisoners and their role in the ongoing genocide in Gaza in addition to analyzing how they are an integral part of the Palestinian national movement. This commentary sheds light on the significant impact Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails have on current events by featuring a selection of the author's works, including “The Prisoners’ Diaries: Palestinian Voices from the Israeli Gulag,” “Dreaming of Freedom: Palestinian Child Prisoners Speak,” and “A Shared Struggle: Stories of Palestinian and Irish Hunger Strikers.

Gunning for Damascus: The US War on the Syrian Arab Republic

: Commentators across Anglophone media and academic institutions frequently have minimized the role of US-led imperialism in Syria. This trivialization has been made possible by the covert nature of the war’s initial phases. Therefore, this article aims to piece together some of the most conspicuous aspects of the empirical record of the war. It begins with a historical overview of major US attacks against Syria, as well as prevailing attitudes about Syria within the US National Security Establishment (NSE), between the end of the WWII and 2011. The second part aggregates and reviews the existing empirical record on the current war, beginning with the Bush Administration’s preparations for operations subsequently launched under the Obama Administration in 2011, then continuing to be waged under the following administrations. The conclusion offers some theoretical remarks on the wider regional context of the US’s aims in Syria, highlighting their connections to various developments elsewhere in the region, ranging from similar wars nearby, to recent political losses suffered by the Palestinian national movement.

Infrastructure sovereignty: battling over energy dominance in Jerusalem

ABSTRACT This article explores the intersection between nationality, urban space and critical infrastructures through the lens of urban infrastructure politics. It analyses the struggle between the Israeli government and the Palestinian national movement over the Jerusalem District Electricity Company between 1967 and 1987. Based primarily on archival documents and sources, we suggest that each political community aspires to obtain ‘infrastructure sovereignty’. Furthermore, we propose analysing the contestation in six socio-technical arenas of control: spatial, technical, regulative, financial, executive and discursive, thus exposing the practices used to obtain and challenge urban socio-technical control.

Putting Palestinian Agency First

Abstract While some political science scholarship and commentary on Palestinian politics engages Palestinian society as a topic of empirical scrutiny and theoretical significance, much of it either ignores society-level actors and dynamics or regards them as superfluous. Accordingly, society factors into the political story to the degree that it absorbs Israeli policies, is manipulated by self-interested factions, or is pushed to extremism by repression or religious radicalism. This special issue pushes against these trends. This introduction begins with an illustration of the problem, using the example of protest and how, for a century, many commentaries dismiss the societal groundings of mobilization. The essay then reviews a broad interdisciplinary scholarship that offers an alternative approach and the new contribution made by each of the five research articles in this issue. As a collection, these cutting-edge works put Palestinian society front and center as the driver of the Palestinian national movement, the anchor of Palestinian politics, and a key to the Arab-Israeli conflict without which no resolution is possible.

Worldmaking in the Palestinian Radio Stations (1965-1982): Revolutionary Love and Anticolonial Afterlives

The Palestinian national liberation movement achieved iconic status as one of the great anticolonial struggles of the twentieth century. Radio stations were an important part of the movement’s cultural infrastructure: producing regular news reports; disseminating songs, plays, and poetry about Palestine and the international anticolonial struggle; and creating a space where cadres from political parties, artists, and international delegations could meet to discuss revolutionary strategy and aims. Drawing on primary materials from the movement’s various radio stations—including memoirs, interviews, poems and photographs from its operators and contributors—alongside secondary readings, this article provides an overview of the political history of Palestinian radio stations between 1965 and 1982. Then, it traces the activities and interactions of revolutionaries within two of the radio stations during this time (Voice of Al-‘Asifah in Cairo and Voice of Palestine, Voice of the Palestinian Revolution in Beirut) to demonstrate their role in the production of a Palestinian revolutionary culture. This approach is used to illuminate how the Palestinian radio stations engaged in “anticolonial worldmaking,” in which political practice and revolutionary love entwined to create traditions of anticolonialism with afterlives beyond the material infrastructure and imagined spatiotemporal boundaries of the historic anticolonial moment.

In solidarity with Birzeit: The black, the white, and the gray

Birzeit University (BZU)—established in 1924 by the Nasir family—was born out of struggle and developed as a microcosm of the Palestinian national movement against the Zionist settler colonial state of Israel. This article explores specific moments of solidarity with BZU and beyond. I map out a genealogy of three modes of solidarity with Palestine analyzed in light of the political thought and praxis of Amilcar Cabral, Albert Camus, and Hannah Arendt. BZU has been an important and contested site for individual, collective, and universal solidarity initiatives, as gestures of solidarity have been made since 1974 and have continued since then, including the establishment of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel in 2004. In this article, I trace the shifting apathy, empathy, and sympathy expressed with the Palestinian struggle and BZU with a particular emphasis on initiatives by Jewish and Israeli intellectuals. Although this article is neither a chronology nor a moral taxonomy, it aims to produce an indigenous, de-orientalized, and de-colonized account of the meanings of solidarity with Palestine.

An initial Shiʿa debate on the Palestinian question

The following article will shed light on the initial phase of the Shiʿi encounter with the Palestinian question during the British mandate over Iraq. It will focus on the thought of a prominent Shiʿi cleric of the time, Muhammad Husayn Al Kashif al-Ghitaʾ, who published numerous fatwas in support of the Arabs of Palestine. In the context of Iraq's strong identification with Palestine, his strong rhetoric was not exceptionally unique. The novelty in Kashif al-Ghitaʾ's discourse was in mitigating its Shiʿi angle, viewing himself not only as a Shiʿi mujtahid but as an Arab and pan-Islamic leader, disregarding the historical apolitical position of Shiʿa Islam. Kashif al-Ghitaʾ embraced several circles of identifications: the Shiʿi community, the Arab world, and the Islamic nation, even incorporating the broader notion of humanity, reflecting his reformist agenda of activism, renewal, and pan-Islam. He also took an important stand within the Shiʿi community, given the diverse Shiʿi positions on Arabism. Any attempt at mobilizing the Arab and Muslim masses was welcomed by Hajj Amin al-Husayni as Kashif al-Ghitaʾ planted the first seeds in Shiʿi support for the Palestinian question—framed in a non-Shiʿa discourse—during this initial stage of building the Palestinian national movement.

The PLO and Communist Albania: Cold War Relations

This article examines Communist Albania’s support for the Palestinian cause and the relationships Tirana cultivated with the various groups comprising the Palestinian national movement. It explores the latter’s motivation for cultivating relations with Albania, a tiny Communist country that refused the logic of the bipolar world, both in its alliance with China and, later, through its disengagement from the East-West conflict and retreat into self-imposed isolationism. The article shows that, following Albania’s break with the Soviet bloc in the 1970s, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and specifically Fatah, was a more natural and logical choice for Tirana’s support than other, more self-avowedly left-wing Palestinian organizations. This study is based on primary sources from the archives of the Albanian foreign affairs ministry and the Party of Labour of Albania, as well as secondary sources such as accounts by members of the Albanian military who trained Fatah guerrilla fighters.

On the Decolonial Beginnings of Edward Said

This essay historicizes the formation of Edward Said's critique of imperial culture before the publication of Orientalism (1978) and examines how it framed the decolonial approach that made him world-renowned. Deeply influenced by the writings of Martinique-born psychiatrist and Algerian revolutionary Frantz Fanon, an Arab tradition of anti-orientalism, existentialist thought, and the Palestinian national movement, the New York-based intellectual reconceptualized the idea of decolonization in the late 1960s in a way that shifted contemporary thinking on social relationships between racial difference and empire from the individual and interpersonal to the collective and intercultural. Through his deep historical, epistemological, and phenomenological digs into orientalism's imperial culture and its myriad ways of being, Said made it his antiracist mandate to liberate consciousnesses from Eurocentrism and empower the universalization of decolonization.

The Impact of American Involvement on National Liberation: Polarization and Repression in Palestine and Iraqi Kurdistan

Abstract What is the effect of international involvement on national liberation movements? In the last few decades, movements transforming into states have increasingly operated in a globalized context and have had to contend with international pressures. However, the effects of international involvement on the internal dynamics of these movements should be more centrally considered. This paper thus examines the role of international involvement in the Kurdish national liberation movement in Iraqi Kurdistan and the Palestinian national liberation movement within the Palestinian territories. Specifically, I look at the role of the United States as the most powerful actor in the Middle East region. This paper argues that international involvement leads to authoritarian conditions within these state-building projects as well as paralyzes the efficacy and coherence of these movements. Specifically, international involvement creates polarization among political elites and a divergence between elite and public preferences, which creates authoritarian conditions.

Review

Review

JPS “Hidden Gems” and “Greatest Hits”: Repression and Dissent; Contentious Politics in Palestine

In this essay, Yousef Munayyer reflects on the politics of contentiousness through the lens of dissent and repression. He singles out Naseer Aruri’s “Resistance and Repression: Political Prisoners in Israeli Occupied Territories” (1979) as a JPS “hidden gem” and Gene Sharp’s “Intifadah and Nonviolent Struggle” (1989) as a “greatest hit.” Aruri’s piece, which has not garnered as much visibility as Sharp’s, pinpoints the ways in which political imprisonment, torture, and the weaponization of the law, as well as extraterritorial jurisdiction, are wielded by Israel as instruments of political repression. The “greatest hit,” by the late contemporary theorist of nonviolence Gene Sharp examines the Palestinian national movement’s resistance strategy eighteen months into the First Intifada.

Palestinian Non-Violent Resistance and the Apartheid Analogy

Israel/Palestine is a context in which the term “apartheid” keeps reappearing. As a historical analogy and cultural shorthand, it functions as a powerful Palestinian weapon when used to describe Israeli policy and actions in what amounts to a battle of narratives in the international arena. For a long time, Palestinians have been known primarily for their violent struggle, but employing loaded vocabulary to depict their lives and experiences under Israeli control is more than just using a certain word, it is a strategic choice. The earliest uses of the apartheid analogy have long been placed in the 1970s, however, evidence of its use can already be found before the United Nation’s General Assembly declared apartheid a crime in 1973. The first instances happened simultaneously with the development of the organized Palestinian national movement in the 1960s. Focusing on Fayez Sayegh (1922–1980), an academic and UN special rapporteur to the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, I argue such historical analogies need to be read as a non-violent tactic of resistance within the Palestinian struggle. Sayegh was almost singlehandedly responsible for introducing the apartheid analogy at the United Nations – my primary contextual interest. His analyses of racial segregation, however, were thoroughly countered, making his engagement for Palestine seem like a failure. And yet his early attempts to bring the apartheid analogy into wide circulation, along with the increasingly more complicated situation on the ground, show results. Today, the term has become common usage in describing Israel and puts enormous pressure on the country. The spread of the apartheid analogy shows that non-violent forms of Palestinian resistance, which in the 1960s and 1970s were almost invisible internationally, long existed.

Palestinian diplomats: an elite on the fringes of the Palestinian national movement?

Aux debuts du mouvement national palestinien, les representants de l’Organisation de liberation de la Palestine (OLP) etaient avant tout des membres proches du leadership palestinien, en particulier du Fatah et de Yasser Arafat. Mais le developpement d’une profession diplomatique reglementee ainsi que l’integration massive de fonctionnaires dans la nouvelle administration diplomatique au sein des Territoires palestiniens occupes apres les accords d’Oslo de 1993 favorisent l’emergence d’une nouvelle generation de diplomates. Ces nouveaux membres, censes representer le visage du professionnalisme de la diplomatie palestinienne, doivent composer avec des pratiques clientelistes qui se perennisent et faire valoir leurs capitaux propres pour legitimer leurs positions au sein de cet espace.

Monopolization of Violence in the Palestinian Struggle

ABSTRACT Palestinians currently find themselves involved in two conflicts: an external one with the state of Israel, and an internal one with the leadership of the Palestinian national movement itself. In this essay, we argue that violence is overly monopolized in both conflicts. Firstly, Israel can safely ignore the peace process and renege on political concessions as long as Palestinians lack a credible militant threat. This threat, in turn, has been neutralized in large part by the Palestinian Authority (PA) itself, which has offered Israel increasingly effective security cooperation over the past decade. We argue that the PA’s decision to deepen security cooperation with Israel – in spite of its unpopularity among Palestinians – results from its own territorial monopolies on violence, which render it unaccountable to its constituents. Only by reintroducing a credible, latent threat of political-militant competitors to the PA will Palestinians be able to regain bargaining leverage over their own leadership, restore conditionality to their security cooperation with Israel, and put the peace process back on course.

New Bottles, Old Wine

This study examines the prolonged Palestinian division. Its essential focus is to explore the various stages that the Palestinian political system has gone through and track its development from the British mandate up to the ongoing division between Fatah and Hamas. It aims to uncover the roles of regional and foreign actors which have destabilized the Palestinian national movement. Moreover, it demonstrates the role of the United Kingdom and Israel in inciting the divide and conquer principle during the British mandate, as well as the way the Palestine Liberation Organisation managed to maintain national unity from the 1960s. Finally, this study examines the real and historical reasons behind the current division between Fatah and Hamas, as well as the external factors that contribute to the continuity of the division.

Emergencia, articulación y declive del Movimiento Nacional Palestino durante el periodo de entreguerras

El Movimiento Nacional Palestino (MNP) del periodo de entreguerras es revisitado a la luz de una perspectiva comparada con los actores de su entorno y externos que, junto a las aportaciones de nuevos estudios, muestra sus debilidades y limitaciones estructurales para superar los desafíos coloniales a los que se enfrentó. Originado al unísono del nacionalismo árabe en los dominios otomanos en Oriente Próximo entre finales del siglo XIX y principios del XX, el MNP se enfrentó al reto material y existencial del proyecto colonial sionista avalado por Gran Bretaña, la potencia mandataria en Palestina. Sin consolidarse del todo, con una estructura fragmentada y un liderazgo débil, el MNP se opuso a dichos planes mediante una resistencia predominantemente pacífica durante cerca de dos décadas hasta la frustración de sus expectativas, con la gradual transformación demográfica y política de Palestina, que propició la radicalización de sus bases sociales y una de la más tempranas rebeliones anticoloniales del siglo XX. La represión y el desmantelamiento del MNP en 1939 dejó a la sociedad palestina exhausta y huérfana de un movimiento na- cional y dirección política en un momento crucial de su historia, cuando su territorio fue sometido a la partición.

Roundtable

Delegations of Black revolutionary leaders to the Middle East were a prominent feature of Black-Palestinian transnational solidarity at the height of the worldwide revolt against imperial domination in the decades following World War II. Though they never ceased, delegations have become a critical feature of solidarity practices once more. Unlike their historical predecessors, today's delegations are no longer organized in collaboration with the official organizations of the Palestinian national movement but between individuals and/or social justice organizations. In addition, the delegations are no longer unidirectional, as they now encompass visits by activists from Palestine and other “Palestinian geographies” in the Middle East to the United States. Finally, recent delegations have included one by indigenous youth to Palestine as well as several from the African continent to the Middle East. This roundtable, featuring leading organizers of recent delegations, aims to reveal the ruptures and continuities of a historical legacy. We intend for this roundtable to serve as an archive and a site of knowledge production.

Making Jerusalem the centre of the Muslim World: Pan-Islam and the World Islamic congress of 1931

ABSTRACTThis article investigates the place of Jerusalem in the interwar Pan-Islamic movement through a discussion of the history of how the city came to host the World Islamic Congress of 1931. Arguing against the conventional view that the congress was an unproductive diversion for the Palestinian national movement, it considers how the congress both promoted the Palestinian cause to the wider Muslim world and how it represented Jerusalem’s successful integration into interwar Islamic political networks. The imperial context is also considered at length, not only in terms of the imperial power’s treatment of Pan-Islamism but also in terms of how imperial connections helped the conference’s co-organizers Hajj Amin al-Husayni, the mufti of Jerusalem, and Shawkat ‘Ali, a leading Indian Pan-Islamist connect across national borders.