Palestinian Self-determination Research Articles

“Our Identity is Our Dignity”: Digital Transformations: Palestinian Aspirations, Idealism, Reality and Pragmatism

This article reports on a collaborative project for the digital innovation of language teaching in Palestine, and it argues for the necessity of mobile learning to circumvent disruption created by the Israeli occupation causing challenges that result in marginalisation and disenfranchisement of opportunity. This partly occurs through the oppression of a sovereign curriculum that supports Palestinian self-determination. This oppression is against both the United Nations Development Goals protected rights for education and the Palestinian Ministry’s vision for a society with an education sector that embraces the use of technology to invigorate the value of its culture, produce knowledge and promote emancipation. The article proposes the integration of digital technologies with student-centred learning to enhance and support transformation through three main elements: 1. Digital competence to develop confidence and agency in teachers; 2. Continuous teacher learning to develop autonomy and collaboration within organisations; 3. Problem-solving competencies, which can result in continuous improvement loops and local solutions to barriers. This article will resonate with those recognising the need for critical theory to challenge policy and practice where it deepens disadvantage. It draws upon the voices of 20 teachers from four higher education institutions in Palestine, who reflect on the barriers to innovation and a reclaiming of educational terrain.

Emotions and a Genre of Jewish Politics: American Jewish Advocacy for Israeli-Palestinian Peace, 1967–1977

ABSTRACT: It has long been held that American Jewish support for Israel is underwritten by a prevailing sense of emotional attachment to the Jewish state. Focusing on Jewish activist groups formed in the aftermath of the 1967 war, this article shows that emotions also played a central role in American Jewish mobilization for what is now termed the "two-state solution" to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. An entire "genre" of American Jewish political activism has emerged since 1967 to urge Israel to relinquish captured territories while embracing the Jewish state using emotional terminology. Conforming to a broader emotional regime as a way of staying within the bounds of the constructed American Jewish emotional community, generations of American Jewish activist organizations have emphasized love for Israel while simultaneously pushing for Palestinian self-determination. American Jewish advocates for a two-state solution typically argue that their commitment to a peaceful and stable future for the Jewish state drives them to support the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Using oral histories and archival documents, this article offers a new perspective on such activism during its first decade (1967-1977).

India’s policy towards the Arab–Israeli conflict, the Palestinian issue and Israel: the Indira Gandhi years

During her tenure as prime minister of India, Indira Gandhi reaffirmed India’s commitment to three interconnected and overlapping factors that shaped the country’s early regional outreach: Muslims, Arabs and Pakistan. Decisions by the government on the Arab–Israeli conflict, the Palestinian issue and (non-)relationship with Israel were usually ‘path dependent’. Mrs Gandhi, well aware of the significance of the ‘Muslim vote’ to her electoral victories, reaffirmed India’s support for Arabs and the Palestinian cause against Israel, thereby appeasing her domestic Muslim constituency. The establishment of Pakistan as an avowedly Islamic state, combined with the Indo-Pakistani conflict over Kashmir, forced the two countries to compete for the support of Muslim Arab states. Indira Gandhi cultivated Arabs by diplomatically supporting them in their conflict with Israel, first by strongly condemning Israel during episodes of conflict between the two parties and then by unequivocally supporting Palestinian self-determination through diplomatic recognition of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Despite Mrs Gandhi’s pro-Arab statements, India did not receive the same level of diplomatic support from Arab countries, which favoured Pakistan in Indo-Pakistani subcontinental conflicts. In contrast, Israel provided India with both military and diplomatic assistance. Despite this, and despite repeated calls from the opposition, Mrs Gandhi refused to normalise relations with Israel, believing that a pro-Arab stance would be more beneficial to national interests. The attitude portrayed India as completely partisan, preventing it from acting as a mediator in the Arab–Israeli conflict, which was a stated goal of India’s West Asia policy.

The Trials of Rasmea Odeh: How a Palestinian Guerrilla Gained and Lost U.S. Citizenship by Steven Lubet

Reviewed by: The Trials of Rasmea Odeh: How a Palestinian Guerrilla Gained and Lost U.S. Citizenship by Steven Lubet Angela Berliner Steven Lubet, The Trials of Rasmea Odeh: How a Palestinian Guerrilla Gained and Lost U.S. Citizenship. Fairfax, VA: George Mason University Press, 2021. Pp. 281. $34.95. The author weaves a tale of two narratives. The central figure in this legal exposé, Rasmea Odeh, appears alternately as a Palestinian refugee fighting for the liberation of her people and a remorseless murderer sentenced to life in prison for her involvement in a supermarket bombing that killed two students and injured many more. Odeh plays the roles of both victim and perpetrator, guerrilla and terrorist. The author deftly investigates Odeh’s murder conviction in Israel and her trial in the U.S., decades later, for unlawful procurement of citizenship after lying about her prior sentence on her visa application and naturalization exam. In the first seven chapters, Lubet gives an overview of Odeh’s early years when she joined the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a Marxist-Leninist, pan-Arab organization dedicated to the destruction of Israel. Through her involvement with the PFLP, she took part in the Friday morning bombing of the largest supermarket in Jerusalem, killing Edward Joffe and Leon Kanner, agricultural students at Hebrew University. Odeh was arrested after Israeli soldiers discovered weapons and explosives in her home. Her interrogation was brutal, and she soon confessed. A military court found Odeh guilty, and she was given two life sentences in prison but served only ten years before the government released her in a prisoner exchange between Israel and the PFLP. The second half covers Odeh’s trial in the U.S. From the beginning of her legal troubles, Odeh and her supporters (primarily from the left-leaning, anti-Israel crowd) sought to politicize the case and put the Jewish state on trial. Her defense team relied on a mix of “truth, exaggeration, and outright myth” to paint a one-sided portrait of Odeh as a victim of the “Israeli lobby,” reframing her prosecution as a story of prejudice against Palestinians and Muslims. The author is a law professor, so it is no surprise that the book’s biggest strength is his ability to write about Odeh’s trials with such precision that a reader need not have prior knowledge of the legal system. Lubet proves himself the John Grisham of nonfiction crime as he expertly delineates the facts of the case from the fiction propagated by Odeh and her supporters. In a story that could easily elicit bias, Lubet wisely does not give his opinion but presents the evidence with the fairness of a judge. [End Page 615] While Lubet briefly mentions the Antisemitism in Odeh’s upbringing and the PFLP, he only hints at how anti-Jewish fallacies served her U.S. defense. The Palestinian-rights activists who supported her resorted to conspiracy theories of undue Jewish power’s influencing the American legal system to persecute an innocent woman, ironically in the presence of family members of the murdered students. For the uninitiated into the left-wing paradigm of the world’s oldest hatred, a reader might miss its relevance to this story. To assuage this potential misunderstanding, the author could have included a paragraph describing the function of Antisemitism in the guise of anti-Zionism among social justice movements. This book reveals how a breakdown in interideological dialogue perpetuates false narratives and demonization of the other. Outside the Levant, the worldwide obsession with the Israel-Palestine conflict reflects personal ideology more than complex understanding. Side-taking is de rigueur. Lubet’s balanced recounting of Odeh’s trials juxtaposes the anti-Israel bias of her supporters and reminds any lucid activist of the Antisemitism that threatens to delegitimize movements for Palestinian self-determination. Angela Berliner Los Angeles Valley College, Valley Glen, CA Copyright © 2022 Journal of Ecumenical Studies

“Tyranny of the Veto”: PLO Diplomacy and the January 1976 United Nations Security Council Resolution

ABSTRACT Scholars have long debated when the Palestinian Liberation Organisation [PLO] first accepted the international consensus on a two-state settlement as a resolution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. This analysis contributes to the debate by closely examining PLO diplomatic support for a draft United Nations [UN] Security Council resolution along the lines of the two-state consensus in January 1976, its passage prevented by an American veto. Drawing upon declassified documents in American, UN, and British archives, this analysis argues that the record of negotiations at the Security Council strongly indicates that by the mid-1970s, the PLO was ready to accept the terms of a two-state settlement, even as the United States and Israel persistently rejected a negotiated settlement inclusive of Palestinian self-determination.

Navigating the Time of Arab Jerusalem: A Perspective from Within

For many Palestinians, the colonial denial of Palestinian self-determination in an independent nation-state has rendered futile the very notion of a future. But it is imperative to challenge the colonial logics that produce the native’s future as always already failed, unachievable, or impossible. This essay examines snippets of the life of Arab Jerusalem between the two major ruptures of 1948 and 1967 to deconstruct colonial and nationalist epistemologies of time and to challenge the persistently violent present and its domination of Palestinian pasts and futures. Using as its lens the memories and attachments of Jerusalemites who lived, worked, and struggled in the city, the essay examines the ways in which they thought of, imagined, produced, fulfilled, or were deprived of a future—in other words, how Jerusalemites shaped futurity. Such a nonlinear unfolding of time challenges dominant perceptions of the Nakba as constituting a clean break between past and present.

Neither vertical nor horizontal: Kissinger and Israeli-Jordanian disengagement mediation

Israeli-Jordanian disengagement talks saw Israel promote its plan of West Bank ‘Jordanization’, to curtail Palestinian self-determination. This failed. However, it served as the blueprint for future failed autonomy schemes. The pragmatic approach taken by Kissinger in these negotiations, also counters narratives portraying Kissinger as dogmatically opposed to Palestinian self-determination.

A short history of Zionist and Israeli political Marxism

ABSTRACT In this article, I argue that despite seemingly intractable disagreements between different Zionist and Israeli political Marxists, they share a common theoretical and political perspective, which cannot simply be summed up as the commitment to a set of universal values. Rather, I argue that common to all Zionist and Israeli political Marxists is a commitment to a particular struggle at their historical moment, only through which universal socialism is claimed to be achievable. I use three examples from different historical periods to demonstrate this thesis. I argue that for Ber Borochov in 1907, the commitment to Zionist immigration and settlement is what enables Jews to participate in a universal socialist revolution; For Moshe Sneh, writing in 1954, only by embracing Israeli patriotism can Israelis work toward socialism; and for Tamar Gozansky in 1986, it is the commitment to Palestinian self-determination that makes possible universal anti-capitalist struggle. Thus, for each of these political Marxisms, universal socialism is only achievable through a commitment to some concrete particular struggle, one that is not expressed in terms of class.

Was and is Zionism Just? On the Morality of Jewish Self-rule in the Land of Israel

Of all ethnocultural conflicts over territory, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is the most important. Even though deeply reflecting on it was challenging and writing about it made my hands quiver due to its controversial nature and global import, I am very grateful to have been given the chance to do so by reacting to the thought-provoking theory that Chaim Gans develops in A Political Theory for the Jewish People.1 As is expected of an academic exchange of this nature, I will focus on issues of disagreement. But before doing so, I want to stress that this is a brilliant theory. Its background theory of nationalism is Gans’s The Limits of Nationalism.2 The two Zionist applications of that theory, his earlier Just Zionism3 and A Political Theory for the Jewish People,4 provide a complete moral compass providing answers to all major moral questions with respect to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict—including the justice of the 1948 borders, the 1967 borders, the new settlements, the rights of Israeli Arabs, Palestinian self-determination, the Law of Return, Palestinian refugees, etc. As of now, no theorist of Israeli/Palestinian questions of justice can ignore Gans’s theory on the matter, but even beyond the specific Israel/Palestine issue, I don’t know of any other books that have so comprehensively and lucidly theorized an entire country’s founding and current state according to principles of justice.

Richard Falk: “Citizen Pilgrim” in the Role of UN Special Rapporteur

Richard Falk's quest to combine academic scholarship with political activism is witnessed throughout his lifework, but perhaps especially so during his tenure as United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, a position he held from 2008 to 2014. Falk is a vocal critic of Israel's occupation and a staunch supporter of Palestinian selfdetermination, positions that have drawn strong condemnation from Israel and its supporters, but praise from Palestinians and their supporters. There is little doubt that Falk's work has had a huge influence on public debate and activism pertaining to this issue, both within Israel-Palestine as well as globally. This article outlines Falk's scholarship and activism regarding Palestine, analyzes the post of UN special rapporteur in general, reviews both criticism of and support for Falk's work, and assesses Falk's concept of the “citizen pilgrim.” It concludes by reflecting on what this reveals about the experience of praxis for politically engaged academics.

Beyond Camp David: Jimmy Carter, Palestinian Self-Determination, and Human Rights

Beyond Camp David: Jimmy Carter, Palestinian Self-Determination, and Human Rights

On Message

Anyone interested in finding critical perspectives on the Israel-Palestine conflict at a US university will readily recognize the seemingly unavoidable dynamic that the presence of a Palestinian or pro-Palestinian speaker on campus will generate. The period of questions and discussion following the speaker’s talk will be more or less hijacked by audience members who insist upon presenting the speaker as one-sided, as having ignored or misrepresented the Israeli viewpoint, and, therefore, as being in need of correction. While such responses are typically coded as demands for fairness and equal time, the effect is to normalize particular pro-Israel political positions and to silence dissenting viewpoints by policing the boundaries of acceptable or recognizable discourse on the topic of the Israel-Palestine conflict, with the clear implication that any discourse of Palestinian self-determination or cultural and intellectual autonomy must centrally incorporate Israeli view-points on the Palestinian people, without reciprocity. I argue that this kind of exchange, or failure of critical exchange, should be understood in the context of larger trends in American political culture, the ongoing transformation of the public sphere in mass-mediated societies, and resulting shifts in norms of public speech, shifts that pose significant challenges to the norms of academic discourse.

“The American People Know So Little”: The Palestine Arab Refugee Office and the Challenges of Anti-Orientalism in the United States, 1955–1962

This paper explores the activities of the New York-based Palestine Arab Refugee Office (PARO), the first unofficial Palestinian-led organization that defended Palestinian self-determination in the United States following the establishment of Israel. Based mainly on the private papers of PARO public-relations officer Sami Hadawi, the memoirs and writings of PARO president Dr. Izzat Tannous, as well as rare PARO publications (such as its monthly newsletter), it examines how this small, two-person operation attempted to culturally decolonize U.S. state and society, and thus Palestinians in the process.

A Chronicle of Failure Foretold: The UK, Israel and Arms Sales to Argentina in the Era of the Falklands War

ABSTRACTIn spite of fierce British protests, Israel supplied Argentina with arms both during the Falklands war and with greater intensity after the fighting. While the weapons sales were vital for Israel's economy and its arms industry, recently declassified papers suggest that the Begin government viewed the arms supplies to Argentina as a bargaining chip to exert pressure on Britain to halt its own sale of weapons to Israel's Arab adversaries and to end London's arms embargo against the Jewish State. Britain's restrictions on arms sales had long cast a shadow over Anglo-Israeli ties, and Israeli resentment towards Britain was exacerbated by anger over London's strong condemnation of Israel's invasion of Lebanon and its leading involvement in the EEC Venice Declaration of June 1980 which recognized Palestinian self-determination and a role for the Palestinian Liberation Organization. The Israelis also perceived the arms supplies as a means to influence the junta in its treatment of Argentina's Jews. Yet, there was actually a rise in the level of anti-Semitism in Argentina during the period in question. At the same time, Britain's approach in attempting to dissuade its allies from selling arms to Argentina was riddled with inconsistencies and ultimately misconceived.

‘That’s the beauty of it, it’s very simple!’ Animal rights and settler colonialism in Palestine–Israel

ABSTRACTThis article examines the contemporary animal rights movement in Palestine–Israel and compares Jewish Israeli activism to Palestinian activism to illuminate the ways in which the settler colonial context shapes animal politics. The article argues that human–animal relationships constitute a significant dimension through which settler colonialism is expressed, engaged with, and resisted. As such, drawing on ethnographic material, it explores how different approaches to animal activism can obscure or reveal the racial and colonial relations they are bound up with. It considers how Jewish Israelis frame animal rights in non-intersectional ways, as a simple, single-issue movement that can be abstracted from human politics and power relations, while the Palestinian Animal League in the occupied West Bank weaves animal activism with the decolonial struggle for Palestinian self-determination in an intersectional spirit. The article hence suggests that, to a great extent, animal politics follows the patterns set up by the settler colonial regime, with the type of advocacy on behalf of animals being shaped by the sides taken within the settler state. Instances that trouble and complicate this settler/native binary are explored as well as the possibilities of coalitional politics.

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.

In Solidarity

This article examines how Chicago Puerto Rican independentistas imagine the colonial relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States through an analysis of their articulations and actions with and on behalf of Palestinian self-determination in the 1970s and early 1980s. Drawing primarily on the writings of individuals imprisoned for alleged participation in the Puerto Rican armed clandestine organization Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (FALN; Armed Forces of National Liberation), this article argues that Chicago independentistas constructed a reimagined geography of liberation that simultaneously declared solidarity while also disrupting narratives of US exceptionalism—what we might term the articulation of Palestine in the Puerto Rican political imaginary. Ultimately, it contends that we move beyond the aura of exceptionality that so often characterizes Puerto Rico's ambiguous political status by locating demands for Puerto Rican independence within a transnational, comparative framework of anticolonial and anti-imperial resistance movements.

Neither Two States nor One: The Palestine Question in the Age of Trump

In the opening weeks of his administration, President Donald Trump overturned a longstanding U.S. commitment to territorial partition and a two-state model for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu seized the opportunity to demand “overriding security control over the entire area west of the Jordan River” while exploring regional approaches that bypass the Palestinians. At the same time, a host of Israeli politicians are reviving older models such as limited autonomy without political sovereignty and partial territorial annexation, or advocating for other forms of separation with Israel’s continued control. The resulting middle ground—neither two states nor one—poses a great risk to Palestinian self-determination. By situating recent developments in a broader historical context going back to the autonomy plan of Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, this essay provides an overview of a shifting political discourse and examines the consequences for the fate of the Palestinians today.

The United States and Israel

The United States and Israel

How to (Not) Walk the Talk: The Demand for Palestinian Self-Determination as a Challenge for the European Neighbourhood Policy

The aim of the current article is to analyse the challenges for the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) to pursue a meaningful and effective policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on four dimensions: the history of European foreign policies toward the Middle East conflict, opportunities and constraints of realizing Palestinian self-determination, institutional opportunities and constraints for the ENP of walking the talk of an Israeli-Palestinian settlement, and policy options of the EU toward the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and their success conditions. The EU’s chances and constraints in addressing the Israeli–Palestinian conflict are discussed as structural challenges: the challenge created through the historical normative engagement of the EU, the problematic local conditions for constructively dealing with the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and the European institutional capabilities and their limits to project its policy concepts on the Middle East. The critical discussion of the three-faceted system of challenges that the EU is exposed to when dealing with the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is followed by the presentation and assessment of different policy options in the light of success conditions to (not) walk the talk of dealing with the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in a productive way. The article comes to the conclusion that the EU is hardly capable of contributing to the realization of Palestinian self-determination.