Palestine Question Research Articles

Gender, Human Rights Networks, and the State of Emergency During the Arab Revolt (1936–1939)

Abstract Contrary to the current literature on the British state of emergency during the 1936–1939 Arab revolt, that sees women as victims of counterinsurgency policies or the differential objects within national-military cultures, this article argues that Palestinian women played an active role in fostering the rise of early human rights networks, and highlights how the politics of race and gender-based violence marked an embedded dimension of the imperial and colonial political authority and practice. By focusing on the emotional and divisive question of Palestine during the Arab Revolt, and using gender as a polyhedric tool of analysis, the article aims to show the centrality of gender and women’s activism in forging and grasping technologies of colonial emergency governance as tools of resistance to colonial violence. It enriches current histories of international law and adopts a critical feminist intersectional approach.

Palestine and the Dialectic of Racial Capitalism

This article situates racial capitalism as a historical-theoretical framework to generate new and alternative theory on the question of Palestine. It argues that the genocidal assault on Gaza must be understood as the clearest expression of the logic of racial capitalism and the terrain upon which we must generate theory and strategy able to dismantle Zionism, colonialism and Imperialism. Many of the critiques of Zionism deploy frameworks of apartheid, understood by radicals in South Africa as a social structure reproduced by racial capitalism. It was understood that such a system could only be effectively dismantled through a national liberation project which understood race, class, capital and Imperialism as a single contradiction which must be overthrown as a totality. Similarly, earlier theorists within the Palestinian anti-colonial struggle, such as Fayez Sayegh, understood Zionist settler colonialism as an outpost of Western Imperialism. By tracing the emergence of racial capitalism within the South African anti-apartheid struggle and the similarities between the white minority regime and Zionism, this article acts as a point of departure to drawing together histories of the Black radical tradition and the Palestinian struggle in crafting radical theory relevant for our present moment.

Colonial Racial Capitalism and Violence: Theorising the Relationship between Empire and Israeli Settler Colonialism

This article theorises the relationship between empire and Israeli settler colonialism through the interplay between violence and capital accumulation in colonial racial capitalism. It argues that Israel's genocidal violences of land theft is the means and grounds for Israeli and US imperial capital accumulation. This can be observed in the genocidal operation in the Gaza Strip. The first section contextualizes the genocide in the Gaza Strip within a larger structure of genocide. The section highlights the centrality of the conquest of land in the Zionist settler colonial project and how that appealed to the British empire in the early parts of the twentieth century. The second section examines why the US empire has actively participated in the genocide. States in the US imperial bloc essentially reduce the whole question of Palestine to a simple equation where Palestinian liberation does not equate with their own economic interests, while Israeli settler colonialism does. Though there exists a tension between imperial and settler colonial interests around the question of what kind of violence is preferable for capital accumulation, the article concludes by arguing that a transformation of the logics and systems of colonial racial capitalism cannot arise without activism and pressure from below on states and capitalist structures.

Immigration Crisis in Palestine (1933–1936) as Reflected in Periodical Press of United States

The image of Palestine during the years 1933 to 1936 was shaped in the periodical press of the United States under the influence of the “colonial discourse”. In the first half of the 1930s, the issue of Jewish immigrants became one of the central themes in the “Palestinian question”. The materials from the periodical press allow for an exploration of how perceptions regarding the causes of the crisis in the Middle East evolved within the informational discourse of the United States; how the representations of Arabs, Jews, and Great Britain underwent transformation. Publications from American newspapers provide insights into evaluations of British measures aimed at resolving the immigration crisis in Palestine during the 1930s. An analysis of U.S. newspapers reveals distinctive features in the construction of the images of the Jewish and Arab populations of Palestine. It identifies who was categorized as “the other”. The first half of the 1930s proved decisive for American public opinion in prioritizing positions within the context of the Middle Eastern conflict. The material presented in this article vividly illustrates the stages of evolving assessments of the situation in Palestine from 1933 to 1936. The study examines the manipulative techniques and strategies employed by American periodicals in the 1930s concerning Palestine, thereby providing a clearer understanding of how the issue of Jewish immigration was integrated into the broader narrative of Palestine within U.S. periodical literature.

The Academic Question of Palestine

This article provides theoretical and contextual background to The Academic Question of Palestine. Building on the work of Edward Said, we maintain that Palestine constitutes a unique question with special status in international academic spaces, particularly in the West, because of its entanglement with other imperial and settler colonial forms of dispossession. We argue that the special place that Zionism and its defence has occupied for decades in academia has rendered Palestine one of the thorniest and most divisive issues of our time. In the new millennium, the birth of the BDS movement; the emergence of new solidarities with global anti-racist movements; the scholarly and human rights consensus that Israel constitutes a regime settler colonial apartheid; the acceleration of Zionist violence, until the Gaza genocide, have generated new forms of repression and resistance in the academic space. This Special Issue offers the tools for understanding these recent transformations of the question of Palestine.

From ‘Operation Cast lead” to “Operation Swords of Iron”: A case study of naming and framing in “The Question of Palestine.

From ‘Operation Cast lead” to “Operation Swords of Iron”: A case study of naming and framing in “The Question of Palestine.

Global Hindutva and the Palestinian Cause

A lot of attention has been paid within academic and journalistic literature to how India’s relationship with Israel has improved under the rule of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Looking beyond this, the objective of this article is to assess the position of Palestine and its liberation struggle within the Global Hindu Nationalist imaginary. The study’s main argument, therefore, is that the broader Palestinian liberation struggle, in its pluralism, its global scope, and its interconnectivity with various struggles over the course of its history, implicitly represents a refutation of the core ideological mechanisms that underpin the Hindu Nationalist Project, including but not limited to its othering of Muslims and other non-Hindu groups as well as its more recent embrace of neoliberal capitalism. More explicitly, the articles argues that the way Hindu Nationalists construct Indian Muslim and Palestinian subjectivities as being analogous and connected through tropes of them as invaders and terrorists – in line with broader imperialist constructions of Muslim subjectivities – is a key feature of Global Hindutva’s globality. To make this argument, this article first examines the literature on the historical relationship between Hindu Nationalism and Zionist settler colonialism. After this, the article analyses the overlap between Indian state and Hindutva positions on the Palestine Question before exploring practical tensions between the Hindutva outlook and the Palestinian liberation struggle. The final section of the article explores how Global Hindutva’s historic and strategic alignment against the Palestinian liberation struggle manifests in both Indian foreign and domestic policy and in Hindu Nationalist mobilisations across the world.

Sociology Faces the Question of Palestine

Sociology Faces the Question of Palestine

War and Self-Defense: Some Reflections on the War on Gaza

Abstract This paper reflects on the current war on Gaza in 2024 that followed the Hamas attack on October 7th 2023, reading the events is a wider historical context. The paper has three main parts. In the first part, the paper argues against the fragmentation of the question of Palestine historically and geographically, arguing instead for the importance of the overall context of the conflict. The second part considers the issue of Palestinian resistance. How can the Palestinians resist occupation? This part is mainly descriptive and indicates the impasse that the Palestinians found themselves in it after the Oslo accords in 1993. The third and last part moves to normative questions regarding the question of self-defense both on the part of the Palestinians and on the part of Israel and tries to outline the ways these arguments can develop.

Populism at the UN: comparing Netanyahu’s and Abbas’s speeches, 2010–19

ABSTRACT Populism impacts policy choices and may contribute to fuelling crises and limiting the prospects for conflict resolution. This paper applies a multidimensional populism theoretical framework to compare quantitatively and qualitatively 18 speeches by Mahmoud Abbas and Benjamin Netanyahu at the United Nations General Assembly between 2010 and 2019. Our analysis shows that while both Abbas and Netanyahu use populist language—mostly focused on antagonistic, moral and idealised depictions of the ‘people’ and the ‘other’—the latter consistently displayed a greater density of populist references in his UN speeches over the period analysed. Netanyahu’s discourses were both more aggressive and exclusionary and made more allusions to religion and securitisation than those of the Palestinian leader. His framing essentialised the ‘us’ (‘the Jewish people’) as threatened by an ‘enemy’; what he called ‘militant Islam’. By contrast, Abbas referred more to borders as a requirement for statehood. Their different communicative frames and language suggest discrepant worldviews. Abbas’s speeches reflected a more ‘liberal’ conception of international relations, relying more on international cooperation, institutions, and regulation to resolve the Palestinian question, while Netanyahu conveyed a realpolitik stance and stressed his concerns with external threats and willingness to act unilaterally.

The situation of the Russian Palestine Society in the second half of the 1920s based on materials from the Archive of Orientalists of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences

The activities of the Russian Palestine Society after its restoration in 1926 faced numerous problems that were of chronic and systemic character. The lack of its own location, limited access to its archive, insufϐicient funding, and lack of foreign travel presented great difϐiculty for the Society and its members. The article provides archival materials, which illustrate these problems. Based on the analysis of the Archival materials, one could conclude that all the difϐiculties originated from the reluctance of Soviet authorities to provide support to the Society. As a result, the research activity of the Society in the 1930s was curtailed. It resumed only in the 1950s in connection with the growing role of the Palestine question in the post-war politics. Due to the lack of funds and stagnation the scholarly potential of the Society, as well as valuable research projects, had already been lost. The lack of potentially important results could not positively contribute to the assessment of the political situation in the Middle East in the second half of the 20th century.

Surviving colonialism? A response to Neither Settler nor Native

This article engages Mahmood Mamdani's arguments in Neither Settler nor Native from the perspective of the question of Palestine. Sympathetic with his call to “decolonize the political” by severing nation from state, I, nevertheless, query his proposal to abandon, a priori, binaries such as “settler/native” and “perpetrator/victim” in order to achieve a decolonized state and polity. The unifying concept of the “survivor” that he proposes—that we are all survivors of the ravages of political modernity, I argue, has its own history and grammar of injury, victimhood, and identity that is not easily abandoned and certainly not in the context of Palestine. How might one achieve justice—redistributive justice, that is, rather than mere reconciliation—if political demands cannot be made in the name of the collectives (in this instance, Palestinians) who have suffered the displacement and violence of settler-colonialism? We might need to hold onto such binaries—even if only for a time and even as we recognize that what it means to be a “settler” does not remain stable over time—in order to decolonize the political in substantive rather than merely formal terms.

The Gaza War and the Region

Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack and the subsequent war in Gaza has forced the Palestinian question back to the top of the Middle Eastern agenda after years of neglect. The crisis has also confirmed Hamas’s identity as an agent of resistance rather than governance and shattered Israel’s perceptions of its own power, the competence of its security services and political leadership, and the manageability of its immediate neighbourhood. Israeli forces may well destroy Hamas’s advanced military capabilities and decapitate its Gaza-based command, but they are unlikely to obliterate Hamas as a social, political and ideological actor, and a determined insurgency. In Arab forums, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict will probably inhibit normalisation with Israel and overshadow other conflicts. Iran does not have an immediate interest in expanding the war and has other options through partners for signalling support for Hamas. The war broadly benefits Tehran by affirming its forward-defence strategy, re-energising its axis of resistance and shaking its regional rivals.

Palestine between Reasonableness of Zionist Claims and the Legitimacy of the British Mandate

This study aims to study the legal nature of the British mandate over Palestine after World War I, in addition to studying the claims of the Zionist movement regarding its connection to the land of Palestine, thus determining the correct legal concept of the Question of Palestine in accordance with international law. The methodology of the study is the legal analytical and critical method and the Statute approach. In it, the author used Zionist, Jewish, Arab and foreign references. The results showed that the Zionist movement was established to unite the efforts of the Jews in Europe with the aim of establishing a national home for them in Palestine with the help of the colonial European countries under historical and religious arguments that completely contradict the facts and discoveries in Palestine. On the other hand, Britain's goal from the Balfour Declaration was to support the Zionist project in Palestine, thus helping to dismantle the Ottoman Empire and colonize the Arabian Peninsula with the participation of France. In addition, the British Mandate Deed for Palestine was only ratified by the Principal Allied Powers in World War I. Therefore, it did not reflect a real international will and thus was a violation of the provisions of international law.

Book Review – ‘Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine’ by Noura Erakat

Book Review – ‘Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine’ by Noura Erakat

Rebb Binyamin’s Gandhi: India, Islam, and the Question of Palestine

Rebb Binyamin’s Gandhi: India, Islam, and the Question of Palestine

The Impact of U.S. President Trump’s Middle East Peace Plan on Jordan and Palestinians

Objectives: This study aims to assess how a more pro-Israeli stance from the U.S. can potentially harm Jordanian interests and relations, and pose a challenge in the region. Methods: The qualitative approach and the case study were applied, as well as extensive investigation and examination of relevant resources published in journal articles, newspapers, reports, press releases, and TV interviews. Results: The study found that Trump’s plan affects Jordan, as it contradicts with the priority in Jordan’s national interests which lies in the question of Palestine, supporting the two-state solution, and the creation of a viable Palestinian state. Since Trump’s initiative does not include a viable Palestinian state and removes the two-state solution from the peace process, it poses significant challenges to Jordan’s national security, economy, and role in Jerusalem, and implementing it will cause further conflict; impacting Jordan’s interests. Ignoring Jordan’s special role as the custodian of Jerusalem’s Islamic and Christian holy sites, will complicate and negatively impact Jordanian - American and Jordanian-Israeli relations. Conclusions: The study recommends the need of rebuilding trust between Jordan and the U.S, as they enjoy close security cooperation and strategic relationship. It is expected that Biden’s administration will seek conflict management with low interest, instead of conflict resolution. Jordan shall convince Arab leaders normalizing relations with Israel that resolving the Palestine issue is the most important, and it will not give up its historic role in Jerusalem.

The Lasting Impact of Trump’s ‘Deal of the Century’ on the Question of Palestine

: In 2017 US President Donald Trump launched the ‘Deal of the Century’ (DoC) to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Although Trump is no longer in office, the impact of the DoC lingers and will continue affecting future approaches to the conflict and its resolution. This article argues that the Trump DoC profoundly impacted the colonial order in Palestine, destroying further the illusion that a just settlement addressing the plight of the Palestinians could be reached. The DoC’s impact has affected three significant areas: the vision of a resolution, the approach to conflict resolution, and the venue where the conflict occurs. It helped shift the vision from two-state solution to none, significantly undermining the approach that was based on negotiation and third-party mediation, and assisted in creating a new regional versus international venue for the conflict.

Philistine imaginings and the naissance of a world other

ABSTRACT This study traces the figure of the Philistine, its symbolic afterlife, in general, and its transatlantic circulatory logics, in specific. It follows the figure's ruptures and passages since it first emerged in Late Egyptian as P-r-s-t (transliterated: Peleset) and later on in Hebrew as פלשתי (transliterated: P'lishti) to signify an ancient people dating back to the twelfth century BCE, bearing the anthropological traces of the inhabitants of historical Palestine, and the biblical adversaries of the Israelites in the Old Testament (ca. 450 BCE). The study also examines the modern theological appearance of the Philistine in enlightenment philosophy – set in motion by way of Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, following the German Romantic tradition – which subsequently shaped the theological epistemological foundations of the modern secular world, with serious effects on the rise of twentieth-century humanism, its racial logics, and on the postmodern constructions of the Palestinian question.

Turkish-Arab Relations in the Axis of the Question of Palestine and the Establishment of Israel State

The question of Palestine issue began when Jewish immigrants settled in Palestine from the 1880s and formed large colonies on the land they purchased, and it evolved into a chronic problem with the establishment of the State of Israel. 
 The recognition of Israel's independence by Türkiye induced intense reactions in the Arab Middle East and sabotaged the development process of Turkish-Arab relations. Following this act of recognition, Türkiye quickly became distanced to the region and despite all the moves attempted afterwards, Türkiye failed to erase its scars and the desired level of relations could not be achieved. Moreover, the impact of Türkiye's recognition of Israel was deeply felt in the Cyprus issue that emerged in the 1960s, and Türkiye was deprived of the support of the Arab States in this vital question. Considering this recognition and the question of Palestine as a whole, it is understood that Türkiye's abandonment of its stance in support of the Arabs is a concrete indicator of its inconsistency in its foreign policy. 
 In this article, the author aims to examine and clarify the question of Palestine and the impact of the foundation of Israel State on Turkish-Arab relations.