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.