Editing in a Time of Dispossession: The Palestine-Israel Journal, 2001–02

Abstract

Can a journal provide in its pages a meaningful venue for equal dialogue in the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians? Can it help bridge a pro found divide in a land encumbered with competing mythologies, percep tions, and claims? These are the hard questions the Palestine-Israel Journal of Politics, Economics and Culture has sought to answer in the affirmative over the past fourteen years. My experience as an editor of that journal tells me that productive political editing is complicated by many more prerequisites than are assumed. In 2000,1 was back in my birth city after a long absence. My family had suffered exile, and having accomplished a return of sorts in the only way I could?on a three-month visitor visa given to me on a foreign passport at the Israeli-controlled crossing?I now found myself renting an apartment in East Jerusalem. Across in West Jerusalem were family properties I could not reclaim. Joining the Palestine-Israel Journal meant shouldering a dif ficult idealism, putting it to work toward some genuine restitution or real return, toward my belief that truth can be approximated and a humanely progressive consciousness reached. My studies had brought me to several convictions, some of them historically blunt: that claims systems have to be dismantled in people's minds in order for conflict to be resolved and fundamental justices restored; that the foundations of the particular claim system that disinherited my people, according to the persuasive evidence