Journal of Palestine Studies最新文献

{"title":"Lightning through the Clouds: ‘Izz al-Din al-Qassam and the Making of the Modern Middle East","authors":"A. Halabi","doi":"10.1080/0377919X.2021.2013032","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0377919X.2021.2013032","url":null,"abstract":"Even before Shaykh ‘Izz al-Din al-Qassam was buried, several groups had already claimed him as their own. They draped his corpse in the Iraqi flag and those of his companions in the flags of other independent Arab states. Although al-Qassam (b. 1883) died nearly a century ago in November 1935, an array of different, if not opposing, groups have since appropriated his image and memory. Before Hamas named a brigade in his honor and intifada communiqués evoked his legacy, leftist groups had already hailed him as an “Arab Che Guevara.” Mark Sanagan’s masterful study of this iconic figure tackles these conflicting and contested interpretations of his legacy. Based on extensive archival research, as well as memoirs, newspapers, and interviews, this study challenges conventional works that treat the events of alQassam’s life as a prologue to his martyrdom in 1935. These works reduce the Syrian-born scholar’s life to simplistic characterizations, such as “anti-colonial,” “Palestinian nationalist,” “jihadist,” and “Salafi.” Citing Ted Swedenburg’s study on early biographies of al-Qassam,* Sanagan explains, “There has been no hegemonic ‘national’ interpretation of al-Qassam imprinted on the minds of Palestinians.” As a result, al-Qassam has become “a sort of nationalist tabula rasa,” subject to the many claims over his memory and legacy by different Palestinian groups and writers (p. 3). As a result, Sanagan produces a social biography of al-Qassam in this lucidly written work accessible to a wide range of audiences. He contextualizes al-Qassam’s life story in the larger sociohistorical environment of the late-Ottoman and post–World War I Arab East (mashriq). A social biography, as Sanagan demonstrates, is “dialectic”—it reveals how the environment shaped the life of a single individual, just as it explains that environment through the lens of an individual (p. 6). The first three chapters explore al-Qassam’s life before arriving in Palestine in 1921. He grew up in Jabla, Syria (120 miles southwest of Aleppo), where his family was active in the Qadiri Sufi order. Al-Qassam favored the Naqshbandiyya Sufi order’s understanding of “sober” mysticism grounded in strict adherence to the sharia. Later, that Sufism was mixed with a Salafism that he encountered while studying at al-Azhar University in Cairo. Sanagan avoids debates about al-Qassam as either a “Salafi” or a “Sufi,” demonstrating how both these religious ideals shaped how he understood proper Islamic practice and Islam’s relevance to the larger umma. These beliefs inspired him to assemble fighters to defend Libya against Italian occupation and take up arms against the French in Syria after World War I. After eluding a French death sentence, al-Qassam found refuge in Haifa, the topic of the following five chapters. In Haifa, al-Qassam cultivated a relationship with the city’s swelling labor force that had been pushed out of their surrounding villages because of global capitalism, British colonialism, a","PeriodicalId":46375,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Palestine Studies","volume":"51 1","pages":"1 - 2"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41583711","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Finding a New Idiom: Language, Moral Decay, and the Ongoing Nakba","authors":"E. Khoury","doi":"10.1080/0377919x.2021.2013024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0377919x.2021.2013024","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This essay is a translated and edited version of the Anis Makdisi Program in Literature lecture delivered by the author in May 2021. The talk, on the uprising sweeping every Palestinian geography from the river to the sea, was constructed as a series of illustrative stories. Their distillation, as Khoury points out, is that there will be no end to the Palestinian question so long as there exists a people continually prepared to resist the ongoing Nakba. “It is enough,” Khoury concludes, “that with this uprising Palestine has recovered the alphabet, leaving us to create a new idiom.”","PeriodicalId":46375,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Palestine Studies","volume":"51 1","pages":"50 - 57"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42130561","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Promoting Democracy: The Force of Political Settlements in Uncertain Times","authors":"Khaled Elgindy","doi":"10.1080/0377919X.2021.2013031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0377919X.2021.2013031","url":null,"abstract":"Over the past couple of decades, an ever-growing body of scholarship has emerged to scrutinize the consequences of Western democracy promotion efforts, particularly in the context of the Middle East, which has been a target of regime change and democratization in the post–9/11 moment. Manal A. Jamal’s book, which seeks to understand why democracy promotion succeeds in some countries but fails in others is a welcome addition to this body of literature. The book is based on original fieldwork conducted in El Salvador and the occupied Palestinian territory (OPT), comprising a rich data set of interviews with political leaders and civil society activists as well as foreign donors, in addition to analyses of reports on donor assistance to the respective countries or territories. In an innovative departure from most other assessments of foreign democracy promotion efforts, Jamal focuses on the context in which democracy assistance is given as the factor determining democratic outcomes. In particular, she dismisses the argument that the failure of democratic development in Palestine was due to the demobilization of what were previously vibrant, mass-based, grassroots organizations because of NGO-ization and professionalization caused by the inpouring of foreign aid in the wake of the Oslo Accords. Her research finds that El Salvador experienced a similar trend of professionalization of civil society organizations but without the effect of demobilizing wider grassroots constituencies. This leads her to argue that the type of political settlement governing post-conflict transitions is the key factor determining the success or failure of democracy promotion efforts. In this respect, she elaborates:","PeriodicalId":46375,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Palestine Studies","volume":" ","pages":"1 - 2"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45443814","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"An Invitation to Belong: Challenging the Systemic Exclusion of Palestinians as Present Absentees","authors":"S. A. Minkin","doi":"10.1080/0377919x.2021.2010497","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0377919x.2021.2010497","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This essay takes as its starting place the “present absentee” status of Palestinians in U.S. and Jewish discourse and engagement with Israel/Palestine. Ethnographic fieldwork in Jewish American communities demonstrates practices that reiterate a dynamic of Jewish belonging against the presence of Palestinian absence. The essay explores different initiatives to challenge this systemic exclusion of Palestinians, including public programs that amplify Palestinian voices and normalize hearing Palestinians as experts in their own lives and an experimental study group with Jewish American leaders that centers Palestinian perspectives in an effort to cultivate radical empathy. Insights gained in these initiatives point to the importance of articulating fuller visions of community and belonging in engagement with Israel/Palestine.","PeriodicalId":46375,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Palestine Studies","volume":"51 1","pages":"62 - 67"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42983352","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Music in Conflict: Palestine, Israel and the Politics of Aesthetic Production","authors":"G. Bisharat","doi":"10.1080/0377919x.2021.2017177","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0377919x.2021.2017177","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46375,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Palestine Studies","volume":" ","pages":"1 - 2"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48817770","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Toward the Consolidation of a Gazan Military Front?","authors":"Camille Mansour","doi":"10.1080/0377919X.2021.2006997","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0377919X.2021.2006997","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This essay considers the place of the Gaza Strip in the broader Palestinian context. Israel’s determination to separate Gaza from the West Bank since the signing of the Oslo Accords and its subsequent withdrawal from the territory in 2005 resulted in a process that culminated in the buildup of a Palestinian military front reminiscent of that established by the Palestine Liberation Organization in south Lebanon in 1975–82. In both instances, the military front appears to serve as a Palestinian counterstrategy to achieve linkage. Palestinians demonstrated their determination to break the isolation of Gaza in the war of May 2021 that was accompanied by mass mobilization across and outside Mandate Palestine. The essay probes the question of whether we are witnessing the consolidation of a Gazan military front and points to the minimal political conditions necessary for such a development to advance the liberation struggle.","PeriodicalId":46375,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Palestine Studies","volume":"51 1","pages":"68 - 72"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47557058","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Ignore the Poets at Your Peril: A Reflection on Neither Settler nor Native; The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities","authors":"Eve M. Troutt Powell","doi":"10.1080/0377919x.2021.2010498","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0377919x.2021.2010498","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Mahmood Mamdani has posited a new approach to decolonization and to the question of extreme violence meted out in decades of independence, the age of political modernity. To do so, he explores the issues of justice and accountability in five case studies: Native Americans in the United States; the Nuremberg trials in Germany; South Africa and apartheid; South Sudan; and Israel/Palestine. Do his ideas offer his readers something really new? This review questions the historical methodologies used by Mamdani, a political theorist, and explores different artistic origins for people in these countries who have long articulated the lived experience between “settler” and “native.”","PeriodicalId":46375,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Palestine Studies","volume":"51 1","pages":"78 - 84"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44153721","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Palestinian Theatre in the West Bank: Our Human Faces","authors":"F. Hamadah","doi":"10.1080/0377919x.2021.2017179","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0377919x.2021.2017179","url":null,"abstract":"Gabriel Varghese’s Palestinian Theatre in the West Bank: Our Human Faces is confronted by a few unenviable tasks presented to it by the dearth of academic writing on Palestinian theater, especially in monograph form. First, it must work as a history lesson on Palestine, ensuring that the readers who come to it from theater and performance studies are provided with enough context to understand the stakes of the exceptional experience of theater and performance faced by Palestinians. Second, it must intervene in a field—Palestine cultural studies, broadly speaking—that for its own reasons neglects theater and performance in favor of written literature, from poetry to the novel, the visual and plastic arts, and cinema. Third, it must provide a theoretical vantage point from which to view diverse artistic practices that take place under vastly differing historical and political conditions, a vantage point that does not overwrite these diverse practices but positions them as responding to a shared concern. Finally, it has to analyze live theater production, a complicated medium to discuss academically, considering the fleeting nature of performance, the “you had to have been there” nature of a good play, and the behind-the-scenes workings of theater, which are often occluded by the performance event but remain necessary for understanding theater’s place in culture. Varghese’s book meets these difficult tasks with aplomb and erudition, an impressive feat considering the book’s readability and its brisk 166 pages. The book’s first chapter provides a history lesson on settler colonialism in Palestine and introduces the book’s central theoretical apparatus. Here, Varghese argues that due to the hegemonic nature of Zionist discourse in creating a public sphere in which Palestinian voices are excluded, the theater has worked as a “counterpublic,” one that utilizes a number of tactics to “disrupt, subvert and bypass the Zionist public sphere” (p. 2). Varghese marshals the psychoanalytic and queer theoretical concept of abjection to analyze Palestinian theater’s position in relation to the Zionist public sphere. In brief, the argument here, which structures the rest of the book, is that abjection is a form of governance that uses political power to violently exclude a group of subjects. This leads to a revolt of the subject, or in Varghese’s words, “abjection, then, is about the revolt (or resistance) of those subjects whom the state constitutes and marginalizes as revolting (disgusting)” (p. 4). Theater in Palestine, then, is positioned as a key site in which this revolt—a “cultural intifada,” as the book later terms it—is performed, allowing Palestinian subjects to insist on and perform the very humanness denied to them by the Israeli state. In insisting on the abject nature of Palestinian theater makers and performers, this framework comes too close to suggesting that Palestinian cultural and social identity is constituted purely in negation to Zionism’s e","PeriodicalId":46375,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Palestine Studies","volume":" ","pages":"1 - 2"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45558107","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Open Gaza: Architectures of Hope","authors":"Fatina Abreek-Zubiedat","doi":"10.1080/0377919x.2021.2015996","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0377919x.2021.2015996","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46375,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Palestine Studies","volume":"51 1","pages":"1 - 2"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59960580","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Optimist: A Social Biography of Tawfiq Zayyad","authors":"Nadeem Karkabi","doi":"10.1080/0377919X.2021.2017183","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0377919X.2021.2017183","url":null,"abstract":"legislation, lobbying, civic education, and women’s participation, the PA was expected to focus on institution building, anti-corruption, and above all security reform. In the case of both Palestinian civil society and the PA, depoliticization was the result of the highly political goals of Western donors, including European and American aid agencies, for whom the success of the peace process to a large extent depended on Israel’s security remaining paramount and the exclusion of certain, problematic political groups and constituencies. More could have been said about the underlying political provisions of Oslo and its idiosyncrasies. Most notably absent were the specific structural constraints imposed by the Oslo framework, including the primacy of security (for Israel, that is) and the securitization of the PA—both major focuses of the donor community, as well as the PA’s governance model. Also left unsaid is the highly intrusive nature of Oslo itself, which was at once a process of conflict resolution and an exercise in state building, and which gave outside actors—including Western donors and even Israel—a direct say in Palestinian political life. Likewise, there is a tendency to gloss over key differences between the Palestinian and Salvadoran cases—most notably whether the Oslo process, which was an interim arrangement that left all of the core issues of the conflict unresolved, should even qualify as a “conflict-to-peace” transition. Despite these relatively minor issues, Jamal’s book is a timely and welcome contribution to the literature on the complex relationships between democracy promotion, state building, and peace building. Above all, the book is a reminder of the primacy of political settlements—and of politics more broadly—in supporting democratic outcomes as well as the folly of attempting to reengineer or freeze out elements of Palestinian politics. While donor aid can help create institutions and even keep them afloat, as Promoting Democracy diligently explains, it is no substitute for a vibrant civil society and coherent domestic politics.","PeriodicalId":46375,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Palestine Studies","volume":" ","pages":"1 - 2"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44596573","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}