From Shared Life to Co-Resistance in Historic Palestine

From Shared Life to Co-Resistance in Historic Palestine
Author: Marcelo Svirsky
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2017-11-07
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1783489650

How do we contribute to the decolonisation of Palestine? In what ways can we divest from settler arrangements in the present-day? Exploring the Zionist takeover of Palestine as a settler colonial case, this book argues that in studying the elimination of native life in Palestine, the loss of Arab-Jewish shared life cannot be ignored. Muslims, Christians, and Jews, shared a life in Ottoman Palestine and in a different way during British rule. The attempt to eliminate native life involved the destruction of Arab society – its cultural hegemony and demographic superiority – but also the racial rejection of Arab-Jewish sociabilities, of shared life. Thus the settlerist process of dispossession of the Arabs was complemented with the destruction of the social and cultural infrastructure that made Arab-Jewish life a historical reality. Both operations formed Israeli polity. Can this understanding contribute to present-day Palestinian resistance and a politics of decolonisation? In this book, the authors address this question by exploring how the study of elimination of shared life can inform Arab-Jewish co-resistance as a way of defying Israel’s Zionist regime. Above and beyond opposing an unacceptable state of affairs, this book engages with past and present to discuss possible futures.

The Hundred Years' War on Palestine

The Hundred Years' War on Palestine
Author: Rashid Khalidi
Publisher: Metropolitan Books
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2020-01-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 1627798544

A landmark history of one hundred years of war waged against the Palestinians from the foremost US historian of the Middle East, told through pivotal events and family history In 1899, Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, mayor of Jerusalem, alarmed by the Zionist call to create a Jewish national home in Palestine, wrote a letter aimed at Theodore Herzl: the country had an indigenous people who would not easily accept their own displacement. He warned of the perils ahead, ending his note, “in the name of God, let Palestine be left alone.” Thus Rashid Khalidi, al-Khalidi’s great-great-nephew, begins this sweeping history, the first general account of the conflict told from an explicitly Palestinian perspective. Drawing on a wealth of untapped archival materials and the reports of generations of family members—mayors, judges, scholars, diplomats, and journalists—The Hundred Years' War on Palestine upends accepted interpretations of the conflict, which tend, at best, to describe a tragic clash between two peoples with claims to the same territory. Instead, Khalidi traces a hundred years of colonial war on the Palestinians, waged first by the Zionist movement and then Israel, but backed by Britain and the United States, the great powers of the age. He highlights the key episodes in this colonial campaign, from the 1917 Balfour Declaration to the destruction of Palestine in 1948, from Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon to the endless and futile peace process. Original, authoritative, and important, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine is not a chronicle of victimization, nor does it whitewash the mistakes of Palestinian leaders or deny the emergence of national movements on both sides. In reevaluating the forces arrayed against the Palestinians, it offers an illuminating new view of a conflict that continues to this day.

A Land With a People

A Land With a People
Author: Esther Farmer
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2021-10-23
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1583679308

"A Land With A People began as a storytelling project of Jewish Voice for Peace-New York City and subsequently transformed into a theater project performed throughout the New York City area. A Land With A People elevates rarely heard Palestinian and Jewish voices and visions. It brings us the narratives of secular, Muslim, Christian, and LGBTQ Palestinians who endure the particular brand of settler colonialism known as Zionism. It relays the transformational journeys of Ashkenazi, Mizrahi, Palestinian and LGBTQ Jews who have come to reject the received Zionist narrative. Unflinching in their confrontation of the power dynamics that underlie their transformation process, these writers find the courage to face what has happened to historic Palestine, and to their own families as a result. Stories touch hearts, open minds, and transform our understanding of the "other"-as well as comprehension of our own roles and responsibilities. A Land With a People emerges from this reckoning. Contextualized by a detailed historical introduction and timeline charting 150 years of Palestinian and Jewish resistance to Zionism, this collection will stir emotions, provoke fresh thinking, and point to a more hopeful, loving future-one in which Palestine/Israel is seen for what it is in its entirety, as well as for what it can be"--

After Israel

After Israel
Author: Marcelo Svirsky
Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2014-05-08
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1780326157

In this unique new contribution, Marcelo Svirsky asserts that no political solution currently on offer can provide the cultural marrow necessary to effect a transformation of modes of being and ways of life in the State of Israel. Controversially, Svirsky argues that the Zionist political project cannot be fixed - it is one that negatively affects the lives of its beneficiaries as well as of its victims. Instead, the book aims to generate a reflective attitude, allowing Jewish-Israelis to explore how they may divest themselves of Zionist identities by engaging with dissident rationalities, practices and institutions. Ultimately, the production of military hardware and technology that helps Israel control the lives of Palestinians, of separate policies, laws and spaces for Jews and Palestinians, are all linked with the production of Zionist subjectivities and modes of being. Overcoming these modes of being is to after Israel.

The Rape of Palestine: A Mandate Chronology - Vol. 2

The Rape of Palestine: A Mandate Chronology - Vol. 2
Author: Blake Alcott
Publisher: tredition
Total Pages: 858
Release: 2023-04-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 334789653X

This book is a chronology of the dialogue between the colonised Palestinians and their British colonisers during the 'Mandate' years from November 1917 through May 1948. It names, dates, quotes from and discusses 490 separate manifestos, letters, statements of policy, petitions, resolutions, minutes and debates going either from the British to the indigenous Palestinians or vice versa. A few examples: Samuel's The Future of Palestine, the Balfour Declaration, the League of Nations Covenant, the Report on the State of Palestine and other tracts by the Palestine Arab Congress and the Moslem-Christian Associations, the King-Crane report, the General Syrian Congress, the Palin, Haycraft, Cavendish, Shaw, Hope Simpson, Peel and Anglo-American investigations, the arguments of the Palestinian Delegations to London, the Churchill, Passfield and MacDonald White Papers, some petitions of the Arab Executive Committee to the League of Nations, various positions of the Palestine High Commissioners, protests of the Women's Delegations, debates in both Houses of Parliament, Ramsey MacDonald's Black Letter, the manifestos of several Arab newspapers and many leaders such as Musa Kazem al-Husseini, Musa Alami, Awni Abdul Hadi, Ragheb Nashashibi, Izzat Darwaza, George Antonius, Yaqub al-Ghussein, Matiel E.T. Mogannam, Jamal al-Husseini, Izzat Tannous, Emil Ghoury, Aref Abdul Razzak, Henry Cattan, Amin al-Husseini, Mohammed Zafarullah Khan and Albert Hourani, and finally the spewings of the UN General Assembly and its Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP). Its main sources are: 1) records held at the National Archives at Kew, London, mainly the minutes of Cabinet meetings and material written by the Foreign and Colonial Offices; 2) other records accessible online held by universities and private historians; and 3) other books and articles about the Mandate, i.e. 'secondary sources'. It thus traces the ins and outs of the three decades of robbery of Palestine by Britain from its rightful owners, preparing the ground for Palestine's takeover in 1948 by Egypt, Jordan and the Zionist state of Israel. The story is nothing if not simple: The Palestinians demanded their independence, the British denied it. The book is dedicated to the Palestinians who fought and suffered, or died, for their self-determination, and to the often-unsung Palestinian freedom fighters, resisters and historians who have related these events in their own ways.

Biopolitics of the More-Than-Human

Biopolitics of the More-Than-Human
Author: Joseph Pugliese
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 178
Release: 2020-10-23
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1478009071

In Biopolitics of the More-Than-Human Joseph Pugliese examines the concept of the biopolitical through a nonanthropocentric lens, arguing that more-than-human entities—from soil and orchards to animals and water—are actors and agents in their own right with legitimate claims to justice. Examining occupied Palestine, Guantánamo, and sites of US drone strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, Pugliese challenges notions of human exceptionalism by arguing that more-than-human victims of war and colonialism are entangled with and subject to the same violent biopolitical regimes as humans. He also draws on Indigenous epistemologies that invest more-than-human entities with judicial standing to argue for an ethico-legal framework that will enable the realization of ecological justice. Bringing the more-than-human world into the purview of justice, Pugliese makes visible the ecological effects of human war that would otherwise remain outside the domains of biopolitics and law.

Home, History and Possession in Israel-Palestine

Home, History and Possession in Israel-Palestine
Author: Tovi Fenster
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2024-09-05
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1040043585

Taking a micro-geographical approach to Israeli-Palestinian relations, this book analyses the history of space and place in West Jerusalem and Jaffa in the context of specific addresses. Based on the unique and innovative ‘archaeology of addresses’ methodology, the book provides an in-depth analysis of 11 specific sites. This ‘micro’ perspective – paying particular attention to the history and past ownership of an individual property – allows the author to draw new insights into the process of ‘population exchange’ that took place in 1948 when Jewish people began to populate Palestinian deserted homes after the Nakba. By looking at archival planning documents, the histories of addresses as ‘contact zones’ between previous and current owners are revealed. Moreover, the research on each address highlights new theoretical understandings, encompassing: the micro-politics of the contact zone; mediated agonism; ruinations and beginnings; creative destruction in urban planning; the right to the city and the right to return; the violence of property; and fragmented settler colonialism. The book concludes by proposing practical applications of the research in teaching and planning practice. The book will prove important reading for students and researchers interested in urban planning, Middle Eastern geography, and the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Against the Wall

Against the Wall
Author: William Parry
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2011-04-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1569768587

This stunning book of photographs captures the graffiti and art that have transformed Israel's wall into a living canvas of resistance and solidarity. Featuring the work of artists Banksy, Ron English, Blu, and others, as well as Palestinian artists and activists, these photographs express outrage, compassion, and touching humor. They illustrate the wall's toll on lives and livelihoods, showing the hardship it has brought to tens of thousands of people, preventing their access to work, education, and vital medical care. Mixed with the images are portraits and vignettes, offering a heartfelt and inspiring account of a people determined to uphold their dignity in the face of profound injustice.

Partitions and Their Afterlives

Partitions and Their Afterlives
Author: Radhika Mohanram
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2019-06-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 1783488409

How can we theorise partitions differently? How are new identities, moralities, polities and life constructed post-partition? How are gender and sexuality recalibrated after partition? How can violence be theorised? What is the relationship between identity in the diaspora and identity after partition? What is the relationship between the movement of capital and national borders that is the mark of partition? Partitions and their Afterlives engages with political partitions and how their aftermath affects the contemporary life of nations and their citizens. Using a comparative perspective, the essays seek to stretch our understanding of these conflicts and to show how elements of our day-to-day lives have been shaped by them. In juxtaposing the various partitions in a single volume the book contributes to debates on citizenship, collective memory, nation-building, and borders and boundaries. Such a focus also reveals how local communities as well as nations use their knowledge of the past and history. This ground-breaking multi-disciplinary and multi-region volume will analyse the various convergences and departures between the different partitions and draw out lessons for the present. In so doing, this work will also examine methodological challenges and the imperatives for scholars working on individual countries.

Colonizing Palestine

Colonizing Palestine
Author: Areej Sabbagh-Khoury
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 446
Release: 2023-08-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 1503636291

Among the most progressive of Zionist settlement movements, Hashomer Hatzair proclaimed a brotherly stance on Zionist-Palestinian relations. Until the tumultuous end of the British Mandate, movement settlers voiced support for a binational Jewish-Arab state and officially opposed mass displacement of Palestinians. But, Hashomer Hatzair colonies were also active participants in the process that ultimately transformed large portions of Palestine into sovereign Jewish territory. Areej Sabbagh-Khoury investigates this ostensible dissonance, tracing how three colonies gained control of land and their engagement with Palestinian inhabitants on the edges of the Jezreel Valley/Marj Ibn 'Amer. Based on extensive empirical research in local colony and national archives, Colonizing Palestine offers a microhistory of frontier interactions between Zionist settlers and indigenous Palestinians within the British imperial field. Even as left-wing kibbutzim of Hashomer Hatzair helped lay the groundwork for settler colonial Jewish sovereignty, its settlers did not conceal the prior existence of the Palestinian villages and their displacement, which became the subject of enduring debate in the kibbutzim. Juxtaposing history and memory, examining events in their actual time and as they were later remembered, Sabbagh-Khoury demonstrates that the dispossession and replacement of the Palestinians in 1948 was not a singular catastrophe, but rather a protracted process instituted over decades. Colonizing Palestine traces social and political mechanisms by which forms of hierarchy, violence, and supremacy that endure into the present were gradually created.