NDPS 2020: Who owns Palestine?

Doumani, Beshara, and Paul Kohlbry. "Introduction: Claiming Property, Claiming Palestine." Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 43, no. 3 (2023): 245-248.

This special section of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, “Claiming Property, Claiming Palestine,” explores the paradoxes of Palestinians make ownership claims to agricultural land and urban real estate. Contributors foreground Palestinian thought and action, and demonstrate how Palestinian claim-making practices temporally exceed the colonial condition and trouble dominant assumptions about ownership, property, and sovereignty. Through granular cases studies rooted in the particularities of time and space, they show how claim-making allows for a critique of the settler colonial and Indigenous frameworks in Palestinian studies and points to generative avenues for comparative history and theory-making between Palestine and the global South.

Bentley, Elizabeth. "Between Extinction and Dispossession: A Rhetorical Historiography of the Last Palestinian Crocodile (1870–1935)." Jerusalem Quarterly 88 (2021): 9-29.

This article presents a rhetorical historiography of the last Palestinian crocodile, tracing its circulation across colonial zoological literatures between 1870 and 1935. This was the historic period of colonial zoologists' speculation about Palestinian crocodile extinction, and by extension, the whereabouts of the last Palestinian crocodile. The article argues that the Palestinian crocodile extinction story is intertwined with violent histories of colonial resource extraction, racialized labor exploitation, and indigenous human dispossession. By tracing the last Palestinian crocodile's rhetorical circulation to 1935 – when a Zionist zoologist declared that Palestinian crocodiles were finally extinct – the article connects Palestinian crocodile extinction with the British Mandate and the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association (PJCA)-led drainage and destruction of the crocodile's former habitat and the dispossession of the Ghawarna who lived on that land. 
 

Berg, Kjersti. "Mu'askar and Shu'fat: Retracing the Histories of Two Palestinian Refugee Camps in Jerusalem." Jerusalem Quarterly 88 (2021): 30-54.

Radi, Tareq. "Cultivating Credit: Financialized Urbanization Is Alienation!" Journal of Palestine Studies 51.1 (2022): 4-26.

Since 2007, the Palestinian Authority has implemented a strategy of financialized urbanization in response to economic crises precipitated by Israel’s settler-colonial stranglehold on the Palestinian economy. This article argues that financialized urbanization operates as a mechanism to expand the local banking sector and as a modality of settler-colonial alienation. Examining the joint-ownership structures of companies whose activities straddle real estate and financial markets, the article shows where land ownership in the West Bank ultimately lies. The study highlights qualitative changes in money lending and the extended reach of finance to emphasize the risks of financial collapse. Understanding finance capital and settler colonialism as systems predicated on managing risk for maximum returns, the discussion draws their relation to each other into a single analytical framework to center the question of land dispossession and racialization at the heart of financialized urbanization.

NDPS 2019: PALESTINIAN HOMES AND HOUSES

Jerusalem Quarterly 83 (2020) Editorial: Home and House (Part 1): Materialities and Subjectivities.

Jerusalem Quarterly 84 (2020) Editorial: Home and House (Part 2) Intimacies and Material Politics.

Amrov, Sabrien. "Virtual Reality Encounters at the Israel Museum: Palestinian Homes and Heartlands." Jerusalem Quarterly 84 (2020): 87-104.

This essay discusses the relationship between intimacy and violence in the context of colonial oppression. Drawing from geographical literature on spatial intimacies, the article delves into the specific ways Israel targets socio-spatial entities while deploying and targeting intimacy. It does so through an analysis of Visitors, a virtual reality installation at Israel Museum that abolishes the social and political realities of Palestinians, which are juxtaposed with the settler colonial violence that daily targets Palestinian homes outside the borders of the Israel Museum. The author argues that home as a site of analysis can shed light on how political representations become mapped out and framed in the case of Palestinians, making explicit the relationship between the geography of home and the politics of representation. While Landau’s exhibition is meant to bridge a social gap between two people, his ideological assumptions, seemingly divergent from the state of Israel, remain infused by settler colonial politics of fear and racial superiority.

Banko, Lauren. "Migrants, Residents, and the Cost of Illegal Home-Making in Mandate Palestine." Jerusalem Quarterly 84 (2020): 47-65.

This article seeks to underscore the need for a broader historical framework for understanding belonging in Mandate Palestine in order to incorporate non- settler migrants. Using the notion of “home” and situating physical houses and structures of home, I investigate the stories of certain migrants who came to Palestine not as part of the settler-colonial, Zionist movement but nonetheless with the hope to settle and reside there alongside and within Arab societies and communities. These individuals, from a variety of socio-economic backgrounds and situations, positioned themselves as “indigenous” in order to maintain their homes and residences in the territory. I interrogate the physical realities and emotional sentiments of “home” as Palestine transitioned from an imperial to a national space. As part of this transition, many of these migrants came to be classified by the British authorities as illegally resident in Palestine. Unable to claim any legal status of indigeneity and not entirely able to integrate themselves as settlers, both more prosperous migrants and more marginalized migrants made articulated intimate pleas and legitimizations of belonging. Ultimately, the histories here lead to the question of how historians of the Mandate can know who is “at home” in Palestine during the decades before the Nakba and who gets to make that determination.

Ben Zeev, Nimrod. "'We Built This Country': Palestinian Citizens in Israel's Construction Industry, 1948–73." Jerusalem Quarterly 84 (2020): 10-46.

This article explores the experiences of Palestinian citizens in Israel's construction industry in the twenty-five years following the Palestinian Nakba and the establishment of Israel. The article relies primarily on the narratives of thirteen Palestinian individuals who were construction workers, foremen, contractors, organizers, and activists, as well as their family members, interviewed by the author in October 2018. The article utilizes these narratives alongside archival and secondary sources to examine four primary issues: 1) the conditions and considerations that drove Palestinian citizens to effectively become migrant workers in the Israeli job market, specifically in the construction industry; 2) workers' attempts and experiences of creating spaces of safety and intimacy away from home with their peers and, at times, with their employers; 3) the pressures workers felt to conceal themselves in Jewish spaces because of their racialized hyper-visibility, alongside their experiences of the social invisibility which made their exploitation possible; and 4) how workers and their communities made use of the knowledge, skills, and resources they gained in an industry into which many of them were driven through necessity, to rebuild and reimagine their own communities in the wake of catastrophe and to resist the state's stranglehold on their development.

Morrison, Heidi. "Unchilding by Domicidal Assault: Narrating Experiences of Home during the Second Intifada." Jerusalem Quarterly 84 (2020): 66-86.

Trauma resulting from Israeli violence is embedded in the life stories narrated by Palestinians. Oral histories recorded with Palestinians who grew up during the Second Intifada reveal that the home is a central and critical location for Palestinians to trace their memories of war. It is in the intimate spaces of the home that such trauma is exposed. Though rarely addressed in mainstream news and academic publications, the Palestinian home is never immune from violence related to the larger armed conflict, and this has a particularly harmful impact on home's youngest inhabitants. Israeli attacks on the home are part of a larger process of unchilding, that is, Israel's use of Palestinian children as political capital.

Norris, Jake. "Mobile Homes: The Refashioning of Palestinian Merchant Homes in the Late Ottoman Period." Jerusalem Quarterly 83 (2020): 9-33.

This article is about movement and the role it has played in shaping Palestinian homes. The article looks at merchants from Bethlehem as a case study of how mobility produced new types of homes in the late Ottoman and mandate periods, both materially and conceptually. It documents how the merchants' newfound economic success transformed Bethlehem's urban landscape and in turn produced a kind of “mobile home” as they adopted increasingly transient lifestyles, moving between multiple locations across the globe. These trends are explained within a framework of nineteenth century globalization, the birth of corporate identities, and shifting gender relations.

Rabie, Kareem. "Housing and Generality in Palestine Studies." Jerusalem Quarterly 83 (2020): 34-53.

This paper argues that housing in Palestine might both require and productively enable wider analytical approaches in Palestine studies. Drawing on ethnographic material on privatization and state building in the West Bank, this paper raises questions about the local and more general meanings of class, homeownership, and private property. It discusses some changing ideas of the land in Palestine that can be blurred by place-specific approaches to real estate development. This paper proposes to make a method intervention and to add a more processual understanding of political economy and geography to academic work on housing and on Palestine. It expands outward to argue occupation is not only present through the physical, visible state apparatus, but functions to invisibly and mutually orient Palestine's relationship to capital, to the rest of the world, and to Israel. Occupation is a matter not just of closure but of unequally distributing openings in ways that affirmatively produce and reconfigure the relationships between Palestine and Palestinians, and possible futures. Thus, present forms of building are not simply about emulating a coherent structure and imposition. Instead, housing appears as an outcome of larger processes through which different classes of Palestinians are implicated with international actors and phenomena. Housing is a realization of uneven, generalizing material processes that inform contexts and social relations, and continually shape political economic interventions.

Stomatopolou-Robbins, Sophia. "Occupied Home-Sharing: Airbnb in Palestine." Jerusalem Quarterly 83 (2020): 54-78. 

If home is the engine room of Palestinian subjectivities, what does Airbnb do to the functioning of that engine? What do the experiences of Palestinian hosts demonstrate about the logics, presuppositions, and effects of Airbnb as a technology of platform capitalism? This essay makes two arguments: First, in enrolling people into new relations with their homes and the homes of others, Airbnb shapes and is shaped by socialities, modes of exchange, and material conditions. Second, encoded within Airbnb's operation are assumptions that users are located in benevolent, democratic states with functioning infrastructures. An analysis of the platform must thus take politics, history, and culture into account. Part I introduces the concept of “occupied home-sharing” for understanding Airbnb's manifestation in Palestine. Occupied home-sharing highlights that Palestine's hosts are incarcerated and host unfreely. It also helps reframe occupation and settler colonialism as forms of coerced hosting that allow intrusions of violence into home spaces. Part II examines four different aspects of hosts' experiences of the platform: 1) property as flexible infrastructure, 2) gifts, family, community, 3) rejections, and 4) exclusions. The conclusion considers what these help us to understand about the relationship between Airbnb and precarity in Palestine. Airbnb is both a result of existing forms of precarity born from occupied home-sharing and an instrument for mitigating and making worlds within them.

NDPS 2018: The Shadow Years: Material Histories of Everyday Life

Doumani, Beshara, and Alex Winder. "1948 and Its Shadows." Journal of Palestine Studies 48.1 (2018): 7-15.

Seventy years after the Nakba, what does it mean to commemorate 1948? This introduction to three articles drawn from the 2018 New Directions in Palestinian Studies workshop at Brown University, “The Shadow Years: Material Histories of Everyday Life,” examines the emergence of 1948 as the primary focus of Palestinian commemorative practices and guiding star of future political possibilities, as well as the promise and limitations of the settler-colonial framework. It argues that widening our lens to include the material histories of everyday life in the context of a generational struggle for survival, contextualizes moments of great trauma and violence within the larger dynamics of Palestinians society, and recasts the time/space architecture of narratives about Palestine and the Palestinians.

Doumani, Beshara. "The Everyday and the Shadow Years." Jerusalem Quarterly 79 (2019): 3-6.

The contributions to this issue of the Jerusalem Quarterly coalesce around a number of themes central to Palestinian experiences – the relationships between materiality and memory and between space and power. Two articles in this issue, Fredrik Meiton's “Nation or Industry: The Non-Electrification of Nablus” and Dima Saad's “Materializing Palestinian Memory: Objects of Home and the Everyday Eternities of Exile,” are the final pieces that JQ will publish from the sixth annual New Directions in Palestinian Studies workshop held at Brown University in 2018, thematically organized around “The Shadow Years: Material Histories of Everyday Life.” (Other articles that emerged from this workshop were published in the Autumn 2018 issue of the Journal of Palestine Studies and in the Autumn 2019 issue of the Jerusalem Quarterly.) Each, in its own way, focuses on the materiality of Palestinian experiences and their afterlives.

Abourahme, Nasser. "Nothing to Lose but Our Tents”: The Camp, the Revolution, the Novel." Journal of Palestine Studies 48.1 (2018): 33-52.

Palestinian revolutionary politics were in part defined by the historical challenge of the refugee camps. To politically mobilize the encamped Palestinian body and become a popular mass movement, the revolution required nothing less than the transformation of the camps into the means of their own undoing. This article examines three novels of the revolutionary period (by Kanafani, Abu Shawir, and Yakhlif) to show that Palestinian revolutionary realism both heeded this insurrectionary call but also undermined it. On the one hand, camp life is mediated as only the superficial expression of deeper political totality that lies elsewhere—in other words, only in armed struggle outside the camps can camp life be overcome—and on the other, just at the point when the camp should be overcome in the protagonist's journey toward militancy, the very narrative drive itself stutters. Reading these novels, I argue, points us to political roads not taken, and to ways of thinking about Palestinian camp life as more than a means to another end elsewhere.

Anderson, Charles. "The Suppression of the Great Revolt and the Destruction of Everyday Life in Palestine." Jerusalem Quarterly 79 (2019): 9-27.

Everyday life, and its social and economic foundations, became a battleground during the Great Revolt. Recent scholarship in English has disclosed much about the collective punishments, dirty war tactics, and ambient brutality that characterized the counterinsurgency against the Great Revolt.6 This paper supplements our understanding of the counterinsurgency by highlighting its targeting of the everyday existence of the Palestinian population. The colonial state intruded upon all manner of daily activities, degrading Palestinians’ living conditions and turning the mundane into a site of contest and a pressure point through which to exercise power. The colonial regime converted schools and hotels into military bases, seized crops and livestock, and invaded, assaulted, and demolished homes, villages, and urban quarters. Quotidian and ritual activities like attending prayers or going to school were made contingent on docile behavior or random circumstance; even funerals were prohibited as potential “disturbances.” Villages were temporarily incarcerated and the movement of goods and persons was restricted and rendered dependent on compliance with state surveillance. The rebels were determined to build an alternative sovereignty and public realm that would incorporate the Palestinian population. To destroy that project and cow the population into submission, colonial authorities employed an array of collective punishments that targeted the body politic. The result was a sustained attack on the daily life of the colonized that operated through four registers: economic sanctions, the control of space, the loss of bodily autonomy, and movement controls. No less than its other legacies, this article contends that the 1930s counterinsurgency established a critical precedent for Israel’s subsequent approach to the Palestinians, one premised on the systematic disruption and degradation of everyday life as a means of curbing resistance and controlling the population.

Halevy, Dotan. "Toward a Palestinian History of Ruins: Interwar Gaza." Journal of Palestine Studies 48.1 (2018): 53-72.

Ruins typically mark the endpoint of historical stories, regarded as objects worthy of attention only for the bygone times they represent. But what might a history reveal if it took ruins as its departure point? How would a history of ruins look? This article aims to write ruins into history by pondering the case of Gaza in the aftermath of World War I. The ruins of the city, it is argued here, were the site of a transformation in the modalities of urban change: what had been a ubiquitous and organic process of evolution in the cityscapes of the Middle East up to the late nineteenth century was replaced by top-down spatial convention, imposed by the modern state. This transformation deprived ruins from their long-standing role as essential elements of the urban landscape and flattened them into mere emblems of cultural decay. Consistent with the ontological stance of the progress/decline binary, by the early twentieth century, spatial ruination had become regarded as a unidirectional rather than multidirectional process. This modern framing of ruins proved especially significant for postwar Gaza, whose reconstruction efforts were consequently plagued by internal contradiction.

Manna, Adel. "Resistance and Survival in Central Galilee, July 1948–July 1951." Jerusalem Quarterly 79 (2019): 28-38.

The challenges of resistance and survival facing the people living in rural Galilee were rarely noticed even by the urban Palestinian leadership in Jerusalem, and the resilience of many Palestinian families in the Galilee is a fascinating story still largely absent from the Nakba narrative. This essay proposes to shed light on the daily experiences of Palestinians during the later stage of the Nakba in northern Palestine. The microhistories of Majd al-Kurum and its adjacent villages during the later phase of the 1948 war and after have much to teach us about the meaning of the Nakba in the daily experiences of refugees and non-refugees in the Galilee. I rely heavily on the broader research undertaken for my recent book Nakba and Survival to delve into the realities of the people of Majd al-Kurum before and immediately after its surrender to the Israeli Army on 30 October 1948. In writing Nakba and Survival, I interviewed dozens of eyewitnesses from Majd al-Kurum and neighboring localities. These oral testimonies are a valuable source for understanding the people's experiences, hopes, and fears during this critical period, as are the diaries of Abu Jamil – one of the few educated elders of Majd al-Kurum village – to which I was granted access by his family and which span a period of more than forty years, before and after the Nakba.

Meiton, Fredrik. "Nation or Industry: The Non-Electrification of Nablus." Jerusalem Quarterly 80 (2019): 8-22.

This article highlights one component of the historical conjuncture that generated the two most salient facts of the ArabIsraeli conflict: that in the nationalist struggle over Palestine, Jews achieved statehood and Palestinians did not. Since what is at issue here is as much why something did not happen as why something did, this paper approaches the topic from the perspective of a non-event, namely the fact that the Palestinian town of Nablus, located in what is today the Israeli-occupied West Bank, was never connected to Mandate Palestine’s electric grid. 

Nimrod, Ben Zeev. "Building to Survive: The Politics of Cement in Mandate Palestine." Jerusalem Quarterly 79 (2019): 39-62.

In this article, I focus on the period of British rule (1918–48), which I argue was the formative stage of cement's Palestinian biography. During this period construction was a central component in both the Zionist and the Palestinian nation-building projects. In the process, the consumption and production of cement became indexical of the ability to construct not only modern buildings but also communities. While tracing cement consumption became one method of quantifying “the movement of construction” (Arabic: harakat al-bina'; Hebrew: tnu‘at ha-binyan), its production was understood as crucial to the prospect of economic independence and liberation from colonial domination. As part of a broader narrative that posits construction and construction work as central pillars of the structures of inequality and domination in twentieth-century Palestine/Israel, the article illuminates cement's role in the formation of these structures and in the strategies of struggle and survival Palestinians would deploy in their shadows.

Pasquetti, Silvia. "Experiences of Urban Militarism: Spatial Stigma, Ruins and Everyday Life." International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 43.5 (2019): 848-869.

A key question in urban sociology is how people interpret the urban environment. At a time when cities are increasingly militarized, this question is particularly important for understanding how militarism impacts urban life. However, urban sociologists have not addressed how people experience militarized environments. This article turns to this question by considering the case of Lydda‐Lod, an Israeli city that has been demographically and physically transformed by war, displacement and securitization. Drawing on Wacquant's sociology of spatial stigma and adding insights from works on emotions in (post‐)conflict cities, I examine how poor Palestinians think and feel about the surveilled districts where they live within the city's broader landscape of ruins. I show how the Israeli military, security and policing agencies have collectively produced spatial stigmatization of these districts. I discuss how Palestinians respond to this spatial stigma by attaching a sense of worthlessness to their districts. However, this reproduction of spatial stigma is punctuated by expressions of care for the built environment and by a desire to revalorize collective Palestinian life in the city. I conclude by discussing how a perspective on militarized cities focused on everyday responses to militarism and attentive to marginalities enriches urban sociology and urban studies more generally.

Qato, Mezna. "A Primer for a New Terrain: Palestinian Schooling in Jordan, 1950." Journal of Palestine Studies 48.1 (2018): 16-32.

This article offers a close reading of the first geography textbook printed by the Ministry of Education after the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan annexed the West Bank in 1950. Examining the Hashemite regime's early curricular attempts to incorporate its new Palestinian citizens, refugees and otherwise, the article highlights the tactics used to achieve these ends, namely a topographic centralization of Jordan, an erasure of human geography in favor of a natural one, and the foreclosure of other forms of national attachment and belonging. The discussion seeks to expand our understanding of one of the most significant narrative materials confronted by Palestinians in the aftermath of the Nakba, seeing in it a possible mechanism by which to understand the challenges to Palestinian demands for a self-determined education.

Saad, Dima. "Materializing Palestinian Memory: Objects of Home and the Everyday Eternities of Exile." Jerusalem Quarterly 80 (2019): 57-71.

In this paper, I ethnographically examine how Palestinians living in Jordan exalt these objects as they refuse the enclosure of Palestine in the times and spaces of a concluded past. I consider, at the same time, how the objects themselves haunt, ensnare, and enchant their owners as they reconstruct lost worlds. By focusing not on what is remembered, but on the relationship between people and (the memories of) their things, I hope to afford a closer examination to the unrehearsed practices of recollection and the refracted temporal unravelings that characterize the daily logistics of coping at (and away from) home. I seek, in other words, to track the overlooked modes and idioms of remembering by which Palestinians imbricate fragments of home with the everyday eternities of exile.