12.09.24
Editorial Note
Last week, Cornell University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies hosted the Palestinian Studies Speaker Series. The speakers were Tamir Sorek, a professor of Middle East history at Pennsylvania State University, and Sonia Boulos, an associate professor of international human rights law at Antonio de Nebrija University, Madrid, Spain. Deborah Starr, professor and chair of the Cornell Near Eastern Studies Department, was the moderator.
Sorek and Boulos are the co-editors of a new academic journal, The Palestine/Israel Review, published by The Pennsylvania State University Press. In their talk, they explained that the Journal “was created to challenge the typically separated approach to Israel and Palestine studies in academia.” To this end, the Journal includes Israeli as well as Palestinian scholarship.
Sorek said in his talk, “About three years ago, a group of scholars at Pennsylvania State University started thinking… Let’s build a journal that will try to bring these two scholarly fields together.” The journal’s “relational approach,” according to Sorek, aims to emphasize “the intertwined conflicts and progress of Israeli and Palestinian societies. He said that their study in academia has branched due to opposing political agendas.” Sorek argued that Israel studies has largely ignored the “settler colonial context, crucial for understanding Zionism, Israeli society and any kind of interaction between Israelis and Palestinians.” He said that “conversely, Palestine studies focuses on the historical injustices faced by Palestinians.”
Buolos explained that the Journal’s key goal is “to increase awareness of how Israeli internal conflicts and policies impact Palestinian oppression.” The Palestine/Israel Review encourages writers to use literature in Arabic. “There exists an entire academic world in Arabic.“ Buolos pointed to the lack of Western use of Arabic materials. “We’re trying to fight against this [to] give voice to the people writing about these things.”
Boulos and Sorek wrote in the Journal’s Introduction: “The current war in Gaza, with the International Court of Justice ruling that a genocide is plausible, has highlighted the pivotal role of settler colonialism as an analytical framework to understand and contextualize the current wave of apocalyptic violence. At the same time, references to settler colonialism have triggered discursive resistance among certain academic circles. To debate this issue, Palestine/Israel Review organized a special webinar titled “Israel–Hamas: A Colonial War?” While the title focuses in its first part on Israel versus Hamas, the second part challenges the claim that Israel is fighting a war against Hamas, and suggests that the recent violence inflicted on Gazans is an escalation of a continuous physical and symbolic erasure of Palestine and Palestinians.”
They argued, “Ever since the recent cycle of apocalyptic violence erupted in Gaza, there has been a political struggle between those who believe that the history of recent violent events begins with the Palestinian Nakba 75 years ago or even earlier, and those who want to set the clock on 7 October. We at Palestine/Israel Review place ourselves in the first camp. We believe that the 7 October attacks, including the atrocious targeting of Israeli civilians, and the ensuing Israeli violence in Gaza that could be framed as genocidal (as the provisional measures issued by the International Court of Justice indicate) cannot be understood outside the context of Israel’s settler-colonial history. Coloniality can also explain how the colonial roots of the international order and of international law have enables this violence. But those who believe that the history of this unfolding human catastrophe begins on 7 October suggest that Hamas’s crimes fall outside history, politics, and sociology, and rationalize Israel’s violence as an act of self-defense. This discourse often ignores the Palestinians’ right to be free from oppression and domination, paying little or no attention to the fact that Israeli occupation in itself ‘constitutes an unjustified use of force and an act of aggression,’ as highlighted by the UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese.”
Furthermore, they argued, “to dismiss the relevance of settler colonialism and broader historical perspectives, members of this camp have relentlessly attempted to discredit scholars who refer to settler colonialism by accusing them of legitimizing violence against civilians.”
To debate these issues, Palestine/Israel Review organized a special webinar titled ‘Israel–Hamas: A Colonial War?’ As stated, “While the title focuses in its first part on Israel versus Hamas, the second part challenges the claim that Israel is fighting a war against Hamas, and suggests that the recent violence inflicted on Gazans is an escalation of a continuous physical and symbolic erasure of Palestine and Palestinians.”
Several scholars participated and published papers in the Journal, as Boulos and Sorek described:
Oren Yiftachel argued that “the 7 October attack and accompanying discourses by Hamas leaders places them under the rubric of counter-colonization.”
Ian Lustick argued that Israel “was imagined and created by Jews as a means of salvation, retribution, and protection… now appears as probably the most dangerous threat facing Jews, both in Israel and in the diaspora.”
Honaida Ghanim argued that “Palestinian hopelessness has intensified to an indescribable extent,” leading to an “intractable organic crisis that culminated in an eruption of extreme violence. Recognizing the colonial character of this dynamics is crucial for confronting it.”
Michal Frenkel was, for Boulos and Sorek, a “snapshot of mainstream Israeli academia, which resists the contextualization of the 7 October attacks in a broader historical perspective marked by continued oppression and dispossession of Palestinians.” Frenkel argues that the “colonial lens is sometimes applied, especially by those not directly involved in the study of Palestine/Israel, in ways that appear to justify actions like the Hamas massacre of Israeli and foreign civilians on 7 October.” Instead, she offers an “imperial analysis” that “involves scrutinizing the shifting relations between various empires across different historical periods.”
Boulos and Sorek concluded, “The war in Gaze continues as these lines are going to press. While we are still looking for words to describe and explain the horrors, vocabulary borrowed from other settler-colonial conflicts remains the optimal—even if not perfect—working tool.”
Worth noting that the talk and the Journal reflect the evolution of the pro-Hamas advocacy among scholars known for their long record of delegitimizing Israel, using the critical, neo-Marxist jargon. Hamas is a terror organization and, as such, has been condemned for its atrocities and the murderous attack on October 7. To call the Gaza attack and Israel’s response a “colonial war” is farfetched even by the notoriously biased standards of academics in the field of Middle East Studies. As IAM documented, these scholars are nothing more than propagandists for the Palestinians.
These scholars should be reminded that nearly a year into the Gaza War, there is a large body of empirical evidence that Hamas runs a brutal dictatorship in Gaza, stifling critics who complained about the diversion of billions of international aid to build the enormous network of tunnels and the vast corruption of the Hamas government which helped its officials to build a luxurious neighborhood in Gaza City nicknamed “Beverley Hills.”
The academics featured in the Cornell symposium and the Journal forgot to mention some five hundred kilometers of tunnels built by Hamas. In what is arguably the most radical case of embedding within the civilian population, access to the tunnels was located in public spaces, mosques, schools, and hospitals, forcing the noncombatants to act as human shields for the terrorists.
As usual, in the “colonial” rendition of the conflict, the Palestinians have no responsibility. They are depicted as powerless – like individuals subjected by their colonial master, Israel. Nothing can be further from the truth. The Palestinians had plenty of opportunities to make better choices. First, in the 1947 UN Partition Plan, which, under the pressure of the Arab countries and their leader Haj Amin al Husseini, an ardent admirer of Hitler, they rejected, forcing them into the 1948 war in which they lost. After the 1967 War, the Israeli Labor government proposed to trade most of the territories taken in the war for a peace agreement. The Palestinians who participated in the Khartoum Conference responded with the “three no’s:” No Peace with Israel, No Recognition of Israel, No Negotiations. After the signing of the Oslo Accord in I993 between Israel and Yasser Arafat’s PLO, the Iranian theocratic regime mounted a huge effort to sink the agreement. Its’ proxies, Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, launched a wave of suicide bombing that morphed into the Second Intifada, where thousands of Israelis were killed and wounded.
There is little doubt that the October 7 attack was also a response to the Abraham Accords.
By omitting the historical context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, these scholars are not interested in historical truth or facts. Equally important, they have not helped the Palestinians to make more reasonable choices. But these are never their goals; their purpose is bashing Israel.
REFERENCES:
https://events.cornell.edu/event/palestineisrael-studies-carving-out-a-new-intellectual-space
Palestine/Israel Studies: Carving Out a New Intellectual Space
Tuesday, September 3, 2024 5pm to 6:30pm
About this Event
Goldwin Smith Hall, G64 Kaufmann AuditoriumView map Free Event
232 East Ave, Central Campus
Sonia Boulos (Nebrija University, Spain) and Tamir Sorek (Penn State University), co-editors of the new journal Palestine/Israel Review, will give a talk, “Palestine/Israel Studies: Carving Out a New Intellectual Space” on Tuesday, September 3. This lecture is the first in the Palestinian Studies speaker series.
Knowledge about Palestine/Israel is often shaped by conflicting political struggles. Separate scholarly fields for Palestine and Israel studies reflect different political agendas. Israel studies tend to normalize colonial power dynamics, while Palestine studies challenge them. This separation overlooks the intertwined nature of Palestinian and Israeli societies. Boulos and Sorek question if a new, integrated approach to studying these societies is possible, focusing on structural barriers like the unequal positioning of scholars and resource gaps.
Sonia Boulos is an associate professor of international law at Nebrija University, Spain. Her research focuses on international protection of human rights. She has worked on human rights issues related to the Palestinian minority in Israel, such as, gender equality, due process in Ecclesiastical family courts, and the policing of the Palestinian minority in Israel. Boulos is a co-editor of the new journal Palestine/Israel Review.
Tamir Sorek is a professor of Middle East history at Penn State University. He studies culture as a field of conflict and resistance, particularly in the context of Palestine/Israel. He is the author of The Optimist: A Social Biography of Tawfiq Zayyad (Stanford University Press, 2020), Palestinian Commemoration in Israel: Calendar, Monuments, and Martyrs (Stanford University Press, 2015) and Arab Soccer in a Jewish State: The Integrative Enclave (Cambridge University Press 2007). Sorek is a co-editor of the new journal Palestine/Israel Review.
Sponsor:
Department of Near Eastern Studies
Co-sponsors:
Einaudi Center‘s Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) initiative
===============================================
Scholars Discuss New Journal Which Joins Israeli and Palestinian Studies
By Christine Savino
The Palestine/Israel Review was created to challenge the typically separated approach to Israel and Palestine studies in academia, according to Tamir Sorek, an editor for the journal.
Sorek, along with co-editor Sonia Boulos, spoke in Goldwin Smith Hall on Tuesday as part of the Palestinian Studies Speaker Series hosted by the Department of Near Eastern Studies.
Boulos is an associate professor of international human rights law at Antonio de Nebrija University and Sorek is a professor of Middle East history at Pennsylvania State University. The talk was moderated by Deborah Starr, professor and chair of the Near Eastern Studies Department.
The Palestine/Israel Review is published by The Pennsylvania State University Press and includes Israeli as well as Palestinian scholarship.
“About three years ago, a group of scholars at Pennsylvania State University [and I] started thinking, why not?” Sorek said. “Let’s build a journal that will try to bring these two scholarly fields together.”
Sorek explained that the journal’s “relational approach” emphasizes the intertwined conflicts and progress of Israeli and Palestinian societies.
He said that their study in academia has branched due to opposing political agendas.
Sorek argued that Israel studies has largely ignored the “settler colonial context [that is] crucial for understanding Zionism, Israeli society and any kind of interaction between Israelis and Palestinians.”
He said that conversely, Palestine studies focuses on the historical injustices faced by Palestinians.
Buolos explained that one of the journal’s key goals is to increase awareness of how Israeli internal conflicts and policies impact Palestinian oppression.
The journal also addresses the structural challenges that Palestinian scholars face, such as language barriers, which hinder their participation in academic discourse, according to Buolos. The Palestine/Israel Review encourages writers to use literature in Arabic.
“There exists an entire academic world in Arabic,“ Buolos explained. “We’re trying to fight against this [lack of Western use of these materials to] give voice to the people writing about these things.”
This Palestinian Studies Speaker Series, alongside the Antisemitism and Islamophobia Examined speaker series, is being hosted amid high tensions on campus.
Since the start of the Israel-Hamas war in October 2023, the University has seen incidents of antisemitism and Islamophobia, causing students of both groups to express fear for their safety on campus.
Pro-Palestine demonstrations have continued into the Fall 2024 semester, including the vandalism of Day Hall on the first day of classes.
===========================================
https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/psup/pir/issue/1/1
Palestine/Israel Review: Carving Out a New Intellectual Space
View articletitled, <em>Palestine/Israel Review</em>: Carving Out a New Intellectual Space
Open thePDFfor in another window
ARTICLES
“Judeo-Arabic” and the Separationist Thesis
View articletitled, “Judeo-Arabic” and the Separationist Thesis
Open thePDFfor in another window
Walking with Ghosts along the Bazaar: Urban Life in Ludd, Palestine, at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
Open thePDFfor in another window
Walking to Unsettle Jerusalem
View articletitled, Walking to Unsettle Jerusalem
Open thePDFfor in another window
Egyptian Popular Culture in Late Ottoman and Mandate Palestine
View articletitled, Egyptian Popular Culture in Late Ottoman and Mandate Palestine
Open thePDFfor in another window
Circumventing Israeli Control: Palestinian Furniture Exports via Israeli Settlements
Open thePDFfor in another window
Settler Mimicry: Colonization and Decolonization through Imitation
View articletitled, Settler Mimicry: Colonization and Decolonization through Imitation
Open thePDFfor in another window
Old and New Strategies for Exploiting Structural Change in Palestine/Israel: A Review Essay
Open thePDFfor in another window
Is the Israeli Discipline of “Middle East and Islam Studies” Decolonizing?
View articletitled, Is the Israeli Discipline of “Middle East and Islam Studies” Decolonizing?
Open thePDFfor in another window
A Special Project on the War in Gaza
Introduction: A Colonial War
View articletitled, Introduction: A Colonial War
Open thePDFfor in another window
Settler Colonialism and Decolonization
View articletitled, Settler Colonialism and Decolonization
Open thePDFfor in another window
Colonial—And Counter-colonial: The Israel/Gaza War through Multiple Critical Perspectives
Open thePDFfor in another window
Must Every Golem Die?
View articletitled, Must Every Golem Die?
Open thePDFfor in another window
The Urgency of the Settler Colonialism Framework in Understanding 7 October and the War on Gaza
Open thePDFfor in another window
The October 2023 War—From a Colonial to an Imperial Analysis
View articletitled, The October 2023 War—From a Colonial to an Imperial Analysis
Open thePDFfor in another window
- Cover Image
- PDF Icon PDF LinkFront Matter
- PDF Icon PDF LinkTable of Contents
=================================================
Introduction: A Colonial War
Palestine/Israel Review (2024) 1 (1): 219–222.
https://doi.org/10.5325/pir.1.1.0010
Abstract
The settler-colonial paradigm has gained traction in the study of Palestine/Israel in recent years. The current war in Gaza, with the International Court of Justice ruling that a genocide is plausible, has highlighted the pivotal role of settler colonialism as an analytical framework to understand and contextualize the current wave of apocalyptic violence. At the same time, references to settler colonialism have triggered discursive resistance among certain academic circles. To debate this issue, Palestine/Israel Review organized a special webinar titled “Israel–Hamas: A Colonial War?”. While the title focuses in its first part on Israel versus Hamas, the second part challenges the claim that Israel is fighting a war against Hamas, and suggests that the recent violence inflicted on Gazans is an escalation of a continuous physical and symbolic erasure of Palestine and Palestinians. Five scholars from different disciplines participated in the webinar.
Gaza, Hamas, settler colonialism, webinar
Issue Section:
A Special Project on the War in Gaza
Ever since the recent cycle of apocalyptic violence erupted in Gaza, there has been a political struggle between those who believe that the history of recent violent events begins with the Palestinian Nakba 75 years ago or even earlier, and those who want to set the clock on 7 October. We at Palestine/Israel Review place ourselves in the first camp. We believe that the 7 October attacks, including the atrocious targeting of Israeli civilians, and the ensuing Israeli violence in Gaza that could be framed as genocidal (as the provisional measures issued by the International Court of Justice indicate) cannot be understood outside the context of Israel’s settler-colonial history. Coloniality can also explain how the colonial roots of the international order and of international law have enables this violence.
But those who believe that the history of this unfolding human catastrophe begins on 7 October suggest that Hamas’s crimes fall outside history, politics, and sociology, and rationalize Israel’s violence as an act of self-defense. This discourse often ignores the Palestinians’ right to be free from oppression and domination, paying little or no attention to the fact that Israeli occupation in itself “constitutes an unjustified use of force and an act of aggression,” as highlighted by the UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese. Furthermore, to dismiss the relevance of settler colonialism and broader historical perspectives, members of this camp have relentlessly attempted to discredit scholars who refer to settler colonialism by accusing them of legitimizing violence against civilians.
To debate these issues, Palestine/Israel Review organized a special webinar titled “Israel–Hamas: A Colonial War?” While the title focuses in its first part on Israel versus Hamas, the second part challenges the claim that Israel is fighting a war against Hamas, and suggests that the recent violence inflicted on Gazans is an escalation of a continuous physical and symbolic erasure of Palestine and Palestinians. Five scholars from different disciplines participated in the webinar.
In his contribution, Raef Zreik argues that settler colonialism is a useful frame for analyzing Israeli society, economy, politics, and law. However, resort to this paradigm as an analytical tool should not exclude other frames of analysis, such as class struggle, feminist approaches, cultural analysis, global politics, economic analysis, and nationalist analysis. But more importantly, no particular political solution can emerge “from the mere fact that a situation can be analyzed under the frame of settler colonialism.” A solution would ultimately depend on the particularities of each settler-colonial society.
Oren Yiftachel argues that the recent cycle of violence in Israel/Palestine is indeed a horrific outcome of the settler-colonial relations between Jews and Palestinians. However, he argues that settler colonialism alone “cannot provide a sufficient account of the complex forces driving Israel/Palestine in general, and the Gaza flashpoint in particular.” He distinguishes between decolonization and counter-colonization. The former “entails the political and legal dismantling of the tools of colonialism,” while the latter entails “the (violent) overthrowing of the regime of a legitimate political entity and the potential eviction or subjugation of settler-immigrant population, even after several generations.” Accordingly, Yiftachel argues that the 7 October attack and accompanying discourses by Hamas leaders places them under the rubric of counter-colonization.
Ian Lustick refers to the legend of the golem in Jewish tradition, who was created by Rabbi Loew, the Maharal of Prague, to defend the Jews against ferocious antisemitism. While successful in his mission to protect Jews from anti-Semites, with time the golem becomes more and more violent, destructive, and uncontrollable. This eventually forces his creator to end his life to save the community from his violence. Lustick argues that just like the golem, Israel “was imagined and created by Jews as a means of salvation, retribution, and protection.” However, the Zionist settler project with its violence “now appears as probably the most dangerous threat facing Jews, both in Israel and in the diaspora.”
In her contribution, Honaida Ghanim argues that the new far-right leadership under Benjamin Netanyahu has deployed the strategy of “conflict management” to dismantle the Palestinian cause. This strategy involves the Judaization of the space and demography on the one hand and the division of Palestinians into isolated communities under Israeli dominance on the other. This was paralleled with international and regional abandonment of Palestinians. Therefore, Ghanim argues that “Palestinian hopelessness has intensified to an indescribable extent,” leading to an intractable organic crisis that culminated in an eruption of extreme violence. Recognizing the colonial character of this dynamics is crucial for confronting it.
The contribution of Michal Frenkel is a snapshot of mainstream Israeli academia, which resists the contextualization of the 7 October attacks in a broader historical perspective marked by continued oppression and dispossession of Palestinians. She argues that the “colonial lens is sometimes applied, especially by those not directly involved in the study of Palestine/Israel, in ways that appear to justify actions like the Hamas massacre of Israeli and foreign civilians on 7 October.” Instead, she offers an “imperial analysis” that “involves scrutinizing the shifting relations between various empires across different historical periods.”
The war in Gaze continues as these lines are going to press. While we are still looking for words to describe and explain the horrors, vocabulary borrowed from other settler-colonial conflicts remains the optimal—even if not perfect—working tool.
israel-academia-monitor.com 