In this introduction to “Queering Palestine,” the curators of this special issue of the Journal of Palestine Studies explore what queer theory and activism can teach us about the Palestinian condition, and vice versa. They contextualize the arguments made by the contributors for the relevance of queer politics to the question of Palestine, which encompass queer theory and dissent, sexuality politics and the nation-state, and queerness as decolonial practice.

This paper reexamines the Palestinian struggle for self-determination and the extent to which a viable two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was ever truly possible. Such a reexamination seems all the more pertinent today on the hundredth anniversary of the Balfour Declaration. It is also seventy years since the UN partition plan to divide historic Palestine and fifty years since UN Security Council Resolution 242, which has been the basis for every peace agreement between Israel and its neighbors but makes no mention of or reference to the Palestinian people. The paper argues that the history of the past fifty years reinforces the claim that a State is central to any attempt to fight Palestinian erasure and ensure “the right to have rights,” as Hannah Arendt put it, but it argues that such an entity needs to be elevated above the nation, rather than made subservient to it if it is to protect the rights of Palestinians and all those living on the land of Palestine.

After the Oslo peace process got underway in the early 1990s, international donors allocated billions of dollars in aid to the occupied Palestinian territories to kick-start the process of economic development deemed necessary to state building. This article argues that although much of the money was directed at democracy enhancement and civic engagement projects, contrary to stated intentions, it actually undermined rather than promoted those outcomes. Donor countries, led by the United States and the European Union, designed and implemented programs with complete disregard for the reality underlying the Palestinian predicament—the almost 50 years of military occupation and the broader context of Israel's settler-colonial project. Besides their entrenchment of a neoliberal agenda, such projects have contributed to the ongoing fracturing of Palestinian politics and the growing authoritarianism of the Ramallah government, leaving the Palestinian economy less viable and more dependent on Israel than ever.

This article reflects on the body of knowledge that has been constructed around the Palestinian economy. It traces the paradigm shifts between the two most commonly used theoretical frameworks—neoliberalism and colonialism—and assesses their success in analyzing and explaining the determinants of Palestinian economic growth. The Zionist project itself as well as the significant disparities between the various Palestinian communities that exist (inside Israel, in the occupied territories, and in the diaspora) have figured unevenly or not at all in scholarly analyses. The paper argues that as a result, the scholarship on the Palestinian economy has been quite inconsistent. The discussion seeks to demonstrate that this inconsistency has compromised the ability of economists both to explain the failure of Palestinian development and to identify possible remedies.

This article analyzes employment trends of West Bank and Gaza Palestinians working in Israel during the Oslo years (1993––2000). While significantly reduced from pre-1992 levels, Palestinian labor flows to Israel remained important but changed in form and content, revealing contrasting Israeli policies toward the two territories. In Gaza, labor links with Israel were increasingly severed, reflecting the growing separation of the two economies and the transformation of Gaza into a de facto labor reserve. In the West Bank, where the process of "Bantustanization" is described, workers continued to be employed beyond the Green Line and in the settlements, enhancing the incorporation of parts of the territory into Israel.