Gaza is often decried as a uniquely brutal open-air prison, but is the carceral condition imposed on the Gaza Strip part of a broader historical lineage of confinement landscapes? The argument in this essay is that Gaza belongs to a historically longstanding lineage of places and people subjected to practices of incarceration imposed on landscapes, and that the system of confinement in the Gaza Strip has escaped systematic comparison to these other confined spaces. To support this contention, the essay compares the prison-like conditions of Gaza to three examples of carceral environments: the early-modern, plague-stricken European town; the carceral landscape of the “cotton kingdom” in the antebellum American South; and the French system of confinement in the pacification of Algeria. Using both text and photographic images, this article also speculates that situating Gaza within this comparative frame at this moment offers new opportunities for changing the discourse about Gaza to a world seemingly indifferent to the injustices suffered by the Palestinians of Gaza.

The Palestinian experience has been aptly characterized as carceralism, in both literal and metaphorical senses. It is arguable that ever since the 1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the most consensual pillar of national Palestinian discourse has been the issue of Palestinians imprisoned by Israel. After Hamas's so-called takeover of Gaza in 2007, however, a new, intra-Palestinian carceralism emerged. This article traces the shifts in Palestinian representations and experiences of the carceral post-2007, their historical resonances in the late Oslo era, and their implications for Palestinian unity after nine years of division.

Women have been instrumental to the Palestinian liberation struggle from its inception, and the role they have played in political, civil, and armed resistance has been as critical, if not as visible, as that of their male counterparts. In addition to experiencing the same forms of repression as men, be it arrest, indefinite detention, or incarceration, Palestinian women have also been subjected to sexual violence and other gendered forms of coercion at the hands of the Israeli occupation regime. Drawing on testimonies from former and current female prisoners, this paper details Israel's incarceration policies and examines their consequences for Palestinian women and their families. It argues that Israel uses the incarceration of women as a weapon to undermine Palestinian resistance and to fracture traditionally cohesive social relations; and more specifically, that the prison authorities subject female prisoners to sexual and gender-based violence as a psychological weapon to break them and, by extension, their children.

The U.S. Security Coordinator (USSC) mission in Jerusalem was created in 2005 to help implement security sector reform within the Palestinian Authority (PA). With a single-minded focus on “counterterrorism,” Washington considered the USSC an ancillary mechanism to support U.S. diplomatic and political efforts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Despite upending long-standing U.S. policy and cutting all other forms of aid to the Palestinians, the Trump administration has maintained the USSC in the run-up to the “Deal of the Century.” This article draws on original interviews with security personnel responsible for enacting USSC interventions. It uses their insights to highlight how the mission tethered Israeli political aims to its remit, and the distorting ramifications that have ensued for Palestine and the Palestinians. In uncovering the full parameters of Washington's securitization policy, this history also points to the ways in which the PA has consequently been woven into the U.S.-led “global War on Terror.”

This introductory essay outlines the context for this special issue of the Journal of Palestine Studies on Black-Palestinian transnational solidarity (BPTS). Through the analytic of “renewal,” the authors point to the recent increase in individual and collective energies directed toward developing effective, reciprocal, and transformative political relationships within various African-descendant and Palestinian communities around the world. Drawing from the extant BPTS literature, this essay examines the prominent intellectual currents in the field and points to new methodologies and analytics that are required to move the field forward. With this essay, the authors aim not only to contextualize the field and to frame this special issue, but also to chart new directions for future intellectual and political work.

This essay questions a key takeaway from the Ferguson/Gaza convergence that catalyzed the current wave of Black-Palestinian transnational solidarity: the idea that “equivalence,” or a politics of analogy based on racial or national identity, or racialized or colonial experience, is the sole or primary grounds for solidarity. By revisiting three recent spectacular moments involving Black intellectuals advocating for Palestine—Michelle Alexander's op-ed in the New York Times criticizing Israeli policies, CNN's firing of Marc Lamont Hill, and the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute's initial decision to deny Angela Davis its highest honor—this paper suggests that their controversial positions must be traced back to the post-1967 moment. The convergence of Black urban rebellions and the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war birthed the first significant wave of Black-Palestinian solidarity; at the same time, solidarities rooted in anti-imperialism and Left internationalism rivaled the “Black-Jewish alliance,” founded on analogy of oppression rather than shared principles of liberation. Third World insurgencies and anti-imperialist movements, not just events in the United States and Palestine, created the conditions for radically reordering political alliances: rather than adopting a politics of analogy or identity, the Black and Palestinian Left embraced a vision of “worldmaking” that was a catalyst for imagining revolution as opposed to plotting coalition.

This article provides an outline of the project of queer theory and the ways that this project has (and has not) engaged with the question of Palestine. Ultimately, the author argues that queer theory and Palestinian liberation share, albeit perhaps unwittingly, a defining resistance to elimination and an enduring commitment to unsettlement. As such, queer politics is and can surely become decolonial praxis, just as decolonization has a clear affinity with dissident queer resistance.

This update summarizes bilateral, multilateral, regional, and international events affecting the Palestinians and Israel during the quarter from 16 November 2017 to 15 February 2018. Highlights include: U.S. president Donald Trump pledged to move the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and formally recognized Jerusalem as Israel's capital, reversing decades of U.S. policy. His decision provoked an international backlash, sparked a wave of protests and clashes in the occupied Palestinian territories, and compromised his own diplomatic efforts. The Israelis celebrated Trump's decision, while the Palestinians cited it as an illustration of the United States' pro-Israel bias and as the reason for their rejection of U.S. mediation in any future peace talks. Outraged, Trump ordered punitive cuts to U.S. humanitarian aid designated for Palestinian refugees, further undercutting any peace initiative, which advisors insisted was still under way. The Palestinians began pursuing a new, multilateral framework to continue the peace process. Amid these developments, the Palestinian national reconciliation process stalled once again.

In this profile of Rasmea Odeh, JPS examines the case of a Palestinian woman who has been incarcerated in both Israel and the United States. After a decade of confinement in Israel, Odeh was freed in a prisoner exchange in 1979. Following deportation from the occupied Palestinian territories, she became a noted social justice and women's rights organizer, first in Lebanon and Jordan, and later in the U.S., where she built the now over 800-strong Arab Women's Committee of Chicago. In April 2017, Odeh accepted a plea bargain that would lead to her deportation from the United States after a years-long legal battle to overturn a devastating conviction on charges of immigration fraud. Observers, legal experts, and supporters consider the case to “reek of political payback,” in the words of longtime Palestine solidarity activist, author, and academic Angela Davis. Odeh's generosity of spirit, biting wit, and easy smile did not desert her throughout the years that she fought her case. To know Odeh is to be reminded that the work of organizing for social justice is about the collective rather than the individual, and that engagement, relationship building, and trust are the foundations of such work.

This update, which summarizes bilateral, multilateral, regional, and international events affecting the Palestinians and the future of the peace process, covers the quarter beginning on 16 February 2017 and ending on 15 May 2017. During this period, the administration of U.S. pres. Donald Trump attempted to put its own stamp on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, the Israeli government announced a new policy on settlement growth in the West Bank, and the Ramallah-based Palestinian leadership struggled to consolidate power. Palestinians in the West Bank elected new local leaders, despite disagreements among the major parties. Some 1,500 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails declared a hunger strike, drawing support from across the political spectrum. Meanwhile, Israel's right-wing government kept up a campaign to undermine and delegitimize its opponents, including the Israeli Left, the Palestinian minority in Israel, and the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

This update summarizes bilateral, multilateral, regional, and international events affecting the Palestinians and the future of the peace process. It covers the quarter beginning on 16 August and ending on 15 November 2016. The surge of violence that escalated during the Jewish High Holidays in 9/2015 continued to subside this quarter. This year's holidays passed without major incidents. While the Palestinian Authority and Israeli government reached deals on electricity and postal service, neither altered their positions on a return to final-status negotiations, despite ongoing initiatives from the international community. The Palestinian leadership advanced initiatives in international institutions, including the United Nations Security Council. The recently reshuffled Israeli govt. instituted a new carrot-and-stick policy for administering the occupied Palestinian territories while struggling with internal differences over Amona, an illegal Israeli settlement outpost, as well as with the settlement enterprise itself. Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, ushering in a Republican-dominated U.S. government that portends significant changes to the U.S. position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

This section comprises international, Arab, Israeli, and U.S. documents and source materials, as well as an annotated list of recommended reports, from the quarter which covers February 16 through 15 May 2016. Documents and source materials are reproduced without editing to conform to JPS style or spelling. Along with PDFs of recommended reports, they are available in full at www.palestine-studies.org .

This short biography of Dr. Eyad El Sarraj, the founder of the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme, describes his formative experiences under Israeli occupation, his education, and his professional life, including interactions with Palestinian and Israeli colleagues. El Sarraj's vision of collective resistance, his stubborn ‘pathological optimism,’ and his devotion to the dignity and well-being of his patients and the people of the Gaza Strip in the face of unrelenting Israeli state violence are colorfully described by his colleague and long-time friend Paul Aaron.

In this no-holds-barred essay, former New York Times Middle East correspondent and Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Chris Hedges examines how the United States’ staunch support provides Israel with impunity to visit mayhem on a population which it subjugates and holds captive. Notwithstanding occasional and momentary criticism, the official U.S. cheerleading stance is not only an embarrassing spectacle, Hedges argues, it is also a violation of international law, and an illustration of the disfiguring and poisonous effect of the psychosis of permanent war characteristic of both countries. The author goes on to conclude that the reality of its actions against the Palestinians, both current and historical, exposes the fiction that Israel stands for the rule of law and human rights, and gives the lie to the myth of the Jewish state and that of its sponsor, the United States.