This article traces the research trajectory of the Institute of Community and Public Health (ICPH) at Birzeit University, whose work focuses on life and health outcomes for Palestinians living in chronic warlike conditions under Israeli settler-colonial rule. Over decades of field-based work, ICPH researchers came to the realization that medicalized responses to trauma contributed to concealing the social and political meaning that Palestinians attribute to their collective experience. By adopting an approach that linked the biological/biomedical sphere to the political sphere through the concept of suffering, and exposing the sociopolitical conditions of life and the collective trauma inducing nature of Israeli military occupation and repression, ICPH's research has allowed for the simultaneous personalization of war and politicization of health. In addition to discussing some of the health problems identified by ongoing investigations, the article also touches on the ways in which institution building and research production are linked to the capacity of Palestinians to endure and resist violation in their struggle for justice.

This October 2015 interview with director of the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme (GCMHP) Dr. Yasser Abu Jamei addresses how mental health professionals care for themselves and each other in an environment with little break from sustained conflict. Mental health workers in the Gaza Strip must cope with the resource shortage generated by the Israeli blockade and their own trauma while aiding others. The United Nations Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF) estimates that over one-third of Gaza's children require direct and specialized psychosocial support as a result of Israel's Operation Protective Edge (OPE), the fifty-day war on Gaza in the summer of 2014, and earlier assaults. GCMHP provides services free of charge at clinics, community centers, and by phone via a twenty-four-hour hotline, and since its founding, has served more than twenty thousand Gazans with capacity-building programs and trainings, community education, scientific research, and human rights advocacy. GCMHP provided mental health support to the community both during and after each of the three large-scale Israeli assaults on Gaza (in 2008, 2012, and 2014), helping the community to work through both collective and individual trauma. Over twenty-one hundred Palestinians, five hundred of them children, were killed during OPE and another eleven thousand injured. During OPE an airstrike killed twenty-eight members of Abu Jamei's extended family, including nineteen children, as they broke their Ramadan fast. It was the largest loss of life within a single family at that point in the war. The structural damage was similarly catastrophic, leaving over one hundred thousand Gazans homeless. Long after the cease-fire, the psychological wounds sustained during consecutive assaults continue to disrupt everyday life.

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.

The frequent and repeated large-scale attacks on the Gaza Strip have had a blunting effect, with the oft-cited statistics and casualty tolls failing to convey the suffering and trauma entailed by the relentless violence perpetrated on the Palestinian population. In this reflection, Laila El-Haddad interweaves personal stories about families and loved ones into her essay about the summer 2014 assault on her home of origin. She humanizes her subjects and focuses on their day-to-day experiences rather than on the enumeration of the damage, destruction, and devastation wrought. She reminds her readers that in spite of being beleaguered and besieged, Gazans are not beaten down and are resorting to art and other forms of creative expression to memorialize the dead, the displaced, and the wounded, and to remind the world of their humanity.

The Covid-19 pandemic has laid bare the devastating and disproportionate effects of structures of violence that produce vulnerability in communities of color globally, including with respect to mental health-care provision. While coping and resilience are dominant mainstream frameworks to understand mental health in crisis—both in Palestine and elsewhere—the three contributors to this roundtable were asked to offer a rejoinder to that approach. They reflect on the pandemic as an opportunity to revisit how we understand and advocate for critical approaches to mental health in Palestine in the midst of prolonged crisis.

This introductory essay contextualizes the special collection of papers on the pandemic and seeks to map the terrain of extant public health research on Palestine and the Palestinians. In addition, it is a contribution in Palestine studies to a nascent yet propulsive conversation that has been accelerated by Covid-19 on the erasure of structures of violence, including those of settler colonialism and racial capitalism, within the discipline of epidemiology. Using public health as an analytic, this essay asks us to consider foundational questions that have long been sidelined in the public health discourse on Palestine, including the implications for health and health research of eliding ongoing settler colonialism. Rather than ignoring and reproducing their violence, this essay seeks to tackle these questions head-on in an attempt to imagine a future public health research agenda that centers health, and not simply survivability, for all Palestinians.

This paper examines Mahmoud Darwish's exploration of the political, geographical, existential, and metaphysical dimensions of displacement, banishment, and statelessness in his 2005 lyrical epic “Exile.” The paper offers an analysis of Darwish's treatment of dialectic, heteroglossia, the juxtaposition of the national and the existential, and conflicting temporalities, as well as political uncertainty and metaphysical fear. With particular reference to the paradoxical portrayal of space in “Exile”—the juxtaposition of the near and far, real and illusory, localized and dispersed—I also examine the ways in which Palestinian identity, as narrated in this poem, is destabilized and dispersed by what Michel Foucault calls “heterotopic space.”

This bibliography lists articles and reviews of books relevant to Palestine and the Arab-Israeli conflict from the quarter 16 February–15 May 2020. Entries are classified under the following headings: Palestine in Global and Comparative Perspectives; Palestine and the Palestinians; Literature and the Arts; Middle East and the Arab World; Israel and Zionism; and Recent Theses and Dissertations.

This bibliography lists articles and reviews of books relevant to Palestine and the Arab-Israeli conflict from the quarter 16 November–16 February 2020. Entries are classified under the following headings: Palestine in Global and Comparative Perspectives; Palestine and the Palestinians; Literature and the Arts; Middle East and the Arab World; Israel and Zionism; and Recent Theses and Dissertations.

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.

Published each issue, this section strives to capture the tenor and content of popular conversations related to the Palestinians and the Arab-Israeli conflict, which are held on dynamic platforms unbound by traditional media. Therefore, items presented in this section are from a variety of sources and have been selected because they either have gone viral or represent a significant cultural moment or trend. A version of Palestine Unbound is also published on Palestine Square ( palestinesquare.com ), a blog of the Institute for Palestine Studies. Stories from this quarter (16 August–15 November 2019), which include a Palestine-based resistance movement to gender-based violence and a digital outpouring of respect for Palestinian grandmothers, deliver the unequivocal message that Palestinian women are determined to forge a just future where their voices are heard. Trending hashtags this quarter are #MyPalestinianSitty, #Kullna_Isra' al Ghrayyib (#WeAreAll_Israa_Ghrayeb), and #Tal3at.

This bibliography lists articles and reviews of books relevant to Palestine and the Arab-Israeli conflict from the quarter 16 May–15 August 2019. Entries are classified under the following headings: Palestine in Global and Comparative Perspectives; Palestine and the Palestinians; Literature and the Arts; Middle East and the Arab World; Israel and Zionism; and Recent Theses and Dissertations.

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.

Delegations of Black revolutionary leaders to the Middle East were a prominent feature of Black-Palestinian transnational solidarity at the height of the worldwide revolt against imperial domination in the decades following World War II. Though they never ceased, delegations have become a critical feature of solidarity practices once more. Unlike their historical predecessors, today's delegations are no longer organized in collaboration with the official organizations of the Palestinian national movement but between individuals and/or social justice organizations. In addition, the delegations are no longer unidirectional, as they now encompass visits by activists from Palestine and other “Palestinian geographies” in the Middle East to the United States. Finally, recent delegations have included one by indigenous youth to Palestine as well as several from the African continent to the Middle East. This roundtable, featuring leading organizers of recent delegations, aims to reveal the ruptures and continuities of a historical legacy. We intend for this roundtable to serve as an archive and a site of knowledge production.

This bibliography lists articles and reviews of books relevant to Palestine and the Arab-Israeli conflict from the quarter 16 November 2018–15 February 2019. Entries are classified under the following headings: Palestine in Global and Comparative Perspectives; Palestine and the Palestinians; Literature and the Arts; Middle East and the Arab World; Israel and Zionism; and Recent Dissertations.

Building on “The Idolatry of Force: How Israel Embraced Targeted Killing,” published in the Autumn 2017 issue of the Journal of Palestine Studies, this companion piece examines the practices through which Israel's garrison state normalizes aggressive militarism and indifference to the pain of others. Political discourse and semantics, media, pedagogical instruction, religious training, and the shared experience of army service all feed into a warrior code and culture where combat and preparations for combat become second nature, and where violence, no matter how extreme and disproportionate, assumes collective legitimacy. A broad rhetorical repertoire is deployed to craft a narrative of virtue, sacrifice, and necessity. Key to this narrative are the threat to national survival posed by demonic enemies and the spiritual valor embodied and replenished in the struggle to vanquish them.