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.

The situation of West Bank Palestinians working in Israel has highlighted a number of parallels with the conditions of global labor employed in essential sectors during the Covid-19 pandemic. Under capitalism, the compulsion to work, ostensibly to cultivate life, comes at the risk of being exposed to death, but is preferred over immiseration caused by unemployment. The pandemic has merely amplified existing structural features of such employment. For Palestinian workers, with the risk of infection in Israel being significantly higher, the perilous conditions experienced by Palestinian labor have turned the preservation of life enabled by such employment more firmly into the production of death. The Palestinian Authority (PA), too, faces a conundrum: to balance the economic benefits it derives from Palestinian disposability in the Israeli labor market with public health considerations limiting such employment. This essay argues that the Covid-19 pandemic lays fully bare the necroeconomy produced by the intersection of settler colonialism and capitalism, which also forms the bedrock of the necropolitical order in the West Bank.

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 is the second installment of a two-part article on the recently released secret testimony to the Peel Commission. Part I ( JPS 49, no. 1) showed how the secret testimony deepens our understanding of the structural exclusion of the Palestinians from the Mandate state. Part II now focuses on what the secret testimony reveals about the Peel Commission's eventual decision to recommend partition. It turns out that Zionist leaders were less central to this decision than scholars have previously assumed, and that second-tier British colonial officials played a key role in the commissioners' partition recommendation. British decision-making over the partition of Palestine was shaped not only by a broad ambition to put into practice global-imperial theories about representative government and the protection of minorities; it also stemmed from a cold-eyed self-interest in rehabilitating the British reputation for efficient colonial governance—by terminating, in as deliberate a manner as possible, a slack and compromised Mandatory administration.

This remembrance commemorates the life of Eugenio Chahuán Chahuán, one of Latin America's foremost advocates for Palestine and a pioneer of Arab studies in that region. Chahuán passed away in Santiago, Chile, on 4 August 2019 at the age of sixty-eight.

The Peel Commission (1936–37) was the first British commission of inquiry to recommend the partition of Palestine into two states. The commissioners made their recommendation after listening to several weeks of testimony, delivered in both public and secret sessions. The transcripts of the public testimony were published soon afterward, but the secret testimony transcripts were only released by the United Kingdom's National Archives in March 2017. Divided into two parts, this article closely examines the secret testimony. Part I discusses how the secret testimony deepens our understanding of key themes in Mandate history, including: the structural exclusion of the Palestinians from the Mandate state, the place of development projects in that structural exclusion, the different roles played by British anti-Semitism and anti-Arab racism, and the importance of the procedural aspects of committee work for understanding the mechanics of British governance. Part II extends this analysis by focusing on what the secret testimony reveals about how the Peel Commission came to recommend partition.

The Bahrain workshop and its associated economic plan are little more than elaborate smokescreens for U.S. president Donald Trump's political vision centered on the broader goals of normalizing Israeli occupation, consolidating the “Greater Israel” agenda, and effectively foreclosing Palestinian political aspirations. By working together with the government of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to redefine the conflict and do away with the traditional ground rules of the peace process, including the two-state solution, Trump is attempting to turn back the clock to the pre-1967 era when Palestinians were viewed mainly as an economic, humanitarian, and security problem rather than a political one. For Palestinians to effectively confront this unprecedented challenge, they will need to put their political house in order, including ending the debilitating political division between Fatah and Hamas, reviving institutional politics, and working to build a national consensus around a new strategy.

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 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.

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 report summarizes the bills and resolutions pertinent to Palestine, Israel, or the broader Arab-Israeli conflict that were introduced, during the second session of the 115th Congress, which coincided with the second year of Donald Trump's presidency. Major legislative themes related to the Palestine issue are identified here, as well as initiators of specific legislation, their priorities, the range of their concerns, and their attitudes toward regional actors. Security and intelligence support for Israel, attempts to cut funding to Palestinian refugees, and sanctions against Iran are included. This report is part of a wider database project of the Institute for Palestine Studies, congressionalmonitor.org , which contains all relevant legislation from 2001 to the present (the 107th through the 115th Congresses) and is updated on an ongoing basis.

Conceptually linked, noncontiguous, and undeniably national, Ibrahim Nasrallah's book series Al-milhat al-filastiniyya (The Palestine Comedies) breaks conceptual ground. Told across twelve volumes, the Comedies represents the long-called for Palestinian national novel, though in unconventional form. The series uses diverse literary devices, including intertextuality and the archetype of the twin, to demonstrate how formal innovations can redirect assumptions about what constitutes not only a national novel, but also a nation. The series reimagines relationships between space, time, and people, giving narrative shape to a community so often imagined as fragments. Abandoning the retrospective prerequisite of bounded sovereign space and homogeneous, linear time, the Comedies imagines a “nation constellation.” A close examination of two novels within the series, A'ras amna (2004) and Tifl al-mimhat (2000), shows how Palestinian relationships can be imagined outside existing national logics. It reads the constellation as an alternative nation form that can both encompass colonial frameworks and free the delimitation of Palestine from the dominance of power structures that only begin with the nation-state.

Germany's complex relationship to the issue of Palestine is often explained in terms of the country's past and its consequent affinity for Israel as the perceived homeland of Holocaust survivors. German policy decisions in the last two decades, including the sale of nuclear-capable submarines to Israel, seem to confirm this view. That notwithstanding, argues this article, Germany's Middle East policy and popular German perceptions of the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis must be placed in a more contemporary historical context of evolving political priorities. The article contends that the current political class' zealous identification with Israel is a qualitatively new phenomenon in Germany largely unrelated to moral considerations pertaining to the Nazi era. In addition to examining how this identification plays out more broadly in society, the article also attempts to locate possible fissures that could give rise to changes in official policy.

In July 2018, the Israeli Knesset passed Basic Law: Israel – The Nation-State of the Jewish People (Nation-State Law). This article highlights three of the law's central premises: the entrenched supremacy of Jewish settlers; the erasure of indigenous Palestinians; and, with reference to borders, the effective annexation of those parts of historic Palestine that were occupied in 1967. The authors reflect on the passage of the law within a broader history of settler colonialism and in the current global context of growing authoritarianism and overt institutionalized racism. The passage of such a colonial piece of constitutional legislation in 2018 is a testament to the continued resistance of Palestinians and the growing movement for Palestinian rights. The authors argue that the alternative to the exclusionary Nation-State Law, a rights-based, people-centered framework, is a promising avenue to not only secure Palestinian rights, but also advance a universal struggle for equality and historical justice.

This report summarizes the bills and resolutions pertinent to Palestine, Israel, or the broader Arab-Israeli conflict that were introduced, during the first session of the 115th Congress, which coincided with the first year of Donald Trump's presidency. Major legislative themes related to the Palestine issue are identified here, as well as initiators of specific legislation, their priorities, the range of their concerns, and their attitudes toward regional actors. The Taylor Force Act, attempts to cut funding to Palestinian refugees, and anti-BDS legislation are included. This report is part of a wider database project of the Institute for Palestine Studies, congressionalmonitor.org , which contains all relevant legislation from 2001 to the present (the 107th through the 115th Congresses) and is updated on an ongoing basis.

In this interview, Gabriel M. Schivone, 2018 visiting scholar at the University of Arizona's Agnese Nelms Haury Program in Environment and Social Justice, talks to the Journal of Palestine Studies about the multi-billion-dollar surveillance technology industry and how U.S., Israeli, and Mexican state and corporate entities collaborate in the “laboratory” of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Schivone discusses how, in 2006 and 2014, the U.S. government subcontracted Israel's Elbit Systems to provide a “virtual wall” under President George W. Bush's Secure Fence Act. In 2014, Elbit's U.S. subsidiary was awarded a new $145 million contract to build the Integrated Fixed Towers project, a similar “virtual wall” concept to provide fifty-two Israeli-style surveillance towers along southern Arizona's border with Mexico.

This essay examines how and why Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have pursued policies that have aligned closer to Israel since 2011. The disruptive impact of the Arab Spring and its turbulent aftermath altered threat perceptions in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, which increasingly saw Islamism and Iran as the major sources of regional instability. For Saudi and Emirati leaders committed to adopting a more forceful approach to shaping the post-Arab Spring landscape, Israel no longer represented the primary fissure in Middle Eastern politics. Although the process of creating informal ties between the Gulf states and Israel has been decades in the making, the nature of the post-2011 connections between Saudi Arabia and the UAE with Israel have greater strategic depth and are taking place in a far more open setting than ever before.

This sample of photos from 16 November 2017 to 15 February 2018 aims to convey a sense of Palestinian life during this quarter. The images reflect the fallout from Trump administration policy toward the Palestinians, especially the relocation of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, and also include scenes from Gaza, and the Ahed Tamimi trial.

This section, updated regularly on the blog Palestine Square , covers popular conversations related to the Palestinians and the Arab-Israeli conflict during the quarter 16 November 2017 to 15 February 2018: #JerusalemIstheCapitalofPalestine went viral after U.S. president Donald Trump recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and announced his intention to move the U.S. embassy there from Tel Aviv. The arrest of Palestinian teenager Ahed Tamimi for slapping an Israeli soldier also prompted a viral campaign under the hashtag #FreeAhed. A smaller campaign protested the exclusion of Palestinian human rights from the agenda of the annual Creating Change conference organized by the US-based National LGBTQ Task Force in Washington. And, UNRWA publicized its emergency funding appeal, following the decision of the United States to slash funding to the organization, with the hashtag #DignityIsPriceless.

This article analyzes the work of Palestine's most established queer rights organization, alQaws for Sexual and Gender Diversity in Palestinian Society, to reveal the political power of being queer in Palestine. It argues that an open, feminist, queer space such as alQaws is a productive site to think and practice decolonization. Relying on the author's direct involvement with the group, the article traces the development of queer Palestinian thought to provide a critique of queer politics in Palestine: it recounts how since the establishment of the organization in 2001, alQaws activists have increasingly transcended exclusivist gay identifications and rejected singling out sexuality as a discrete site of oppression disconnected from Zionist settler colonialism. The discussion covers Israeli pinkwashing and its counter, Palestinian pinkwatching; it deconstructs pinkwashing narratives, rejects the myth of the colonial savior, and reveals how discourses of sexual progress reproduce Zionist colonialism. It also documents alQaws's challenge to normalizing development discourse.