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.

Andrew Ross's Stone Men: The Palestinians Who Built Israel is a significant contribution to an emerging literature on Palestinian labor. Through an examination of various facets of the stone industry in both Israel and the West Bank, Ross develops a series of insights into the nature of settler colonialism, patterns of urban development, the political economy of Palestinian class formation, borders and migration, and the ecological impacts of occupation. By highlighting the ways in which Palestinians actually built Israel, Ross's book carries important implications for how we think about Palestinian political strategy and the debates around one- or two-state solutions.

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 May–15 August 2019) include the international boycott of the 2019 Eurovision Song Contest, held this year in Tel Aviv; the viral reaction to Palestinian American model Anwar Hadid's first music video, which was filmed in the occupied West Bank, and Palestinian's chagrin at the Israeli-sponsored visit Saudi influencer and Zionist activist Mohammed Saud. Trending hashtags this quarter are #DareToDreamTogether and #Motabi‘_saudi_fi_Filistin.

This article offers a close reading of the first geography textbook printed by the Ministry of Education after the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan annexed the West Bank in 1950. Examining the Hashemite regime's early curricular attempts to incorporate its new Palestinian citizens, refugees and otherwise, the article highlights the tactics used to achieve these ends, namely a topographic centralization of Jordan, an erasure of human geography in favor of a natural one, and the foreclosure of other forms of national attachment and belonging. The discussion seeks to expand our understanding of one of the most significant narrative materials confronted by Palestinians in the aftermath of the Nakba, seeing in it a possible mechanism by which to understand the challenges to Palestinian demands for a self-determined education.

This article examines the formation of land defense in relation to changing legal and economic conditions in the occupied Palestinian territories. It argues that as a result of settler capital and law, Palestinian land defense should be understood as emerging through, rather than apart from, private property. Specifically, it explores how private property and market forces shaped agrarian land defense (1970s–1980s) and real estate land defense (post-2007). In the 1970s and the 1980s, land defense sought to protect agriculture against market forces that drew Palestinians off the land and into wage labor in Israel. Beginning in the 1990s, the exclusion of Palestinians from Israeli wage labor and new forms of West Bank governance created the conditions for real estate land defense to appear. Taking the real estate project TABO as a case study, this article details its political logic, unexpected market effects, and its social and economic limits.

A careful examination of Palestinian service work in Israeli settlements and of everyday settler-Palestinian contact demonstrates how these encounters play a key role in normalizing the presence and dominance of settlers in the occupied West Bank. Based on ethnographic fieldwork at a settlement supermarket, this article shows that Palestinians are called upon to perform customer service in a setting where they are not only subjugated but are also coerced to help create the ultranationalist climate of their occupiers' holidays. In addition to being compelled to normalize Israeli dominance, Palestinian workers are also the object of a seemingly contradictory orientation, one that favors not having Palestinians around at all. The article thus weighs in on the broader contemporary significance of Palestinian labor for the settler-colonial logics of Zionism.

This paper seeks to show how Israel has deployed Occupation Law in strategic ways to incrementally take the land of Palestine without its people. It argues that Israel has used UN Security Council Resolution 242 to retroactively legitimate those colonial takings in a political framework shaped by U.S. intervention. In themselves, the constituent pieces of the argument are not new and they have been extensively discussed in legal, political science, and historical literature. Rather than consider them as the sum of their parts, this paper attempts to view the issues that have been kept distinct and separate within disciplinary silos as a mutually-reinforcing whole, demonstrating that the United States' political position made an otherwise bankrupt legal argument effective and showing how the Security Council's deliberations gave Israel ample room for maneuver in spite of the drafting parties' original intent. In examining the relationship between law and political power, the article points to the ways in which the balance of power bears upon the meaning and significance of law in international conflict. Thus, the failure of Occupation Law to regulate the occupation of the Palestinian Territories ultimately reflects the outcome of a political, not a legal, contest: Israel's legal argumentation that the territories are merely under its administration would have no value were it not for the power politics that shape international relations in the region.

This quarter began less than one month after the 20 January 2017 inauguration of U.S. president Donald Trump, whose stated positions on settlements and the two-state solution, at times contradicting decades of U.S. policy, had far-reaching implications for Palestinians. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was emboldened by the regime change in Washington and the new administration's lack of organization and experience. Within two months of the inauguration, observers marked a sharp increase in the demolition of Palestinian homes and in announcements of renewed Israeli settlement construction. In fact, just two days after Trump was sworn into office, the Jerusalem municipality approved the construction of 566 new housing units, which had earlier been delayed under pressure from outgoing U.S. president Barack Obama. And on 24 January, the Israeli government announced plans for 2,500 new settlement units in the West Bank. In early February, Israeli lawmakers passed the so-called Regularization Bill, retroactively legalizing the expropriation of private Palestinian land. As settlement plans continued to grow apace, the end of the quarter saw the submission of a measure extending Israeli sovereignty to Ma'ale Adumim before a Knesset committee. Some MKs were also considering the annexation of the E1 zone into Ma'ale Adumim, which would effectively sever the northern from the southern West Bank and create a impassable zone for Palestinians around East Jerusalem. Bedouin communities inside E1 resisted persistent expulsion threats and demolition orders, while the world's soccer governing body FIFA refused to take on the issue of soccer clubs inside settlements.

The Settlement Monitor covers items—reprinted articles, statistics, and maps—pertaining to Israeli settlement activity in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights. They are reproduced as published, including original spelling and stylistic idiosyncrasies. Significant developments this quarter: As the first half of 2016 came to a close, Israel continued demolishing Palestinian homes in Area C of the West Bank and stepped up punitive and agenda-driven demolitions across East Jerusalem. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu also approved 800 new settlement units and announced another 600 in Beit Safafa after a spate of violent attacks in June and July. While officials in the United States were preoccupied with upcoming presidential elections, the Jerusalem Municipal Council for Planning and Building pushed forward with stalled expansion plans for the Ramot settlement, while Israel declared an area south of Bethlehem as state land to expand the Gush Etzion settlement bloc. Finally, Israel attempted to appease its settlers further by exploring means to override the High Court's decision to evacuate the illegal Amona outpost.

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.