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 article examines early Palestinian engagements with multiple facets of the Black American struggle for freedom through a content analysis of influential Palestinian press outlets in Arabic prior to 1967. It argues that, since the 1930s, Palestinian intellectuals with strong anti-colonial views linked anti-Black racism in the United States to larger imperial and Cold War dynamics, and that they connected Black American mobilizations against racism to decolonization movements around the world. This article also examines Mahmoud Darwish's early analytical writings on race as a social construct in both the U.S. and Israeli contexts. Understanding these early engagements sheds light on subsequent developments in Black-Palestinian transnational solidarity and on Palestinian Afro-Arab cultural imaginaries.

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 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 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.