Looks at the lives of three young Palestinian fighters caught up in the second Palestinian Intifada and examines the recent history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the cross-generational differences and divisions in religious,...

Artificial intelligence (AI) is embedded in higher education through learning analytics, automated assessment, academic integrity systems, and generative tools. While global AI ethics frameworks emphasize fairness, transparency, accountability, privacy, and human oversight, we argue that these principles cannot be applied as if ethical risk were evenly distributed across all educational contexts. Focusing on Palestinian universities, we examine how political restriction, infrastructural fragility, and dependence on externally developed digital platforms intensify vulnerabilities related to algorithmic bias, language and epistemic inequality, data privacy, (...) surveillance, technostress, academic freedom, and professional autonomy. We show that decontextualized ethical universalism is inadequate for higher education systems shaped by precarity and constrained institutional capacity. In response, we propose a contextual ethical AI framework grounded in human primacy, rights-based data governance, linguistic inclusion, transparency, contestability, participatory oversight, and institutional accountability. By centering Palestinian higher education, we advance a justice-oriented approach to ethical AI governance in higher education. (shrink)

The Impacts of Lasting Occupation examines the effects that Israel's decades-long occupation of Palestinian territories have had on Israeli society. The consequences of occupation are evident in all aspects of Israeli life, including its political, social, legal, economic, cultural, and psychological spheres.

Drawing on Levinasian concepts of sleep, insomnia, and the il y a, this paper examines the liminal states of insomnia and sleep within the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Sleep and insomnia, being proximates of death as well as displacement and anonymous existence successively, are topics that have not, to the best of our knowledge, received any critical commentary within (post)colonial studies. This paper argues that the Israeli military occupation deprives Palestinians from sleep, casting them into the horror and anonymous (...) existence of insomnia which, like the Israeli occupation, signifies impervious dialogue and is a catalyst for both psychic and physical displacement. As the Israeli occupation deprives Palestinians of place and sleep, two terms in the words of Levinas recognised as intertwined, it is the ethical responsibility of Palestinians and Palestinian leaders to arm themselves with wakefulness so as to secure their homeland (place) and to fortify themselves against displacement and the horror of the night. Sleep reveals an ethical dimension when examined closely within the Israeli-Palestinian conflict due to its subtle proximity to death. Hence, we contend that falling asleep on the part of Palestinians is unethical due to its direct adverse effects, namely, displacement and death. (shrink)

The Israeli approach to advertising consists of two complementary sets of norms, legal norms and moral‐ethical norms. Advertising legislation demands honest disclosure. The Israeli legislator refrains from intervening in fundamental rights such as freedom of expression, free trade, occupation, and liberty of contract in advertising. However, there are also few interventions to prevent phenomena that are dangerous or abusive, especially to groups needing protection. The Israeli courts do try to apply moral considerations in cases tried by (...) them, but living up to moral responsibilities is different from complying with legal obligations. Advertisers in Israel have a(i) Treatise(r), consisting of ten ethical guidelines, which neither sums up advertising ethics in its entirety nor is legally binding. Sociological and psychological features of the culture need to be examined in order to spell out what truth and honesty in advertising actually mean in this society, and the manner in which these values are practised. Lacking sanctions in public law against misleading consumers or manipulation based on false facts, consumers must find remedy in civil actions which rely on moral and ethical rules. (shrink)

Heavily influenced by Frantz Fanon and critically engaging the theories of decoloniality and liberatory psychoanalysis, Lara Sheehi and Stephen Sheehi platform the lives, perspectives, and insights of psychoanalytically-inflected Palestinian psychologists, psychiatrists, and other mental health professionals, centering the stories that non-clinical Palestinians have entrusted to them over four years of community engagement with clinicians throughout historic Palestine. Sheehi and Sheehi document the stories of Palestinian clinicians in relation to settler-colonialism and violence but, even more so, in relation to their patients, (...) communities, families, and one another (as a clinical community). In doing so, they track the appearance of settler colonialism as a psychologically extractive process, one that is often effaced by discourses of "normalization," "trauma," "resilience," and human rights, with the aid of clinicians, as well as psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine unpacks the intersection of psychoanalysis as a psychological practice in Palestine, while also advancing a set of therapeutic theories in which to critically engage and "read" the politically complex array of conditions that define life for Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. (shrink)

A Jewish Israeli journalist for the newspaper Ha'aretz offers a portrait of the daily experiences of the Palestinians under Israeli occupation.

This paper addresses the implementation of semantic markedness as a subtle tool of ideology in U.S. mainstream newspapers The New York Times, Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal in the context of the Israeli raids on Nablus between 2022–2023. Existing research on this topic suggests that international media associate lexemes connoting negative images with Palestinians as a part of its control over the worldview of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Previous research also touches upon semantic markedness (...) as a tool that indicates gender-based discrimination against women. However, there is no critical scholarship directed towards the use of semantic markedness in media discourse and critical discourse analysis (CDA). This paper adheres to Jakobson and Lyon’s (1971; 1997) definitions of markedness and builds on discussion of semantic discourse and political ideology, respectively, as its framework. Using Halliday’s transitivity and semantic markedness as a tool of analysis, the findings of the paper reveal that the selected newspapers employ semantically marked lexemes to portray Palestinian resistance as disorganised militant units and hence justify the mass murder of Palestinians. (shrink)

Taking its point of departure from a thread of references to Palestine in Derrida's writings, from Glas to his last texts, this essay seeks to demonstrate that these writings can be a resource for us as we navigate our way through the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It traces Derrida's complicated relation to his own Jewishness and argues that it is this complexity that enables him to guide us through the thicket of the present war in Gaza. My title, ‘No (...) class='Hi'>Occupation’, aims to evoke not only the slogan of the anti-war movement against Israel's occupation of Gaza and the West Bank – and Derrida's relation to this movement – but also Israel's 2023 campaign to declare that there is ‘no occupation’. The instrumentalisation of the phrase ‘no occupation’ in different directions permits me to exploit this conflicting resonance, moving one use against another. (shrink)

Social researchers have extensively addressed the immigration of one million Russian speakers to Israel/palestine over the past twenty-five years. However, the immigrants’ incorporation into the Israeli occupation regime and the ongoing colonisation of Palestine have rarely been questioned as such. In the interviews informing this article, Russian-speaking immigrant women living in Arab-Palestinian communities discuss their complex relations with Palestinian, Jewish-Israeli and Russian-Israeli communities. Sharing a background with Russian-speaking Jewish Israelis on the one hand, and marital kinship (...) ties to Palestinians on the other, these women encounter multiple boundaries of territory and identity in their everyday lives. Drawing on feminist border thinking, I explore these encounters as a navigation through geopolitical and epistemic borderlands in a dense colonial reality. I am particularly interested in the potential of such an exploration to question essentialism and destabilise binary ethno-national categories of identity, such as Arab/jew and Israeli/palestinian, that dominate not only hegemonic but also emancipatory discourses. These binary divisions are not a straightforward outcome of political regimes but rather the result of ongoing border-making processes, which are vulnerable to disorder and disruption. This perspective aims to enrich understandings of the roles that gendered ethno-national identities play in sustaining the colonial relations of power in Israel/palestine. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt to implement Gilles Deleuze's theory of the series and the event, and the related function of the empty square (as formulated primarily in The Logic of Sense), in relation to the geopolitical regime comprising ‘Israel proper’ and the system of occupation in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The purpose of this exercise is to help establish a practical access to Deleuze's philosophies, and to offer a clinical account of the Israeli (...) class='Hi'>occupation of the Palestinian territories. (shrink)

The authors suggest that social movements research should recognize more the potential of the protesting body as an agent of social and political change. This contention is based on studying the relations among the body, gender, and knowledge in social protest by comparing two Israeli-Jewish leftist protest movements, a woman-only movement and a mixed-gender one, which protested against the Israeli Occupation in the early 1990s. The comparison reveals reversed patterns of body/knowledge relations, each connoting a different meaning (...) and outcome of the social protest. In the mixed movement, the body served as an instrument in carrying out the political knowledge and thus was left unmarked. In Women in Black, on the other hand, the body was the message, as it produced and articulated political ideology, simultaneously challenging the national security legacy and the gender order in Israel. (shrink)

Since the start of the occupation of Palestinian territories in 1967, Israel's domination of the Palestinians has deprived an entire population of any political status or protection. But even decades on, most people speak of this rule—both in everyday political discussion and in legal and academic debates—as temporary, as a state of affairs incidental and external to the Israeli regime. In _The One-State Condition_, Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophir directly challenge this belief. Looking closely at the history and (...) contemporary formation of the ruling apparatus—the technologies and operations of the Israeli army, the General Security Services, and the legal system imposed in the Occupied Territories—Azoulay and Ophir outline the one-state condition of Israel/Palestine: the grounding principle of Israeli governance is the perpetuation of differential rule over populations of differing status. Israeli citizenship is shaped through the active denial of Palestinian citizenship and civil rights. Though many Israelis, on both political right and left, agree that the occupation constitutes a problem for Israeli democracy, few ultimately admit that Israel is no democracy or question the very structure of the Israeli regime itself. Too frequently ignored are the lasting effects of the deceptive denial of the events of 1948 and 1967, and the ways in which the resulting occupation has reinforced the sweeping militarization and recent racialization of Israeli society. Azoulay and Ophir show that acknowledgment of the one-state _condition_ is not only a prerequisite for considering a one- or two-state _solution_; it is a prerequisite for advancing new ideas to move beyond the trap of this false dilemma. (shrink)

The book addresses the representation of three groups of "others" in Israeli schoolbooks: Holocaust victims, presented as the stateless persecuted Jews "we" might become again if "we" lose control over the second group of "others" - Palestinian Arabs - who are racialized, demonized and Nazified, and presented as "our" potential exterminators. The third group comprises non-European (Mizrahi and Ethiopian) Jews, portrayed as backward people who lack history or culture, requiring constant acculturation by "Western" Israel. Thus, a rhetoric of victimhood (...) and power evolves, and a nationalistic interpretation of the "never again" imperative is inculcated, justifying the Occupation and oppression of Palestinians and the discrimination of non-European Jews. Advocating a multidirectional memory, the book proposes an alternative Hebrew-Arabic, multi-voiced and poly-centered curriculum that would relate the untold accounts of the people whom the pedagogic version of history seeks exclude. Instead of traumatizing and urging vengeance, it will encourage discussion and celebrate diversity and hybridity. (shrink)

This article examines whether recent immigrant women in the Israeli labor market are at a “double disadvantage”—first as immigrants and second as women—and whether and to what extent such disadvantages differ across ethnic and geocultural groups. Data were obtained from the last available population census. The analysis focuses on gender differences in employment opportunities among men and women who immigrated to Israel between 1979 and 1983. Data reveal that the double disadvantage of immigrant women is evident with regard to (...) both labor force participation and occupational attainment. Immigrant women are less likely than immigrant men to join the Israeli labor market, and they face much greater occupational loss. Data also reveal an interaction effect between gender and ethnicity. Immigrant women from the less developed countries in Asia and Africa constitute the most disadvantaged group. This group of women appears to be at a “triple disadvantage.”. (shrink)

This article presents and analyzes two examples of peace education practices in the Israeli-Palestinian context. Zochrot is an organization dedicated to raising public awareness of the Palestinian Nakba, especially among Jews in Israel. The School for Peace is a Jewish-Arab organization that conducts encounter activities with the goal of encouraging participants to become active in relation to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Both practices are grounded in critical pedagogy and postcolonial literature, and their aim is to change existing power structures. (...) Current political realities, however, which include oppression, occupation, and injustice, exacerbate the challenge of this goal. We identify three challenges that demand attention if these practices are to realize their transformative potential: essentialism, responsibility of the victim, and singular utopia. Finally, we highlight the importance of hybrid identity as an educational approach that is a promising path for realizing the transformative potential of critical PE. (shrink)

This paper looks at the documentary Five Broken Cameras (Palestine, Israel, France, Netherlands, 2011) to discuss the temporal implications of a quotidian under occupation. More specifically, the investigation casts light over the peaceful resistance against the Israeli wall in the Palestinian village of Bil’in portrayed by the lenses of Emad Burnat, a Palestinian villager who becomes the village´s filmmaker after the acquisition of his first camera. Upon the analysis, I claim that in the context of the Palestinian struggle, (...) cinema is both an integral part of the resistance and an instrument to structure the experience of time in an area fragmented by the occupation. (shrink)

Economic opportunities and the status of women are mediated by socio-political structural factors, as well as cultural-specific norms and patterns of behavior. As consumers (and, in many cases, regulators) of resources at the household level, women are integral to the analysis of economic and political development. This paper examines the role of motivation and perception on women’s participation in Palestinian Fair Trade projects. In the occupied Palestinian Territories, Fair Trade projects have been recently introduced by both international agencies and local (...) Palestinian associations as means through which women can earn income, participate in cooperative leadership, and engage at economic and political levels. Current scholarship largely focuses on measuring outcomes of Fair Trade initiatives or the experiences of members after the implementation of a project. However, there is less understanding about factors influencing the recruitment and retention of members into these initiatives. This ethnographic account explores both the motivations of members to join several couscous (maftoul) Fair Trade cooperatives and the members’ understanding Fair Trade goals and the cooperative structure. We examine four Palestinian women’s maftoul cooperatives and their unique challenges and opportunities. This project highlights the lack of detail most women have about the global Fair Trade market, which has a potential to result in decreased recruitment and retention rates. This paper also examines the tensions between product quality and market demands existing within couscous cooperatives and the competing demands of child-care needs, household pressures, and military restrictions on Palestinian movement enforced by the Israeli military within the occupied Palestinian Territories. (shrink)

Facing israelian intransigent Ilan Halevi explain the failure of Oslo’s agreement, from the first intifada to the second. The archaic structure of Israel in front of pluriethnic and multi-denominational society, holds only because the society defines as being in war. There is only an international intervention which can prevent, the risk to pass of hundred deaths to thousand deaths... This intervention is necessary, only because it can realize for the Israeli opinion which it is impossible to settle question by (...) force. The Israelis do not stop saying « we shall not negotiate under the fire », but Palestinians always knew that they are making peace, under the fire, colonial and military violence never broke off. (shrink)

For more than a century, Palestinians have been dispersed as refugees, displaced, and an occupied people. While currently framed as a statehood issue, removal from the land has accompanied the Palestinian people since the British Mandate. From being denationalized in 1925 when Britain enacted the Palestine Citizenship Order, to being systematically expelled as a result of the 1948 and 1967 Wars, to being forcibly displaced from the West Bank and Gaza through deportations, revocation of residencies, and the daily violence of (...) the illegal Israeli occupation as well as the subsequent wars, these generations of refugees and displaced persons have this feature in common: the denial of repatriation. This chapter explores how the protracted conflict has created layers of Palestinian refugees with varying legal statuses, and with no ability to exercise their rights guaranteed under international law. Despite the protracted nature of the conflict, and some arguments about the deleterious impact of the passage of time on rights, the chapter argues that the conflict of more than a century did not alter the status of Palestinian refugees and their associated rights under international law, particularly repatriation and reparation. On the contrary, a customary law for refugees has emerged, which keeps the case legally active as long as the incumbent rights are unrecovered. (shrink)

Shaul Magid's Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical (2021) has the potential to urge American and Israeli Jews to “own” Meir Kahane and hold him up as a mirror reflecting the toxic and tragic dimensions of modern Jewish history. Such a look in the mirror can only happen once Jews see Palestinian suffering as central to the building of the state of Israel and also how they are complicit and implicated in such (...) suffering. (shrink)

The authors ground their reflections on gender and the complex realities of the second Palestinian intifada against Israeli occupation in the political processes unleashed by the signing of the Israeli–Palestinian rule, noting that the profound inequalities between Israel and Palestine during the interim period produced inequalities among Palestinians. The apartheid logic of the Oslo period – made explicit in Israel's policies of separation, seige and confinement of the Palestinian population during the intifada and before it – is (...) shown to shape the forms, sites and levels of resistance which are highly restricted by gender and age. In addition, the authors argue that the Palestinian Authority and leadership have solved the contradictions and crisis of Palestinian nationalism in this period through a form of rule that the authors term ‘authoritarian populism’, that tends to disallow democractic politics and participation. The seeming absence of women and civil society from the highly unequal and violent confrontations is contrasted with the first Palestinian intifada (1987–91), that occurred in a context of more than a decade of democratic activism and the growth of mass-based organizations, including the Palestinian women's movement. The authors explore three linked crises in gender roles emerging from the conditions of the second intifada: a crisis in masculinity, a crisis in paternity and a crisis in maternity. (shrink)

Despite the severe social, health, political and economic impacts of the outbreak of Covid-19 on Palestinians, we contend that one positive aspect of this pandemic is that it has revealed the perils and shortcomings of the teacher-centered, traditional education which colonizes students’ minds, compromises their analytical abilities and, paradoxically, places them in a system of oppression which audits their ideas, limits their freedoms, and curtails their creativity. While Israeli occupation has proven to be an obstacle in the face (...) of the Palestinian government’s attempt to combat and contain the Corona crisis, on-line education, the sole arena that escapes this colonial system, has forced many instructors to give up their domination over the process of education and to create a more collaborative atmosphere of education that is based on dialogue, research and flexibility of the curriculum content. This study is designed to gauge English literature students’ responses to this mode of digital learning. We interviewed a hundred students from six English literature programs between March and August, 2020. Thus, through critically examining students’ answers, and by drawing on Freire’s concepts of banking education, consciousness and dialogue, we propose that online education is an important step towards the decolonization of education and a call for a paradigm shift on the account that the existing paradigm of traditional education is stifling students’ creativity and critical thinking. (shrink)

Inspired by Said’s concept of exile, Camus’ 1947 novel The Plague, and testimonies from our students, this paper explores the striking similarities between experiences of exile and the COVID-19 pandemic. Both exile and the pandemic are seen as intrusive forces causing rupture and discontinuity in one’s life at the physical, psychological and socio-cultural levels. This paper demonstrates that for many Palestinians – including us and our students – the pandemic manifests what Freud termed ‘repetition compulsion’. That is, many of our (...) students interpret the detrimental and precarious impact of the pandemic as a complex form of exile, a nuanced understanding that blends a historical, communal memory of displacement with a present, universal crisis. This paper further explains that the themes of exile and displacement in Camus’ The Plague provide us and our students with a focal point to examine the striking, albeit anachronistic, similarities between the pandemic caused by Israeli occupation and the COVID-19 virus. This uncanny relationship between the pandemic and exile is further substantiated by the fact that the pandemic has provided cover, or at least distraction, for the escalation of oppressive political actions, thus deepening the entrenchment of a physical and psychological ‘exile’ for Palestinians. (shrink)

This article explores the legal means of Palestinian statehood with reference to the United Nations Charter, with specific emphasis on Article 4 and the process of admission of new members to the United Nations. The article will analyze the changing status of Palestine, from its Declaration of Independence in 1988 to its status as a non-member observer state in 2012, and the recent applications for membership in 2024. This article will address the declaratory and constitutive theories of statehood, the Montevideo (...) criteria, and the role of collective recognition in the context of the United Nations framework. The article will also analyze the role of the 2024 International Court of Justice Advisory Opinion on Palestinian Sovereignty and the legal hurdles created by the Oslo Accords, the role of the United States veto, and the Israeli occupation. This article will contend that, despite the objective criteria for statehood, the political hurdles in the Security Council hinder the Palestinian quest for United Nations membership, revealing the contradiction between the universalist ambitions of the United Nations Charter and the realpolitik of great power politics. (shrink)

This paper focuses on Marcuse’s stance toward Israel and problematizes how his critical theory can help make sense of the longstanding Israeli occupation in Palestine. As a Jew himself, Marcuse experienced antisemitism both in Germany and the US. It is for this reason, along with the longstanding persecution of the Jewish people, that he was sympathetic to the state of Israel’s right to exist. On the other hand, he provided critical perspectives on Israel’s policies against the Palestinians, in (...) that he also recognized the legitimate plight of the latter. Guided by this, I aim to answer three questions: 1) What is Marcuse’s general critique of military aggression? 2) How did Marcuse’s visit to Israel shape his stance on the Israel-Palestine conflict during his time? and 3) What is the current state of Palestine, and how does Marcuse’s notion of radical imagination invoke a rethinking of Israel’s hubristic and hawkish military stance today? Ultimately, this paper does not claim to offer a grand solution to the existing conflict in the said region; rather, it centers primarily around an exploratory use of Marcuse’s critical social project in analyzing the plight of the Palestinians along with the possibilities for radical resistance. (shrink)

This study explores the traumatic experiences, religious coping strategies and future prospects of Palestinian individuals affected by Israeli attacks on Gaza started in October 2023. A qualitative methodology was used and semi-structured interviews were conducted with eight war-affected participants from Gaza. In this research, purposive sampling was used to select participants who were directly affected by Israeli occupation in Gaza and had personally experienced war-related trauma. This research explores the psychological consequences of such traumatic experiences and the (...) role of religion in serving as a coping mechanism. In the analysis of the data set obtained in the study, the themes of "Scars of War" and "Connecting to Life with Faith" were reached. The "Scars of War" theme includes the codes "Deep Wounds" and "Posttraumatic Stress Disorder". In the theme of "Connecting to Life with Faith", there are the codes of "Leaning on and Trusting God", "Trial" and "Looking to the Future with Hope/Not Looking to the Future with Hope". Participants reported severe psychological distress, exhibiting symptoms consistent with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), including intense fear, sadness, and hopelessness. Subjects' experiences included bereavement, injury, devastation, and exposure to constant threats. Despite the obvious challenges faced by the subjects, religious beliefs and practices emerged as important coping mechanisms. Perspectives on the future varied. Some participants had a positive outlook, expressing a strong belief in the imminent recovery of Gaza and the possibility of being reunited with their relatives. Others expressed feelings of uncertainty and hopelessness shaped by ongoing trauma and instability. The findings emphasize the dual impact of trauma and faith in the aftermath of war. It is clear that religious coping strategies have been identified as important sources of resilience. Furthermore, future expectations, particularly belief in a hopeful future, have been shown to have a significant impact on the healing process. (shrink)

This article examines the factors contributing to the suppression of free speech in Palestine, with a focus on the West Bank. We argue that anti-democratic politics and restricted public discourse in both public and academic spheres are mutually reinforced by the Israeli occupation and the Palestinian Authority. Despite education’s potential as a tool of liberation, the ongoing cooperation between the Palestinian Authority and Israel, as well as internal factional conflict, impede free speech within Palestine. Traditional teaching methods based (...) on rote learning continue to dominate, posing a significant challenge to critical thinking and expression. Although education may serve as a pathway to freedom, constraints transform it into a tool for subjugation. Drawing on Foucault’s adaptation of the ancient Greek concept of parrhesia, we argue that Palestinian universities require more robust protections for free speech. At the same time, we argue that the struggle for free speech in these universities can be instructive to liberal democracies. Through analysis of the atrocities perpetrated against journalists and other dissenting voices, we shed light on the obstacles to democracy in Palestinian intellectual life. (shrink)

In the aftermath of Palestinian political divide in June 2007, a number of regional and local initiatives and agreements were introduced to restore Palestinian unity and reconciliation. The old model was focused on factional reconciliation and how the main factions (Fatah and Hamas) foresee national reconciliation. These initiatives and agreements have tackled Palestinian reconciliation from a security and factional interests’ perspective without engaging the Palestinian people or youth who make more than half of the eligible power base in the Gaza (...) Strip. However, all of these initiatives and agreements have failed so far to put an end to the internal political divide and achieve national unity and reconciliation. The political split between Hamas and Fatah has deepened over the past decade. In addition to ideological differences between Hamas and Fatah, international and regional players have also prevented them from concluding reconciliation. Fatah is a nationalist group dedicated to the two-state solution with Israel through peaceful negotiations. On the other hand, Hamas is an Islamist organization who is not willing to relinquish historic Palestine and is dedicated to put an end to the Israeli occupation through armed struggle and resistance. Internal special interests are also an obstacle preventing leaders of both factions from ending their differences and move forward. Neither Fatah nor Hamas believe in political partnership. Hamas is not willing to give up its security control over Gaza, while Fatah is not willing to share political power in the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) political institutions with Hamas. The purpose of this paper is to look into Palestinian reconciliation from a different perspective. How do Palestinian youth see national reconciliation? What are the most important components of such reconciliation. Palestinian youth in Gaza have been victims of the political split as many of them have been persecuted by the de facto Hamas government and its security services, and also suffered enormously from the rising unemployment levels which reached about 60% among them. In addition, thousands of Palestinian youth from Gaza have migrated and fled the ongoing life conditions in Gaza. Palestinian youth have also protested against the ongoing split frequently in March 2011 and 2017. While some believe that the Palestinian split is irreconciled, this study will also learn from the literature of reconciliation in Germany, South Africa, Rwanda, and pay attention to how progress was possible in these cases that is missing in the Palestinian case. The study will be based on a field research among Palestinian youth in the Gaza Strip. The researchers will design a questionnaire and survey which will be distributed evenly among Palestinian youth, males, and females, above the age of 18. (shrink)

Al-Bassam’s The Al Hamlet Summit (2006), an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1603), presents a cynical comment on the political corruption in the Arab World and it constitutes from a presentist perspective, we argue, an anachronistic critique of some Arab leaders’ lapse into normalisation with the long-standing Other, the Israeli occupation. Al-Bassam captures the political corruption and Arab leaders’ liaison with Israel through the figure of Claudius, who, like Arab leaders, normalises relations with the enemies of his nation, Fortinbras (...) and the Arms Dealer. Many Arab leaders are normalising relations with Israel as a defensive mechanism against their citizens who have been protesting against dictatorial and tyrannical regimes that have conceived rottenness and corruption in the political and spiritual foundations of the states. While the waves of normalisation that have plagued the contemporary Arab scene raise the spectre of Western hegemony over Arabs, being channelled by the Trump Administration, many Arab leaders hurl to the strategy of normalisation ‘pants down’ so as to curb their citizens prospective revolutionary acts. (shrink)

ABSTRACTDuring the second Intifada which started in 2000 and ended sometime in mid 2000s, Palestinian male and female martyrs used video testimonies, records and documents of death, using the first person pronoun so as to articulate their missions and justifications for carrying out their acts of martyrdom. This study, which focuses on Palestinian female martyrs’ video-testimonies, investigates the elusive relationship between martyrdom and witness. I contend that the female martyr is a witness to the Israeli occupation of Palestine (...) and to the oppression and dehumanisation to which Palestinians are subject. Palestinian female martyrs are also witnesses to Arab leaders’ weakness and their inability to defend Palestine. The act of martyrdom is a collective one, involving the martyr, the agent of narration and the audience. The audience, who bears witness to the martyr, is necessary for martyrdom to be recognised and to take place. I argue that the end of the martyr’s speech marks out her silence and her tra... (shrink)

Ted Honderich’s book After the Terror (2003) managed to be both eminently commonsensical and highly controversial. This was a sure sign that it had touched a raw nerve and identified confusions and contradictions in conventional moral thinking which needed to be examined and clarified. The aspects of the contemporary world which he addressed in After the Terror and in its successor, Humanity, Terrorism, Terrorist War (2006), were: (a) global poverty and the inadequate response to it on the part of the (...) populations of the most prosperous societies; (b) the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories; and (c) political terrorism, particularly Islamist-inspired terrorist actions such as the attack on the Twin Towers in 2001. These he discussed in the light of his proposed ethical framework, the principle of humanity, revealing the inconsistency between the popular abhorrence of (c) and the prevailing complacency with respect to (a) and (b). In this chapter, I shall be mainly concerned with philosophical questions about the principle of humanity, and its implications for moral attitudes to terrorism and political violence, but I shall preface that with a brief glance at the substantive practical concerns. (shrink)

We investigated the influence of humiliation on inter-group conflict in three studies of Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza. We demonstrate that experienced humiliation produces an inertia effect; a tendency towards inaction that suppresses rebellious or violent action but which paradoxically also suppresses support for acts of inter-group compromise. In Study 1, Palestinians who felt more humiliated by the Israeli occupation were less likely to support suicide attacks against Israelis. In Study 2, priming Palestinians with a (...) humiliating experience caused fewer expressions of joy when subsequently hearing about suicide attacks. In Study 3, Palestinians who felt more humiliated by peace deals were less likely to support those deals, while Israeli symbolic compromises that decreased feelings of humiliation increased support for the same deals. While the experience of humiliation does not seem to contribute to political violence, it does seem to suppress support for conflict resolution. (shrink)

Palestinian teachers at the pre-collegiate level who participate in the CEEPAT programme will, it is hoped, learn to place new emphasis on enhancement of their students' analytical skills and discourage an identification of knowledge with memorisation. For their part, Palestinian professors who have been trained to teach in the programme will presumably constitute a growing reservoir of talent which may be expected to raise the quality of Palestinian university education. Plans are now under way to give all Palestinians teaching under (...) the auspices of CEEPAT an opportunity to attend an annual, three-week winter seminar in Gaza and/or a summer seminar in the United States, both of which will focus on issues of pedagogy and methodology. Such professors can be expected to “pass on their new understanding of teaching via discussion to their colleagues and to their university students, thereby spreading an important pedagogical method to other segments of the Palestinian... community”. 7 CEEPAT clearly has the potential to make a significant contribution to the elevation of educational standards in Palestine at a time of major historical change.In Palestine, higher education of quality is obviously a very serious business. It is understood that it underlies any possibility of individual betterment, economic development, or the evolution of an independent Palestinian state. If ever the Israeli occupation is completely terminated and the present financial crisis of the universities is solved, Palestinian university and post-baccalaureate training may reasonably be expected to become fully competitive on an international scale. (shrink)

This article responds to Quassim Cassam’s arguments for the claim that the only viable strategy for Israel in its conflict with Hamas is to continue the war begun in October 2023 until Hamas is “crushed.” It critically examines his reasons for claiming that Hamas fails to satisfy the five conditions he states for potentially successful peace negotiations. While it may be true that Hamas fails to satisfy the conditions, it is also true that Israel fails even more egregiously to satisfy (...) them. And even if the satisfaction of the conditions by both sides were necessary for successful negotiations, which is not the case, peace negotiations are not the best alternative to continued war. The best strategy for achieving a lasting peace is for both parties to address what Cassam calls the “root causes” of the conflict. Israel could successfully do this entirely unilaterally. And the Palestinians could also act unilaterally in a way that would be the best they could do to eliminate the fundamental source of the conflict. (shrink)

End of Days (translated from the recently published Hebrew book, Atchalta) is both a meditation on Jewish morality in the age of Israeli Jewish power, and a cri du coeur by an Orthodox Israeli Jew, a former combat officer in the IDF, for Israelis to look into the Jewish religious ethical tradition for an alternative to the secular and religious Zionism that sanctifies power, statehood, and sovereignty. Appealing to a wealth of Jewish sources from the Bible to the (...) present, including medieval Jewish ethical literature, rabbinic sources, Jewish law, and contemporary Israeli thought, the book presents an argument against the Israeli's occupation of the Palestinian people and the suppression of their rights from the perspective of a modern Israeli religious Jew. (shrink)

In this chapter, the application of nonviolent ideas in the modern era is examined, with an emphasis on the attempt to apply them in Palestine, in the work of Mubarak Awad. Inspired by Martin Luther King Jr., Awad promoted nonviolence during the First Intifada against Israeli occupation. His efforts aimed to reduce violence and foster peaceful resistance, highlighting the enduring relevance of King’s principles in contemporary conflicts. The experience of the First Intifada, the only explicitly nonviolent persistent political (...) movement in the Middle East, gives room for hope but also concern. The hope lies in the fact that a nonviolent movement took root among mostly Muslim Palestinians. The concern involves how it did not last. One observation is that ongoing and charismatic nonviolent leadership, such as that provided by King in the United States and by Awad in Palestine, is needed for a nonviolent movement to persist. (shrink)

In his influential history of the post-1967 history of the Palestinian Occupation, radical Israeli architect Eyal Weizman show how even well-meaning decolonial efforts from privileged allies can be coopted by the colonizers, in what I call “de-decolonizing.” Here I focus on one of his examples, namely IDF (Israeli Defense Force) military professors repurposing the anarcho-communist philosophy of French postmodernist Gilles Deleuze into a weapon against Palestinian guerrilla resistance. My conclusion is that attempted decolonizing via (inevitably complicit) privileged (...) allies must include what Weizman calls “co-resistance,” and I call “reconstruction.” In other words, when a Deleuzian “line of flight” to “escape” is impossible, as arguably for Palestinians today, then one should follow the heroic example of the Bedouins, who (as Weizman acknowledges) are the only Arabs who have never stopped rebuilding their Palestine. (shrink)

The new Mizrahi narrative, presented by Israeli Mizrahi groups such as The Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow, presents a challenge to multi-cultural education. In particular, it repudiates the hegemonic meta-narrative of Ashkenazi-Zionist-Jewish-Israeli history that identifies the (White) Ashkenazi as the Zionist. The article summarizes a narrative-oriented academic research of the evolution of the new Mizrahi narrative in Israel, since the 1990s.It presents findings from historical, philosophical, and narrative analyses of texts from different periods of older and newer Mizrahi struggles in (...) Israel. The article presents a three-stage model of the development of resistance narratives that evolved, in this case, in opposition to the hegemonic Ashkenazi mega-narrative, and that employed different practices that facilitated their expression in social narrative networks. These stages are: (1) accounting for the past (placing historic, colonialist Zionism on trial); (2) writing a new (purely Mizrahi) historiography; and (3) creating an Arab-Mizrahi identity separate from the Ashkenazi hegemony (identified as occupational Zionism that has been violent against both Jews and Arabs, and which is an invasive, foreign growth in a non-European space). The article offers critical perspectives on the main philosophical and educational challenges of the new narrative which reveals that, historically, these three processes also involve use of stereotypes and assumed an elitist point of view that governed development of the resistance discourse. Such actions contradict the movement’s claim that the new Mizrahi narrative exists on purely moral grounds and seeks to liberate itself from these very same oppressive elements found in the dominant meta-narrative. In contrast, the analytical approach presented in this article allows for an analysis of the resistance narrative that changes the stage of liberation to one of unification. (shrink)

The trauma of the October 7 massacre for Israelis and the catastrophe that Gazans have experienced in the subsequent war mark a new stage in the Palestinian–Israeli conflict. While October 7 and indeed the Israeli response are exceptional, we cannot overcome their consequences without addressing the root of the conflict. Calls for an immediate ceasefire are understandable but fall into the trap of seeing the solution as being a military decision. This echoes to the attitude of the current (...) Israeli government which poses the response to October 7 as a military one. A new international political initiative is required to change the atmosphere by setting the goal of resolving the conflict on the basis of self-determination for both Israelis and Palestinians. That needs to inform the approach we adopt to ending the current conflict by replacing Hamas and Israel in Gaza with an international security mechanism. (shrink)

To resist the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank, Palestinian prisoners are smuggling sperm samples out of Israeli prisons to enable their wives to undergo fertility treatment. Bodies and bodily matter figure as central actors in this practice of resistance. In this article, I draw from fieldwork I conducted with Palestinian women and medical staff in the occupied West Bank to examine the tension between carcerality and matter(ing). I argue that bodies and bodily matter are constitutive (...) of the relationship between oppression and resistance. I analyze how Israeli military authorities assign evidentiary status to Palestinian bodies and illustrate how Palestinian families challenge the Israeli carceral system through new modes of embodied resistance. This article demonstrates how intersecting forms of oppression shape and are being shaped by bodies and their materiality. It also suggests that theorizing the materiality of power from Palestine offers new ways of understanding the political work that bodies do. (shrink)

Since Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967, the quest for just and lasting peace has been a fountainhead of debate, negotiation, and violent friction. Souad Dajani traces the Palestinians' struggle and argues for a strategy of nonviolent civilian resistance based on deterrence and defense. This strategy would defeat Israel's political will to maintain their occupation and prepare Palestinians for a time beyond the interim period of self-rule agreed upon by Israel and the PLO (...) in September 19932. Dajani's formulation of nonviolent civilian resistance is examined against a backdrop of early developments in Mandate Palestine, the impact of Zionist ideology, and the realities of life for Palestinians under occupation. Her assessment of the role of the PLO, objectives of the Palestinian National Movement, developments since the Gulf War, and other factors crucial to an effective strategy raises critical questions surrounding the operation of nonviolent techniques for the Palestinian community, Israeli politics, and international actors, most prominently the United States. (shrink)

The prevailing discourse in Israeli academia on justifying the values of Israel as a “Jewish and democratic state” takes the form of a debate involving questions of group rights of a national minority, as in any liberal democracy. The framework of this discourse relies on three interconnected, hegemonic assertions. These assertions assume the applicability of equal individual rights, put aside the Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza as irrelevant for the “Jewishness” of the state as it belongs (...) to a different rule of recognition, and conceptualize the Green Line based on majority-minority relations with Jewish group rights, including the Law of Return, as not leading to discrimination against individuals. I contend that these assertions are invalid and that colonialism is the relevant framework of Israel’s constitutional identity in Palestine (the Green Line, the West Bank including Jerusalem and Gaza). I argue there is one Constitution in Palestine based on one conception of sovereignty, regardless of any rules of recognition where the Law of Return, together with the value of “preserving a Jewish majority,” constitutes its very essence that targets the Palestinians as such. The Article presents a case-law study regarding family life between spouses and their children in Palestine. This case-law reveals an unfamiliar phenomenon. Unlike the plurality of written laws that characterize colonial regimes, the Israeli legal system introduces a unique model in which racial domination is created mostly by decisionism of the Court, out of the written laws and regardless of any rule of recognition. (shrink)

This article argues that Palestinian cinema can collectively be understood as adopting a crip aesthetic that gives expression to how, after Jasbir K. Puar (2017), Palestinians are routinely and systematically rendered disabled, or debilitated, by the Israel Occupation Forces. It is through the twin lenses of disability theory and critical race theory that I propose the concept of cinephilistinism, a term that attempts two things: firstly, to express an essayistic opposition to both a cinematic settler-colonial occupation and the (...) support, be that tacit or explicit, lent to that occupation by various purportedly cinephilic institutions; and, secondly, to function as a means for currying what Steven Salaita might term, apropos of Indigenous and Palestinian relations (but here applied to Palestinian solidarity networks more generally), “inter/nationalism” or “solidarity, transnationalism, intersectionality, kinship, or intercommunalism” with Palestine at this moment of intensified Israeli state brutality. What is more, the article will latterly pitch cinephilistinism against a western theological Zionist myth regarding the (Second) Coming, which has Palestine as its focus, such that the battle for Palestinian freedom becomes the battle for the future of humanity, with cinema playing a key role in this struggle. (shrink)

A political framing of mental health emphasizes political conditions as contributing causal factors to psychiatric conditions. In this article, I will argue that highlighting political factors matters for three reasons. First, it can further our understanding of the causal genesis and provenance of psychiatric conditions. Second, it can indicate alternative interventions, including those targeting the political sphere or the broader community rather than just the individual. Third, it can point to inadequacies in existing psychiatric diagnoses and reorient clinicians and researchers (...) toward novel diagnostic categories. The case study used to support these claims is the Israeli military occupation of Palestine. (shrink)

Looking at one site, the Israeli checkpoints in the occupied Palestinian territory, this article seeks to understand the mechanisms by which violence can present itself as justifiable (or justified), even when it materializes within frames presumably set to annul it. We look at the checkpoints as a condensed microcosmos operating within two such frames. One is the prolonged Israeli-Palestinian ‘peace process’ (the checkpoints became a primary technology of control in the period following the beginning of the peace process), (...) and the other is regulatory power (disciplinary and biopower), which in the Foucauldian framework presumably sidelines the violent form which sovereign power takes. We argue that the checkpoints, which dissect the Palestinian occupied territories into dozens of enclaves and which are one of the most effective and destructive means of control within the current stage of occupation, can be seen as more than obstacles in the way of Palestinian movement; we suggest that they also function as corrective technologies that are meant to fail. It is with this failure that violence can appear as justified. In order to show the operation of this embedded failure, we examine one mechanism operating within the checkpoints: ‘the imaginary line’. The imaginary line is both a component within, and an emblem of a mode of control that constantly undoes itself in order to summon violence. Since it is never visibly marked in the physical space, the imaginary line is bound to be unintentionally crossed, thereby randomly rendering Palestinians as ‘transgressors’ of the rule and thus facilitating eruptions of violence by the soldiers stationed at the checkpoints. This article proposes an analysis of this hidden demarcation of space in order to question the different relations between subjects and power which it both assumes and constitutes. (shrink)