Decolonial Solidarity In Palestine Israel

Recent years have seen the Israeli state become ever more extreme in its treatment of Palestinians, manifested both in legislation stripping Palestinians of their rights and in the escalating scale and violence of the Israeli occupation. But this hard-line stance has in turn provoked a new spirit of dissent among a growing number of Israeli scholars and civil society activists. As well as recognising Palestinian claims to justice and self determination, this new dissent is characterised by calls for genuine decolonisation and an end to partition, as opposed to the now discredited 'two state solution.' Through the analytical lens of settler colonial studies, this book examines the impact of this new 'decolonial solidarity' through case studies of three activist groups: Zochrot, Anarchists Against the Wall, and the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD). In doing so, Todorova extends the framework of settler colonial studies beyond scholarly analysis and into the realm of activist practice. She also looks at how decolonial solidarity has shaped, and been influenced by, the writings of both Palestinian and Israeli theorists. The book shows that new forms of civil society activism, bringing together Palestinian and Israeli activists, can rejuvenate the resistance to occupation and the Israeli state's growing authoritarianism.

Recent years have seen the Israeli state become ever more extreme in its treatment of Palestinians, manifested both in legislation stripping Palestinians of their rights and in the escalating scale and violence of the Israeli occupation. But this hard-line stance has in turn provoked a new spirit of dissent among a growing number of Israeli scholars and civil society activists. As well as recognising Palestinian claims to justice and self determination, this new dissent is characterised by calls for genuine decolonisation and an end to partition, as opposed to the now discredited 'two state solution.' Through the analytical lens of settler colonial studies, this book examines the impact of this new 'decolonial solidarity' through case studies of three activist groups: Zochrot, Anarchists Against the Wall, and the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD). In doing so, Todorova extends the framework of settler colonial studies beyond scholarly analysis and into the realm of activist practice. She also looks at how decolonial solidarity has shaped, and been influenced by, the writings of both Palestinian and Israeli theorists. The book shows that new forms of civil society activism, bringing together Palestinian and Israeli activists, can rejuvenate the resistance to occupation and the Israeli state's growing authoritarianism.

“The age of transnational humanities has arrived.” According to Steven Salaita, the seemingly disparate fields of Palestinian Studses and American Indian studies have more in common than one may think. In Inter/Nationalism, Salaita argues that American Indian and Indigenous studies must be more central to the scholarship and activism focusing on Palestine. Salaita offers a fascinating inside account of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement—which, among other things, aims to end Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land. In doing so, he emphasizes BDS’s significant potential as an organizing entity as well as its importance in the creation of intellectual and political communities that put Natives and other colonized peoples such as Palestinians into conversation. His discussion includes readings of a wide range of Native poetry that invokes Palestine as a theme or symbol; the speeches of U.S. President Andrew Jackson and early Zionist thinker Ze’ev Jabotinsky; and the discourses of “shared values” between the United States and Israel. Inter/Nationalism seeks to lay conceptual ground between American Indian and Indigenous studies and Palestinian studies through concepts of settler colonialism, indigeneity, and state violence. By establishing Palestine as an indigenous nation under colonial occupation, this book draws crucial connections between the scholarship and activism of Indigenous America and Palestine.

Zahi Zalloua provides the first examination of Palestinian identity from the perspective of Indigeneity and Critical Black Studies. Examining the Palestinian question through the lens of settler colonialism and Indigeneity, this timely book warns against the liberal approach to Palestinian Indigeneity, which reinforces cultural domination, and urgently argues for the universal nature of the Palestinian struggle. Foregrounding Palestinian Indigeneity reframes the Palestinian-Israeli conflict as a problem of wrongful dispossession, a historical harm that continues to be inflicted on the population under the brutal Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. At the same time, in a global context marked by liberal democratic ideology, such an approach leads either to liberal tolerance – the minority is permitted to exist so long as their culture can be contained within the majority order – or racial separatism, that is, appeals for national independence typically embodied in the two-state solution. Solidarity and the Palestinian Cause not only insists that any analysis of Indigeneity's purchase must keep this problem of translation in mind, but also that we must recast the Palestinian struggle as a universal one. As demonstrated by the Palestinian support for such movements as Black Lives Matter, and the reciprocal support Palestinians receive from BLM activists, the Palestinian cause fosters a solidarity of the excluded. This solidarity underscores the interlocking, global struggles for emancipation from racial domination and economic exploitation. Drawing on key Palestinian voices, including Edward Said and Larissa Sansour, as well as a wide range of influential philosophers such as Slavoj Žižek, Frantz Fanon and Achille Mbembe, Zalloua brings together the Palestinian question, Indigeneity and Critical Black Studies to develop a transformative, anti-racist vision of the world.

This book explores the political economy of Palestine through critical, interdisciplinary, and decolonial perspectives, underscoring that an approach to economics that does not consider the political—a de-politicized economics—is inadequate to understanding the situation in occupied Palestine. A critical interdisciplinary approach to political economy challenges prevailing neoliberal logics and structures that reproduce racial capitalism, and explores how the political economy of occupied Palestine is shaped by processes of accumulation by exploitation and dispossession from both Israel and global business, as well as from Palestinian elites. A decolonial approach to Palestinian political economy foregrounds struggles against neoliberal and settler colonial policies and institutions, and aids in the de-fragmentation of Palestinian life, land, and political economy that the Oslo Accords perpetuated, but whose histories of de-development over all of Palestine can be traced back for over a century. The chapters in this book offer an in-depth contextualization of the Palestinian political economy, analyze the political economy of integration, fragmentation, and inequality, and explore and problematize multiple sectors and themes of political economy in the absence of sovereignty.

Taking a multidisciplinary approach to examine the dynamics of ethno-national contestation and colonialism in Israel/Palestine, this book investigates the approaches for dealing with the colonial and post-colonial urban space, resituating them within the various theoretical frameworks in colonial urban studies. The book uses Henry Lefebvre’s three constituents of space – perceived, conceived and lived – to analyse past and present colonial cases interactively with time. It mixes the non-temporal conceptual framework of analysis of colonialism using literature of previous colonial cases with the inter-temporal abstract Lefebvrian concepts of space to produce an inter-temporal re-reading of them. Israeli colonialism in the occupied areas of 1967, its contractions from Sinai and Gaza, and the implications on the West Bank are analysed in detail. By illustrating the transformations in colonial urban space at different temporal stages, a new phase is proposed - the trans-colonial. This provides a conceptual means to avoid the pitfalls of neo-colonial and post-colonial influences experienced in previous cases, and the book goes on to highlight the implications of such a phase on the Palestinians. It is an important contribution to studies on Middle East Politics and Urban Geography.

A collection of selected essays investigating the historical response of African American freedom movements to the colonial settler state of Israel and its role in American imperialism in the Middle East. Through nuanced discussions of racism, capitalism, imperialism, and state power, these writings help to clarify one of the most controversial legacies of Black liberation in the United States.