Thinking Palestine

This book brings together an inter-disciplinary group of Palestinian, Israeli, American, British and Irish scholars who theorise 'the question of Palestine'. Critically committed to supporting the Palestinian quest for self determination, they present new theoretical ways of thinking about Palestine. These include the 'Palestinization' of ethnic and racial conflicts, the theorization of Palestine as camp, ghetto and prison, the tourist/activist gaze, the role of gendered resistance, the centrality of the memory of the 1948 Nakba (catastrophe) to the contemporary understanding of the conflict, and the historic roots of the contemporary discourse on Palestine. The book offers a novel examination of how the Palestinian experience of being governed under what Giorgio Agamben names a 'state of exception' may be theorised as paradigmatic for new forms of global governance. An indispensable read for any serious scholar.

What does it mean to inhabit the land of Palestine and Israel justly? How should Christians understand the Palestinian-Israeli conflict? Alain Epp Weaver examines answers to these questions, paying particular attention to the theologies of sumud, or steadfastness, advanced by Palestinian Christian theologians, while also presenting other Christian, Jewish, and Muslim responses. Contextualizing these theologies within Palestinian and Israeli Jewish histories, Epp Weaver introduces readers to the intertwined histories of Zionism (as a movement to establish a Jewish state and renew Jewish life in the biblical land of Israel) and Palestinian nationalism. He also situates Palestinian Christian theologies within broader Christian conversations about election, God's enduring covenant with the Jewish people, and Zionism. In the face of a politics of separation and dispossession, Epp Weaver contends, Palestinian Christian theologies testify to the possibility of a shared polity and geography for Palestinians and Israeli Jews not defined by walls, militarized fences, checkpoints, and roadblocks, but rather by mutuality and reconciliation.

Operation Protective Edge, Israel’s seven-week bombing campaign and ground invasion of Gaza in the summer of 2014, resulted in half a million displaced Gazans, tens of thousands of destroyed homes, and more than 2,000 deaths—and, yet, it was only the latest in a long series of assaults endured by Palestinians isolated in Gaza. But, following the conflict, polls revealed a startling fact: for the first time, a majority of Americans under thirty found Israel’s actions unjustified. Jon Stewart aired a blistering attack on Israeli violence, and a video of a UN spokesperson weeping as he was interviewed in Gaza went viral, appearing on Vanity Fair and Buzzfeed, among other sites. This book traces this swelling American recognition of Palestinian suffering, struggle, and hope, in writing that is personal, lyrical, anguished, and inspiring. Some of the leading writers of our time, such as Junot Díaz and Teju Cole, poets and essayists, novelists and scholars, Palestinian American activists like Huwaida Arraf, Noura Erakat, and Remi Kanazi, give voice to feelings of empathy and solidarity—as well as anger at US support for Israeli policy—in intimate letters, beautiful essays, and furious poems. This is a landmark work of controversial, committed literary writing.

Finalist for the 2022 Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize Elegant, surprising stories about Palestinian immigrants in Canada navigating their identities in circumstances that push them to the emotional brink. Saeed Teebi’s intense, engrossing stories plunge into the lives of characters grappling with their experiences as Palestinian immigrants to Canada. A doctor teaches his girlfriend about his country, only for her to fall into a consuming obsession with the Middle East conflict. A math professor risks his family’s destruction by slandering the king of a despotic, oil-rich country. A university student invents an imaginary girlfriend to fit in with his callous, womanizing roommates. A lawyer takes on the impossible mission of becoming a body smuggler. A lonely widower travels to Russia in search of a movie starlet he met in his youth in historical Jaffa. A refugee who escaped violent circumstances rebels against the kindness of his sponsor. These taut and compelling stories engage the immigrant experience and reflect the Palestinian diaspora with grace and insight.

Dr. Effarahs weekly editorials and articles in this volume are based on developing events that took place involving the USA Administrations and their policies of support to Israel in the conflicts among Palestinians, Arabs and Israelis. This book is intended to those students, teachers, politicians, executives, policy makers, and others who are interested or involved in the Middle East. Dr. Effarah interprets these events and policies as reflected by his six years (2007-2012) of writings that started since 1952. As an Arab American independent thinker, he judges events according to their merits while acting as a participant observer to the one-sided American policy toward the Middle East. He records and highlights the facts in an attempt to find the key to unlock the Palestinian, Arab and Israeli conflicts. His personal feelings and interpretations towards the proceedings represent a major part in presenting the events that took place in that period. Dr. Effarah attempts to create a voice for Arab Americans to stand up and be counted and act as an integral part of the American society. He keeps pressing for more American-Arab participation in the political process, for more transparency, and for faster and farther reaching to the Americans hearts and minds by trying to make them understand the Arabs situations, and Arab Christian Patrimony, culture and heritage. Dr. Effarah attempts to create an Arab American balanced policy to reach Americans and convince them that there are special interests groups and influential lobbyists in Washington, D.C. who misinform media and try to spin around while beholding to the fabricated Israeli points of view. To counterbalance the Zionist efforts, Arab Americans should think Palestine and ask the American citizens to find answers for why the American citizens, the taxpayers, give money outright to Israel: more than $8.5 million per day, according to the CIA Factbook in 2012.

In this meticulous work, based almost entirely on Hebrew archival material, Nur Masalha examines the Zionist concept of "transfer," or the expulsion of the Palestinian population to neighboring Arab lands. Masalha establishes the extent to which "transfer" was embraced by the highest levels of Zionist leadership, including virtually all the Founding Fathers of the Israeli state.

It is clearly obvious that, in the United States, limits are imposed on the Palestinians right to speak, on what the Palestinians could or should not say. Platforms for an impartial Palestinian discourse were extremely narrow to begin with, and when any was available, Palestinians hardly took center stage. For that purpose, Dr. Effarah kept writing weekly articles in Arabic and English for the last twenty-six years with one objectiveThink Palestine. This third volume includes unpublished articles for the last three years (20122015); volume 1 includes the published articles from 2001 to 2006, while volume 2 includes articles from 2007 to 2012. Dr. Effarah believes that the media discrepancies are far more pronounced. The moral crisis in mainstream Western media on the subject of Palestine requires volumes, and much has indeed been written about it. His writings are based on developing events that took place in the last seventy years of his own experience since he was uprooted from his home in Haifa, Palestine, in 1948, along with his community; such change in his life caused him to be involved in the politics of the Middle East. Dr. Effarahs articles on Think Palestine have a propensity to find solutions to the Palestinian dilemma while waiting for a form of a peaceful settlement between the Palestinians and the Israelis. The struggle in Palestine requiresand in fact, demandsglobal solidarity, a critical mass of a support base that is enough to turn the tide against the violent Israeli occupation, incorporating governments and companies that currently support, sustain, and bankroll Israels daily crimes against Palestinians. There were not enough Palestinian intellectuals around to speak for themselves and are capable of enunciating the Palestinian experience or that the struggle of Palestine is part of a larger battle against imperialism. Today, theres a massive shift that the Internet and social media has brought abouta change in understanding the truth about Palestine being occupied by intruders coming from the four corners of earth to fulfill a fallacy of certain myth that a certain god promised the land of Palestine to the Jews. However, the frame of mind that neglected or avoided the Palestinian narrative has not been defeated completely in the Western world as long as the appreciation of the authenticity of the Palestinian narrative to the central discourse of the Palestine-Israel conflict at every available platformbe it political, academic, cultural, artistic, or in the mediais not comprehended. Dr. Effarah attempts to create a voice for Arab Americans to stand up and be counted and act as an integral part of the American society and help Americans understand the Palestinians situation as part of the Arab culture and heritage.

Academic freedom is under siege, as our universities become the sites of increasingly fraught battles over freedom of speech. While much of the public debate has focussed on 'no platforming' by students, this overlooks the far graver threat posed by concerted efforts to silence the critical voices of both academics and students, through the use of bureaucracy, legal threats and online harassment. Such tactics have conspicuously been used, with particularly virulent effect, in an attempt to silence academic criticism of Israel. This collection uses the controversies surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a means of exploring the limits placed on academic freedom in a variety of different national contexts. It looks at how the increased neoliberalisation of higher education has shaped the current climate, and considers how academics and their universities should respond to these new threats. Bringing together new and established scholars from Palestine and the wider Middle East as well as the US and Europe, Enforcing Silence shows us how we can and must defend our universities as places for critical thinking and free expression.