Dear Friends and Colleagues,
Nearly a year into the genocide of the Palestinian people, we continue to search for the words to express our profound grief, rage, and disbelief at a world order that allows this to persist. In these dark times, and as Sherene Seikaly eloquently put it in her editor’s letter, we turn to Gaza to find strength:
Existing in the interstices between past and future, debility and loss, Palestinian parents in the Gaza Strip wrest life from death, hope from despair, cohesion from fragments. Their grief is a portal through time and place. We follow their directive to “leave the door to the tent ajar and put a dish of lentil soup on the floor … the kids could wake up from their graves hungry any time.”
As we continue to withstand the unimaginable, the Journal of Palestine Studies is committed to deepening knowledge around Palestine and Palestinians. The second issue of 2024 features original historical research, innovative political analysis, trenchant critiques, and a range of personal testimonies that reflect the expansive scope of Palestine studies.
The issue features three open-access articles. Loab Hammoud examines Arab art music, or tarab, during the British Mandate as the sonic harbinger of Palestinian modernism, showing that the production, consumption, and dissemination of this music was linked to the emergence of a Palestinian elite at a time when Palestine was growing into an important node of cultural exchange. Through an examination of League of Nations records and the text of the “Mandate for Palestine,” John Quigley argues that Britain did not have the legal grounding to unilaterally alter its status as belligerent occupant in 1920, and that the League of Nations never took a position on Jewish territorial rights or on the legality of Britain’s governance of Palestine. He asks: was there ever a mandate for Palestine? The third article, by Raz Segal, examines the depiction of Israel as a nation-state like any other as a mechanism of disavowing Israeli settler colonialism. For Segal, since modern antisemitism emerged at the intersection of the nation-state system and European imperialism and colonialism, Israel as a settler nation-state also functions according to the logic of what he calls settler antisemitism, thereby exposing a serious crisis in Holocaust and genocide studies.
The issue’s seven essays are topical, critical, and reflective. Brendan Ciarán Browne’s open-access contribution exposes the colonial foundations of Israel’s ongoing enforced starvation in Gaza by reading it through the Irish Famine, An Gorta Mór. Sherene Razack offers a much-needed critique of Masha Gessen’s July 2024 essay in the New Yorker, arguing that Gessen’s weaponization of feminism to respond to the alleged sexual violence on October 7 reifies racist tropes about civilized European Jews being forced to wage a genocide against barbaric, Muslim Arabs in order to defend their homeland. Tarek Hamoud offers original perspective into the October 7 attacks by examining Hamas’s decentralized leadership structure and its pragmatic adaptability since its founding, and especially since seizing control in Gaza in 2007. In this open-access piece, Hamoud argues that October 7 highlights the failed and misguided attempts of regional and international players to contain Hamas—fundamentally a resistance movement—within mainstream politics. The five remaining essays by Said Boulos, R. Isa, Bushra K., and Nadine Naber offer reflective testimonials from fragmented Palestinians and Arabs in Amman, Jerusalem, Ramallah, and Chicago. From their respective geographic locations, the authors reflect about the significance of October 7 for the collective Palestinian consciousness, the importance of taking up space as Palestinians in Jerusalem, the human capacity to adapt and hope in the face of overwhelming death and suffering, and the enduring and transcendent power of intergenerational grief, collective love and care, and sumud among diaspora Palestinians, Arabs, and allies.
The legacy of the late Palestinian poet, writer, and educator, Refaat Alareer, killed by Israeli fire in December 2023, is honored by one of his students, Yousef Aljamal, in a moving open-access obituary. Geoffrey Levin reviews two books, Azad Essa’s Hostile Homelands: The New Alliance Between India and Israel and Eric Alterman’s We Are Not One: A History of America’s Fight over Israel. The issue ends with an open-access review by Roula Hajjar of Lara and Stephen Sheehi’s book, Psychoanalysis under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine.
The full table of contents can be found here.
In Gratitude and Solidarity,
The JPS Team