The Anthropological Rise of Palestine
Keywords: 
anthropology
ethnography
epistemology
academia
research
Solidarity
Palestine
Palestinians
Abstract: 

This article traces the rise of anthropological scholarship on Palestine and/or Palestinians from 2011 through the present, providing readers with a comprehensive bibliography of anthropological publications related to Palestine over that period. Drawing upon the author’s experience as a scholar of Palestine and a publicly engaged anthropologist, it accounts for the factors fueling the proliferation of this domain of knowledge production and the implications this has for representations of individual and collective Palestinian human conditions. The article argues that contemporary anthropological research and writing provide Palestinians with intellectual tools for discursive enfranchisement. Such anthropological engagement also makes possible global solidarity wherein Palestinians are recognized as epistemic equals, rendering legible the heterogeneity and complexities of Palestinian lived experiences.

Full text: 

Ten years have passed since the publication of anthropologists Khaled Furani and Dan Rabinowitz’s widely read “The Ethnographic Arriving of Palestine,” in which the authors identified four modes of ethnographic engagement with Palestinians in the English language. First came European writing on “Biblical Palestine” rooted in Christian theology in the nineteenth century. This was followed by writing on “Oriental Palestine” rooted in secularized and scientific approaches in the first four decades of the twentieth century. Then came “Absent Palestine” in the aftermath of the 1948 Nakba and the creation of the State of Israel, when ethnographies by and large silenced Palestinians with occasional interruptions. And finally, “The Poststructural” mode emerged from the 1980s on, with anthropologists questioning the Israeli state’s oppression of Palestinians and affirming the existence of Palestinians as national subjects. Furani and Rabinowitz argued that Palestine was “admissible” as an ethnographic subject in the 1980s “at a time when Israel’s unassailable position in the West was beginning to falter.”1

They noted that “the West [was increasingly] losing confidence in its established structures of power,” and spaces for critical discourse on Israel/Palestine had emerged.2 While Furani and Rabinowtiz did not explicitly define what they meant by “arriving,” the term is clearly linked to the notion of the admissibility of Palestine in anthropology and Western academia more broadly as a legitimate and recognizable domain of intellectual inquiry.

This article draws upon the literature review and arguments advanced by Furani and Rabinowitz to survey anthropological work on Palestine starting from 2011. I argue that the field has moved beyond the “arrival” described by the two scholars to a discernible “rise” in the present. I link this rise to a proliferation of scholarship where Palestine is not only admissible to domains of anthropological inquiry but is now welcome and expanding, thereby allowing us to get closer to understanding the many “Palestines” that shape the world. As I will demonstrate, indicators of this rise include factors such as the treatment of Palestinians as epistemic equals, thereby de-exceptionalizing Palestine; the expanding intellectual boundaries of the field; the establishment of associations like Insaniyyat; and the evisceration of compulsory Zionism hurdles.

Because of this enormous expansion of ethnographic engagement related to Palestine in the last decade, this article adopts an examination of scholarship that is self-consciously anthropological. Furani and Rabinowitz integrated ethnographic works advanced by non-anthropologists as well, but because so many scholars from different disciplines have since integrated ethnographic methods into their analysis of Palestine and/or Palestinians, this article is concerned solely with contributions made by anthropologists. The criteria for the work I reviewed were as follows: intellectual engagement in the English language by self-identified sociocultural anthropologists (versus archeologists and biological anthropologists) on Palestine and/or Palestinians from 2011 through the present.

In accounting for the factors that have fueled the proliferation of this domain of knowledge production and its implications for representations of the collective Palestinian human condition, I argue that contemporary anthropological research and writing provide Palestinians with intellectual tools for empowerment. Palestinians are identifying entry points to membership in the field of anthropology and opportunities to reshape the field itself. Furthermore, this anthropological engagement also makes possible global solidarity where Palestinians are recognized as epistemic equals, rendering legible the complexities and heterogeneity of Palestinian lived experiences.

With the assistance of colleagues in the field, I assembled a database of 117 anthropologists who have worked on the question of Palestine over the past decade. A finding of this research is that there is an even gender breakdown among the anthropologists in the field (between women and men). It also became clear that the majority of these anthropologists were trained in doctoral anthropology programs in the United States and are now based at U.S. institutions of higher education. A minority were trained or are based outside the United States and/or are not working in academia. A growing cohort of these anthropologists are at British, Canadian, and European institutions, with a significant subgroup of them at Israeli universities and a smaller cohort at Palestinian and Arab universities. Scholarship in the field includes robust representation of the West Bank, Israel, and refugee communities; yet ethnographic engagement is lacking in the Gaza Strip and many diaspora communities. The range of themes explored in the literature over the past decade is even broader than the spectrum of topics identified by Furani and Rabinowitz at the time of their publication. Finally, nearly half of the total number of anthropologists in the field are of Palestinian heritage.

 

Epistemic Equals

The anthropology of Palestine and Palestinians is often situated within the larger subfield of the anthropology of the Middle East. In their book, Anthropology’s Politics: Disciplining the Middle East, Lara Deeb and Jessica Winegar discuss the “compulsory Zionism” that many Palestinian anthropologists and other scholars of Palestine have reported within U.S. academia.3 This compulsory Zionism is evident in the challenges that scholars experience in accessing space for public critiques of the Israeli state. The book captures the alienation that these academics face and the ways they navigate this terrain to affirm the dignity and rights of the Palestinian people while remaining true to anti-Zionist principles. Despite the hegemonic nature of Zionist influences on U.S. institutions of higher education, solidarity with Palestine has nonetheless found a stronghold in many anthropological spaces. Yet Palestinian anthropologists cannot escape suspicion and the questioning of their rationality and scholarly authority in Western academia, or the structural racism of anti-Arab sentiments and Islamophobia.

Within U.S. academia, Palestinian anthropologist Amahl Bishara has become a prominent figure, with a robust publication record that has covered topics ranging from Christian minorities in Palestine, to fragmentation between the West Bank and Israel, to water politics.4 In her book, Back Stories: U.S. News Production and Palestinian Politics, Bishara discusses how Palestinian journalists (including fixers, photojournalists, camerapeople, reporters, and producers) are viewed and treated as “epistemic others” by mainstream Western news outlets. The international journalists often see their local Palestinian counterparts, on whom they depend, as “unable to be objective.”5 Bishara’s work not only renders visible the invisible Palestinian contributions to journalism in the eyes of so many Western readers and viewers, her ethnography reveals the epistemic agency of Palestinians. Bishara recognizes that Palestinians are fully capable of epistemological work, of theorizing their local moral worlds. The field of anthropology is much more open than journalism to critical interrogations of objectivity and bias. Nonetheless, anthropological scholarly networks are also not immune to treating their Palestinian scholars as “epistemic others.” Anthropologists such as Bishara, who are open about their Palestinian backgrounds, have over the past decade played an invaluable role in furthering the treatment of Palestinians as epistemic equals, be they anthropologists or research subjects themselves. Anthropological engagement as an intellectual tool for solidarity with Palestine from non-Palestinian allies has also become salient. The transformation from “epistemic others” to epistemic equals exemplifies the cumulative efforts of Palestinian anthropologists, and their anthropologist allies, in shaping this field.

A primary concern of my own anthropological scholarship has been what I call the discursive disenfranchisement of Palestinians—specifically lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer Palestinians.6 My research has revealed how queer Palestinians face suspicion, and also discursive attacks, from across the political spectrum regarding their ability to self-identify and name their own lived experiences. Bishara’s work demonstrates how anthropological engagements can empower Palestinians to overcome such suspicion and attacks. In a recent interview, Bishara reflected, “I think anthropology … has been a good way for me to think about a kind of praxis of living, of engaging with people, listening to people, expanding who one considers to be knowledgeable, and that has been absolutely crucial to my own thinking about Palestine and what liberation could mean.”7 Bishara’s words reflect how anthropology has equipped her and other Palestinian anthropologists with resources that advance discursive enfranchisement, both for themselves and their Palestinian interlocutors.

It is noteworthy to observe the rise of an influential critical mass of Palestinian anthropologists who are citizens of Israel, mobilizing anthropology as a mode of knowledge production and community empowerment. While their epistemic standing is systematically marginalized because of their status as an Indigenous minority confronting the oppressive settler-colonial state, these Palestinian anthropologists nevertheless navigate Israeli academia to help preserve their communal life. For instance, Sarab Abu-Rabia-Queder is a pioneer of scholarship on the economies of Palestinian Bedouin women in Israel;8 Nadeem Karkabi is an authority on language, culture, and politics among Palestinian citizen of Israel (PCIs);9 and Furani has emerged as one of the preeminent anthropologists of Palestine/Israel. Furani’s work on Arabic poetry and the cumulative nature of his sophisticated theoretical insights are profoundly shaping anthropological intellectual thought more broadly.10

 

Identity Politics

Anthropology has provided a modality for non-Palestinian scholars to amplify the voices of Palestinians and to provide rigorous analysis of Palestinian society and politics. There is a long history of anthropological solidarity, with figures in this domain who have maintained active ethnographic engagements and publications for decades through the contemporary period. Key examples include Glenn Bowman, whose most recent work centers on religion, space, and politics in Palestine;11 Julie Peteet, who writes on language, space, and temporality;12 and Ted Swedenburg, with his research on Palestinian culture, history, and politics.13 Among the longest-serving ethnographers of Palestine are British anthropologist Rosemary Sayigh, whose recent scholarship focuses on dispossession, memory, and identity14 and Palestinian anthropologist Sharif Kanaana, who has an edited volume titled The Future of Palestinian Identity.15 Palestine-based Rema Hammami is also a crucial voice in the field; her decades-long intellectual labor has distinguished her in Palestinian anthropology.16

A new generation of anthropologists, such as Diana Allan and Chiara De Cesari, are producing scholarship that is enriching knowledge of Palestinian communities and charting a path for future ethnographies on Palestine. Allan has produced a vast record of publications that examines the intersections of Palestinian refugee life, visual culture, and memory studies.17 De Cesari’s scholarship positions her as an authority on heritage studies and Palestinian nationalism.18

The work of Jewish and Israeli anthropologists has helped catalyze solidarity with Palestine. In her public intellectual work, U.S. anthropologist Susan Slyomovics discusses her experiences coming from a Holocaust survivor family. Her scholarship on history and memory in Palestine19 is explicit in recognizing Israel’s settler-colonial nature, and her book on reparations acknowledges Palestinians as victims of Israeli oppression and imagines Palestinians as rightful subjects of future reparations.20 Similarly, U.S. anthropologist Rebecca Stein has had a long track record of critical scholarship on the Israeli occupation, visual and media politics, and Palestinian human rights.21

In centering Palestinian voices, Israeli anthropologist Daniel Monterescu’s work destabilizes hegemonic conceptions of Israeli coexistence or democracy.22 Additionally, Guy Shalev’s scholarship on Palestinian physicians in the Israeli medical system reveals the profound asymmetries of power that govern Palestinian life in Israel and the myths about the neutrality of health care encounters between Israelis and Palestinians.23 With a faculty position at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem as his base, Shalev serves as a volunteer coordinator with Academia for Equality, a social justice organization including anthropologists and other scholars in Israel who publicly advocate for Palestinian rights and an end to Israeli educational institutions’ complicity in Israeli state oppression. Academia for Equality has emerged alongside the rise of Israeli anthropological attention to Palestinian life. The work of Efrat Ben Zeev, Omri Grinberg, Natalia Gutkowski, Assaf Harel, Matan Kaminer, Smadar Lavie, Eilat Maoz, Regev Nathanson, Amalia Sa’ar, and Rabinowitz is furthering Jewish-Israeli anthropological solidarity with Palestine and helping to break the taboo of interrogating Zionism in Israeli academia. Such scholars are moving further in the direction of honestly contending with privilege and authority in knowledge production and beyond.

Still, Zionist hegemony persists among many Israeli anthropologists and anthropologists of Israel. Some older Israeli anthropologists such as Clinton Bailey24 and Henry Rosenfeld25 continue to publish work with reified Orientalist conceptions of “Bedouins,” “peasants,” and “kinsmen.” In other Israeli contexts, there is a widespread illusion that the anthropology of Israel can be separated from the anthropology of Palestine, as if Palestinians and Israelis were not inextricably linked to one another, in the past as well as the present. For instance, in her 2015 book providing an overview of Israeli anthropology, Orit Abuhav makes such a distinction, briefly referencing the Furani and Rabinowitz article as a separate domain for readers who are interested in Palestinian society. The book only briefly addresses the relationship between colonialism and Israeli anthropology.26 Many Israeli anthropologists do not analyze the existence of Palestinian society in a robust manner, even when it comes to PCIs, who in Orientalist fashion continue to be described as “Israeli Arabs.” The anthropology of Israel has also largely failed to properly address the complicity of Israeli academia in Israel’s systematic oppression of Palestinians. In 2018, the Israeli Anthropological Association decided not to cooperate with Israeli academic institutions in the occupied Palestinian territories (oPt) because of their roles in the process of annexation; yet there was no recognition of how universities within the Green Line are also implicated in these oppressive realities.27

Contemporary anthropological scholarship on Palestine now overwhelmingly affirms the dignity of the Palestinian people notwithstanding the remnants of Orientalist and Zionist strains in anthropological representations of Palestinians. This affirmation can be seen in the recognition of the regimes of domination that Palestinians confront and the forms of resistance and resilience that animate their everyday lives. The subfield has been hospitable to Palestinian scholars invested in decolonizing anthropology and academia more broadly, leading to robust representation of Palestinians. The equal numbers of non-Palestinians in the field have maintained their spirit of allyship and solidarity. Considering anthropology’s own colonial itinerary, the anthropology of Palestinians is critical in that it demonstrates the potential for decolonial methodologies and epistemologies to further solidarity with the colonized.

Anthropological engagement with Palestine also reveals that the excesses of identity politics are not as pronounced in the anthropology of Palestine as in some other fields. The diversity of anthropologists of Palestine and Palestinians signals the value of an intersectional approach to identity politics in academia as well as to the potential for coalitions of differently positioned intellectuals to contribute to a shared purpose of scholarship and liberation. The deeply intersectional nature of contemporary ethnographic work on Palestine and Palestinians has collectively accounted for the forces of colonialism, race, class, religion, gender, sexuality, ability, health, migration, and other positionalities. Anthropology enables understanding of how humans make meaning but also how it is that our intellectual engagements can be deployed in service of the alleviation of human suffering.

 

De-exceptionalizing Palestine

Anthropological engagement on Palestine often aims to balance explicating the particularities of contemporary Palestinian conditions while situating Palestine/Israel within the context of transnational processes. For instance, recent anthropological research has focused on situating Palestine at the heart of the global military-industrial and prison-industrial complexes. Comparative analyses that place Israel in relation to other settler-colonial states also enrich ethnographic exploration of Palestinian experiences under Israeli domination and within the accompanying contexts of displacement and dispossession.

Another notable trend is the growing number of influential anthropologists who after establishing their credentials and contributing to knowledge production in other contexts have subsequently turned their anthropological attention to Palestine and/or Palestinians. The intellectual trajectories of Lila Abu-Lughod, Didier Fassin, Ghassan Hage, and Ann Stoler are a case in point. For instance, in her 2013 book, Do Muslim Women Need Saving?, Abu-Lughod includes voices of Palestinian women alongside those of women from other Muslim-majority contexts.28 Her recent article on the Palestinian Museum in the West Bank brings together settler colonialism, museums, and imaginations of Palestinian futures, on the one hand, with North American and Australian Indigeneity, on the other.29

One year after his keynote address at the Geographies of Aid Intervention conference at Birzeit University, Fassin published an article in Anthropological Theory placing his prior research on Palestine in conversation with his research in the Ecuadorian Andes, Venezuela, and South Africa to explicate an anthropological “critique of moral reason.”30 Fassin later edited a volume, If Truth Be Told: The Politics of Public Ethnography, featuring insights from leading anthropologists working on five continents. Three of the volume’s contributors, Nadia Abu El-Haj, Hage, and Sherine Hamdy, included meaningful discussions of Palestine in their respective chapters. Hage examines issues surrounding public interventions, truth, and oppression; Hamdy examines publics, ethnography, and divided audiences; and Abu El-Haj examines scholarly texts and academic freedom.31 Furthermore, in her book on Jewish genetic history and the anthropology and cultural study of science, Abu El-Haj reveals how the figure of the Palestinian often emerges when analyzing Jewish (and Israeli) identities.32

In 2013, Hage visited Palestine (from his base in Australia) to deliver the keynote address at a conference at Birzeit’s Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Institute of International Studies. Three years later, in his critical examination of global anti-racism discourses and political projects, Hage wrote, “Most importantly, we are seeing a massive rise in virulently racist and intolerant forms of ethno-religious nationalism, with Zionist nationalism in Israel being an extreme case of what is fast becoming the rule rather than the exception.”33 Stoler’s work also de-exceptionalizes Palestine. In an article in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, she draws upon her anthropological engagements with Palestine to imagine “how a collective might go about shaping the imaginative geography of a Palestinian archive.”34 In reflecting on her 2015 trip to Palestine, where she was invited to consult on how to manage the archive of the Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Institute, Stoler links Palestine to U.S. empire and Indigenous struggles around the world.

All four of these preeminent anthropologists—Abu-Lughod, Fassin, Hage, and Stoler— turned to Palestine later in their careers, and invitations from Palestine, particularly to visit Birzeit University, became tremendously formative intellectual experiences. As they continue to integrate Palestine into their scholarly imaginations, they contribute in significant ways to the de-exceptionalizing of Palestine within anthropology and academia more broadly. The invitations from Birzeit matter because of the marginalization of Palestinian universities in global hierarchies of power. In defying Israeli controls over Palestinian lives and organizations, influential scholars challenge the power asymmetries that exist between Global North institutions and oppressed Palestinians. By making Palestine more intellectually stimulating to wider audiences, the anthropology of Palestinians becomes increasingly mainstream, and Palestine is de-exceptionalized as it is placed in conversation with other salient social and political contexts in the global sphere.

 

Breadth

Anthropologists have raised concerns about “the problem of over-research” in particular Palestinian contexts, specifically “as articulated by the residents of the Shatila Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut, Lebanon” in Mayssoun Sukarieh and Stuart Tannock’s seminal article.35 The authors conclude, “It is imperative to recognise that sometimes conducting no new research at all is the most appropriate response to community concerns of over-research. Serious engagement with the issues that afflict marginalised and impoverished communities often requires activities other than conducting further research studies on the lives of the marginal and poor.”36 Sukarieh and Tannock make compelling interventions regarding the need for vigilance with respect to anthropological engagements that may be superfluous or even harmful.

My reading of much of the work from the past decade reveals the potential for the anthropology of Palestine and Palestinians to contribute to knowledge production, the expansion of methodological and theoretical frontiers of the discipline and beyond, the affirmation of the epistemic agency of Palestinians, and the advancement of solidarity. Additionally, the breadth of themes that this field has covered in recent years is remarkable. In this section, I synthesize key examples that reveal the range of themes and domains with which Palestinian anthropology overlaps.

George Bisharat’s scholarship anchors Palestine in political anthropology and the anthropology of law;37 Lotte Buch Segal has written on affect, violence, and politics;38 Rochelle Davis on the politics of commemoration;39 Yara El-Ghadban on popular music and globalization;40 Honaida Ghanim on history and nationalism;41 Nina Gren on refugees in the oPt;42 Andreas Hackl on exile and minority status;43 Maria Holt on women, memory, and dissent;44 Laura Junka-Aikio on occupation, aesthetics, and neoliberalism;45 Moslih Kanaaneh on music and identity;46 Rhoda Kanaaneh on citizenship and political subjectivity;47 Bard Kartveit on Palestinian Christians;48 Laurie King on film and solidarity;49 Nisreen Mazzawi on ecoanthropology;50 Emily McKee on the environment and the Negev;51 Anne Meneley on the environment and cultural life;52 Ethan Morton-Jerome on settlement labor;53 Khalil Nakhleh on development and neocolonialism;54 Esmail Nashif on art and culture; Victor Nygren on space, representation, and resistance;55 Simone Popperl on geology and settler colonialism;56 Caitlin Procter on mobility, youth, and the Covid-19 pandemic;57 Omar Qassis on sociocide;58 Sophie Richter-Devroe on women’s political activism;59 Ruba Salih on refugees, gender, and human rights;60 Leonardo Schiocchet on refugees and critical theory;61 Siri Schwabe on Palestinian-Chileans;62 Ilana Webster-Kogen on hip-hop;63 Jeremy Siegman on humor and settlement labor;64 Jake Silver on colonialism, gender, sexuality, and visual politics;65 and Dina Zbeidy on marriage.66

Scholarship on the anthropology of gender in Palestine is prominent, with Suhad Daher-Nashif’s67 and Sarah Ihmoud’s68 bodies of work offering some of the most astute analyses of gendered politics in the field. Daher-Nashif and Ihmoud’s collaborations with one another, in addition to their collaborations with Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, are striking. While Shalhoub-Kevorkian is a sociologist, her deep ethnographic research on women and the family in Palestine is breathtaking, and it comes as no surprise that she has worked so closely with anthropologists. These collaborations are not as common in the field, given the anthropological tendency to pursue individualized fieldwork and sole-authored publications.

 

Expanding Boundaries

Over the past decade, other fields have devoted more analytical space to methodological and theoretical insights from the anthropology of Palestine. The work of anthropologists of Palestinian experiences that has significantly expanded the frontiers of broader fields include Lori Allen’s scholarship on political anthropology, commissions, and human rights in Palestine;69 Ilana Feldman’s historical ethnographies and contemporary work on Palestinian refugees that have made her one of the most widely recognized anthropologists of humanitarianism more generally;70 Nicola Perugini’s analytical insights on Palestine, which have critically interrogated conventional understandings of human rights, human shields, humanitarian law, and other concepts that are taken for granted in the social sciences;71 and Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins has not only substantially shaped environmental anthropology and the anthropology of infrastructure but has also catalyzed the mainstreaming of Palestine in these burgeoning subfields.72

Even when such anthropological engagements build upon themes and domains that have long histories, in recent years innovative research has been a key feature of the anthropology of Palestine. Such innovation is evident in Nayrouz Abu Hatoum’s research on Jerusalem and visual anthropology,73 Nadia Abu El-Haj’s work on the politics of archeology,74 Aref Abu-Rabia’s scholarship on Bedouins and Indigenous medicine,75 Miriyam Aouragh’s examinations of online activism,76 and Khaldun Bshara’s work on art, architecture, and space.77

Nell Gabiam’s foregrounding of Syria as a site for Palestinian refugee encounters with humanitarianism and other forms of governance, alongside the longue durée of her engagement on the question of Palestine, has been original in approach.78 Gren’s work on Palestinians in Sweden,79 Anja Kublitz’s on Palestinians in Denmark,80 and my coauthored work with Katharina Galor on Palestinians in Germany81 have also helped fill gaps in scholarship on the Palestinian diasporas in Europe. Natalia Gutkowski’s scholarship on the environment and agriculture has brought analytical insights from sustainability studies to the anthropology of Palestine.82 Emanuel Schaeublin’s long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Palestine has made important contributions to the anthropology of ethics, religion, and Islam.83 Kiven Strohm’s work on Palestinian art and music has enriched the anthropology of culture and politics.84 Luigi Achilli’s ethnographic research has revealed the power of quotidian Palestinian life, particularly through the prisms of migration and nationalism.85 Achilli’s article on Palestinian refugee masculinity in Jordan,86 coupled with Gustavo Barbosa’s book on Palestinian refugee masculinity in Lebanon (forthcoming),87 expand the anthropology of gender to considerations of masculinity in Palestine studies.

Kareem Rabie has just published his book on the political economy of the West Bank, titled Palestine Is Throwing a Party and the Whole World Is Invited: Capital and State Building in the West Bank.88 One leading scholar notes, “Drawing on his exceptional knowledge and understanding of Palestine, along with a considerable amount of original, innovative, and detailed fieldwork, Kareem Rabie presents thought-provoking insights on the question of urbanism in Palestine.”89 The innovative nature of so much work on the anthropology of Palestine and Palestinians is increasingly moving the field in interdisciplinary directions.

The anthropology of Palestine is also adopting intersectional approaches to engagement on questions of solidarity, particularly in the realm of Black-Palestinian relations. For instance, Safa Abu-Rabia’s article on Bedouin women in the Negev ethnographically examines how these Palestinian women navigate understandings of, and experiences with, their own Blackness and whiteness.90 My coauthored article with Darnell Moore explores the history of Black, Palestinian, and queer reciprocal solidarity.91 Arguably the most popularly recognized anthropologist of Palestine in the English language is Marc Lamont Hill. His coauthored article with Noura Erakat, in the 2019 Black-Palestinian transnational solidarity special issue of the Journal of Palestine Studies (JPS), refers to what the two authors call “renewal, returns, and practice.”92 Lamont Hill is a leading U.S. Black intellectual who has taken public positions in support of Palestinian rights, culminating in his 2021 coauthored book with Mitchell Plitnick, Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics.93 He has been conducting research in recent years on the Afro-Palestinian community in Jerusalem, and he is finalizing a film currently titled Black in the Holy Land.94 In 2018, CNN fired Lamont Hill as one of their political commentators in the context of the backlash to his speech at the United Nations International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People.95 Yet he has maintained his public advocacy for Palestine.

 

Ecosystem

The anthropology of Palestine and Palestinians is now supported by an ecosystem that has grown increasingly robust in recent years. This was partly catalyzed by the 2015 establishment of Insaniyyat, the Society of Palestinian Anthropologists. In his American Anthropologist article reflecting on Insaniyyat, Furani writes: “Insaniyyat is a new way to say ‘anthropology’ in Arabic. Insan means ‘person’ or ‘human,’ which in Arabic is contrasted to jinn, meaning ‘demonic.’ It also emerges from the verb anasa meaning ‘offering affable company that dispels loneliness.’ To be ‘human’ is therefore to be a congenial companion. We combine insan with the suffix iyyat to indicate a subject of study, hence Insaniyyat.”96 Since 2016, Insaniyyat has held conferences in Palestine and abroad.97 They maintain additional activities, including expanding the membership base, running an email listserv, a podcast, an online bibliography, and fundraising. Their current strategic projects are also focused on anthropological knowledge in the Arabic language, fostering anthropology and community engagement, developing the organization’s bylaws, and nurturing publications.

The American Anthropological Association (AAA) has played a critical role in the ecosystem of Palestinian anthropology. In 2016, a group of anthropologists identified with the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) Palestinian solidarity movement, went through a rigorous process and obtained a clear mandate to introduce a resolution calling on the AAA to boycott Israeli academic institutions. The resolution failed by a mere 39 votes, with 2,423 AAA members voting against the resolution and 2,384 voting in favor.98 A vigorous debate preceded the vote, with anthropologists writing and lobbying in favor of BDS and a countermovement of groups lobbying against. The resolution succeeded in raising awareness about the Palestinian freedom struggle, normalizing Palestine-centered discourse in the most hegemonic of anthropological spaces. And the vote revealed some of the fault lines of Western anthropology, with the vast majority of people of color and younger anthropologists supporting the resolution in solidarity with Palestinians. This has had a significant impact on anthropologists who have added Palestine to their research, syllabi, university politics, activism, and public engagement. And the AAA has increased its resources and support for Palestinian anthropology, including funds for scholars from Palestine to present at AAA meetings and greater attention to panel proposals related to Palestine.

JPS has also contributed to the Palestinian anthropology ecosystem in meaningful ways. On this, JPS’s fiftieth anniversary year, it is clear that the Editorial Board and team have fully embraced anthropology in recent years, whether by including anthropologists in key positions, publishing peer-reviewed anthropological articles, reviewing anthropological books, or affirming anthropological theories and methods. An example of JPS’s important interventions in anthropology is a three-part “Special Document File” published in 2015. It is comprised of an article by Yugoslav anthropologist Nina Seferović, and translated by U.S. anthropologist Darryl Li, titled “The Herzegovinian Muslim Colony in Caesarea, Palestine,”99 which traces the history of the “Bushnaqs” (“Palestinians whose ancestors hail from the territory of present-day Bosnia-Herzegovina”); a preface by Li titled “A Note on Settler Colonialism”;100 and an appendix on “Balkan Migration to the Middle East.”101 Besides the compelling nature of such a dossier, the Journal’s wide reach has helped to increase the circulation of anthropological work of this kind. JPS’s interdisciplinary nature has also made it an invaluable resource for knowledge on history, economy, politics, society, and other spheres for anthropologists and other scholars.

Additional publications, both online and print, such as the International Journal of Middle East Studies (IJMES)Jadaliyya, and the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP) have facilitated the proliferation of anthropological discourse on Palestine in the public domain. Palestine-related articles have also appeared in each of the major cultural anthropology journals over the past decade, including American AnthropologistAmerican EthnologistAnnual Review of AnthropologyAnthropological QuarterlyAnthropological TheoryCultural AnthropologyCurrent AnthropologyCulture, Medicine, and PsychiatryJournal of the Royal Anthropological Institute; and Political and Legal Anthropology Review. Furthermore, Palestine-related research projects have been funded in each of the major grant agencies supporting cultural anthropology research or engagements, including the Ford Foundation, Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, Social Science Research Council, National Science Foundation, Open Society Foundations, and Wenner-Gren Foundation.

The Palestinian American Research Center (PARC), which has offices in both the United States and Palestine, has been at the forefront of supporting anthropological research on Palestine and/or Palestinians. With anthropologists represented on its board, a history of grants to Palestinian researchers (including anthropologists), and grants to American scholars conducting research on Palestinians (also including anthropologists), PARC is one of the very few funding bodies focused on Palestinian research. It has also led annual faculty development seminars for U.S. scholars in Palestine and has funded and supported Insaniyyat events. PARC relies on private donations, institutional sponsorships, member dues, and external grants.

While few in number, Palestine studies centers in the Western academy have a disproportionate intellectual weight and impact. Columbia University’s Center for Palestine Studies, Brown University’s New Directions in Palestinian Studies initiative, and the University of Exeter’s European Centre for Palestine Studies all have administrators, faculty, postdocs, staff, and students who include a significant representation of anthropologists. Their conferences, events, and initiatives regularly include anthropological modalities of engagement with the question of Palestine.

The ecosystem of Palestinian anthropology also now includes Stanford University Press (SUP) as a critical pillar. SUP is historic, having been established in 1892, and it has emerged as one of the most selective academic presses (they reject more than 95 percent of the book proposals they receive each year).102 Renowned for subjects including anthropology, Jewish studies, and security studies, it has also become the leading press in Middle East Studies, a portfolio developed under the leadership of Editor-in-Chief Kate Wahl. Within the Middle East list, Palestine is a major focus. The percentage of influential books in the anthropology of Palestine that are published by SUP is astounding. SUP’s reputation, marketing, and circulation networks have ensured that these books have been able to reach libraries and classrooms widely, raising consciousness about anthropological insights on Palestinian humanity.

A potential future addition to this ecosystem could be Al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network. Al-Shabaka has published the work of some anthropologists, including Randa Farah’s 2012 policy brief on Palestinian refugees and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and her 2014 pieces on the right of return for Palestinian refugees and on political forces in the Gaza Strip.103 Al-Shabaka would benefit from embracing the anthropology of policy. Anthropology’s deep commitment to ethnography would offer additional human-centered approaches to their policy analysis.

 

Future Horizons

There is a nascent public conversation on the place of teaching and pedagogy related to the anthropology of Palestine. Farah’s recent article, “Taboo Narratives: Teaching Palestine and the Palestinians,”104 Maura Finkelstein’s “What Is a Classroom For? Teaching the Anthropology of Palestine,”105 and Daniel Segal’s “Teaching Palestine-Israel: A Pedagogy of Delay and Suspension,”106 provide important points of departure. Additionally, Thea Abu El-Haj’s book on educating Palestinian-American children is illuminating107 alongside Nadia Abu El-Haj’s reflections on navigating anti-Palestinian repression in U.S. higher education.108

As we look to the future, there is an urgent need to address the dearth of intellectual spaces and resources for anthropological and ethnographic training in the oPt. The overwhelming absence of anthropology from the Gaza Strip is one of countless travesties resulting from Israel’s brutal siege on the territory’s two million residents. In the West Bank—in addition to Hammami—Ala Alazzeh, Lena Meari, and Rami Salameh are working tirelessly at Birzeit to maintain their research and scholarship, anthropological teaching, and public intellectual engagements. Alazzeh’s writing engages critically with themes of Palestinian resistance;109 Meari’s work on colonialism, gender, and resistance are ethnographically rich;110 and Salameh advances an intimate understanding of quotidian life in Palestine.111 As I have written elsewhere, Palestinian intellectuals in the oPt face systematic assaults on their academic freedom.112 Unlike diaspora Palestinian intellectuals in the West, their bodies interface directly with the coercive apparatus of the Israeli state. In envisioning the potentialities of anthropology for theory and praxis, it is Palestine-based anthropologists and intellectuals whose leads we must follow.

In the meantime, attention to the work of rising scholars in North America provides a horizon for what lies ahead in terms of the anthropology of Palestine. Current graduate students in anthropology doctoral programs (or 2021 graduates of such programs) are emerging voices in the field with promising research agendas. They include Columbia University’s Hadeel Assali on science and settler colonialism and Aamer Ibraheem on Druze communities in the occupied Golan; Duke University’s Jake Silver on the anthropology of astronomy; Brown University’s Samee Sulaiman on political violence and disability; University of Chicago’s Hadeel Badarni on agricultural and military technologies; Harvard University’s Randa Wahbe on bodies and prisons; Johns Hopkins University’s Arpan Roy on culture and ethnic difference; McGill University’s Ramzi Nimr on mental health; and Yale University’s Dina Omar on surveillance and psychology.

Anthropology is uniquely poised to provide human-centric epistemic and ontological tools to imagine and build a decolonized Palestine that is free from carceral and militarized regimes of segregation, oppression, and domination. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Angela Davis have respectively written, “Abolition is about presence, not absence. It’s about building life-affirming institutions,”113 and it “is not only, or not even primarily, about abolition as a negative process of tearing down, but it is also about building up, about creating new institutions.”114 As Palestine has shifted from ethnographic arrival to rise, may its next chapter be the building of this abolitionist future.

 

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Lila Abu-Lughod, Nadeem Karkabi, Rosemary Sayigh, and Guy Shalev for their invaluable feedback as this article was being conceptualized. I am also grateful for the comments that have significantly strengthened this article provided by my Editorial Board colleagues at JPS. Finally, my deepest appreciation goes to Lucas Meyer-Lee, my research assistant, for his support with the endnotes.

 

Endnotes:

1 Khaled Furani and Dan Rabinowitz, “The Ethnographic Arriving of Palestine,” Annual Review of Anthropology 40, no. 1 (October 2011): pp. 475–91, quote at p. 482.

2 Furani and Rabinowitz, “Ethnographic Arriving of Palestine,” p. 485.

3 Lara Deeb and Jessica Winegar, Anthropology’s Politics: Disciplining the Middle East (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015).

4 See Shatha Alazzeh et al., “Impacts of Intermittent Water Supply on Water Quality in Two Palestinian Refugee Camps,” Water 11, no. 4 (March 2019): p. 670; Amahl Bishara, “Sovereignty and Popular Sovereignty for Palestinians and Beyond,” Cultural Anthropology 32, no. 3 (October 2017): pp. 349–58; Bishara, “Palestinian Acts of Speaking Together, Apart: Subalterneities and the Politics of Fracture,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6, no. 3 (Winter 2016): pp. 305–30; Bishara, “From Dust to Concrete: Infrastructural Change, Political Intractability, and the Colonial Road Movie,” American Anthropologist 117, no. 2 (June 2015): pp. 398–401; Bishara, “Driving While Palestinian in Israel and the West Bank: The Politics of Disorientation and the Routes of a Subaltern Knowledge,” American Ethnologist 42, no. 1 (February 2015): pp. 33–54; Bishara, “Covering the Christians of the Holy Land,” Middle East Report, no. 267 (Summer 2013): pp. 7–14; Bishara, Back Stories: U.S. News Production and Palestinian Politics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012); Bishara, “Circulating the Stances of Liberation Politics: The Photojournalism of the Anti-wall Protests,” in Sensible Politics: The Visual Culture of Nongovernmental Activism, ed. Meg McLagan Yates McKee (New York: Zone Books, 2012), pp. 139–48; and Bishara, The Arab Public Sphere in Israel: Media Space and Cultural Resistance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009).

5 Bishara, Back Stories, p. 50.

6 Sa’ed Atshan, Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020), p. 11.

7 Amahl Bishara and Anna Tyshkov, “Episode 01: Amahl Bishara,” 3 December 2020, in Voices of Insaniyyat, produced by Insaniyyat, podcast, audio, 1:02:10, quote at opening.

8 See Sarab Abu-Rabia-Queder, “Embedded Economy and Empowerment: Public/Private Revisited,” Women’s Studies International Forum, no. 77 (November–December 2019); Sarab Abu-Rabia-Queder, Avigail Moriss, and Heather Ryan, “The Economy of Survival: Bedouin Women in Unrecognized Villages,” Journal of Arid Environment, no. 149 (February 2018): pp. 80–88; Abu-Rabia-Queder, “The Biopolitics of Declassing Palestinian Professional Women in a Settler-Colonial Context,” Current Sociology 67, no. 1 (January 2019): pp. 141–58; and Abu-Rabia-Queder, “The Paradox of Professional Marginality among Arab-Bedouin Women,” Sociology 51, no. 5 (October 2017): pp. 1084–100.

9 See Nadeem Karkabi, “The Impossible Quest of Nasreen Qadri to Claim Colonial Privilege in Israel,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 44, no. 6 (2021): pp. 966–86; Karkabi, “Self-Liberated Citizens: Unproductive Pleasures, Loss of Self, and Playful Subjectivities in Palestinian Raves,” Anthropological Quarterly 93, no. 4 (Fall 2020): pp. 679–708; Nadeem Karkabi and Aamer Ibraheem, “On Fleeing Colonial Captivity: Fugitive Arts in the Occupied Jawlan,” Identities (December 2020),; Karkabi, “Arabic Language among Jews in Israel and the New Mizrahi-Zionism: Between Active Knowledge and Music Performance,” Journal of Levantine Studies 9, no. 2 (Winter 2019): pp. 81–106; Oded Erez and Nadeem Karkabi, “Sounding Arabic: Postvernacular Modes of Performing the Arabic Language in Popular Music by Israeli Jews,” Popular Music 38, no. 2 (2019): pp. 298–316; Karkabi, “How and Why Haifa Has Become the ‘Palestinian Cultural Capital’ in Israel,” City and Community 17, no. 4 (December 2018): pp. 1168–88; and Karkabi, “Electro-Dabke: Performing Cosmopolitan Nationalism and Borderless Humanity,” Public Culture 30, no. 1 (January 2018): pp. 173–96.

10 See, by Khaled Furani, “After Criticism: Mahmoud Darwish’s Mural for Enlightenment,” ­Boundary 2 47, no. 1 (February 2020): pp. 145–72; Redeeming Anthropology: A Theological Critique of a Modern Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019); “Mastering Submission: Palestinian Poets Measuring Sounds of ‘Freedom,’” American Anthropologist 120, no. 4 (December 2018): pp. 697–710; “Is There a Postsecular?” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 83, no. 1 (March 2015): pp. 1–26; “States of Exception, Ethics and New Beginnings in Middle East Politics,” Interventions 16, no. 3 (May 2013): pp. 346–64; “Dangerous Weddings: Palestinian Poetry Festivals under Israel’s First Military Rule,” Arab Studies Journal 21, no. 1 (Spring 2013): pp. 79–100; and Silencing the Sea: Secular Movements in Palestinian Poetry (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012).

11 See, by Glenn Bowman, “Shared Shrines and the Discourse of Clashing Civilisations,” Entangled Religions, no. 9 (April 2019): pp. 108–38; “Gaza: Encystation,” in Gaza as a Metaphor, ed. Dina Matar and Helga Tawil-Souri (London: Hurst, 2016), pp. 113–26; “Grounds for Sharing—Occasions for Conflict: An Inquiry into the Social Foundations of Cohabitation and Antagonism,” in Post-Ottoman Coexistence: Sharing Space in the Shadow of Conflict, ed. Rebecca Bryant (New York: Berghahn, 2016), pp. 258–75; “À l’ombre de Rachel,” in Lieux Saints Partagés, trans. Jean-François Allain (Marseilles/Arles: MuCEM/Actes Sud, 2015), pp. 70–74; “Encystation: Containment and Control in Israeli Ideology and Practice,” JPS 44, no. 3 (Spring 2015): pp. 6–16; “Violence before Identity: An Analysis of Identity Politics,” in Violence and Society: Toward a New Sociology, ed. Jane Kilby and Larry Ray (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), pp. 152–65; “Sharing and Exclusion: The Case of Rachel’s Tomb,” Jerusalem Quarterly, no. 58 (Spring 2014): pp. 30–49; “Viewing the Holy City: An Anthropological Perspectivalism,” in Jerusalem: Conflict and Cooperation in a Contested City, ed. Madelaine Adelman and Miriam Elman (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2014), pp. 217–32; “The Politics of Ownership: State, Governance and the Status Quo in the Anastasis (Holy Sepulchre),” in Choreographies of Shared Sacred Sites, ed. Elazar Barkan and Karen Barkey (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), pp. 202–40; “Re-Packaging Palestine: Tourist Literature,” JPS 42, no. 4 (Summer 2013): pp. 93–95; “Christian Ideology and the Image of a Holy Land: The Place of Jerusalem Pilgrimage in the Various Christianities,” in Contesting the Sacred: The Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage, ed. John Eade and Michael J. Sallnow (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2013), pp. 98–121; “A Weeping on the Road to Bethlehem: Contestation over the Uses of Rachel’s Tomb,” Religion Compass 7, no. 3 (March 2013): pp. 79–92; “Popular Palestinian Practices around Holy Places and Those Who Oppose Them: An Historical Introduction,” Religion Compass 7, no. 3 (March 2013): pp. 69–78; Bowman, ed., Sharing the Sacra: the Politics and Pragmatics of Inter-communal Relations around Holy Places (New York: Berghahn, 2012); “Identification and Identity Formations around Shared Shrines in West Bank Palestine and Western Macedonia,” in Sharing Sacred Spaces in the Mediterranean: Christians, Muslims, and Jews at Shrines and Sanctuaries, ed. Dionigi Albera and Maria Couroucli (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), pp. 11–30; “Nationalizing and Denationalizing the Sacred: Shrines and Shifting Identities in the Israeli-Occupied Territories,” in Sacred Space in Israel and Palestine: Religion and Politics, ed. Marshall Breger, Leonard Hammer, and Yitzhak Reiter (New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 195–227; and “‘In Dubious Battle on the Plains of Heav’n’: The Politics of Possession in Jerusalem’s Holy Sepulchre,” History and Anthropology 22, no. 3 (August 2011): pp. 371–99.

12 See, by Julie Peteet, “Closure’s Temporality: The Cultural Politics of Time and Waiting,” South Atlantic Quarterly 117, no. 1 (January 2018): pp. 43–64; Space and Mobility in Palestine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017); “The Work of Comparison: Israel/Palestine and Apartheid,” Anthropological Quarterly 89, no. 1 (Winter 2016): pp. 247–81; “Camps and Enclaves: Palestine in the Time of Closure,” Journal of Refugee Studies 29, no. 2 (June 2016): pp. 208–28; and “Language Matters: Talking about Palestine,” JPS 45, no. 2 (Winter 2016): pp. 24–40.

13 See, by Ted Swedenburg, “1936–39,” in Nakba Archive: Fragments from the Palestinian Expulsion, ed. Diana Allan (London: Pluto Books, forthcoming); “The Kufiya,” in Global Middle East: Into the Twenty-First Century, ed. Asef Bayat and Linda Herrera (Oakland: University of California Press, 2021), pp. 162–73; and “Palestinian Rap: Against the Struggle Paradigm,” in Popular Culture in the Middle East and North Africa: A Postcolonial Outlook, ed. Walid El Hamamsy and Mounira Soliman (New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 17–32.

14 See, by Rosemary Sayigh, “Oral History, Colonialist Dispossession, and the State: The Palestinian Case,” Settler Colonial Studies 5, no. 3 (2015): pp. 193–204; “Silenced Suffering,” Borderlands 14, no. 1 (May 2015); “On the Exclusion of the Palestinian Nakba from the ‘Trauma Genre,’” JPS 43, no. 1 (Autumn 2013): pp. 51–60; The Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries (London: Zed Books, 2013); “Palestinian Camp Refugee Identifications: A New Look at the ‘Local’ and the ‘National,’” in Palestinian Refugees: Identity, Space and Place in the Levant, ed. Sara Hanafi and Are Knudsen (New York: Routledge, 2011), pp. 50–64; and Palestinian Refugee Identity/ies: Generation, Class, Region (Birzeit: Birzeit University, 2011).

15 Sharif Kanaana, ed., The Future of Palestinian Identity (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018).

16 See Rema Hammami, “Destabilizing Mastery and the Machine: Palestinian Agency and Gendered Embodiment at Israeli Military Checkpoints,” Current Anthropology 60, no. S19 (February 2019): pp. S87–S97; Hammami, “On (Not) Suffering at the Checkpoint: Palestinian Narrative Strategies of Surviving Israel’s Carceral Geography,” Borderlands 14, no. 1 (May 2015); Hammami, “Gender Equality and Muslim Women: Negotiating Expanded Rights in Muslim Majority and Immigrant Contexts,” in Development and Equity: An Interdisciplinary Exploration by Ten Scholars from Africa, Asia and Latin America, ed. Tom Dietz et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2014), pp. 118–31; Rema Hammami and Penny Johnson, Change and Conservation: Family Law Reform in Court Practice and Public Perceptions in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (Birzeit: Institute of Women’s Studies, Birzeit University, 2014); Hammami, “Home and Exile in East Jerusalem,” in Seeking Palestine: New Palestinian Writing on Exile and Home, ed. Penny Johnson and Raja Shehadeh (Northampton, MA: Interlink Publishing, 2013), pp. 111–34; Hammami, “Governance or Governmentality? Reflections on the Palestinian Authority,” Review of Women’s Studies, no. 7 (2012): pp. 26–31; Hammami, “Introduction: A Decade of Catastrophe,” in A Dangerous Decade: The 2nd Gender Profile of the Occupied West Bank and Gaza (2000–2010) (Birzeit: Institute for Women’s Studies, Birzeit University, 2011), pp. 5–14; and Hammami, Who Answers to Gazan Women? An Economic Security and Rights Research (New York: UN Women, 2011).

17 See Diana Allan, ed., Voices of the Nakba: A Living Archive of Palestine (London: Pluto Press, 2021); Allan, “At Sea: Maritime Palestine Displaced,” in Displacement: Global Conversations on Refuge, ed. Sylvia Pasquetti and Romola Sanyal (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2020), pp. 99–116; Allan, “The Long Turning: A Palestinian Refugee in Belgium,” Cultural Anthropology 35, no. 2 (2020): pp. 225–30; Allan, “What Bodies Remember: Sensory Experience as Historical Counterpoint in the Nakba Archive,” in An Oral History of the Palestinian Nakba, ed. Nahla Abdo and Nur Masalha (London: Zed Books, 2018), pp. 66–86; Allan, “‘This Is Not a Politics’: Solidarity and Subterfuge in Palestinian Refugee Communities in Lebanon,” South Atlantic Quarterly 117, no. 1 (January 2018): pp. 91–110; Allan, “‘See and Remember’: The Golden Days of Said Otruk,” in The Philosophy of Documentary Film: Image, Sound, Fiction, Truth, ed. David LaRocca (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), pp. 251–60; Diana Allan and Mark Westmoreland, “Visual Revolutions in the Middle East,” Visual Anthropology 29, no. 3 (April 2016): pp. 205–10; Allan, “Watching Photos in Shatila: Visualizing Politics in the 2011 March of Return,” Visual Anthropology 29, no. 3 (April 2016): pp. 296–314; Allan, Refugees of the Revolution: Experiences of Palestinian Exile (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014); Allan, “Commemorative Economies and the Politics of Solidarity in Shatila Camp,” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 4, no. 1 (Spring 2013): pp. 133–48; and Allan, “From Archive to Art Film: A Palestinian Aesthetics of Memory Reviewed,” Cairo Papers in Social Science 31, nos. 3–4 (2012): pp. 149–66. A PDF of “From Archive to Art Film” is available on the Academia.edu page.

18 See Chiara De Cesari, “Creative Institutionalism: Statecraft beyond the State in Palestine,” in Urban Recovery: Intersecting Displacement with Post War Reconstruction, ed. Howayda Al-Harithy (London: Routledge, 2021), pp. 295–319; De Cesari, “Heritage beyond the Nation-State? Nongovernmental Organizations, Changing Cultural Policies, and the Discourse of Heritage as Development,” Current Anthropology 61, no. 1 (February 2020): pp. 30–56; De Cesari, Heritage and the Cultural Struggle for Palestine (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019); De Cesari, “Anticipatory Representation: Thinking Art and Museums as Platforms of Resourceful Statecraft,” in Reimagining the State: Theoretical Challenges and Transformative Possibilities, ed. Davina Cooper, Nikita Dhawan, and Janet Newman (London: Routledge, 2019), pp. 153–70; De Cesari, “Heritage by NGOs in Palestine: Towards a Grassroots Politics of the Past?” in Reclaiming the Past for the Future: Oral History, Craft, and Archaeology; Adel Yahya in Memoriam, ed. Reinhard Bernbeck, Arwa Badran, and Susan Pollock (Berlin: Ex oriente, 2018), pp. 149–68; De Cesari, “Grassroots Ethnographies and Political Mobilization” in Labour of Love: New Approaches to Palestinian Embroidery, curated by Rachel Dedman, ed. Shuruq Harb, Birzeit: The Palestinian Museum, October 2018; De Cesari, “Heritage between Resistance and Government in Palestine,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 49, no. 4 (November 2017): pp. 747–51; De Cesari, “Haunting Arts of Memory,” in Memory Flows like the Tide at Dusk, Roskilde: Museet for Samtidskunst/Museum for Contemporary Art, 2016, exhibition catalog, published in conjunction with Alexandra Sophia Handal’s art exhibition of the same name; De Cesari, “Ottonostalgias and Urban Apartheid,” International Journal of Islamic Architecture 5, no. 2 (July 2016): pp. 339–57; Chiara De Cesari and Michael Herzfeld, “Urban Heritage and Social Movements,” in Global Heritage: An Anthropological Reader, ed. Lynn Meskell (Oxford: Blackwell, 2015), pp. 171–95; De Cesari, “Le patrimoine et le droit à la ville,” Afkar/Idées, no. 44 (Winter 2015): pp. 64–67; De Cesari, “World Heritage and the Nation-State: A View from Palestine,” in Transnational Memory: Circulation, Articulation, Scales, ed. Chiara De Cesari and Ann Rigney (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), pp. 247–70; De Cesari, “Anticipatory Representation: Building the Palestinian Nation(-State) through Artistic Performance,” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 12, no. 1 (April 2012): pp. 82–100; and De Cesari, “Cultural Governmentality: Government through Heritage Conservation in Old Hebron,” Conflict in Cities working papers series, no. 23 (Cambridge: Centre for Urban Conflicts Research, University of Cambridge, 2011).

19 See, by Susan Slyomovics, “Memory Studies: Lebanon and Israel/Palestine,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 45, no. 3 (August 2013): pp. 589–601; and “Who and What Is Native to Israel? On Marcel Janco’s Settler Art and Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff’s ‘Levantinism,’” Settler Colonial Studies 4, no. 1 (2014): pp. 27–47.

20 Susan Slyomovics, How to Accept German Reparations (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014).

21 See Rebecca L. Stein, “How One Palestinian University Is Remaking ‘Israel Studies,’” Middle East Report Online, 16 May 2019; Stein, “Machines, Coloniality, Glitch: Ethnographic Reflections on Israeli Techno-Modernity,” in State Machines: Reflections and Actions at the Edge of Digital Citizenship, Finance, and Art, ed. Yiannis Colakides, Marc Garrett, and Inte Gloerich (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2019), pp. 22–31; Stein, “GoPro Occupation: Networked Cameras, Israeli Military Rule, and the Digital Promise,” Current Anthropology 58, no. S15 (February 2017): pp. S56–S64; Stein, “#StolenHomes: Israeli Tourism and/as Military Occupation in Historical Perspective,” American Quarterly 68, no. 3 (September 2016): pp. 545–55; Adi Kuntsman and Rebecca L. Stein, Digital Militarism: Israel’s Occupation in the Social Media Age (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015); Stein, “Dispossession Reconsidered: Israel, Nakba, Things,” Ethnologie Française 45, no. 2 (2015): pp. 309–20; Stein, “Performative Zion: Butler’s Parting Ways,” Studies in American Jewish Literature 33, no. 2 (2014): pp. 259–63; Rebecca L. Stein and Adi Kuntsman, “Selfie Militarism,” LRB Blog, 23 May 2014; Stein, “Viral Occupation: Cameras and Networked Human Rights in the West Bank,” Middle East Report Online, 20 March 2013; Stein, “Inside Israel’s Twitter War Room: History of a Social Media Arsenal,” Middle East Report Online, 24 November 2012; Stein, “An All-Consuming Occupation,” Middle East Report Online, 26 June 2012; Stein, “Of Possessions and Dispossessions: A Story of Palestinian Property in Jewish Israeli Lives,” in Struggle and Survival in Palestine/Israel, ed. Mark LeVine and Gershon Shafir (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), pp. 295–305; Stein, “StateTube: Anthropological Reflections on Social Media and the Israeli State,” Anthropological Quarterly 85, no. 3 (Summer 2012): pp. 893–916; Stein, “Impossible Witness: Israeli Visuality, Palestinian Testimony and the Gaza War,” in Journal for Cultural Research 16, nos. 2–3 (2012): pp. 135–53; Adi Kuntsman and Rebecca L. Stein, “Digital Suspicion, Politics, and the Middle East,” Critical Inquiry, 2011; and Stein, “The Other Wall: Facebook and Israel,” LRB Blog, 19 April 2011.

22 See Merav Kaddar and Daniel Monterescu, “Dancing with Tears in Our Eyes: Political Hipsters, Alternative Culture and Binational Urbanism in Israel/Palestine,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 44, no. 6 (January 2021): pp. 925–41; Ariel Handel and Daniel Monterescu, “Terroir and Territory on the Colonial Frontier: Making New-Old World Wine in the Holy Land” Comparative Studies in Society and History 62, no. 2 (2020): pp. 222–61; Daniel Monterescu and Ariel Handel, “Liquid Indigeneity: Wine, Science and Colonial Politics in Israel/Palestine,” American Ethnologist 46, no. 3 (August 2019): pp. 313–27; Daniel Monterescu and Haim Hazan, Twilight Nationalism: Politics of Existence at Life’s End (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018); Monterescu, Jaffa Shared and Shattered: Contrived Coexistence in Israel/Palestine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015); Daniel Monterescu and Miriam Schickler, “Creative Marginality: Jews, Palestinians and the Alternative Cultural Scene in Tel Aviv-Jaffa,” Ethnologie Française 45, no. 2 (2015): pp. 293–308; Daniel Monterescu and Noa Shaindlinger, “Situational Radicalism: The Israeli ‘Arab Spring’ and the (Un)Making of the Rebel City,” Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory 20, no. 2 (February 2013): pp. 40–65; and Monterescu, “Estranged Natives and Indigenized Immigrants: A Relational Anthropology of Ethnically Mixed Towns in Israel,” World Development 39, no. 2 (February 2011): pp. 270–81.

23 See, by Guy Shalev, “Helsinki in Zion: Hospital Ethics Committees and Political Gatekeeping in Israel/Palestine,” American Anthropologist (forthcoming); and “A Doctor’s Testimony: Medical Neutrality and the Visibility of Palestinian Grievances in Jewish-Israeli Publics,” Culture, Medicine, Psychiatry, no. 40 (2016): pp. 242–62.

24 See Clinton Bailey, Bedouin Culture in the Bible (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018).

25 See Henry Rosenfeld, “From Peasantry to Wage Labor and Residual Peasantry: The Transformation of an Arab Village,” in Process and Pattern in Culture: Essays in Honor of Julian H. Steward, ed. Robert A. Manners (New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 211–36.

26 Orit Abuhav, In the Company of Others: The Development of Anthropology in Israel (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2015), pp. 11, 235–38.

27 Or Kashti, “Israeli Anthropological Association: We Won’t Cooperate with Institutions in the West Bank,” Haaretz, 26 June 2018.

28 Lila Abu-Lughod, Do Muslim Women Need Saving? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).

29 Lila Abu-Lughod, “Imagining Palestine’s Alter-natives: Settler Colonialism and Museum Politics,” Critical Inquiry 47, no. 1 (Autumn 2020): pp. 1–27.

30 Didier Fassin, “A Contribution to the Critique of Moral Reason,” Anthropological Theory 11, no. 4 (December 2011): pp. 481–91.

31 In Didier Fassin’s edited volume, If Truth Be Told: The Politics of Public Ethnography (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), see Nadia Abu El-Haj, “Academic Freedom at Risk: The Occasional Worldliness of Scholarly Texts,” pp. 205–27; Ghassan Hage, “What Is a Public Intervention? Speaking Truth to the Oppressed,” pp. 47–68; and Sherine Hamdy, “How Publics Shape Ethnographers: Translating across Divided Audiences,” pp. 287–310.

32 Nadia Abu El-Haj, The Genealogical Science: The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014).

33 Ghassan Hage, “Recalling Anti-racism,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 39, no. 1 (2016): p. 124.

34 Ann Laura Stoler, “On Archiving as Dissensus,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 38, no. 1 (May 2018): pp. 43–56, quote at p. 43.

35 Mayssoun Sukarieh and Stuart Tannock, “On the Problem of Over-Researched Communities: The Case of the Shatila Palestinian Refugee Camp in Lebanon,” Sociology 47, no. 3 (June 2013): pp. 494–508, quote at p. 494.

36 Sukkarieh and Tannock, “On the Problem of Over-Researched Communities,” p. 507.

37 See George Bisharat et al., “Mobilizing International Law in the Palestinian Struggle for Justice,” Global Jurist 18, no. 3 (October 2018); Bisharat, “Apersistência das desigualdades raciais no sistema de justiça criminal dos EUA,” Juris Poiesis 21, no. 27 (December 2018): pp. 256–82; Bisharat, “Law against the People/The Empire Strikes Back,” Revista Antropolítica: Revista Contemporânea de Antropologia, no. 42 (May 2018): pp. 296–308; Bisharat, “What the $655.5 Million Terrorism Judgement against the Palestinian Authority Really Means,” The Nation, 24 February 2015; Bisharat, “The Plea Bargain Machine,” Dilemas: Revista de Estudos de Conflito e Controle Social 7, no. 3 (2014): pp. 767–95; Bisharat, “Mobilising Palestinians in Support of One State,” in The Failure of the Two-State Solution: The Prospects of One State in the Israel-Palestine Conflict, ed. Hani A. Faris (London: I.B. Tauris, 2013), pp. 231–47; Bisharat, “Violence’s Law: Israel’s Campaign to Transform International Legal Norms,” JPS 42, no. 3 (Spring 2013): pp. 68–84; Bisharat, “Re-democratizing Palestinian Politics,” UCLA Journal of International Law and Foreign Affairs 17, nos. 1–2 (Spring 2013): pp. 1–27; and Bisharat, “The One-State Solution to the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict,” in International Law and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: A Rights-Based Approach to Middle East Peace, ed. Susan Akram et al. (New York: Routledge, 2011), pp. 297–329.

38 See Andrew M. Jefferson and Lotte Buch Segal, “The Confines of Time—On the Ebbing Away of Futures in Sierra Leone and Palestine,” Ethnos 84, no. 1 (2019): pp. 96–112; Buch Segal, No Place for Grief: Martyrs, Prisoners, and Mourning in Contemporary Palestine (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Buch Segal, “Ambivalent Attachment—Melancholia and Political Activism in Contemporary Palestine,” Ethos 44, no. 4 (December 2016): pp. 464–84; Buch Segal, “Mourning, Grief, and the Loss of Politics in Palestine: The Unvoiced Effects of Military Occupation in the West Bank,” in Living and Dying in the Contemporary World: A Compendium, ed. Veena Das and Clara Han (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015), pp. 475–92; Buch Segal, “The Burden of Being Exemplary: National Sentiments, Awkward Witnessing, and Womanhood in Occupied Palestine,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 21, no. S1 (May 2015): pp. 30–46; Buch Segal, “Disembodied Conjugality,” in Wording the World: Veena Das and Scenes of Inheritance, ed. Roma Chatterji (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), pp. 55–68; Buch Segal, “Why Is Muna Crying? Event, Relation, and Immediacy as Criteria for Acknowledging Suffering in Palestine,” in Histories of Victimhood, ed. Steffen Jensen and Henrik Ronsbo (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), pp. 179–97; Buch Segal, “Enduring Presents: Living a Prison Sentence as the Wife of a Detainee in Israel,” in Times of Security: Ethnographies of Fear, Protest and the Future, ed. Martin Holbraad and Morten Axel Pederson (New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 123–38; and Liv Nanna Hansson et al., “Political Fertility in the Occupied Palestinian Territory: An Ethnographic Study,” The Lancet 382, no. 4 (December 2013): p. S17.

39 See Rochelle Davis, “The Politics of Commemoration among Palestinians,” JPS 47, no. 1 (Autumn 2017): pp. 69–85.

40 See Yara El-Ghadban, “Popular Music and Globalization,” in The SAGE Handbook of Globalization, ed. Manfred B. Steger, Paul Battersby, and Joseph M. Siracusa (London: Sage Publications, 2014), pp. 379–98.

41 See, by Honaida Ghanim, “What Is the Color of the Arab? A Critical View of Color Games,” in Blackness in Israel: Rethinking Racial Boundaries, ed. Gabriella Djerrahian and Uri Dorchin (London: Routledge, 2020), pp. 217–35; “When Yaffa Met (J)Yaffa: Intersections between the Holocaust and the Nakba in the Shadow of Zionism,” in The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History, ed. Bashir Bashir and Amos Goldberg (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), pp. 92–113; “From Kubaniya to Outpost: A Genealogy of the Palestinian Conceptualization of Jewish Settlement in a Shifting National Context,” in Normalizing Occupation: The Politics of Everyday Life in the West Bank Settlements, ed. Marco Allegra, Ariel Handel, and Erez Maggor (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), pp. 151–71; and “Once upon a Border: The Secret Lives of Resistance—The Case of the Palestinian Village of al-Marja, 1949–1967,” Biography 37, no. 2 (Spring 2014): pp. 476–504.

42 See, by Nina Gren, “Unruly Boys and Obedient Girls: Gender and Education in UNRWA Schools in the West Bank,” Nidaba: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Middle East Studies 2, no. 1 (June 2017): pp. 36–47; Occupied Lives: Maintaining Integrity in a Palestinian Refugee Camp in the West Bank (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2015); and “Gendering Al-Nakba: Elderly Palestinian Refugees’ Stories and Silences about Dying Children,” St. Antony’s International Review 10, no. 1 (May 2014): pp. 110–26.

43 See, by Andreas Hackl, “The Good Arab: Conditional Inclusion and Settler Colonial Citizenship among Palestinian Citizens of Israel in Jewish Tel Aviv,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 26, no. 3 (September 2020): pp. 594–611; “Immersive Invisibility in the Settler-Colonial City: The Conditional Inclusion of Palestinians in Tel Aviv,” American Ethnologist 45, no. 3 (August 2018): pp. 341–53; and “Key Figure of Mobility: The Exile,” Social Anthropology 25, no. 1 (February 2017): pp. 55–68.

44 See, by Maria Holt, “Islam and Resistance in the Middle East: A Methodology of Muslim Struggle and the Impact on Women,” in Routledge Handbook of Middle East Politics, ed. Larbi Sadiki (New York: Routledge, 2020), pp. 335–47; “Muslim Women and (In)security: A Palestinian Paradox,” in Routledge Handbook on Middle East Security, ed. Anders Jägerskog, Michael Schulz, and Ashok Swain (New York: Routledge, 2019), pp. 328–37; “Everyday Practices of Sacrifice: A Case Study of Palestinian Women,” Gender and Research 19, no. 1 (October 2018): pp. 2–25; “A Crisis of Identity: Palestinian Women, Memory, and Dissent,” in The Future of Palestinian Identity, ed. Sharif Kanaana (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018), pp. 1–12; “A Plurality of Resistances: Women, Islam and War in Lebanon and the Palestinian Territories,” in Twenty-First Century Jihad: Law, Society and Military Action, ed. Elisabeth Kendall and Ewan Stein (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2015), pp. 216–32; “Stories of Identity and Resistance: Palestinian Women outside the Homeland,” in Diasporas of the Modern Middle East: Contextualising Community, ed. Anthony Gorman and Sossie Kasbarian (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), p. 212–38; “Resistance Narratives: Palestinian Women, Islam and Insecurity,” in Genocidal Nightmares: Narratives of Insecurity and the Logic of Mass Atrocities, ed. Abdelwahab El-Affendi (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), pp. 153–70; “An ‘Invented People’: Palestinian Refugee Women and Meanings of Home,” ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 14, no. 2 (October 2015): pp. 452–60; Women and Conflict in The Middle East: Palestinian Refugees and the Response to Violence (London: I.B. Tauris, 2013); and “The Wives and Mothers of Heroes: Evolving Identities of Palestinian Refugee Women in Lebanon,” Journal of Development Studies 43, no. 2 (February 2007): pp. 245–64.

45 See, by Laura Junka-Aikio, Late Modern Palestine: The Subject and Representation of the Second Intifada (New York: Routledge, 2015); “Articulation, National Unity and the Aesthetics of Living against Occupation in Elia Suleiman’s Palestine Trilogy,” Journal for Cultural Research 17, no. 4 (May 2013): pp. 398–413; and “Late Modern Subjects of Colonial Occupation: Mobile Phones and the Rise of Neoliberalism in Palestine,” New Formations, no. 75 (Spring 2012): pp. 99–121.

46 See, by Moslih Kanaaneh, “Palestinian Popular Music: How Popular Music Becomes Heritage,” in The Routledge Companion to Popular Music History and Heritage, ed. Sarah Baker et al. (London and New York: Routledge, 2018), pp. 376–87; “Critical Thoughts on National Identity,” in The Future of Palestinian Identity, ed. Sharif Kanaana (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018), pp. 53–64; and “Do Palestinian Musicians Play Music or Politics?” in Palestinian Music and Song: Expression and Resistance since 1900, ed. Moslih Kanaaneh et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), pp. 1–12.

47 See Rhoda Kanaaneh, “Stateless Citizens and Menacing Men: Notes on the Occupation of Palestinians inside Israel,” in Everyday Occupations: Experiencing Militarism in South Asia and the Middle East, ed. Kamala Visweswaran (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), pp. 115–31; and Rhoda Ann Kanaaneh and Isis Nusair, eds., Displaced at Home: Ethnicity and Gender among Palestinians in Israel (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2010).

48 See Bård Helge Kårtveit, Dilemmas of Attachment: Identity and Belonging among Palestinian Christians (Leiden: Brill, 2014).

49 See Laurie King, “Jean Chamoun (1942–2017): Lebanese Filmmaker and Champion of the Palestinian Cause,” JPS 47, no. 2 (Winter 2018): pp. 77–79.

50 See Nisreen Mazzawi and Amalia Sa’ar, “The Hawakir of Nazareth: The History and Contemporary Face of a Cultural Ecological Institution,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 50, no. 3 (2018): pp. 537–56.

51 See, by Emily McKee, “Water, Power, and Refusal: Confronting Evasive Accountability in a Palestinian Village,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 25, no. 3 (September 2019): pp. 546–65; “Environmental Framing and Its Limits: Campaigns in Palestine and Israel,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 50, no. 3 (2018): pp. 449–70; “‘It’s the Amazon World’: Small-Scale Farmers on an Entrepreneurial Treadmill,” Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment 40, no. 1 (June 2018): pp. 65–69; Dwelling in Conflict: Negev Landscapes and the Boundaries of Belonging (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016); “Trash Talk: Interpreting Morality and Disorder in Negev/Naqab Landscapes,” Current Anthropology 56, no. 5 (October 2015): pp. 733–52; “Demolitions and Amendments: Coping with Cultural Recognition and Its Denial in Southern Israel,” Nomadic Peoples 19, no. 1 (2015): pp. 95–119; and “Performing Rootedness in the Negev/Naqab: Possibilities and Perils of Competitive Planting,” Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography 46, no. 5 (November 2014): pp. 1172–89.

52 See, by Anne Meneley, “Hope in the Ruins: Seeds, Plants, and Possibilities of Regeneration,” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 4, no. 1 (March 2021): pp. 158–72; “The Olive and Imaginaries of the Mediterranean,” History and Anthropology 31, no. 1 (2020): pp. 66–83; “Walk This Way: Fitbit and Other Kinds of Walking in Palestine,” Cultural Anthropology 34, no. 1 (2019): pp. 130–54; “Checking Your Waistline at Qalandiya Checkpoint: Dieting as a Peace Initiative,” Jerusalem Quarterly, no. 68 (Winter 2016): pp. 90–103; “The Accidental Pilgrims: Olive Pickers in Palestine,” Religion and Society 5, no. 1 (September 2014): pp. 186–99; “The Qualities of Palestinian Olive Oil,” in Fat: Culture and Materiality, ed. Christopher E. Forth and Alison Leitch (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), pp. 17–31; “Discourses of Distinction in Contemporary Palestinian Extra-Virgin Olive Oil Production,” Food and Foodways 22, nos. 1–2 (May 2014): pp. 48–64; and “Blood, Sweat and Tears in a Bottle of Palestinian Extra-Virgin Olive Oil,” Food, Culture and Society 14, no. 2 (2011): pp. 275–92.

53 See Ethan Morton-Jerome, “Palestinian Labor in West Bank Settlements” (PhD diss., University of Arkansas, 2018).

54 See, by Khalil Nakhleh, “Oslo: Replacing Liberation with Economic Neo-colonialism,” Al-Shabaka, 10 April 2014; and Globalized Palestine: The National Sell-Out of a Homeland (Trenton, New Jersey: Red Sea Press, 2012).

55 See Victor Nygren, “Capital of Resistance: Occupied Hebron as Heterotopia” (master’s thesis, Stockholm University, 2014).

56 See Simone Popperl, “Geologies of Erasure: Sinkholes, Science, and Settler Colonialism at the Dead Sea,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 50, no. 3 (August 2018): pp. 427–48.

57 See Caitlin Procter, “Coordinated Mobility: Disrupting Narratives of Convergence in the Irregular Migration of Youth from the Gaza Strip,” Public Anthropologist 3, no. 1 (March 2021): pp. 93–110; A. A. Abuhabib et al., “Unique Situation of Gaza Strip Dealing with COVID-19 Crisis,” International Journal of Infectious Diseases, no. 100 (2020): pp. 149–51; and Procter, “Claiming the State: The Everyday Lives of Palestinian Refugee Youth in East Jerusalem,” (PhD diss., University of Oxford, 2020).

58 See Omar Qassis, “On Sociocide: (Neo)colonial Production of Knowledge in the West Bank,” (master’s thesis, Central European University, 2013).

59 See Sophie Richter-Devroe, “Palestinian Refugees of the Oslo Generation: Thinking beyond the Nation?” JPS 50, no. 3 (2021), https://doi.org/10.1080/0377919X.2021.1926871; Francesco Amoruso, Ilan Pappé, and Sophie Richter-Devroe, “Introduction: Knowledge, Power, and the ‘Settler Colonial Turn’ in Palestine Studies,” Interventions 21, no. 4 (April 2019): pp. 451–63; Richter-Devroe, Women’s Political Activism in Palestine: Peacebuilding, Resistance, and Survival (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018); Sophie Richter-Devroe and Ruba Salih, “Palestine beyond National Frames: Emerging Politics, Cultures, and Claims,” in “Palestine beyond National Frames: Emerging Politics, Cultures, and Claims,” ed. Eva Cherniavsky, Sophie Richter-Devroe, and Ruba Salih, special issue, South Atlantic Quarterly 117, no. 1 (January 2018): pp. 1–20; Richter-Devroe, “Biography, Life History and Orality: A Naqab Bedouin Woman’s Narrative of Displacement, Expulsion and Escape in Historic Southern Palestine, 1930–1970,” Hawwa 14, no. 3 (December 2016): pp. 310–41; Sophie Richter-Devroe, Mansour Nasasra, and Richard Ratcliffe, “The Politics of Representation: The Case of the Naqab Bedouin,” Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies 15, no. 1 (May 2016): pp. 1–6; Richter-Devroe, “Oral Traditions of Naqab Bedouin Women: Challenging Settler-Colonial Representations through Embodied Performance,” Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies 15, no. 1 (May 2016): pp. 31–57; Richter-Devroe, “‘Like Something Sacred’: Palestinian Refugees’ Narratives on the Right of Return,” Refugee Survey Quarterly 32, no. 2 (June 2013): pp. 92–115; Richter-Devroe, “Defending Their Land, Protecting Their Men: Palestinian Women’s Popular Resistance after the Second Intifada,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 14, no. 2 (April 2012): pp. 181–201; Richter-Devroe, How Women Do Politics: Peacebuilding, Resistance and Survival in Palestine (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012); and Richter-Devroe, “Palestinian Women’s Everyday Resistance: Between Normality and Normalisation,” Journal of International Women’s Studies 12, no. 2 (2011): pp. 32–46, https://vc.bridgew.edu/jiws/vol12/iss2/4.

60 See Ruba Salih, The Political Cultures of Palestinian Refugees: Right to Rights and Right to Return (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming); Salih, “Refugees and Cathartic Politics: From Human Rights to the Right to Be Human,” South Atlantic Quarterly 117, no. 1 (January 2018): pp. 135–55; Salih, “Bodies that Walk, Bodies that Talk, Bodies that Love. Palestinian Women Refugees, Affectivity and the Politics of the Ordinary,” Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography 49, no. 3 (June 2017): pp. 742–60; Sabrina Marchetti and Ruba Salih, “Policing Gender Mobilities: Interrogating the ‘Feminisation of Migration’ to Europe,” International Review of Sociology 27, no. 1 (May 2017): pp. 6–24; Ruba Salih and Sophie Richter-Devroe, “Cultures of Resistance in Palestine and Beyond: On the Politics of Art, Aesthetics, and Affect,” Arab Studies Journal 22, no. 1 (Spring 2014): pp. 8–27; and Salih, “From Bare Lives to Political Agents: Palestinian Refugees as Avant-Garde,” Refugee Survey Quarterly 32, no. 2 (June 2013): pp. 66–91.

61 See, by Leonardo Schiocchet, “Outcasts among Undesirables: Palestinian Refugees in Brazil between Humanitarianism and Nationalism,” Latin American Perspectives 46, no. 3 (February 2019): pp. 84–101; “Critique, Comparison, Suffering, and the Middle East,” Prace Etnograficzne 46, no. 2 (2018): pp. 1–25; “Palestinian Refugees in Lebanon: Is the Camp a Space of Exception?” Mashriq and Mahjar 2, no. 1 (2014): pp. 130–60; and “Suspicion and the Economy of Trust among Palestinian Refugees in Lebanon,” Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 32, no. 2 (September 2014): pp. 112–27.

62 See, by Siri Schwabe, “Paradoxes of Erasure: Palestinian Memory and the Politics of Forgetting in Post-dictatorship Chile,” Interventions 20, no. 5 (July 2018): pp. 651–65; “Resistance in Representation: The Diasporic Politics of Club Deportivo Palestino,” Soccer and Society 20, no. 4 (2019): pp. 693–703; and “A Struggle for Space (Elsewhere): Marching for Gaza in Santiago de Chile,” in Spatial Justice and Diaspora, ed. Emma Patchett and Sarah Keenan (Oxford: Counterpress, 2017), pp. 51–63.

63 See Ilana Webster-Kogen, “Modalities of Space, Time and Voice in Palestinian Hip-Hop Narratives,” in Travelling Towards Home: Mobilities and Homemaking, ed. Nicola Frost and Tom Selwyn (New York: Berghahn Books, 2018), pp. 105–26.

64 See, by Jeremy A. Siegman, “Playing with Antagonists: The Politics of Humor in Israeli-Palestinian Market Encounters,” PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 43, no. 1 (May 2020): pp. 103–19; “‘Super-Israel’: The Politics of Palestinian Labor in a Settler Supermarket,” JPS 47, no. 4 (Summer 2018): pp. 9–29; and “Enemies in the Aisles: the Politics of Market Encounter on Israel’s Settler Frontier,” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2018).

65 See, by Jake Silver, “Familiar Pixels: Imag(in)ing the Dead and the Political in Israel/Palestine,” American Anthropologist 123, no. 1 (March 2021): pp. 120–36; and “Cruising the Jerusalem Light Rail,” Differences 31, no. 2 (2020): pp. 115–51.

66 See Dina Zbeidy, “Marriage Registration among Palestinians and Syrians in Jordan: Debating Identity, Society, and Displacement,” Sociology of Islam 6, no. 3 (September 2018): pp. 359–80.

67 See Suhad Daher-Nashif, “The Work of Transnational Forensic Medicine Experts in Colonised Zones: The Palestinian Case,” Human Remains and Violence: An Interdisciplinary Journal 5, no. 2 (October 2019): pp. 17–33; Daher-Nashif, “Suspended Death: On Freezing Corpses and Muting Death of Palestinian Women Martyrs,” Third World Thematics: A TWQ Journal 3, no. 2 (2018): pp. 179–95; Daher-Nashif, “Trapped Escape: Young Palestinian Women and the Israeli National-Civic Service,” Arab Studies Journal 25, no. 2 (Fall 2017): pp. 34–58; Daher-Nashif, “Historical and Present-Day Practices of Forensic Medicine in Palestine: Body, Society, and Science,” Jerusalem Quarterly, no. 70 (Summer 2017): pp. 75–95; Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian and Suhad Daher-Nashif, “Femicide and Racism: Between the Politics of Exclusion and the Culture of Control,” in Sexual Politics in Muslim Societies: Studies from Palestine, Turkey, Malaysia and Indonesia, ed. Pinar Ilkkaracan and Rima Athar (Surabaya, Indonesia: Gaya Nusantara, 2017), pp. 19–61; Suhad Daher-Nashif and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Access Denied: Palestinian Women’s Access to Justice in the West Bank of the Occupied Palestinian territory (New York: UN Women, 2014); Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian and Suhad Daher-Nashif, “Femicide and Colonization: Between the Politics of Exclusion and the Culture of Control,” Violence against Women 19, no. 3 (March 2013): pp. 295–315; Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian and Suhad Daher-Nashif, “The Politics of Killing Women in Colonized Contexts,”  Jadaliyya, 17 December 2012.

68 See Sarah Ihmoud, “Murabata: The Politics of Staying in Place,” Feminist Studies 45, nos. 2–3 (2019): pp. 512–40; Maya J. Berry et al., “Toward a Fugitive Anthropology: Gender, Race, and Violence in the Field,” Cultural Anthropology 32, no. 4 (2017): pp. 537–65; Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Yossi David, and Sarah Ihmoud, “Theologizing State Crime,” State Crime Journal 5, no. 1 (Spring 2016): pp. 139–62; Ihmoud, “Palestine in the Nepantla,” in Being Palestinian: Personal Reflections on Palestinian Identity from the Diaspora, ed. Yasir Suleiman (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), pp. 195–98; Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian and Sarah Ihmoud, In the Absence of Justice: Embodiment and the Politics of Militarized Dismemberment in East Jerusalem (New York: UN Women, 2016); Ihmoud, “Mohammed Abu-Khdeir and the Politics of Racial Terror in Occupied Jerusalem,” Borderlands 14, no. 1 (May 2015); Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian and Sarah Ihmoud, “Exiled at Home: Writing Return and the Palestinian Home,” Biography 37, no. 2 (Spring 2014): pp. 377–97; and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian and Sarah Ihmoud, “Two Letters from Jerusalem: Haunted by Our Breathing,” Jerusalem Quarterly, no. 59 (Summer 2014): pp. 7–11.

69 See Lori Allen, “What’s in a Link? Transnational Solidarities across Palestine and Their Intersectional Possibilities,” South Atlantic Quarterly 117, no. 1 (January 2018): pp. 111–33; Allen, “Finding Indigenous Critique in the Archives: Thoughts on Didier Fassin’s ‘The Endurance of Critique,’” Anthropological Theory 17, no. 2 (June 2017): pp. 265–73; Allen, “Sincerity, Hypocrisy, and Conspiracy Theory in the Occupied Palestinian Territory,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 48, no. 4 (2016): pp. 701–20; Allen, “Determining Emotions and the Burden of Proof in Investigative Commissions to Palestine,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 59, no. 2 (2017): pp. 385–414; Allen, “Palestine, the Third World, and the UN as Seen from a Special Commission” in Land of Blue Helmets: The United Nations and the Arab World, ed. Karim Makdisi and Vijay Prashad (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016), pp. 58–73; Allen, “The Nation as Moral Community: Language and Religion in the 1919 King-Crane Commission,” in The Routledge Handbook of the History of the Middle East Mandates, ed. Cyrus Schayegh and Andrew Arsan (New York: Routledge, 2020), pp. 258–68; Allen, The Rise and Fall of Human Rights: Cynicism and Politics in Occupied Palestine (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013); Allen, “The Scales of Occupation: ‘Operation Cast Lead’ and the Targeting of the Gaza Strip,” Critique of Anthropology 32, no. 3 (September 2012): pp. 261–84; and Lori A. Allen and Laura J. Shepherd, “Editorial: Gender and Conflict,” Feminist Review, no. 101 (2012): pp. 1–4.

70 See, by Ilana Feldman, “Elimination Politics: Punishment and Imprisonment in Palestine,” Public Culture 31, no. 3 (September 2019): pp. 563–80; “Ruination and Rebuilding: The Precarious Place of a Border Town in Gaza,” in Deepening Divides: How Physical Borders and Social Boundaries Delineate Our World, ed. Didier Fassin (London: Pluto Press, 2019), pp. 214–32; Life Lived in Relief: Humanitarian Predicaments and Palestinian Refugee Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018); “Care and Suspicion: Corruption as Definition in Humanitarian Relations,” Current Anthropology 59, no. S18 (April 2018): pp. S160–70; “Humanitarianism and Revolution: Samed, the Palestine Red Crescent Society, and the Work of Liberation,” in Humanitarianism and Media1900 to the Present, ed. Johannes Paulmann (New York: Berghahn Books, 2018), pp. 222–39; “Humanitarian Care and the Ends of Life: The Politics of Aging and Dying in a Palestinian Refugee Camp,” Cultural Anthropology 32, no. 1 (2017): pp. 42–67; “Humanitarian Refusals: Palestinian Refugees and Ethnographic Perspectives on Paternalism,” in Paternalism beyond Borders, ed. Michael Barnett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 291–314; “Reaction, Experimentation, and Refusal: Palestinian Refugees Confront the Future,” History and Anthropology 27, no. 4 (July 2016): pp. 411–29; “Gaza: Isolation,” in Gaza as Metaphor, ed. Helga Tawil-Souri and Dina Matar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); “Anthropology and Humanitarianism in the Middle East,” in Anthropology of the Middle East, ed. Soraya Altorki (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), pp. 262–81; Police Encounters: Security and Surveillance in Gaza under Egyptian Rule (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015); “Looking for Humanitarian Purpose: Endurance and the Value of Lives in a Palestinian Refugee Camp,” Public Culture 27, no. 3 (September 2015): pp. 427–47; “What Is a Camp? Legitimate Refugee Lives in Spaces of Long-Term Displacement,” Geoforum, no. 66 (November 2015): pp. 244–52; “The Challenge of Categories: UNRWA and the Definition of a ‘Palestine Refugee,’” Journal of Refugee Studies 25, no. 3 (September 2012): pp. 387–406; “The Humanitarian Condition: Palestinian Refugees and the Politics of Living,” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism and Development 3, no. 2 (Summer 2012): pp. 155–72; “Palestinian Refugee Experiences in a Changing Humanitarian Order,” in Palestinian Refugees: Different Generations, but One Identity, ed. Sunaina Miari (Birzeit: Birzeit University, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Institute of International Studies, 2012), pp. 29–38; “The Humanitarian Circuit: Relief Work, Development Assistance, and CARE in Gaza, 1955–67,” in Forces of Compassion: Ethics and Politics of Global Humanitarianism, ed. Erica Bornstein and Peter Redfield (Santa Fe, NM: SAR Press, 2011), pp. 203–26; and “Working in the In-Between: Archives, Ethnography, and Research in Gaza,” in Anthrohistory: Unsettling Knowledge, Questioning Discipline, ed. Edward Murphy et al. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), pp. 97–109.

71 See Nicola Perugini, “Human Screens: Bodies, Media and the Meaning of Violence,” Img Journal, no. 3 (October 2020): pp. 307–33; Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini, Human Shields. A History of People in the Line of Fire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2020); Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini, “‘Hospital Shields’ and the Limits of International Law,” European Journal of International Law 30, no. 2 (May 2019): pp. 439–63; Perugini, “Settler Colonial Inversions: Israel’s ‘Disengagement’ and the Gush Katif ‘Museum of Expulsion’ in Jerusalem,” Settler Colonial Studies 9, no. 1 (2019): pp. 41–58; Perugini, “Are Human Rights an Effective Weapon in the Struggle for Justice in Palestine? Response to Jessica Montell,” in Moment of Truth: Tackling Israel-Palestine’s Toughest Questions, ed. Jamie Stern-Weiner (New York: OR Books, 2018), pp. 335–40; Mimi Cabell, Samir Harb, and Nicola Perugini, Morbid Symptoms: Interregnum and Loops of Authority in the Muqata’as (Ramallah: Sharjah Biennial 13, 2017); Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon, “Distinction and the Ethics of Violence: On the Legal Construction of Liminal Subjects and Spaces,” Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography 49, no. 5 (November 2017): pp. 1385–405; Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini, “Introduction to Symposium on Critical Perspectives on Human Shields,” AJIL Unbound, no. 110 (2016): pp. 296–98; Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini, “Human Shields, Sovereign Power, and the Evisceration of the Civilian,” AJIL Unbound, no. 110 (2016): pp. 329–24; Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini, “The Politics of Human Shielding: On the Resignification of Space and the Constitution of Civilians as Shields in Liberal Wars,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34, no. 1 (February 2016): pp. 168–87; Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon, The Human Right to Dominate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Perugini, “The Moral Economy of Settler Colonialism Israel and the ‘Evacuation Trauma,’” History of the Present 4, no. 1 (April 2014): pp. 49–74; Eyal Weizman, Alessandro Petti, and Sandy Hilal, “A Common Assembly,” with Nicola Perugini, in Architecture after Revolution (New York: Sternberg Press, 2013), pp. 130–53; and Sandi Hilal et al., “The Lawless Line,” London Review of International Law 1, no. 1 (September 2013): pp. 201–9.

72 See Sophia C. Stamatopoulou-Robbins, “Failure to Build: Sewage and the Choppy Temporality of Infrastructure in Palestine,” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 4, no. 1 (March 2021): pp. 28–42; Stamatopoulou-Robbins, “Occupied ‘Home-Sharing’: Airbnb in Palestine,” Jerusalem Quarterly, no. 83 (Autumn 2020): pp. 54–78; Stamatopoulou-Robbins, “Essential Readings: Land, Water, and Environment in the Israeli Occupied Palestinian Territories,” Jadaliyya, 2 December 2020; Stamatopoulou-Robbins, “How I Learned to Start Thinking Like an Engineer: Lessons from Palestine,” Jadaliyya, 16 November 2020; Stamatopoulou-Robbins, Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019); Stamatopoulou-Robbins, “An Uncertain Climate in Risky Times: How Occupation Became Like the Rain in Post-Oslo Palestine,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 50, no. 3 (2018): pp. 383–404; Brian Boyd, Hamed Salem, and Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins, “Toxic Ecologies of Occupation,” EnviroSociety (blog), 2 April 2015; Stamatopoulou-Robbins, “Occupational Hazards,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 34, no. 3 (December 2014): pp. 476–96; and Stamatopoulou-Robbins “In Colonial Shoes: Notes on the Material Afterlife in Post-Oslo Palestine,” Jerusalem Quarterly, no. 48 (Winter 2011): pp. 54–77.

73 See, by Nayrouz Abu Hatoum, “For ‘a No-State Yet to Come’: Palestinian Urban Place-Making in Kufr Aqab, Jerusalem,” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 4, no. 1 (July 2020): pp. 85–108; “Unsettling Visual Politics: Militarized Borders in the Work of Palestinian Artist Raeda Saadeh,” American Quarterly 71, no. 4 (December 2019): pp. 1059–67; “Reclaiming Jerusalem: Palestinians’ Informalized Place‐Making,” City and Society 30, no. 3 (December 2018); and “Framing Visual Politics: Photography of the Wall in Palestine,” Visual Anthropology Review 33, no. 1 (Spring 2017): pp. 18–27.

74 Nadia Abu El-Haj, “Translating Truths: Nationalism, the Practice of Archaeology, and the Remaking of Past and Present in Contemporary Jerusalem,” American Ethnologist 25, no. 2 (May 1998): pp. 166–88.

75 Aref Abu-Rabia, Indigenous Medicine among the Bedouin in the Middle East (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015).

76 See Miriyam Aouragh, “Hasbara 2.0: Israel’s Public Diplomacy in the Digital Age,” Middle East Critique 25, no. 3 (June 2016): pp. 271–97; Helga Tawil-Souri and Miriyam Aouragh, “Intifada 3.0? Cyber Colonialism and Palestinian Resistance,” Arab Studies Journal 22, no. 1 (Spring 2014): pp. 102–33; Aouragh, “Revolutionary Manoeuverings: Palestinian Activism between Cybercide, and Cyber Intifada,” in Media and Political Contestations in the Arab World: A Decade of Change, ed. Lena Jayyusi and Anne Sofie Roald (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 129–60; Aouragh, Palestine Online: Transnationalism, the Internet and the Construction of Identity (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012); Aouragh, “Confined Offline, Traversing Online Palestinian Mobility through the Prism of the Internet,” Mobilities 6, no. 3 (September 2011): pp. 375–97; and Aouragh, “New Modes of Communication: Internet Cafés; Palestine” in Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures, ed. Suad Joseph (Leiden: Brill, 2011).

77 See, by Khaldun Bshara, “Biennales in Palestine: Thinking Art and Making Art,” Parse, no. 5 (Spring 2017): pp. 75–91; “The Structures and Fractures of Heritage Protection in Palestine,” in Challenging the Dichotomy: The Licit and Illicit in Archaeological and Heritage Discourses, ed. Les Field, Cristóbal Gnecco, and Joe Watkins (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2016), pp. 106–26; and “Spatial Memories: The Palestinian Refugee Camps as Time Machine,” Jerusalem Quarterly, no. 60 (Autumn 2014): pp. 14–30.

78 See Nell Gabiam, “Palestinians and Europe’s ‘Refugee Crisis’: Seeking Asylum in France in the Wake of the Syrian War,” Journal of Refugee Studies (forthcoming); Gabiam, “Recurring Displacement, Homemaking and Solidarity amongst Syrian and Palestinian Syrian Refugees in Turkey,” Anthropology of the Middle East 16, no. 1 (June 2021): pp. 32–48; Gabiam, “Mapping Palestinian Identity in the Diaspora: Affective Attachments and Political Spaces,” South Atlantic Quarterly 117, no. 1 (January 2018): pp. 65–90; Nell Gabiam and Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, “Palestinians and the Arab Uprisings: Political Activism and Narratives of Home, Homeland, and Home-Camp,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 43, no. 5 (January 2017): pp. 731–48; Gabiam, The Politics of Suffering: Syria’s Palestinian Refugee Camps (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016); Gabiam, “Citizenship and Development: Palestinians in France and the Multiple Meanings of Statelessness,” Studies in Comparative International Development, no. 50 (September 2015): pp. 479–99; Gabiam, “Implementing the Neirab Rehabilitation Project: UNRWA’s Approach to Development in Syria’s Palestinian Refugee Camps” in UNRWA and Palestinian Refugees: From Relief and Works to Human Development, ed. Sari Hanafi, Leila Hilal, and Lex Takkenberg (New York: Routledge 2014), pp. 221–39; Gabiam, “Spatializing Identity: The Changing Landscape of Palestinian Refugee Camps,” in Palestinian Refugees: Different Generations but One Identity, ed. Sunaina Miari (Birzeit: Birzeit University, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Institute of International Studies, 2012), pp. 147–58; and Gabiam, “When ‘Humanitarianism’ Becomes ‘Development’: The Politics of International Aid in Syria’s Palestinian Refugee Camps,” American Anthropologist 114, no. 1 (March 2012): pp. 95–107.

79 See, by Nina Gren, “Living Bureaucratisation: Young Palestinian Men Encountering a Swedish Introductory Programme for Refugees,” in Refugees and the Violence of Welfare Bureaucracies in Northern Europe, ed. Dalia Abdelhady, Nina Gren, and Martin Joormann (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020), pp. 161–79; “Being at Home through Learning Palestinian Sociality: Swedish-Palestinians’ Houses in the West Bank,” in Diasporic Constructions of Home and Belonging, ed. Florian Kläger and Klaus Stierstorfer (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), pp. 229–48.

80 See, by Anja Kublitz, “The Ongoing Catastrophe: Erosion of Life in the Danish Camps,” Journal of Refugee Studies 29, no. 2 (June 2016): pp. 229–49; “From Revolutionaries to Muslims: Liminal Becomings across Palestinian Generations in Denmark,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 48, no. 1 (January 2016): pp. 67–86; “Seizing Catastrophes: The Temporality of Nakba among Palestinians in Denmark,” in Times of Security: Ethnographies of Fear, Protest and the Future, ed. Martin Holbraad and Morten Axel Pedersen (New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 103–21; and “The Mutable Conflict: A Study of How the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict Is Actualized among Palestinians in Denmark,” (PhD diss., Københavns Universitet, 2011).

81 Sa’ ed Atshan and Katharina Galor, The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis, Palestinians (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020).

82 See, by Natalia Gutkowski, “Bodies That Count: Administering Multispecies in Palestine/Israel’s Borderlands,” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 4, no. 1 (March 2021): pp. 135–57, and “Governing through Timescape: Israeli Sustainable Agriculture Policy and the Palestinian-Arab Citizens,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 50, no. 3 (September 2018): pp. 471–92.

83 See, by Emanuel Schaeublin, “Counting Good and Bad Deeds under Military Rule: Islam and Divine Bookkeeping in Nablus (Palestine),” in Rules and Ethics: Perspectives from Anthropology and History, ed. Morgan Clarke and Emily Corran (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021); “Disconnected Accountabilities: Institutionalizing Islamic Giving in Nablus (Palestine),” Journal of Muslim Philanthropy and Civil Society 4, no. 2 (Fall 2020): pp. 28–60; and “Islam in Face-to-Face Interaction: Direct Zakat Giving in Nablus (Palestine),” Contemporary Levant 4, no. 2 (2019): pp. 122–40.

84 See Kiven Strohm, “The Sensible Life of Return: Collaborative Experiments in Art and Anthropology in Palestine/Israel,” American Anthropologist 121, no. 1 (March 2019): pp. 243–55; Yara El-Ghadban and Kiven Strohm, “Ghosts of Resistance: Dispatches from Palestinian Art and Music,” in Palestinian Music and Song: Expression and Resistance since 1900, ed. Moslih Kanaaneh et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), pp. 175–200; and Strohm, “When Anthropology Meets Contemporary Art: Notes for a Politics of Collaboration” Collaborative Anthropologies, no. 5 (January 2012): pp. 98–124.

85 See Luigi Achilli and Mjriam Abu Samra, “Beyond Legality and Illegality: Palestinian Informal Networks and the Ethno-political Facilitation of Irregular Migration from Syria,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies (September 2019); Achilli, “In Search of Dignity: Political Economy and Nationalism amongst Palestinian Camp Dwellers in Amman,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 8, no. 3 (Winter 2018): pp. 672–85; Achilli, “The Politics of Being Ordinary” in From the River to the Sea: Palestine and Israel in the Shadow of ‘Peace,’ ed. Mandy Turner (Routledge: New York, 2019), pp. 245–70; Achilli, Palestinian Refugees and Identity: Nationalism, Politics and the Everyday (London: I.B. Tauris, 2015); and Achilli, “Disengagement from Politics: Nationalism, Political Identity, and the Everyday in a Palestinian Refugee Camp in Jordan,” Critique of Anthropology 34, no. 2 (June 2014): pp. 234–57.

86 Luigi Achilli, “Becoming a Man in al-Wihdat: Masculine Performances in a Palestinian Refugee Camp in Jordan,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 47, no. 2 (May 2015): pp. 263–80.

87 Gustavo Barbosa, The Best of Hard Times: Palestinian Refugee Masculinities in Lebanon (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2021).

88 Kareem Rabie, Palestine Is Throwing a Party and the Whole World Is Invited: Capital and State Building in the West Bank (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021).

89 See Adam Hanieh’s blurb of Rabie’s book on the publisher’s website at De Gruyter.

90 Safa Abu-Rabia, “Is Slavery Over? Black and White Arab Bedouin Women in the Naqab (Negev),” in Struggle and Survival in Palestine/Israel, ed. Mark LeVine and Gershon Shafir (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), pp. 271–88.

91 Sa’ ed Atshan and Darnell L. Moore, “Reciprocal Solidarity: Where the Black and Palestinian Queer Struggles Meet,” in Biography 3, no. 2 (Spring 2014): pp. 680–705.

92 Noura Erakat and Marc Lamont Hill, “Black-Palestinian Transnational Solidarity: Renewals, Returns, and Practice,” JPS 48, no. 4 (Summer 2019): pp. 7–16.

93 Marc Lamont Hill and Mitchell Plitnick, Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics (New York: The New Press, 2021).

94 Black in the Holy Land, directed by Marc Lamont Hill (1930 Productions, forthcoming).

95 Eli Rosenberg, “CNN Fires Marc Lamont Hill in Wake of Remarks Criticizing Israel and Calling for a ‘Free Palestine,’” Washington Post, 29 November 2018.

96 Khaled Furani, “Why Insaniyyat? A Society for Palestinian Anthropologists,” World Anthropology 122, no. 4 (December 2020): p. 942.

97 In 2016, Insaniyyat held its first symposium at Birzeit University. Its first workshop took place in 2017 in the West Bank city of Jericho. This historic gathering was funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and brought together twenty-five anthropologists to intellectually map “the terrain of past, current, and future imaginings of anthropological inquiry in and on Palestine” and to chart a plan forward for Insaniyyat (see Rabae Fahoum, “Insaniyyat Development Workshop: Jericho,” Insaniyyat, 7 January 2017). Later that year, Aseel Sawalha organized a panel, “Palestinian Ethnography at Home and in Diaspora,” featuring six Insaniyyat members at the AAA conference. In 2018, Randa Wahbe and Nayrouz Hatoum organized the Insaniyyat panel titled “Palestinian Sumoud: Limits and Possibilities” at the AAA conference. In 2019, Insaniyyat organized their second conference, this time in the West Bank town of Bayt Jala, under the theme “Thinking without a State.” Later that year, Nayrouz Abu Hatoum and Sarah Ihmoud organized the Insaniyyat AAA panel titled “Ethnographies of Palestinian Futures.” The November 2021 Insaniyyat AAA panel, organized by Amahl Bishara and Anne Meneley, is titled “Doing Palestinian Ethnography While Palestinian.”

98 Jeff Martin, “AAA Votes Down Academic Boycott Resolution,” American Anthropological Association, 7 June 2016.

99 Nina Seferović, “The Herzegovinian Muslim Colony in Caesarea, Palestine,” trans. Darryl Li, JPS 45, no. 1 (Autumn 2015): pp. 76–83, quote at p. 82.

100 Darryl Li, “Translator’s Preface: A Note on Settler Colonialism,” JPS 45, no. 1 (Autumn 2015): pp. 69–76.

101 Nina Seferović, “Balkan Migration to the Middle East,” trans. Darryl Li, JPS 45, no.1 (November 2015): pp. 83–92.

102 Elise Miller, “The People, the Money, the Books: Inside Stanford University Press,” Stanford Daily, 5 June 2019.

103 See, by Randa Farah, “Keeping an Eye on UNRWA,” Al-Shabaka, 25 January 2012 “What Forces Shape the Palestinians in Gaza?” Al-Shabaka, 23 September 2014; and “Palestinian Dead End Highlights the Right of Return,” Al-Shabaka, 6 May 2014.

104 Randa Farah, “Taboo Narratives: Teaching Palestine and the Palestinians,” Practicing Anthropology 40, no. 4 (September 2018): pp. 12–15.

105 Maura Finkelstein, “What Is a Classroom For? Teaching the Anthropology of Palestine,” Teaching Tools, Fieldsights, 10 May 2019.

106 Daniel A. Segal, “Teaching Palestine-Israel: A Pedagogy of Delay and Suspension,” Review of Middle East Studies 53, no. 1 (June 2019): pp. 83–88.

107 Thea Renda Abu El-Haj, Unsettled Belonging: Educating Palestinian American Youth after 9/11 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

108 Nadia Abu El-Haj, “Some Thoughts on Facts, Politics, and Tenure,” in We Will Not Be Silenced: The Academic Repression of Israel’s Critics, ed. William I. Robinson and Maryam S. Griffin (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2015), pp. 163–70.

109 See Ala Alazzeh and Rania Jawad, “‘Speaking Darwish’ in Neoliberal Palestine,” in Biopolitics and Memory in Postcolonial Literature and Culture, ed. Michael R. Griffiths (Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2016), pp. 207–19; Alazzeh, “Seeking Popular Participation: Nostalgia for the First Intifada in the West Bank,” Settler Colonial Studies 5, no. 3 (April 2015): pp. 251–67; and Alazzeh, “Locating Nonviolence: The People, the Past, and Resistance in Palestinian Political Activism,” (PhD diss., Rice University, 2014.

110 See Lena Meari and Rula Abu-Duhou , “The Palestinian Student Movement and the Dialectic of Palestinian Liberation and Class Struggles,” in The University and Social Justice: Struggles across the Globe, ed. Aziz Choudry and Salim Vally (London: Pluto Press, 2020), pp. 137–54; Meari, “Reading Che in Colonized Palestine: On Analyzing and Drawing Inspiration from Revolutionary Latin American Texts,” NACLA Report on the Americas 50, no. 1 (March 2018): pp. 49–55; Meari, “Colonial Dispossession, Developmental Discourses, and Humanitarian Solidarity in ‘Area C’: The Case of the Palestinian Yanun Village,” Community Development Journal 52, no. 3 (July 2017): pp. 506–23; Meari, “Reconsidering Trauma: Towards a Palestinian Community Psychology,” Journal of Community Psychology 43, no. 1 (January 2015): pp. 76–86; Meari, “Resignifying ‘Sexual’ Colonial Power Techniques: The Experiences of Palestinian Women Political Prisoners,” in Rethinking Gender in Revolutions and Resistance: Lessons from the Arab World, ed. Maha El Said, Lena Meari, and Nicola Pratt (London: Zed Books, 2015), pp. 59–85; Maha El Said, Lena Meari, and Nicola Pratt, “Conclusion: Towards Epistemologies and Ontologies of Gender and Socio-political Transformation in the Arab World,” in Rethinking Gender, pp. 232–40; and Meari, “Sumud: A Palestinian Philosophy of Confrontation in Colonial Prisons,” South Atlantic Quarterly 113, no. 3 (Summer 2014): pp. 547–78.

111 See Haneen Naamneh, Reem al-Botmeh, and Rami Salameh, Palestinian Everyday Life: Living within and without Legality (London: LSE Middle East Centre, 2018).

112 Sa’ ed Atshan, “Complicity, Dissent, and the Palestinian Intellectual,” Comparative Literature and Culture 21, no. 3 (June 2019).

113 Ruth Wilson Gilmore, quoted in adrienne maree brown, We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2020), p. 3.

114 Angela Y. Davis, Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005), p. 73.

Author biography: 

Sa’ed Atshan is an incoming associate professor of anthropology at Emory University. He previously served as a Postdoctoral Fellow in International Studies at Brown University, where he supported the inaugural New Directions in Palestinian Studies workshops. He is the author of Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020) and coauthor of The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis, Palestinians (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020). Atshan currently serves on the boards of JPS and the Palestinian American Research Center.