Amahl Bishara was interviewed by Maria Khoury.
1. How did the idea for your book come about?
This book is about the different environments that shape political expression and action for Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinians under military occupation in the West Bank. As many readers know, Palestinian citizens of Israel live under systematic discrimination as second-class citizens of Israel but have some rights, including to movement and limited forms of political participation. They are marginalized by the official Palestinian leadership. Palestinians in the West Bank are at the center of the official Palestinian national project but have lived under military occupation for over a half-century, with no political participation in that rule and facing violent repression, mass incarceration, and insecurity across all domains of life.
When I was writing my first book, Back Stories (Stanford University Press 2012), on journalism during the second Intifada, the research mostly took place in the West Bank. As I visited my family in Galilee during those years, I began reflecting on how the everyday feel of politics is quite different for Palestinians with Israeli citizenship and Palestinians in the West Bank — including for those who share political perspectives. Palestinians in each of these places live with different dangers. They have distinct platforms for political expression. This shapes their respective forms of activism. I wanted to explore this more.
2. What are the key issues that your book grapples with?
The book addresses Palestinian geopolitical fragmentation on an everyday level to understand different Palestinian experiences of dispossession in relation to each other. As an ethnographer, I could not address all Palestinian communities in one book. The piece of this puzzle that I could best examine was the interface between Palestinians holding Israeli citizenship and Palestinians in the West Bank. How do people in struggle create a political community in the face of an Israeli project of separation and fragmentation?
The first chapter examines how the significance of the very name Palestine shifts across contexts. Sometimes, as when shouted at a demonstration, it carries a revolutionary meaning, but sometimes, as when people refer to the 1967 occupied territories or Palestinian Authority-administered areas as “Palestine,” its use supports the status quo of Israeli occupation and Palestinian Authority complicity. This is a warning about the pitfalls of the current “state-building” project. Each subsequent chapter presents ethnographies of different domains of political expression and action on either side of the Green Line that divides Palestinians holding Israeli citizenship and Palestinians in the West Bank: protests against the Israeli regime’s ferocious 2014 bombardment of Gaza, Nakba Day commemorations, grieving for Palestinians killed by Israeli police or soldiers on social media, a photography exchange, and the politics of prison.
Each kind of political practice corresponds to a specific environment of expression shaped by laws, the threat of physical violence, and political geography, among other factors. I think about the relationships among these sites as one might regard neighboring locales: distinct but interrelated.
For example, the environment for the Nakba commemoration in Jaffa is different from that in the Bethlehem area, but looking at them together reveals more about how Israeli power operates. For Palestinians holding Israeli citizenship, the Nakba Law threatens commemoration, and being publicly in the street in commemoration is an assertive act of being visible. In the West Bank, commemoration often leads to direct confrontation with the Israeli army. On both sides of the Green Line, Palestinian annual practices of commemoration can yield new layers of meaning for core ideas like the right of return, deepen popular knowledge about place and history, and create the practical capabilities needed for organizing protests.
3. What inspired you most as you conducted your research?
What inspired me most was the Palestinians’ determination to gather, whether in protest or commemoration, to sustain Palestinian collectivities. I often think of the Marches of Return, organized in depopulated villages in Galilee, and the Naqab, in which internally displaced people evoked the presence of refugees outside of Palestine who cannot join them at such gatherings. I was also moved by Palestinians who confronted the politics of prison with love and care for each other, with a sense that they can challenge the violence and isolation of incarceration by building on Palestinian forms of kinship to extend Palestinian relationships.
4. Who do you think would benefit most from reading this book?
For Palestine studies scholars, students, and activists, I hope it will illuminate various kinds of activism that are usually seen in isolation from each other. I also hope this book contributes to our understanding of solidarity. It demonstrates the challenges of speaking and acting together when we are confronted with different legal and political systems in ways that are applicable well beyond Palestine.
5. How can the book help us to better understand and approach the recent Unity Intifada?
Like so many others, I was very moved by the Unity Intifada of 2021. When I started this project around 2012, questions about shared spaces and voices of Palestinian resistance across the divides were somewhat less on people’s minds. Now, thanks to the Unity Intifada in particular, we have vital new assertions about the unity of our struggle. The Tal’at movement is also inspiring on this front. Part of what my book explores are the roadblocks to unity. When do claims of unity make space for difference, especially for the voices and experiences of those who have been marginalized by the Palestinian national movement? This includes refugees, Palestinian who hold Israeli citizenship, poor people, women, and queer Palestinians, to give a few examples. My book prompts thinking about how Palestinians have used their location to make space for Palestinians to speak together, but not in unison. In 2021, I was encouraged by the gatherings and activism that seemed to occur in exactly this spirit.
6. What do you hope the impact of your book will be, both in academic spaces and on the ground?
This book invites more research that reaches across geopolitical lines of fragmentation that divide Palestinians, whether they are in Galilee or Gaza or Jenin, Shatila, Amman, Chicago, or Umm al-Hiran. We can interrogate what settler colonialism does to fragment us and what other nation-state borders do to prohibit our collective action toward liberation.
That said, my research was conditioned by my holding of passports that gave me the privilege of movement, and, of course, not all research can or should examine multiple physical areas. Wherever we are working, we can notice how a specific place can cultivate and condition expressivity — how the politics of place can foster connections but also produce blind spots that limit political possibility.
7. Did you come across any topics or issues that you are looking forward to exploring in the future?
I plan to continue looking at how Israel’s politics of separation shape Palestinian politics in the growing sites of engagement. I also want to return to longstanding research of mine that examines the local politics of resistance in Aida Refugee Camp, where people struggle against the occupation, the Palestinian Authority, and the limitations of UNRWA. This allows me to zoom in on the question of place and politics in one specific Palestinian community.
