“We must return to our elders in these moments, to the histories they embody, to the struggles they withstood, to each of the precious tears that they have shed, to their relations to the land, to their ways of being … For Palestinians and Lebanese alike, the work today is to reclaim our historical and revolutionary legacies, to live and die in dignity.” –Sherene Seikaly
Dear Friends and Colleagues,
In its final issue of 2024, the Journal of Palestine Studies honors slain Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, whose “courageous commitment to knowledge production in service of truth and liberation … continues to be embodied in the fearless work of Palestinian journalists in Gaza and beyond.” Coedited by JPS editorial board member Amahl Bishara and Diana Keown Allan, the special issue documents and archives the “Palestinian experience in all its diversity, shoring it against future erasure” in the midst of genocide.
“Mediating Palestine: Representation, Mobilization, and Experimentation” explores a variety of Palestinian media forms that “celebrate and sustain Palestinian lifeworlds.” In the first of three articles, Nayrouz Abu Hatoum and Anna Shah Hoque examine themes of archival praxis, visual storytelling, and care through two Palestinian short films screened at the Palestine Film Festival in Toronto—another site of settler-colonial erasure with which the authors grapple. Sophie Goodfriend authors the second and free-access article, which provides an ethnographic account of how young Palestinian Jerusalemites made use of digital platforms in the summer and fall of 2021 to draw attention to settler violence in their city in spite of intrusive Israeli state surveillance. Sulafa Zidani also explores Palestinian social media activism during the 2021 Unity Intifada as a way to imagine a desired future in which Israel’s forced fragmentation and apartheid occupation no longer exist. Examining a dataset of tweets that use the hashtag #Tweet_Like_It’s_Free, Zidani argues that playfulness and experimentation, as forms of civic imagination, are necessary political practices.
The four essays in “Mediating Palestine” delve deeper into abstract, imagined, and sensory forms of Palestinian expression. In “Frictional Conversations,” Hamada Al-Jomaa, yasmine eid-sabbagh, Ahmad El-Faour, Khawla Khalaf, and Wassim Said reflect on their twenty-two-year-long project of gathering, digitizing, and engaging a repository of photographs in the Palestinian refugee camp of Burj al-Shamali in southern Lebanon. The multimedia essay combines visual and auditory materials to recount a frictional conversation that took place between the authors and in which they discussed the photographs, the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people, and their collective responsibilities to care for the digital repository. The second essay by Anne Meneley explores the humanizing role of olive oil in the Palestinian Netflix series, Mo. In her rich retellings of different scenes, Meneley highlights the series’ ability to combine humor with food to reveal realities about the Palestinian diaspora experience. Sherena Razek’s experimental visual essay offers an understanding of the wildfires that destroyed swathes of Israeli-planted pine forests around Jerusalem in August 2021 as an elemental force of Indigenous Palestinian resistance to environmental and human Nakba—an elemental intifada. And codirectors Rami Younis and Sarah Ema Friedland describe the creative process behind making the award-winning, speculative sci-fi documentary, Lyd, which imagines a Palestine never colonized by the British or Zionists—needed inspiration for imagining alternate realities amid ongoing genocide.
The legacy of Shireen Abu Akleh is spotlighted in the special issue’s penultimate and final publications: a roundtable on the war on Palestinian journalism in Gaza, and an interview with Abu Akleh’s niece, journalist and activist Lina Abu Akleh. The roundtable, cofacilitated by Bishara and Allan, presents firsthand accounts from Palestinian journalists and free speech advocates of their experiences covering the war on Gaza from their respective locations, including Gaza. Ghousson Bisharat, Sherif Mansour, and Mahmoud Mushtaha’s testimonies indicate the importance of platforming Palestinian voices during the deadliest period for journalists since 1992. The special issue ends with Lina Abu Akleh’s moving tribute to her aunt Shireen, forever remembered by her adoring listeners as the voice of Palestine. “Shireen’s legacy has always been her ability to connect with the people,” Lina says. “And to this day, even after Israel killed her and took her away from us, she continues to be close to the people, like that young girl in Gaza who is inspired by Shireen even though she is only eleven years old.”
The issue includes two book reviews: Hanna Salmon’s review of Louis Brehony’s Palestinian Music in Exile: Voices of Resistance, and Benjamin Krusling’s free-access review of The Tent Generations: Palestinian Poems, edited and translated by Mohammed Sawaie.
The full table of contents can be found here.
In gratitude and solidarity,
The JPS Editorial Team
