Dear Friends and Colleagues,
Amid the unending horror being inflicted on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, we hope you continue to find the strength to persevere and affirm Palestinian existence.
This first issue of the Journal of Palestine Studies for 2024 marks the end of a formative era in the history of the journal under the editorial leadership of Rashid Khalidi. In the words of Sherene Seikaly:
Khalidi oversaw two decades of committed scholarship. Each issue of the journal interrogated the conditions of possibility of this wounded place, Palestine. From the politics of Israeli closure and containment, to the right of resistance and the refugee quest for return, and to the poetics of land and memory, Khalidi both led and forged cutting-edge knowledge on Palestine.
It is with great gratitude and pride that we honor and uphold Professor Khalidi’s legacy in this issue and beyond.
This issue features three articles covering critical gaps in knowledge about Palestine. Gadi Algazi’s open-access contribution delves into a previously unexamined period of Palestinian history in the immediate aftermath of the Nakba: the Israeli campaign to displace over five thousand Palestinian Bedouins from the Naqab. The article sheds light on a contradiction of settler colonialism, one that combines the violent “nomadization” of the Bedouins with their forced “sedentarization.” Ali As’ad’s article addresses another gap in Palestinian historiography: the history of Palestinian exhibition making in the twentieth century. As’ad posits Palestinian exhibitions across colonized Palestine and in exile throughout this radically shifting period as practices of resistance and community-building. Finally, Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon coin the term medical lawfare in their open-access article to describe how Israel has been justifying its systematic attacks on healthcare facilities in Gaza since 2008. They argue that this form of Israeli necropolitical governance intensifies the Nakba’s settler-colonial logic of elimination, most blatantly visible in the ongoing genocide in Gaza, while casting Palestinians as guilty of bringing disaster upon themselves.
The five open-access essays in this issue explore different aspects of Palestinian existence, resistance, and solidarity. In the ongoing genocide, Devin Atallah and Hisham Awartani offer profound reflections on Palestinian grief and perseverance from the Palestinian shatat based on intimate conversations between the authors. Brendan Ciarán Browne and Gabriel Huland remind us in their respective essays that we must remain critical of Irish and Brazilian state policy toward Palestine and Israel despite the robust popular Irish solidarity movement and Brazil’s new leftist president. Espinosa-Najjar takes us on a tour of Jerusalem’s threatened Wadi Helweh neighborhood—the site of Israel’s controversial City of David park—showing how Israel’s heritage tourism industry deliberately erases Palestinian existence through fabricated and dubious claims to archaeological findings. And Lana and Adan Tatour stress that the rise in violent crime within ’48 Palestinian communities must be understood as a modality of Israeli settler colonialism, thus necessitating an anti-colonial approach to solving the crisis.
Finally, the issue features an open-access review of Isabella Hamad’s latest novel, Enter Ghost, by Nora Parr, and another of Adel Manna’s Nakba and Survival: The Story of Palestinians who Remained in Haifa and the Galilee, 1948-1956, by Areej Sabbagh-Khoury.
In Gratitude and Solidarity,
The JPS Team
