Forging Justice from Below: Palestinians, Indigeneity, and Abolition

Abstract

This essay examines the practices and institutions of “rebel justice” that emerged during two of the most effective and sustained anti-colonial uprisings of the twentieth century, the Great Revolt and the First Intifada. It addresses these uprisings “from below” to illuminate their social foundations and the kinds of futures they imagined. For Palestinians, communal justice (sulh, ‘urf, and the like) have been prevalent forms of dispute resolution and justice-seeking. Rather than being written in a criminal code, the foundation of justice was based on shared notions of honor, redemption, and a social order that balanced hierarchical impulses with egalitarian ones. The essay also addresses Palestine’s place within abolitionist discussions currently under way in the United States, building upon the notable connections and parallels between the two geographies, from joint trainings undertaken by U.S. and Israeli forces to recent manifestations and longer traditions of Black-Palestinian solidarity.

Keywords:

• Palestinian uprisings
• rebel justice
• abolitionism
• Black-Palestinian solidarity

Acknowledgments

This essay cluster emerged out of a panel at the 2020 Middle East Studies Association conference, and the author would like to thank his copanelists, Charles W. Anderson, Haneen Naamneh, and Sreemati Mitter, as well as Sherene Seikaly, who served as a discussant and encouraged the continuation of this conversation in the pages of the Journal of Palestine Studies.

Notes

1 On the forms of organization that characterized the 1936–39 Great Revolt, see Charles W. Anderson, “From Petition to Confrontation: The Palestinian National Movement and the Rise of Mass Politics, 1929–1939” (PhD diss., New York University, 2013); and “State Formation from Below and the Great Revolt in Palestine,” JPS 47, no. 1 (Autumn 2017): pp. 39–55, https://doi.org/10.1525/jps.2017.47.1.39. On those prevalent during the First Intifada, see Joost Hiltermann, Behind the Intifada: Labor and Women’s Movements in the Occupied Territories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991); and Jamal R. Nassar and Roger Heacock, eds., Intifada: Palestine at the Crossroads (New York: Praeger, 1990), especially Part II (“The Participants”), pp. 91–226.

2 I elaborate on these processes in Alex Winder, “Anticolonial Uprising and Communal Justice in Twentieth-Century Palestine,” Radical History Review, no. 137 (May 2020): pp. 75–95, https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-8092786.

3 Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, “‘History from Below’,” Social Scientist 11, no. 4 (April 1983): pp. 3–20, quote at p. 14, https://doi.org/10.2307/3517020. Bhattacharya here draws on the work of the British Marxist historian Raphael Samuel.

4 For examples of this kind of microhistory, see Sonia Nimr, “‘A Nation in a Hero’: Abdul Rahim Hajj Muhammad and the Arab Revolt,” in Struggle and Survival in Palestine/Israel, ed. Mark LeVine and Gershon Shafir (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), pp. 141–56; Mustafa Kabha, “The Courts of the Palestinian Arab Revolt, 1936–39,” in Untold Histories of the Middle East, ed. Amy Singer, Christoph K. Neumann, and Selçuk Akşin Somel (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 187–213; and Erin Dyer Saxon, Peacemaking and Transformative Mediation: Sulha Practices in Palestine and the Middle East (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

5 On the flaws of such an approach, see Sherene Seikaly’s review of Hillel Cohen’s Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism, 1917–1948, “Cohen, Army of Shadows,” Middle East Report 248 (Fall 2008), merip.org/2008/09/cohen-army-of-shadows/.

6 Fanon writes: “The militant who confronts the colonialist war machine with his rudimentary resources realizes that while he is demolishing colonial oppression, he is indirectly building another system of exploitation. This discovery is galling, painful, and sickening. It was once all so simple with the bad on one side and the good on the other.” See Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004), p. 94.

7 Angela Y. Davis, Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005); CR10 Publications Collective, ed., Abolition Now! Ten Years of Strategy and Struggle against the Prison Industrial Complex (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2008).

8 See Kristian Davis Bailey, “Black-Palestinian Solidarity in the Ferguson-Gaza Era,” American Quarterly 67, no. 4 (December 2015): pp. 1017–26, https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2015.0060; and JPS 48, no. 4 (Summer 2019), a special issue devoted to Black-Palestinian transnational solidarity, coedited by Noura Erakat and Marc Lamont Hill.

9 See, for example: Amna A. Akbar, “An Abolitionist Horizon for (Police) Reform,” California Law Review 108, no. 6 (December 2020): pp. 101–68, https://www.californialawreview.org/print/abolitionist-horizon-police-reform/; Allegra M. McLeod, “Envisioning Abolition Democracy,” Harvard Law Review 132, no. 6 (April 2019): pp. 1613–49, https://harvardlawreview.org/2019/04/envisioning-abolition-democracy/; Alex S. Vitale, The End of Policing (New York: Verso, 2017).

10 See, for example: Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, eds., Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2020); adrienne maree brown, We Will Not Cancel Us, and Other Dreams of Transformative Justice (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2020).

11 Birzeit University Institute of Law, Informal Justice: Rule of Law and Dispute Resolution in Palestine; National Report on Field Research Results (Birzeit: Birzeit University Institute of Law, 2006); George Emile Bisharat, Palestinian Lawyers and Israeli Rule: Law and Disorder in the West Bank (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989); Aharon Layish, Legal Documents from the Judean Desert: The Impact of the Shari’a on Bedouin Customary Law (Leiden: Brill, 2011); and Ifrah Zilberman, “Palestinian Customary Law in the Jerusalem Area,” Catholic University Law Review 45, no. 3 (Spring 1996): pp. 795–811, https://scholarship.law.edu/lawreview/vol45/iss3/12.

12 Sulh is described as a form of Indigenous justice, for example, in Hamdesa Tuso and Maureen P. Flaherty, eds., Creating the Third Force: Indigenous Processes of Peacemaking (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016).

13 See Rana Barakat, “Writing/Righting Palestine Studies: Settler Colonialism, Indigenous Sovereignty, and Resisting the Ghost(s) of History,” Settler Colonial Studies 8, no. 3 (2018): pp. 3495–63, https://doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2017.1300048. On the association of Indigeneity with Palestine’s Bedouin, see Lana Tatour, “The Culturalisation of Indigeneity: The Palestinian-Bedouin of the Naqab and Indigenous Rights,” International Journal of Human Rights 23, no. 10 (2019): pp. 1569–93, https://doi.org/10.1080/13642987.2019.1609454. On the longer history of British, Zionist, and Arab associations of the Bedouin with autochthony, see Seraj Assi, The History and Politics of the Bedouin: Reimagining Nomadism in Modern Palestine (London: Routledge, 2018).

14 J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, “‘A Structure, Not an Event’: Settler Colonialism and Enduring Indigeneity,” Lateral 5, no. 1 (Spring 2016), https://csalateral.org/issue/5-1/forum-alt-humanities-settler-colonialism-enduring-indigeneity-kauanui/. Kauanui writes, “The operative logic of settler colonialism may be to ‘eliminate the native,’ as the late English scholar Patrick Wolfe brilliantly theorized, but . . . indigenous people exist, resist, and persist.”

15 Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), p. 21.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alex Winder

Alex Winder is a visiting assistant professor and director of undergraduate studies at Brown University’s Center for Middle East Studies.