From the Editor

This issue marks the end of a formative, powerful era in the history of the Journal of Palestine Studies under the editorial leadership of Rashid Khalidi. Khalidi’s stewardship of the journal began in 2002 with what he called the “reoccupation of the West Bank” with Israel’s invasion of Jenin.¹ In the wake of September 11 and its broad consequences for US dominance and the so-called war on terror, 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.

Through the vagaries, exigencies, and realities of drastically shifting geographies of Palestine, Khalidi guided the journal and the field through the pivotal and turbulent times of the second intifada, the building of the apartheid wall, the Camp David negotiations, the death of Yasser Arafat, the Israeli “disengagement” from Gaza, the election of Hamas, the internecine struggle between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, and every single Israeli assault on the besieged Gaza Strip. He has led us in commemorating the loss of figures such as Edward Said, Mahmoud Darwish, and Salma Khadra Jayyusi. Throughout, Khalidi has maintained pages that featured analysis of justice and power, diplomacy and politics, and political economy and the state, while also shining a light on narration, testimonies, art, cinema, and popular culture.

Each issue of this journal is rooted in empirically groundbreaking findings, an unwavering attention to detail, and steadfast commitment to the struggle for and the insistence on Palestinian life. In his research and leadership, including as coeditor since 2020, Khalidi has taught us to ask the difficult questions, to think critically and comparatively, and to remain grounded in the contingencies and demands of history. His insistence on Palestinian life through and despite “dispersal, occupation, and geographic fragmentation” is one of the many lessons he has offered us.² It is this insistence that we draw on every day as we weather the harshest of brutalities and the reshaping of the breadth and depth of this ongoing Nakba. Today, what is Palestinian life and how do we imagine a Palestinian future?

The fall, winter, spring, and summer that have strung 2023 and 2024 together have lasted an eternity. A relentless genocide has kept time for us. Throughout these now 225 days of attack on Gaza, a place where nearly 50 percent of the inhabitants are younger than eighteen, Palestinian children have been specifically and inordinately targeted.³ These children, covered in the dust of rubble and burned by the force of arsenal, are ravaged by this terrifying intent to destroy the very idea of Palestinian life. This genocide strives to render Palestinians incapable of inhabiting adjectives like innocent and nouns like civilian and human, of inhabiting anything other than the past tense.

Gaza is ground zero. It is a place where conventions of age and time break under the force of settler-colonial brutality and impunity. What is Palestinian life in this age? It is parents attempting to shield their children in the increasingly attenuating space between life and death. It is the mother’s embrace of her lost child, clinging to the receding warmth of bodies turned into corpses.⁴ It is children searching their surroundings for body parts—brains, arms, legs—that can affirm departure. It is the countless doctors and nurses, “physically and mentally broken,” themselves starving, carrying on the work, tending to the sick and the wounded.⁵ It is the paramedics and the surgeons fighting every day to sustain the injured, even as they learn that Israeli bombardment has killed their entire families.⁶

“Are you taking me to the cemetery?” a young girl of nine or ten asked on the fortieth day of this genocide.⁷ Covered in rubble, her skin burnt, the young girl had heard Gabriel’s trumpet, announcing the end of days. She looked at the death surrounding her and noted the end of her world. This young girl is one of those children that “are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe.”⁸ She is at once singular and representative in her confrontation of loss. She is, we can only hope, a survivor unlike the 35,562 estimated to have perished.⁹ She is just one of the 79,652 people who have been injured.¹⁰ This young girl is just one of the more than 12,000 children who have been injured.¹¹ She is one of the 17,000 children who have lost one or both parents.¹² The man saving this young girl who believed her life was over—surviving as she had the demise of everything and everyone around her as she emerged from underneath the weight of concrete, outliving the US and Israeli attempts to kill her—assured her: “You are as beautiful as the moon. You are here.”¹³

This young survivor is here. She is on this page and in our imagination. Is she lucky or cursed? Did she face the fate of those emaciated children who have died of starvation?¹⁴ Did she suffer surgery without anesthesia? Would she experience what the brutally orphaned Maryam lived in her last hours, hours defined by injury, fear, and hunger?¹⁵ Did she suffer the fate of one girl whose burns exposed her facial bones, who faced the agony and suffering of her death in the tattered hallways of a besieged hospital, without the numbing power of morphine?¹⁶

Did she make it to any one of the hospitals that have become microcosms of Palestinians holding tightly to the remains of a social order? As Faris Giacaman explains, hospitals became targets of Israel’s unbridled annihilation, not simply to destroy the health sector, but to shred the last remaining spaces of social possibility.¹⁷ Did she live to see al-Shifa Hospital and the Nasser Complex transformed from places of healing to sites of mass graves and human heads eaten by crows?¹⁸ Did she look down at those craters of decomposing body parts that one mother described as a “large basin of blood”?¹⁹

How did our survivor manage this living between and with death? Did she, like some adults, come to see death as a refuge from humiliation and devastation? The medical doctor Mohammed al-Ran, who survived Israel’s detention center, Sde Teiman, a center of sexualized and medicalized psychological and corporal torture, put it this way: “It is better to die” than to face a relentless reality of atrocity and brutality.²⁰ When she faced the reality of life, did our young survivor prefer death to the suffering and grief she now inhabited? How would she fare in the face of repeated displacement, the terror of a nuclear state annihilating a small piece of blockaded and parched land, the witnessing of family members dismembered? Did her loss lead her, like other children “as young as five to tell us that they would prefer to die”?²¹

Did she know that just across the constructed border of partition, Israelis celebrated Palestinian death? Did she hear about the group who set up a “giant bouncy castle at the entrance where aid trucks are supposed to pass” at the Kerem Shalom (Karem Abu Salem) crossing?²² The organizer of this celebration urged others to join the party: “Get ready, there will be inflatables, cotton candy, and popcorn and plushies.”²³ Did she know that near Hebron, Israelis attacked trucks of food coming from Jordan and heading to Gaza? Throwing packages of food onto the road, they ripped open bags of grain and set trucks on fire.²⁴ These actions speak the desire for more Palestinian death, more pain, and more hunger; they broadcast the impunity and popularity of a genocide. This spectacle of necropolitical supremacy was so blatant that even US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan called it a “total outrage.”²⁵

Joe Biden would not sense this outrage. He would continue unabated as the faithful handmaiden of this genocide of Palestinian life, of the destruction of children’s bodies and futures, of this brutal annihilation and starving of a people. The US president’s failure to act on repeated warnings from his own experts, the diplomatic cover he has copiously crafted for US complicity in the brutalization of Palestinians, will have far-ranging consequences on the content and form of power, on the understanding and possibility of justice, and on the paradigms of international law. Indeed, if the history of Israel and Palestine traces the rise of US hegemony, it will also be one site of its erosion.

Over the last seven months, states like Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom have intervened in The Gambia vs. Myanmar case at the International Court of Justice to “focus above all on the issues of sexual violence against women and children.”²⁶ All the while, the presidents and prime ministers of these very states have traveled to Israel throughout those months, “begging, urging, appealing.”²⁷ In the face of Israel’s rebuke and rejection of their pleas, they simply continue providing arms and support.

This spectacle of complicity has posed questions about who, indeed, the “great powers” are.²⁸ It is, however, the United States that appears at once feeble and powerless in its pleas for “humanitarianism.” Nothing shakes “the brick fortress of Biden’s ideological commitment to Zionism”;²⁹ not the effervescence of the US and global student movement,³⁰ the powerful case of South Africa in the ICJ and the latter’s conclusion of “plausible genocide,”³¹ or the US administration’s own findings that Israel “most likely violated” international humanitarian law³² in Gaza. Even after Israel blatantly transgressed Biden’s “red line” of an invasion of Rafah, where more than half of the displaced people have fled, the US president could muster little more than a temporary pause of a single arms shipment. This flimsy position lasted just short of a week, when the Biden administration informed congressional committees of its plan to move forward with more than one billion dollars in weapons deals.³³ In the words of the first Jewish American staffer—and the sixth staffer overall—who has publicly resigned from the present US administration, Biden “has the blood of innocent people on his hands.”³⁴

In this sea of blood, Palestinian children are both “hyper-visible and invisible.”³⁵ The intimacy of settler-colonial necropolitics between the United States and Israel has attempted to produce what Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, the Palestinian feminist scholar of law, trauma, and gender violence, has called “unchilding.” This is a process in which children’s lives and bodies are politicized targets that are essential to both race-making and colonial logics. Just this month, as Israeli forces engaged what they called “precise counterterrorism” in eastern Rafah, the doctors in the city’s devastated remaining hospitals reported that “most of the wounded arriving at their wards were children.”³⁶ This genocide has, in Palestinian surgeon Ghassan Abu-Sittah’s words, produced the largest cohort of pediatric amputees,³⁷ demonstrating what Jasbir Puar has called Israel’s right to maim.³⁸ Targeting children’s lives is not limited to Gaza. As settler governance amplifies its terror in the West Bank, the death toll over the last eight months has climbed to over 500 people, 125 of whom are children.³⁹

Shalhoub-Kevorkian has long charted childhood as a “specific location” of colonial target. She has dismantled Israel’s attempt to transform Gaza into a graveyard. Her prescience and courage have rendered her own life and body a target. In October 2023, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem called on Shalhoub-Kevorkian to resign her position as the Lawrence D. Biele Chair in Law because she signed a petition titled “Childhood Researchers and Students Call for Immediate Ceasefire in Gaza,”⁴⁰ which the Hebrew University amounts to “incitement and sedition.”⁴¹ In March 2024, the university suspended Shalhoub-Kevorkian from teaching for once again criticizing the Israeli state. At each turn in these tortuous accusations, Shalhoub-Kevorkian has also been subject to death threats. In April 2024, the Israeli police arrested and detained her, searching her home and confiscating her personal belongings.⁴² Like the vulnerable and precarious children she describes, Shalhoub-Kevorkian threatens settler-colonial power. She reveals that the production of knowledge is always political, that the analysis and narration of settler annihilation is a source of power, and that it is the very idea of Palestinian life—of a Palestinian future—that is a source of threat.

What do we do in the face of “our own vanishing?”⁴³ Every day, Palestinians watch their world disappear. Sharing a photograph of a broad window looking out on a horizon of homes, the journalist Hebh Jamal explains that this “exact view,” the place she had planned on “calling home forever,” no longer exists.⁴⁴ In the reality of this vanished world, we must find new exits. As the recently departed Palestinian political prisoner Walid Daqqah, whose own death in unjust and prolonged captivity was a result of Israeli medical negligence, implored us, we must follow our cue from his daughter Milad to find and open the doors to all of our prisons.⁴⁵

In the face of all this death, Palestinians offer lessons on life, on how to cherish it even in the midst of relentless horror. Fathers like Ahmad Imteiz navigated bullets and survived hunger on and through love. On the day of the Flour Massacre, when throngs of hungry people at the Nabulsi roundabout in Gaza City were subjected to live Israeli ammunition, Imteiz crawled for a kilometer as bullets rained down around him. He clung tightly to four cans of fava beans and a chicken. Once he was far from the Israeli attack that would take 115 lives that hour, he stood up to run. A journalist would later ask him if it was worth it. “Yes,” he answered, “to save my hungry children, yes.”⁴⁶ In the face of Israel’s engineering of social collapse, Palestinians shape and reshape a resilient social cohesion. In the face of death, life, Palestinian life and Palestinian futures continue.

Sherene Seikaly

Notes

1 Rashid I. Khalidi, “Toward a Clear Palestinian Strategy,” JPS 31, no. 4 (2002): 5, https://doi.org/10.1525/jps.2002.31.4.5.

2 Rashid I. Khalidi, “From the Editor,” JPS 34, no. 2 (2005): 5, https://doi.org/10.1525/jps.2005.34.2.005.

3 Linah Mohammad, “Children Make up Nearly Half of Gaza’s Population: Here’s What It Means for the War,” NPR, October 19, 2023, https://www.npr.org/2023/10/19/1206479861/israel-gaza-hamas-children-population-war-palestinians#:∼:text=The%20current%20war%20in%20Gaza,47.3%25)%20are%20under%2018.; Chris McGreal, “‘Not a Normal War’: Doctors Say Children Have Been Targeted by Israeli Snipers in Gaza,” Guardian, April 2, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/02/gaza-palestinian-children-killed-idf-israel-war#:∼:text=Children%20account%20for%20more%20than,suffered%20severe%20injuries%2C%20including%20amputations.

4 Eye on Palestine (@EyeonPalestine), “A father embraces his baby girl on the floor of the hospital following their survival from an Israeli bombardment in Gaza Strip,” X, February 23, 2024, 3:12 a.m., https://x.com/EyeonPalestine/status/1760834957608440216.

5 “British Surgeon Describes Children Suffering ‘Appalling Injuries’ in Gaza, Demands Immediate Ceasefire,” Democracy Now, March 21, 2024, https://x.com/tparsi/status/1760893347600732210.

6 Trita Parsi (@tparsi), “This is the devastating scene when two doctors in Gaza received calls informing them that Israel had bombed their homes and killed all their family members,” X, February 23, 2024, 7:04 a.m., https://x.com/tparsi/status/1760893347600732210.

7 Quds News Network (@QudsNen), “‘Are you taking me to the cemetery?!’ A little girl asking, as she is rescued from beneath the debris of her demolished home in Al-Bureij camp,” X, November 2, 2023, 5 p.m., https://x.com/QudsNen/status/1720093428606992888.

8 James Baldwin, “Notes on the House of Bondage,” The Nation, November 1, 1980, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/notes-house-bondage/.

9 “Israel-Gaza War in Maps and Charts: Live Tracker,” Al Jazeera, accessed May 20, 2024, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2023/10/9/israel-hamas-war-in-maps-and-charts-live-tracker.

10 “Israel-Gaza War in Maps and Charts: Live Tracker.”

11 UN International Children’s Emergency Fund, “Children Disproportionately Wearing the Scars of the War in Gaza–Geneva Palais Briefing Note,” news release, April 16, 2024, https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/children-disproportionately-wearing-scars-war-gaza-geneva-palais-briefing-note.

12 UN International Children’s Emergency Fund, “Stories of Loss and Grief: At Least 17,000 Children Are Estimated to Be Unaccompanied or Separated from Their Parents in the Gaza Strip,” news release, February 2, 2024, https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/stories-loss-and-grief-least-17000-children-are-estimated-be-unaccompanied-or-separated-their-parents-gaza-strip#:∼:text=oPt-,Stories%20of%20loss%20and%20grief%3A%20At%20least%2017%2C000%20children%20are,parents%20in%20the%20Gaza%20Strip&text=GENEVA%2C%202%20February%202023%20%E2%80%93%20%22,story%20of%20loss%20and%20grief.

13 Quds News Network (@QudsNen), “‘Are you taking me to the cemetery?!’”

14 Ramy Abdu (@RamAbdu), “Children in Gaza are dying from starvation in full view and hearing of the entire world,” X, February 23, 2024, 10:52 p.m., https://x.com/RamAbdu/status/1761132023714918877.

15 Eye on Palestine (@EyeonPalestine), “These were the last hours of baby Maryam’s life,” X, February 23, 2024, 4:18 p.m., https://x.com/EyeonPalestine/status/1761032718903627840.

16 “British Surgeon Describes Children Suffering,” Democracy Now.

17 Faris Giacaman, “Israel Destroyed Al-Shifa Hospital to Accelerate Social Collapse in Gaza,” Mondoweiss, April 2, 2024, https://mondoweiss.net/2024/04/israel-destroyed-al-shifa-hospital-to-accelerate-social-collapse-in-gaza/.

18 Giacaman, “Israel Destroyed Al-Shifa Hospital.”

19 Tareq S. Hajjaj, “‘It Felt like Pulling My Heart out of the Earth’: Testimonies from the Mass Grave at Nasser Hospital,” Mondoweiss, April 25, 2024, https://mondoweiss.net/2024/04/i-felt-like-pulling-my-heart-out-of-the-earth-testimonies-from-the-mass-grave-at-nasser-hospital/.

20 “Strapped down, Blindfolded, Held in Diapers: Israeli Whistleblowers Detail Abuse of Palestinians in Shadowy Detention Center,” CNN, May 11, 2024, https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/10/middleeast/israel-sde-teiman-detention-whistleblowers-intl-cmd/index.html.

21 “Doctors without Borders: Children in Gaza as Young as Five Say They Want to Die,” New Arab, February 24, 2024, https://www.newarab.com/news/msf-children-gaza-young-five-say-they-want-die#:∼:text=%22There%20is%20a%20repeated%20displacement,they%20would%20prefer%20to%20die.%22.

22 Paul Graham (@Paulg), “Bouncy castles on one side, starvation and death on the other,” X, February 23, 2024, 9:54 p.m., https://x.com/paulg/status/1761117379008831960.

23 Paul Graham (@Paulg), “Bouncy castles on one side.”

24 Kiara Alfonseca and Will Gretsky, “Protesters in Israel Arrested after Attacking Gaza Aid Trucks,” ABC News, May 15, 2024, https://abcnews.go.com/International/protesters-israel-arrested-after-attacking-gaza-aid-trucks/story?id=110220557.

25 Alfonseca and Gretsky, “Protesters in Israel Arrested.”

26 German Federal Foreign Office, “Statement on Germany’s Intervention in the Proceedings against Myanmar in the International Court of Justice for Alleged Genocide,” news release, November 17, 2023, https://www.auswaertiges-amt.de/en/newsroom/news/-/2632040#:∼:text=On%20Wednesday%2C%2015%20November%2C%20Germany,the%20Netherlands%20and%20the%20UK.

27 Richard Hall, Bel Trew, and Andrew Feinberg, “Biden Is Furious at Allegations That Israel Is Using Starvation as a Weapon of War. But He Is Complicit in Gaza’s Famine,” Independent, May 15, 2024, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/gaza-famine-biden-israel-hamas-b2542961.html.

28 Hall, Trew, and Feinberg, “Biden Is Furious at Allegations.”

29 Jeet Heer, “What It Takes to Break Joe Biden’s Zionist Bubble,” The Nation, April 5, 2024, https://www.thenation.com/article/world/biden-zionist-bubble-gaza-muslims/.

30 Robin D. G. Kelley, “Letter to Columbia President Minouche Shafik,” Boston Review, April 29, 2024, https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/letter-to-columbia-university-president-minouche-shafik/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=2024-05-06&utm_campaign=Robin+D+G+Kelley+s+Letter+to+Columbia+President+Minouche+Shafik.

31 South Africa vs. Israel, ICC 192-20240126-ORD-01-00-EN (January 26, 2024), https://www.icj-cij.org/node/203447.

32 Ellen Knickmeyer, Aamer Madhani, and Matthew Lee, “US Says Israel’s Use of US Arms Likely Violated International Law, but Evidence Is Incomplete,” ABC News, May 10, 2024, https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/biden-administration-conclude-israel-violated-terms-us-weapons-110110673.

33 John Hudson, “Biden Advances $1 Billion in Arms for Israel Amid Rafah Tensions,” Washington Post, May 14, 2024, https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/05/14/biden-israel-weapons-gaza-rafah/.

34 Umar A. Farooq, “Jewish Staffer Resigns from Biden Administration over US ‘Support for Israel’s Genocide,’” Middle East Eye, May 15, 2024, https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/nakba-day-first-jewish-american-biden-appointee-resigns-over-gaza-policy.

35 Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Incarcerated Childhood and the Politics of Unchilding (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 6.

36 Louisa Loveluck, “Battles Rage around Rafah’s Edge as More Than 100,000 Flee the City,” Washington Post, May 10, 2024, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/05/10/israel-rafah-gaza-hamas-displaced/.

37 Eliza Griswold, “The Children Who Lost Limbs in Gaza,” New Yorker, March, 21, 2024, https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/the-children-who-lost-limbs-in-gaza.

38 Jasbir K. Paur, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).

39 “Israel-Gaza War in Maps and Charts: Live Tracker.”

40 Middle East Studies Association (MESA), “Letter to Hebrew University in Defense of Prof. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian,” November 9, 2023, https://mesana.org/advocacy/committee-on-academic-freedom/2023/11/09/letter-to-hebrew-university-in-defense-of-prof.-nadera-shalhoub-kevorkian.

41 MESA, “Letter to Hebrew University in Defense of Prof. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian.”

42 Middle East Studies Association, “Letter Protesting the Arrest and Continued Questioning of Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian,” May 6, 2024, https://mesana.org/advocacy/committee-on-academic-freedom/2024/05/06/letter-protesting-the-arrest-and-continued-questioning-of-professor-nadera-shalhoub-kevorkian.

43 Devin Atallah and Sarah Ihmoud, “A World without Palestinians,” Massachusetts Review: A Quarterly of Literature, the Arts, and Public Affairs 65, no. 1 (2024): https://massreview.org/node/11753.

44 Hebh Jamal (@hebh_jamal), “This exact view does not exist anymore,” X, February 23, 2024, 11:24 p.m., https://x.com/hebh_jamal/status/1761140073670607076.

45 Walid Daqqah and Dalia Taha, “‘A Place without a Door’ and ‘Uncle Give Me a Cigarette’—two Essays by Palestinian Political Prisoner, Walid Daqqah,” Middle East Report, July 11, 2023, https://merip.org/2023/07/a-place-without-a-door-and-uncle-give-me-a-cigarette-two-essays-by-palestinian-political-prisoner-walid-daqqah/.

46 Tareq S. Hajjaj, “Flour Soaked in Blood: ‘Flour Massacre’ Survivors Tell Their Story,” Mondoweiss, March 4, 2024, https://mondoweiss.net/2024/03/flour-soaked-in-blood/.