Introduction: Writing Occupied Palestine: Toward a field of Palestinian Communication and Cultural Studies

ABSTRACT

This special issue emerged from a belief that Communication journals have long ignored Palestinian voices. A review of all manuscripts published across eleven journals published by the National Communication Association provides unequivocal data supporting that belief. Specifically, prior to this special issue, only twelve articles across these 11 outlets emphasized Palestinian perspectives. In this brief introduction to the special issue, a brief summary of the content of those articles is laid out, and a call for the emergence of a domain of Palestinian Communication and Cultural Studies – founded on an essential commitment to center the question of Palestine through a decolonial lens that values the indigenous and Palestinian voice – is made.

KEYWORDS:

• Palestine
• cultural studies
• decolonial

Occupied Palestine

Occupied Palestine

It’s that place with no belonging

It’s that place of longing

That place that we … 

we sought, we fought for

we fought for a country

of Belonging … .

But all we were given was

Heartache and Body ache … wideawake … 

We will never forget … .

We carry the burden of Displacement

Discouragement

Endangerment

Nowhere to belong … 

We sought a space … . A place … for an extinct race … 

A place for a Palestinian face … .

It is here that we write our place … 

In the book, Negotiating Identity & Transnationalism: Middle Eastern and North African Studies, Communication and Critical Cultural Studies, the authors aim to bring Middle Eastern and North African Studies (MENA) and Critical Cultural Studies in conversation with Communication and Transnational Studies (Ghabra et al., 2020). In their introductory chapter, Ghabra and Alaoui (2020) conducted a key search of ten communication journals and found that not only was the literature scarce, but at times Orientalist. The Journal of International and Intercultural Communication (JIIC), for example, had very few articles that focused on MENA topics. Only a few of these articles were written by Muslim scholars of color (Abdi & Van Gilder, 2016; Al Kandari et al., 2017; Hasian, 2016). At that time, the editors of Negotiating Identity & Transnationalism urged JIIC and other Communication journals to expand their reach (Ghabra et al., 2020). Yet still, we were surprised when the editor in chief of JIIC – Dr. Bernadette Calafell – asked us if we were interested in editing a special issue on Palestine for the journal – not because it came from Dr. Calafell, but because it came at all. It had become the expectation of Palestinian scholars (and allies) in the discipline, that no editor – even those who espouse commitments to de-coloniality – would want to have to manage the likely pressure that such a decision would bring. Indeed, even within translational MENA Studies, the issue of Palestine has seemingly always occupied a space at the bottom. Dr. Calafell not only created a space for MENA scholarship but also for Palestinian scholarship. This is vital amid a critical and a decolonial step in our discipline.

In order to further empirically test our assumptions about the absence of the Palestinian voice in our discipline, we conducted a search for the term “Palestine” or “Palestinian” across the history of the 11 journals owned by the National Communication Association. We then eliminated any manuscript that emerged from the search, but which only referenced those terms in passing (i.e., where Palestine was not the focus of the analysis). Since we were specifically interested in manuscripts in which Palestinian experiences or narratives were central aspects of the analysis, we also eliminated manuscripts that took a Zionist frame, were primarily critical of Palestinians, or presented a general analysis of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Ultimately, only twelve journal articles (one of which was a book review) met this criterion, even loosely. Twelve articles across 11 journals and across decades of publications is the sum total of knowledge that included at least some centering on the Palestinian experience within the journals published by the National Communication Association (NCA). Perhaps not surprisingly, given the host of this special issue, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies included nearly half of the total population of Palestine-inclusive articles: five.

Further descriptive analysis reveals that only three of the 12 utilize social scientific methods, and two of the three included Palestinian voices as only part of their analysis: Ellis and Maoz’s (2002) comparison of Israeli-Jewish and Palestinian argument patterns within peace workshops in Israel, and Collier’s (2009) analysis of interview discourse from Palestinian and Israeli participants in peace dialogue groups in the United States. The third (Afifi et al., 2016) appears to be the only social scientific study of Palestinian lives in the history of our field, at least within NCA publications: Afifi et al. (2016) analyzed interviews from 40 Palestinians living in refugee camps in Lebanon. The remaining eight articles provide rhetorical and/or critical cultural analyses. Included among those are a study of the change in Palestinian nationalist rhetoric through an analysis of Haydar “Abd Al-Shafi's Madrid speech (Frank, 2000), and one that offers a critical Habermasian analysis of US newspapers” Israel-biased coverage of the supposed use of human shields in Gaza (Graber, 2017), Hasian is an author on three of the articles, and Ghabra on two, including one on which they work as co-author. Specifically, Hasian (2007) discusses “memoricide” as reflected through the erasure of Palestinian history, and Hasian (2016), in his review of Shared histories: A Palestinian Israeli dialogue, offers a critique of the usefulness of juxtaposing Zionist and Palestinian narratives. In it, he makes the important argument that some histories depend on the erasure of other histories. Ghabra then collaborated with Hasian (Ghabra & Hasian, 2020) in an article that combines decolonial and monstrosity with the rhetoric of auto immunity, and Ghabra worked together with Calafell (Ghabra & Calafell, 2018) in an autoethnographic analysis of feminist solidarity between a Kuwaiti (originally Palestinian) feminist and a Chicana feminist. That piece names the ways in which the Palestinian diasporic experience shapes notions of identity and being. The remaining articles include Tbakhi’s (2021) discussion of the performance aspect of what it means to be Palestinian, Masri’s (2021) essential intervention linking the Palestinian Apartheid wall and the US-Mexico wall as a settler colonial project, and Siegfried’s (2020) analysis of agentic materialism and habitational violence in Palestine, which addresses the connection between materialism and settler colonialism.

In summary, there is an urgent need for more analyses that center the question of Palestine through a decolonial lens that values the indigenous and Palestinian voice. The decolonial turn in an “art of speaking back to systems” (Ghabra, 2018) and decolonial methodologies are frameworks that assist in taking apart stories and texts, which in turn intersect with imperialism (Smith, 1999). While many scholars in Communication Studies have expanded and contributed to the field of decolonial/postcolonial studies (Abdi & Calafell, 2017; Chrifi Alaoui, 2019; Ghabra, 2020; Ghabra & Hasian, 2018; Ghabra & Calafell, 2019; Hegde, 2011; Kraidy, 2012; Matar, 2015; Wanzer-Serrano, 2015), there is much to be expanded in both MENA and COMM studies, but in particular what we hope is a budding area of Palestinian Communication and Cultural Studies. This special issue is a call to integrate Occupied Palestine as both an urgent and existential need for Communication Studies. We have identified a clear disciplinary history in which the Palestinian narrative has been absent and erasure prevalent. Indeed, we must speak of both the right to exist and the right to expose rhetoric that has been used against the Palestinians for centuries to erase their history through a mythical rhetoric for the Israeli Settlers (Pappe, 2007; Said, 1979).

In that vein, this special issue has four articles and a preface by Dina Matar, who explores the reluctance to critically engage with Palestine. The first article explores the effect of military oppression on a group of 22 school-aged youths living in the West Bank. Through a socio-ecological lens, the authors reveal factors that affect children’s maladjustment to traumatic environments. The second article examines global communication through lenses of trans-localism and hybridity by examining the Boycott Eurovision as a case study. The third article brings in a digitalized approach by examining performances on TikTok, and how Palestinian have performed their personal experiences and subjectivities through “playful activism”. And the last article highlights the importance of auto ethnography within Palestinian Communication and Cultural Studies. Through reflection on resilience, survival, and historical trauma, the author uses autoethnography and poetic inquiry to demonstrate the need to reevaluate Western models of disability and Palestinian lived experiences of illness and disability. Together, it is a set of contributions that reflects a very small sampling of the possibilities for disciplinary intervention that comes with the creation of a space for the Palestine voice, and the development of Palestinian Communication and Cultural Studies.

Acknowledgements

We dedicate this special issue to Shafeeq Ghabra, Haneen’s belated father, who taught her the importance of the Palestinian fight for justice and freedom, and Adel Kassem Afifi, Walid’s belated father, who embodied family and community care, and modeled Palestinian sumud.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).