Our first issue of 2016 opens with a Palestinian theme: three articles and a review essay that examine diverse but intertwined aspects of Palestinian life under Israeli occupation. The articles actually were selected from our backlog of accepted manuscripts during the late summer of 2015. Subsequently, beginning on October 1, a wave of violent acts broke out in East Jerusalem and spread through Israel and the Occupied Palestinian territories. Palestinians, angry and concerned about incursions of armed Israeli Jews into the compound of Jerusalem’s ancient Al-Aqsa Mosque (built in 692 CE) during prayer time, initiated this most recent spate of violence by randomly stabbing Jews in the Old City. The site is atop a hill that religious Jews call the Temple Mount, as they believe this was the site of their sacred temple destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE. It has been a flashpoint of tensions for at least 25 years, because some Jewish leaders and groups openly have called for removing the sacred Muslim shrines and rebuilding a new temple. In the course of seven weeks, Palestinians killed 10 Israeli Jews (a eleventh Jew of dark complexion was seriously injured when attacked by fellow Israelis who mistook him for a Palestinian); Israelis, both security officers and armed civilians, killed at least 77 Palestinians and injured 1,500; and an Eritrean refugee was killed by a mob of Israelis who assumed he was Palestinian. Quite coincidently our theme articles provide a context for understanding some of the factors behind this violence.
For example, in the inaugural article, ‘Temporality, Peace Initiatives and Palestinian-Israeli Politics,’ Sean F. McMahon argues that because Palestinians are without time, meaning they live under an Israeli occupation that restricts their lives and has no apparent end, they have no hopes for the future. He develops Michel Foucault’s notion of time as a means of control and disciplining of society. In the case of Israel and the Palestinians, Israel seeks to isolate Palestinians from the past—the official ideology presents Israel as existing for centuries but having been temporarily occupied by Palestinians—and the future—to occupy the land to such an extent to make the creation of an independent Palestinian state impossible. Although the various peace initiatives since 1993 envisage as a final status some form of a Palestinian entity, in practice, says McMahon, Israel has used both time and space to block such an outcome, primarily by creating an ideology of security that justifies tightening control over Palestinians’ daily lives and by expropriating ever more Palestinian private land on which to build exclusively Jewish settlements. In effect, these practices comprise a large part of the modus operandi of Israeli colonialism.
This colonial project began long before the 1993 Oslo Accords. Indeed, in ‘Signs of Visual Resistance in Palestine: Unsettling the Settler-Colonial Matrix,’ Jaafar Alloul traces representations of the Palestinian ‘other,’ especially visually, back to the late nineteenth-century Jewish colonies in Ottoman Palestine and then during the subsequent British Mandate period (1918–1948), when the colonial administration worked with Zionist organizations to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine. It is important to note that Palestine was the official English name of the entity prior to 1948, and for that reason Zionist agencies used the term in their literature, including promotional materials to encourage immigration of European Jews. For example, ‘Visit Palestine’ posters from the 1930s evoke a peaceful land of ancient stone buildings, orange groves and fields of golden grain; the indigenous Palestinian population is visually absent. In 1948, 78 percent of Palestine became the state of Israel, and 19 years later, Israel occupied the remaining 22 percent, including the Old City of Jerusalem and its suburbs. Israel continued to colonize the land after 1967, especially East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and established an elaborate matrix of control for the Arab population (the terms Palestine and Palestinians were ‘erased’ from Israeli/Zionist sources after 1948). However, the Palestinians gradually have appropriated the pre-1948 Zionist posters, adding specific details to demonstrate their historical belonging to Palestine.
Our third Palestine-theme article, ‘Assessing Palestinian Economic Exchange across the Green Line’ by Guy Burton, examines how Israel controls and regulates trade between Palestinians in Israel and those living in Gaza and the West Bank. In order to appreciate the significance of this trade regulation, it is useful to bear in mind that 6 million Palestinians live under Israeli control. Approximately 1.6 million Palestinians live in and are citizens of Israel, that is, they reside within the Green Line, the international borders of Israel as established by the 1949 armistice agreements. However, in June 1967 Israel occupied the remainder of the (historic) Mandate of Palestine, i.e., the non-contiguous territories that became known as the Gaza Strip and the West Bank after 1949, and this resulted in all Palestinians residing in any part of the former Mandate of Palestine falling under Israeli control. Israel immediately annexed the Old City of Jerusalem and a large area north and south of it, all of which is called East Jerusalem, but did not extend citizenship to its Palestinian inhabitants (approximately 190,000 in 2015), instead issuing them resident permits. In effect, the 6 million Palestinians under Israeli rule are divided into several different ‘legal’ categories, and this helps to facilitate control, and one important aspect of control has been economic.Footnote1 According to Burton, Israel has pursued a consistent policy to keep the economy of the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories under-developed and dependent on it. Even though the Oslo Accords of 1993 and 1994 were supposed to help the Palestinians to achieve some measure of economic self-determination to buttress eventual political self-determination, this definitely has not happened. Based on field interviews with Palestinian business proprietors on both sides of the Green Line, Burton is pessimistic about the prospects for a robust Palestinian economy to develop due to the persistent political uncertainty about the future, the limited capital available for entrepreneurial investment, the very real imbalance between the Palestinians’ relatively low cost economy and the high value Israeli economy, and the widespread tendency for personal self-interest, rather than national solidarity, to motivate the decisions of Palestinian businesses.
The fourth of our Palestinian-themed articles is Matteo Capasso’s review of the recent book by Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Security Theology: Surveillance and the Politics of Fear (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Readers who follow Palestinian issues probably are familiar with her pioneering 2010 book, Militarization and Violence against Women in Conflict Zones in the Middle East: The Palestinian Case Study (Cambridge University Press), which documented the victimization of Palestinian women by Israeli security forces and courts as well as by Palestinian society. As Capasso argues in ‘Colonial Biopolitics,’ she broadens her earlier legal research and analytical focus to encompass the praxis and rationale of the Israeli colonial settler regime against Palestinians while also examining how Palestinians maneuver through the politics of fear that Israel maintains over their lives. Two important merits of this book, argues Capasso, are Shalhoub-Kervorkian’s explication of how Israel has elevated security to a virtual theology that both justifies surveillance of and violence against Palestinians as a collective security threat and also maintains Israeli power; and the Palestinian will to survive the politics of fear that dominate all aspects of their everyday lives, from birth to death. This will to survive is the Palestinians’ ultimate resistance strategy against the oppression of the Israeli security apparatus.
Our fifth article takes us away from trying to understand the challenges of daily life for Palestinians under Israeli control to a very different topic: Iran and the discourse of freedom in that country. In ‘Islamic Secularism and the Question of Freedom in Iran,’ returning Critique author Arshin Adib-Moghaddam examines the contestation over the concept of ‘freedom’ since the 1979 Iranian Revolution. For nearly 100 years before that major political event—and since, freedom for some Iranians, both religious and secular, meant the right of citizens to be free from the authority of the state, i.e., democracy; however for others—again both religious and secular, freedom meant the right of the country to be free of foreign interference, i.e., independence. However, argues Adib-Moghaddam, many of Iran’s contemporary liberal Islamic thinkers—Islamic secularists, because they reject the notion that one cleric or a group of senior Islamic scholars are entitled to exercise political authority—–have been preoccupied with trying to demonstrate that terms such as democracy, freedom and human rights are inherently Islamic ideals, rather than universal ideals. That is, they still share with conservative Islamist thinkers a belief that Islam is a superior religion, despite mutual disagreements on the nature of political and theological authority. For this reason, their arguments do not appeal to secular liberals who are non-religious or non-Muslim.
In our final article for this issue, ‘Popular Testimonial Literature by American Cultural Conservatives of Arab or Muslim Descent: Narrating the Self, Translating (an)Other,’ Adam Yaghi examines the role of propagandists of Muslim origins in spreading Islamophobia. Most prominent among them is Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a native of Somalia, who lived in the Netherlands for many years, where she became (in)famous for denunciations of Islam from the perspective of a native informant. After 2001, her ‘autobiographical’ books depicting a barbaric Islam brought her to the attention of conservative American organizations that opposed multiculturalism generally, and Islam specifically, and they invited her to give speaking tours in US cities. She married an American in 2013 and moved permanently to the United States. Yet, even though Islamophobic groups and conservative opponents of multiculturalism applaud her presentations and writings, Ali has become a polarizing personality for those academic institutions that value the very multiculturalism she decries as a threat to US society.
Editor, Middle East Critique
Notes
1. As of mid-2015, the estimated number of Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip was 1.8 million, and in the West Bank, 2.7 million (not including 190,000 in East Jerusalem). One may find more comprehensive population data on the website of the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics: www.pcbs.gov.ps/default.aspx.