Articles by Malaka Shwaikh
Zed Books, 2018
Oral history is a critically important record; it serves to oppose the historical erasure imposed... more Oral history is a critically important record; it serves to oppose the historical erasure imposed by the colonisers. It also archives real experience and history where other records are absent, and, for those reasons, it has become a burgeoning area of study. This research aims to explore and analyse oral history projects in the Gaza Strip.
This article draws from hundreds of interviews and conversations with survivors of wars and viole... more This article draws from hundreds of interviews and conversations with survivors of wars and violence in different contexts to show the limits of resilience. I bring together stories from my experiences talking with survivors across many countriesincluding Palestine, South Africa, Northern Ireland, Qatar, Jordan, and the United Kingdom. Through employing ethnographic and autoethnographic methods, I argue that resilience expectations may impose supernatural coping mechanisms on communities struggling with adversities, romanticize them as exemplary in enduring injustices, obscure their humanity, and normalize (structural) violence they continue to experience or reduce its severity. I question who benefits from an overemphasis on and financing of resilience, especially within (international) development organizations. The communities I spoke with all contend that resilience is not just a useless word but also a discourse, a way of thinking, and a policy implemented during difficulties. They emphasize that the cheap (re)production of them as extraordinary people, who are expected to endure suffering, is violent because it places the onus on them to be resilient on issues beyond their control while, often, ignoring layers of (structural) violence and subsequent traumas they face. As an alternative discourse to resilience, I propose a collective and caring approach that deals with root causes of violence instead of ignoring them.
Prison Periods: Women's Bodily Resistance to Gendered Control, 2022
Prisons are places of power and resistance. This article is based on original research material d... more Prisons are places of power and resistance. This article is based on original research material derived from Arabic, English, and Hebrew sources, including interviews with menstruating prisoners from Palestine, Northern Ireland, England, and the United States. I document and translate stories, including those of minors who had their first periods behind bars. I then show how several global prison structures fail to provide minimum support, from offering adequate sanitary products to accessing toilets and showers. I also ask what the menstruating body-and its treatment by prison guards and by prisoners-enables us to understand about the gendered realities of detention, and about the possibilities of resistance to those realities. The article argues that masculinization by the prison authorities through mechanisms of shaming and embarrassing of prisoners on periods is a crucial component of gendered control over bodies and spirits in detention. I examine the prison journey from interrogation rooms, court spaces, and prison cells, to the use of prison vehicles to transport prisoners between prisons and to/from courts, and "health care" spaces. I have structured the article around this spatialization to emphasize how gendered control goes beyond one space, and how all spaces illuminate different aspects of gendered control and masculinization. A key contribution in this article can be put as follows: while prisons use menstruation to consolidate gendered control over prisoners' bodies, prisoners use those same bodies to resist such control not only of the prison authorities in question but also of detention more broadly. I conclude by making a case for prison abolition, paying particular attention to the nuances of prisons in settings of ongoing coloniality and authoritarianism.
British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 2020
Using feminist anthropology and interview data, this article investigates the gendered dimension ... more Using feminist anthropology and interview data, this article investigates the gendered dimension of hunger striking in Israeli prisons. It draws on other cases from Ireland to the United States to explore the gendered nature of resistance to political imprisonment. I argue that women hunger strikers are active participants who weaponize their lives to resist the Israeli matrix of power and patriarchal societal norms. There have been less women in number when compared to male prisoners, but women have been more effective in collectively coordinating their pioneering action. Through necroresistance (transforming their body to a site of resistance) and the strategy of sumud (Arabic for ‘steadfastness’), women prisoners practice a dual resistance of the colonial authorities and the patriarchal society — simultaneously reclaiming ownership of their bodies and lives from both systems. This does not entail constituting their bodies as masculine (or de-feminizing themselves) so they are protected from sexual abuse. Rather, they insist on feminizing their experience and challenging gendered stereotypes of women as ‘victims’ with ‘fragile bodies’. For them, gender is not a barrier but a motivational factor in which self-sacrifice to protest injustice is far superior to enduring the wrongs of political imprisonment.
Although we only later came to realize its significance in our lives, and for Palestine advocacy ... more Although we only later came to realize its significance in our lives, and for Palestine advocacy generally, February 2017 turned out to be a watershed month for those of us on the frontlines of the Palestine advocacy movement in the UK. That month, amid a wave of cancellations of events critical of Israel, we were attacked in the media, smeared as antisemitic, and simultaneously supported and censored by our universities. The following month was marked by unprecedented censorship of Israel-critical events across the UK. As we have since learned, these events were linked to the UK government's adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism. While many communities and activists were affected by the event cancellations and the many other forms of censorship linked to the IHRA adoption, to our knowledge, we are the first UK-based academics who were directly targeted as a result of written statements relating to Israel. Malaka Shwaikh was then based at the University of Exeter, and completing her PhD on Palestinian hunger strikers at the time of the attack. Rebecca Ruth Gould had recently moved to the University of Bristol, where she was a Reader (Associate Professor) in Translation Studies and Comparative Literature.
Papers by Malaka Shwaikh
Social Science Research Network, May 23, 2020
Prisons are places of power and resistance. This article is based on original research material d... more Prisons are places of power and resistance. This article is based on original research material derived from Arabic, English, and Hebrew sources, including interviews with menstruating prisoners from Palestine, Northern Ireland, England, and the United States. I document and translate stories, including those of minors who had their first periods behind bars. I then show how several global prison structures fail to provide minimum support, from offering adequate sanitary products to accessing toilets and showers. I also ask what the menstruating body-and its treatment by prison guards and by prisoners-enables us to understand about the gendered realities of detention, and about the possibilities of resistance to those realities. The article argues that masculinization by the prison authorities through mechanisms of shaming and embarrassing of prisoners on periods is a crucial component of gendered control over bodies and spirits in detention. I examine the prison journey from interrogation rooms, court spaces, and prison cells, to the use of prison vehicles to transport prisoners between prisons and to/from courts, and "health care" spaces. I have structured the article around this spatialization to emphasize how gendered control goes beyond one space, and how all spaces illuminate different aspects of gendered control and masculinization. A key contribution in this article can be put as follows: while prisons use menstruation to consolidate gendered control over prisoners' bodies, prisoners use those same bodies to resist such control not only of the prison authorities in question but also of detention more broadly. I conclude by making a case for prison abolition, paying particular attention to the nuances of prisons in settings of ongoing coloniality and authoritarianism.
Are prison hunger strikes a means of liberation or harbingers of death? Are they passive or activ... more Are prison hunger strikes a means of liberation or harbingers of death? Are they passive or active means of resistance? This thesis offers the first systematic examination of Palestinian prisoners’ hunger strikes, from their inception in 1968 to 2018. Adopting a historical and an ethnographical approach, I trace the demands of hunger strikers, the outcomes of their action, and the impact of the political reality on their struggle. Taking a mainly bottom-up, qualitative approach to resistance and deriving data largely from in-depth interviews, participants’ observations, and textual analysis, the examination of existing scholarship, which assimilates hunger strikes into a narrative of passive non-violent resistance, reveals its mismatch with the Palestinian reality of prolonged anti-colonial prison hunger strikes. I argue that the equating of hunger strikes with passivity on the part of the oppressed implicitly dehumanises them. Hunger strikers are, rather, active participants and, like all other organised, active political protesters, they have political objectives that they want to achieve, power structures that they want to challenge, and alternative ones that they want to create. Indeed, this research counters such a passive narrative by starting from the local setting (the Israeli prison cell) and then proposes a contextualised approach to the politics of prison resistance. I develop a scholarly approach to pragmatic, active nonviolent prison-based resistance which demonstrates that prisoners weaponise their lives through hunger striking, faced with only one of two choices: freedom or death. This research contributes to and makes a critical intervention within prison hunger strikes. I show how prisons are spaces of resistance: they function as educational, political, and anti-colonial sites where the power of the Israeli prison authorities can be challenged. Palestinian hunger strikers have succeeded in achieving a range of demands from improvement of imprisonment conditions to obtaining freedom for themselves and others. Success or failure, however, is not easily defined in the Israeli prison context since the outcomes of Palestinian hunger strikes are hard to measure. The factors which can determine this success are not absolute because external influences, especially resulting from the peace-process and the internal division, might come into play. As a Palestinian woman, I have been granted access to a range of prison scenarios that have been obscured in prior scholarship as well as in media headlines. These scenarios helped me in making a case for hunger strikers' agency that is conducive to social and political change in Israeli prisons, and affirming that an important element of the hunger strikers’ struggle is the exercise of their human rights, including the right to represent themselves with their own voices
British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Sep 14, 2020
Women have regularly resorted to hunger strikes as tools of active resistance. Using feminist ant... more Women have regularly resorted to hunger strikes as tools of active resistance. Using feminist anthropology and interview data, this article investigates the gendered dimension of prison resistance. It focuses on hunger striking as a means to address harsh conditions in Israeli prisons, drawing on several other cases from Ireland to the United Sates to explore the gendered nature of resistance to political imprisonment. I argue that women hunger strikers are, active participants who weaponize their lives to resist the Israeli matrix of power and the patriarchal societal norms. There have been less women in number when compared to male prisoners, but women have been more effective in collectively conducting/coordinating their pioneering action and in learning new means of resistance. Through necroresistance (transforming their body to a site of resistance) and the strategy of sumud (Arabic for 'steadfastness'), women prisoners practice a duel and dual resistance of the colonial authorities and the patriarchal society-simultaneously reclaiming ownership of their bodies and lives from both systems, even if this means their death or exclusion from their society. This does not entail constituting their bodies as masculine (or de-feminizing themselves) so they are protected from sexual abuse. Rather, they insist on feminizing their experience and challenging gendered stereotypes of women as 'victims' with 'fragile bodies'. For them, gender is not a barrier but a motivational factor in which self-sacrifice to protest injustice is far superior to enduring the wrongs of political imprisonment. By turning their bodies into sites of resistance, they resist the necropolitical matrix of power (the use of social and political power to determine how prisoners might live or die) and assert individual feminine power against colonial and patriarchal injustices.
This chapter takes an indigenous approach to the use of language and translation in warzone areas... more This chapter takes an indigenous approach to the use of language and translation in warzone areas. Inspired by Sandy Grande (2004: IX), who opened her book with “I am a Quechua woman [...] not only who I am but also, in these ‘post-colonial’ times, an identity, I feel [...] obligated to claim,” I am also an indigenous woman, a Palestinian from the Gaza Strip. This is not only who I am but also an identity I feel increasingly obliged to assert in these times, when the advance of research methodologies, translation work, and epistemologies on Palestine are rooted in the imperialism seemingly inherent in Orientalist academia, journalism, and activism. These practices are still alive, advanced through a web of power relations that are part of colonialism’s power/knowledge construct with an ongoing, long history of “research through imperial eyes” (Smith 2012: 58; Hardan 2014: 64). This power/knowledge nexus continues to be implicit in the “contemporary coloniality” (Hardan 2014: 61) of literature on Palestine, with power relations inherent in imperialism and colonization often being the fundamental aspects of the argumentation. The continuous impact of coloniality takes different shapes and forms, and it is constantly used to undermine the colonized societies, through different means including language. To examine how language and translation are means of oppressing instead of representing in the Palestinian case, this chapter examines the knowledgeproduction discourse in the case of the Gaza Strip, since the other parts of Palestine are more widely accessed by scholars. It aims to achieve an alternative approach of knowledge production by indigenous people and understand how helpful it is to speak a different language in the war-zone and whether the indigenous point of view is central to the Orientalist discourse. The chapter also examines how the ongoing Israeli siege on the Gaza Strip is contributing to the process of knowledge production by allowing a certain type of people to enter and leave the Strip.
Biography, 2019
Although we only later came to realise its significance in our lives and for Palestine advocacy g... more Although we only later came to realise its significance in our lives and for Palestine advocacy generally, February 2017 turned out to be a watershed month for those of us on the frontlines of the Palestine advocacy movement within the UK. During this month, amid a wave of cancellations of events critical of Israel, we were attacked in the media, smeared as antisemitic, and both supported and censored by our universities. The following month was marked by unprecedented censorship of Israel-critical events across the UK. As we now know, these events were linked to the UK government's adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism. 1 While many communities and activists were affected by the event cancellations and the many different forms of censorship linked to the IHRA adoption, to our knowledge, we are the only UKbased academics who were directly targeted as a result of our written statements relating to Israel during this tumultuous year. Malaka was based at the University of Exeter, and completing her PhD on Palestinian hunger strikers at the time of the attack. Rebecca had recently moved to the University of Bristol, where she was a Reader (Associate Professor) in Translation Studies and Comparative Literature.
Global studies quarterly, Apr 1, 2023
This article draws from hundreds of interviews and conversations with survivors of wars and viole... more This article draws from hundreds of interviews and conversations with survivors of wars and violence in different contexts to show the limits of resilience. I bring together stories from my experiences talking with survivors across many countriesincluding Palestine, South Africa, Northern Ireland, Qatar, Jordan, and the United Kingdom. Through employing ethnographic and autoethnographic methods, I argue that resilience expectations may impose supernatural coping mechanisms on communities struggling with adversities, romanticize them as exemplary in enduring injustices, obscure their humanity, and normalize (structural) violence they continue to experience or reduce its severity. I question who benefits from an overemphasis on and financing of resilience, especially within (international) development organizations. The communities I spoke with all contend that resilience is not just a useless word but also a discourse, a way of thinking, and a policy implemented during difficulties. They emphasize that the cheap (re)production of them as extraordinary people, who are expected to endure suffering, is violent because it places the onus on them to be resilient on issues beyond their control while, often, ignoring layers of (structural) violence and subsequent traumas they face. As an alternative discourse to resilience, I propose a collective and caring approach that deals with root causes of violence instead of ignoring them. Cet article se fonde sur des centaines d'entretiens et de conversations avec des survivants de guerres et de violences dans différents contextes pour montrer les limites de la résilience. Je rassemble les histoires de mes discussions avec des survivants de nombreux pays, notamment la Palestine, l'Afrique du Sud, l'Irlande du Nord, le Qatar, la Jordanie et le Royaume-Uni. À l'aide de méthodes ethnographiques et autoethnographiques, j'affirme que les attentes de résilience sont susceptibles d'imposer des mécanismes de défense surnaturels à des communautés confrontées à des difficultés, de les romancer comme exemplaires par la façon dont elles endurent l'injustice, de masquer leur humanité, et de normaliser la violence (structurelle) qu'elles Malaka Shwaikh is an Associate Lecturer at the School of International Relations, University of St Andrews, where she teaches and researches prisons as spaces of power, resistance, and peacebuilding. Author's note: Thank you to the communities of Palestine, South Africa, Northern Ireland, Qatar, Jordan, and the United Kingdom whose generosity makes my fieldwork and this article possible. The team of Global Studies Quarterly has been particularly helpful in the review process-thank you to the anonymous reviewers and to Brent Steele and Jelena Subotic for their invaluable feedback. I am grateful to colleagues, students, and friends for their support in making this work a reality. Thank you to
Journal of Feminist Scholarship, 2023
Prisons are places of power and resistance. This article is based on original research material d... more Prisons are places of power and resistance. This article is based on original research material derived from Arabic, English, and Hebrew sources, including interviews with menstruating prisoners from Palestine, Northern Ireland, England, and the United States. I document and translate stories, including those of minors who had their first periods behind bars. I then show how several global prison structures fail to provide minimum support, from offering adequate sanitary products to accessing toilets and showers. I also ask what the menstruating body—and its treatment by prison guards and by prisoners—enables us to understand about the gendered realities of detention, and about the possibilities of resistance to those realities. The article argues that masculinization by the prison authorities through mechanisms of shaming and embarrassing of prisoners on periods is a crucial component of gendered control over bodies and spirits in detention. I examine the prison journey from interrogation rooms, court spaces, and prison cells, to the use of prison vehicles to transport prisoners between prisons and to/from courts, and “health care” spaces. I have structured the article around this
spatialization to emphasize how gendered control goes beyond one space, and how all spaces illuminate different aspects of gendered control and masculinization. A key contribution in this article can be put as follows: while prisons use menstruation to consolidate gendered control over prisoners’ bodies, prisoners use those same bodies to resist such control not only of the prison authorities in question but also of detention more broadly. I conclude by making a case for prison abolition, paying particular
attention to the nuances of prisons in settings of ongoing coloniality and authoritarianism.
Global Studies Quarterly
This article draws from hundreds of interviews and conversations with survivors of wars and viole... more This article draws from hundreds of interviews and conversations with survivors of wars and violence in different contexts to show the limits of resilience. I bring together stories from my experiences talking with survivors across many countries—including Palestine, South Africa, Northern Ireland, Qatar, Jordan, and the United Kingdom. Through employing ethnographic and autoethnographic methods, I argue that resilience expectations may impose supernatural coping mechanisms on communities struggling with adversities, romanticize them as exemplary in enduring injustices, obscure their humanity, and normalize (structural) violence they continue to experience or reduce its severity. I question who benefits from an overemphasis on and financing of resilience, especially within (international) development organizations. The communities I spoke with all contend that resilience is not just a useless word but also a discourse, a way of thinking, and a policy implemented during difficulties....
Are prison hunger strikes a means of liberation or harbingers of death? Are they passive or activ... more Are prison hunger strikes a means of liberation or harbingers of death? Are they passive or active means of resistance? This thesis offers the first systematic examination of Palestinian prisoners’ hunger strikes, from their inception in 1968 to 2018. Adopting a historical and an ethnographical approach, I trace the demands of hunger strikers, the outcomes of their action, and the impact of the political reality on their struggle. Taking a mainly bottom-up, qualitative approach to resistance and deriving data largely from in-depth interviews, participants’ observations, and textual analysis, the examination of existing scholarship, which assimilates hunger strikes into a narrative of passive non-violent resistance, reveals its mismatch with the Palestinian reality of prolonged anti-colonial prison hunger strikes. I argue that the equating of hunger strikes with passivity on the part of the oppressed implicitly dehumanises them. Hunger strikers are, rather, active participants and, like all other organised, active political protesters, they have political objectives that they want to achieve, power structures that they want to challenge, and alternative ones that they want to create. Indeed, this research counters such a passive narrative by starting from the local setting (the Israeli prison cell) and then proposes a contextualised approach to the politics of prison resistance. I develop a scholarly approach to pragmatic, active nonviolent prison-based resistance which demonstrates that prisoners weaponise their lives through hunger striking, faced with only one of two choices: freedom or death. This research contributes to and makes a critical intervention within prison hunger strikes. I show how prisons are spaces of resistance: they function as educational, political, and anti-colonial sites where the power of the Israeli prison authorities can be challenged. Palestinian hunger strikers have succeeded in achieving a range of demands from improvement of imprisonment conditions to obtaining freedom for themselves and others. Success or failure, however, is not easily defined in the Israeli prison context since the outcomes of Palestinian hunger strikes are hard to measure. The factors which can determine this success are not absolute because external influences, especially resulting from the peace-process and the internal division, might come into play. As a Palestinian woman, I have been granted access to a range of prison scenarios that have been obscured in prior scholarship as well as in media headlines. These scenarios helped me in making a case for hunger strikers' agency that is conducive to social and political change in Israeli prisons, and affirming that an important element of the hunger strikers’ struggle is the exercise of their human rights, including the right to represent themselves with their own voices
The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Activism, 2020
This chapter takes an indigenous approach to the use of language and translation in warzone areas... more This chapter takes an indigenous approach to the use of language and translation in warzone areas. Inspired by Sandy Grande (2004: IX), who opened her book with “I am a Quechua woman [...] not only who I am but also, in these ‘post-colonial’ times, an identity, I feel [...] obligated to claim,” I am also an indigenous woman, a Palestinian from the Gaza Strip. This is not only who I am but also an identity I feel increasingly obliged to assert in these times, when the advance of research methodologies, translation work, and epistemologies on Palestine are rooted in the imperialism seemingly inherent in Orientalist academia, journalism, and activism. These practices are still alive, advanced through a web of power relations that are part of colonialism’s power/knowledge construct with an ongoing, long history of “research through imperial eyes” (Smith 2012: 58; Hardan 2014: 64). This power/knowledge nexus continues to be implicit in the “contemporary coloniality” (Hardan 2014: 61) of literature on Palestine, with power relations inherent in imperialism and colonization often being the fundamental aspects of the argumentation. The continuous impact of coloniality takes different shapes and forms, and it is constantly used to undermine the colonized societies, through different means including language. To examine how language and translation are means of oppressing instead of representing in the Palestinian case, this chapter examines the knowledgeproduction discourse in the case of the Gaza Strip, since the other parts of Palestine are more widely accessed by scholars. It aims to achieve an alternative approach of knowledge production by indigenous people and understand how helpful it is to speak a different language in the war-zone and whether the indigenous point of view is central to the Orientalist discourse. The chapter also examines how the ongoing Israeli siege on the Gaza Strip is contributing to the process of knowledge production by allowing a certain type of people to enter and leave the Strip.
Biography, 2019
Although we only later came to realise its significance in our lives and for Palestine advocacy g... more Although we only later came to realise its significance in our lives and for Palestine advocacy generally, February 2017 turned out to be a watershed month for those of us on the frontlines of the Palestine advocacy movement within the UK. During this month, amid a wave of cancellations of events critical of Israel, we were attacked in the media, smeared as antisemitic, and both supported and censored by our universities. The following month was marked by unprecedented censorship of Israel-critical events across the UK. As we now know, these events were linked to the UK government's adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism. 1 While many communities and activists were affected by the event cancellations and the many different forms of censorship linked to the IHRA adoption, to our knowledge, we are the only UKbased academics who were directly targeted as a result of our written statements relating to Israel during this tumultuous year. Malaka was based at the University of Exeter, and completing her PhD on Palestinian hunger strikers at the time of the attack. Rebecca had recently moved to the University of Bristol, where she was a Reader (Associate Professor) in Translation Studies and Comparative Literature.
British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 2020
Using feminist anthropology and interview data, this article investigates the gendered dimension ... more Using feminist anthropology and interview data, this article investigates the gendered dimension of hunger striking in Israeli prisons. It draws on other cases from Ireland to the United States to ...
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Articles by Malaka Shwaikh
Papers by Malaka Shwaikh
spatialization to emphasize how gendered control goes beyond one space, and how all spaces illuminate different aspects of gendered control and masculinization. A key contribution in this article can be put as follows: while prisons use menstruation to consolidate gendered control over prisoners’ bodies, prisoners use those same bodies to resist such control not only of the prison authorities in question but also of detention more broadly. I conclude by making a case for prison abolition, paying particular
attention to the nuances of prisons in settings of ongoing coloniality and authoritarianism.
spatialization to emphasize how gendered control goes beyond one space, and how all spaces illuminate different aspects of gendered control and masculinization. A key contribution in this article can be put as follows: while prisons use menstruation to consolidate gendered control over prisoners’ bodies, prisoners use those same bodies to resist such control not only of the prison authorities in question but also of detention more broadly. I conclude by making a case for prison abolition, paying particular
attention to the nuances of prisons in settings of ongoing coloniality and authoritarianism.
How do prison hunger strikers achieve demands? How do they stay connected with the outside world in a space that is designed to cut them off from that world? And why would a prisoner put their lives at risk by refusing to eat or, at times, drink? This research shows that sometimes prisoners’ need for dignity (karamah) and freedom (hurriya) trump their hunger pangs and thirst.
Prison Hunger Strikes in Palestine evaluates the process of hunger striking, including the repressive actions prisoners encounter, and the negotiation process. It analyzes differences and similarities between individual and collective strikes, and evaluates the role and impact of solidarity actions from outside the prison walls.
The work’s critical and grassroots understanding of prison hunger strikes fully centers the voices of hunger strikers. The analysis results in actionable takeaways that will be as useful to prison activists as they will be to their allies around the world.
work, and epistemologies on Palestine are rooted in the imperialism seemingly inherent in Orientalist academia, journalism, and activism. These practices are still alive, advanced through a web of power relations that are part of colonialism’s power/knowledge construct with an ongoing, long history of “research through imperial eyes” (Smith 2012: 58; Hardan 2014: 64).
This power/knowledge nexus continues to be implicit in the “contemporary
coloniality” (Hardan 2014: 61) of literature on Palestine, with power relations inherent in imperialism and colonization often being the fundamental aspects of the argumentation. The continuous impact of coloniality takes different shapes and forms, and it is constantly used to undermine the colonized societies, through different means including language. To examine how language and translation are means of oppressing instead of representing in the Palestinian case, this chapter examines the knowledgeproduction discourse in the case of the Gaza Strip, since the other parts of Palestine are more widely accessed by scholars. It aims to achieve an alternative approach of knowledge production by indigenous people and understand how helpful it is to speak a
different language in the war-zone and whether the indigenous point of view is central to the Orientalist discourse. The chapter also examines how the ongoing Israeli siege on the Gaza Strip is contributing to the process of knowledge production by allowing a certain type of people to enter and leave the Strip.