Book Cover: Displacement and Erasure in Palestine

Biography

Journal of Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2015

This article examines how Palestinians in France, Sweden and the UK negotiate, mobilise and/or resist, and ultimately problematise, notions of statelessness as a concept and as a marker of identity. Centralising Palestinians’ conceptualisations in this manner – including accounts which directly challenge academics’ and policy-makers’ definitions of the problem of, and solution to, statelessness - is particularly important given that statelessness emerges as both a condition and a label which erase the ability to speak, and be heard. The article draws on the narratives of 46 Palestinians to examine perceptions of statelessness as a marker of rightlessess, home(land)lessness and voicelessness. It then explores statelessness through the paradigm of the ‘threshold’, reflecting both on interviewees’ ambiguity towards this label, status and condition, and the extent to which even Palestinians who hold citizenship remain ‘on the threshold of statelessness’. It concludes by reflecting on interviewees’ rejection of a label which is imposed upon them ‘from a distance’ via bureaucratic processes which reproduce, rather than redress, processes of erasure and dispossession.

Arab Studies Quarterly

Anthropological Quarterly, 2019

Interventions, 2006

The Oslo agreements proposed a two-state solution for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict: a Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza existing alongside Israel. However, the refugees' right of return and claims to land and property expropriated by Israel during the 1948 were removed from the equation, although they represent the core issues in the conflict. Based on the territorial divisions that preceded the 1967 war, or the 'green line', the agreements implicitly rendered the 1948 war and its consequences for the majority of the Palestinian population a non-negotiable historical reality. In a manner of speaking, the crowning of the 'state' (PA) dethroned the nation. In this paper, I review these processes in which refugees have been dismissed, and relegated as relics of an unredeemable past and not as subjects of history in the past-present and whose participation is fundamental in seeking a resolution to the conflict. Based on anthropological research in the region, I argue that, despite the passage of time, refugees continue to hold on to their rights and dream of return, albeit reshaped by the contingencies of exile. I conclude by suggesting that the Israeli state and society must take political, legal and practical responsibility for the refugee problem. This implies that the right of return, decolonization and de-Zionization are inseparable processes.

Antipode , 2023

Urban displacement is receiving growing visibility within urban studies. However, most literature centres on the logic of late capitalism and tends to neglect colonial history and local resistance to displacement. This paper takes an alternative path: it relates (a) the history of colonialism and ethnic cleansing of the city of Jaffa with (b) the present-day gentrification and displacement caused by neoliberal urbanism. To unpack this entanglement, the article focuses on political city walking tours led by Inter nally Displaced Palestinians in Jaffa, alongside a broader repertoire of urban subaltern tactics to reclaim it-ranging from community meetings to more overtly politicised acts of protest and initiatives to disrupt gentrification. The article therefore advances debates on urban displacement and urban citizenship mobilisation through the lens of post colonial theories, and by adopting a participatory interdisciplinary approach-from a novel perspective that centres local knowledge, lived experiences, and grassroots activism.

Refugee camps and enclaves share a conceptual family resemblance. In Palestine, what endows these forms of confinement with specificity is their deployment in a modern and protracted colonial context. This article asks how each speaks to the other experientially and theoretically. Further, how are they entangled with historical processes, intent and experience? Each period in Palestinian displacement entails particular immobilizing physical structures and administrative procedures. Can we compare enclaves and camps, and what are the limitations of comparison? What sorts of subjectivities emerge in these spaces? Questions are proposed about temporality, bare life, mobility, discipline and bio-power, and subjectivities. Enclaves compel thinking beyond the 'bare life' sometimes associated with refugee camps to explore other ways of being simultaneously inside and outside a state. Enclaves exist if a grey zone of legal and political indeterminacy that renders life in them is precarious.

Urban Planning, 2021

In this article, we aim to identify the actors and unpack the discourses and administrative practices used to increase current mobilities of people (Jewish immigrants, investors, tourist visitors, and evicted residents) and explore their impact on the continuity of the settler-colonial regime in pre-1948 Palestinian urban spaces which became part of Israel. To render these dynamics visible, we explore the case of Acre-a pre-1948 Palestinian city located in the northwest of Israel which during the last three decades has been receiving about one hundred Jewish immigrant families annually. Our findings reveal a dramatic change in the attempts to judaise the city: Mobility policies through neoliberal means have not only been instrumental in continuing the processes of displacement and dispossession of the Palestinians in this so-called 'mixed city,' but have also recruited new actors and created new techniques and opportunities to accelerate the judaisation of the few Palestinian spaces left. Moreover, these new mobility policies normalise judaisation of the city, both academically and practically, through globally trendy paradigms and discourses. Reframing migration-led development processes in cities within a settler-colonialism approach enables us to break free from post-colonial analytical frameworks and re-centre the native-settler relations as well as the immigrants-settlers' role in territorial control and displacement of the natives in the neoliberal era.

2021

Each story in the collection Palestine +100 (Basma Ghalayini, ed, 2019) takes place in 2048, or 100 years following the collective trauma of the Nakba (when Palestinians were forced to flee their land upon creation of the State of Israel). However, analysis reveals that this event has not been relegated to the past but continues to reverberate through successive generations, resulting in a uniquely Palestinian postmemory. Science fiction, with its future orientation, has not been popular with Palestinian authors whose literature is largely characterized by allegiance to the past. Palestine +100 is unique in that the intentional framing compels writers to contend with a future imaginary. This results in stories dominated by spatiotemporal (dis)ruptures: characters inhabit parallel spaces and simulations; time moves backwards or stands still; and the notion of "return," which looms large in the Palestinian psyche, is digitized in innovative and unique ways. The article argues that these stories illuminate a narrative present (which, for the reader and writer, is the near future) characterized by profound absence and the alienated suspension of identity. This is a time that lacks meaningful existence in light of a past that has not passed. In such a void, memory and, by extension, history become the enemy. Consequently, characters are trapped between a duty to remember and a desire to forget. This tension illustrates an attempt to sever the inter-and transgenerational link of trauma that is produced by the structure of postmemory.