Suzanne Schneider, Mandatory Separation: Religion, Education, and Mass Politics in Palestine (New Texts Out Now)

Suzanne Schneider, Mandatory Separation: Religion, Education, and Mass Politics in Palestine (New Texts Out Now)

Suzanne Schneider, Mandatory Separation: Religion, Education, and Mass Politics in Palestine (New Texts Out Now)

By : Suzanne Schneider

Suzanne Schneider, Mandatory Separation: Religion, Education, and Mass Politics in Palestine (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018).

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Suzanne Schneider (SS): I’ve always been fascinated by the history of what are often assumed to be timeless constellations of religious belief or practice. There is a widespread tendency to project onto religions a stability and historical consistency that they lack, and I think the appropriate scholarly response is work that highlights religion as a site of change and contestation. However, I found that many histories of the Middle East took religion for granted as something that meant the same thing in, for example, the mid-nineteenth century, as it does now. Consequently, in Mandatory Separation I wanted to explore what exactly made something “religious” within Jewish and Islamic circles in late Ottoman and early twentieth century Palestine, and how that designation came to matter in material terms. In good dialectical fashion, I also wanted to attend to how material conditions—say, the need to rationalize Palestinian agriculture—contributed to the re-definition of what types of human behaviors and activities were counted among the religious. I found this all the more necessary in light of the common assumption that Zionist and Palestinian nationalist movements were largely secular in makeup. In fact, my research has shown that educators and leaders within these movements were interested in constructing new forms of political identity that consciously blurred the religious/secular divide.

What drew me to religious education in particular were the parallel lines of thinking about “old-fashioned” forms of religious learning I found within the writings of Jewish and Arab-Muslim reformers active in the Haskalah and Nahda, respectively. Jewish and Muslims educators in Palestine were heirs to these modernist traditions, though they did not accept their positions across the board. Mandate Palestine therefore offered a unique context to put these modernist lines of thinking in conversation with one another, while also including the added dimension of a British colonial administration bearing its own ideas about the proper role of religion in society. I found these cross currents endlessly fascinating.

J:  What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?

Is religion about faith or practice, individual salvation or communal responsibility? How is the religious sphere demarcated vis-à-vis material or social life? What are the political uses of religion, and what role do schools play therein?

SS: I would like to think that the questions I raise in this book—informed by a close reading of sources ranging from archival documents to textbooks and short stories—are still quite fundamental: Is religion about faith or practice, individual salvation or communal responsibility? How is the religious sphere demarcated vis-à-vis material or social life? What are the political uses of religion, and what role do schools play therein? How do modern educational methods and pedagogy not just convey, but also actually shape, what we understand religion to be? Given this set of concerns, Mandatory Separation is not an institutional history of a particular type of schooling but rather a conceptually-driven study that tries to attend to the points of continuity and rupture among Palestine’s disparate, and increasingly antagonistic, communities. 

This work engages three primary bodies of scholarship, borrowing insights from religious studies, Middle East history, and science and technology studies, in particular the work of Bruno Latour. The latter may seem to be a bit of an outlier, but I was inspired by his idea of the modern constitution (developed in We Have Never Been Modern), and put my own gloss on it in order to conceptualize British colonial claims about the proper relationship between religion, education, and politics. From there, I developed the idea of a politics of denial, i.e. the expression of political power through policies and convention that deny they have anything to do with politics. The politics of denial was not, mind you, simply a feature of an earlier colonial period. On the contrary, I think we find traces of it wherever liberal claims of neutrality, best practices, etc., seem to appear.

J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

SS: Well, given that this is my first book, I might flip this question on its head slightly and comment on how my current work builds on it. Writing Mandatory Separation drove home the fact that there is extraordinary discursive power deployed in labeling something “religious” (e.g. irrational, faith-driven, exclusionary, etc.) versus “secular” (the realm of rational politics, natural laws, tolerance and other civic virtues), and this is an insight that is crucial to my current project on religious violence. In short, the labels we deploy matter very much because they do the essential work of sustaining a sense of distinction between “our” violence and “theirs.” Nowhere is this more evident than in our current gun-crazy America, where figures like Omar Mateen threaten to erode the boundary between psychologically unstable mass shooters and religious fanatics.

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

SS: Well, speaking aspirationally, I hope that Mandatory Separation will be useful to anyone interested in the intersection of religion and politics in the modern Middle East, be they fellow academics, general readers, or policy makers. We are used to associating religious movements today with the most extreme forms of radicalism, so I think it’s particularly important to note that only a century ago religion was assumed by many to march hand in hand with political and social stability. My hope is that by historicizing religion, we might also recognize that there is nothing fixed about the current alignment of forces. The corollary is that religious traditions might also contribute to creating the conditions for human flourishing in the future.

I also hope that the book will appeal to educators and those interested in education policy more broadly, particularly as greater attention is turned to the role of schools and textbooks in perpetuating conflicts or promoting increasingly narrow versions of “true religion” (seen most recently in Saudi Arabia, but also in Israel/Palestine). Finally, I hope readers with an interest in colonialism—and frankly, politics more broadly—will find the politics of denial a useful concept for understanding certain forms of power, and perhaps will be able to further elaborate on the idea.

J: What other projects are you working on now?

SS: I am currently working on a new project about religion and violence. It focuses specifically on the proliferation of militant groups that have, since the 1980’s, appealed to Islamic frameworks to justify their activities. Much has been written since the attacks of September 11, 2001 on either jihad in general or specific networks (e.g. al-Qaeda, ISIS, etc.), but I’m interested in a different set of questions than these works usually attend to. In historical terms, I think we need to ask “why now?” Meaning, what about the last four decades has proved so nourishing to these forms of violence that wasn’t present in, for example, 1850 or 1950? This is also an important corrective to those who argue that such violence is an essential part of Islam, because we can empirically demonstrate just how unique our present era is.

Beyond pushing back against this essentialist narrative—which posits an unbroken chain linking contemporary jihad to the classical period of Islam—the study will examine the question through three overlapping lenses: agency, capital, and spectacle. The analysis is more materialist than Mandatory Separation, but my goal is that it will be a capacious materialism in keeping with the best of the Frankfurt School tradition.

J: To what extent, and in what way, do you think this book speaks to the ongoing conflict in Israel and Palestine?

SS: From the rise of Hamas to the messianic rhetoric of certain Jewish settlers, I think that many observers have been surprised by the resurgence of religion as a political force in the conflict. The research I did for this book has led to believe that such shock is unjustified, and really only makes sense if you accept the traditional narrative about the conflict as one between two nationalist movements – wherein “nationalist” is defined in extremely narrow terms as essentially secular. Yet, the thing about making instrumental use of religious traditions—which was a feature of both Palestinian nationalist and Zionist schools during the Mandate Period—is that you don’t have control over the way that future generations will relate to them. Zionist educators might speak of relating to the Bible as literature, for example, but by making it the cornerstone of a nationalist Hebrew education, they also created the possibility for drastically different interpretations. Such interpretations (e.g. the divine right to “Greater Israel”) themselves are not new; what’s novel is that they have become tied to the educational bureaucracy of a state, and harnessed for the sake of specific political and military aims.

 

Excerpt from Chapter 1, “Religious Education in the Modern Age”

Long a site of crossroads and pilgrimage, Palestine in the early twentieth century nurtured educational ideas and practices that often, though not always, originated elsewhere. Whether it was the latest developments in German educational theory, Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s efforts to develop the empirical sciences in India, or the “lessons” derived from Egyptian schooling, educators of all stripes tried to assimilate global insights and developments into their local contexts. Looking more narrowly at Islamic and Jewish education, we must begin by appreciating the extent to which developments in Palestine were linked to debates and processes that began several decades earlier in places like Berlin, Cairo, and Istanbul. After all, education reform was a key tenet not only of colonial regimes but of modernist platforms propagated by Jewish “enlighteners” (maskilim) in the late eighteenth century and, beginning in the early nineteenth century, by Muslim reformers spread from South Asia to North Africa. In general terms, both movements sprang from a sense of the inadequacy of the existing religious and social order to meet the challenges of the modern world – the latter being represented by the cultural, economic, and political might of western Europe. 

While bearing their individual nuances, which are too expansive to detail here, it is nonetheless true that these reform projects were characterized by an overarching concern with the narrowness of a traditional curricula centered on the study of religious texts. It was, reformers claimed, the neglect of subjects like philosophy and the natural sciences that had caused communities to sink into a state of subordination--either literally colonized in the case of millions of Muslims or unfit to join the communion of European civilization in the case of those Jews petitioning for membership. In both contexts, reformers were confronted with long traditions of communal education, and their efforts were often directed at the transformation of existing schools—which were increasingly viewed as the source of moral corruption and cultural decay—rather than the ab initio creation of secular public ones. In many instances, the core of this reforming impulse involved diversifying the customary curricula to incorporate the empirical sciences, foreign languages and literatures, and the emerging body of European political and social thought. This chapter surveys these overlapping geographies and modernizing impulses, the legacies of which would inform the work of Jewish and Arab-Muslim educators in Palestine as they looked to construct—though not without key changes in orientation—their respective visions for the role of religious traditions in the age of mass politics.

Even as we are attentive to certain points of continuity, we must also appreciate the novelty inherent in modern religious education under state or quasi-state supervision and, correspondingly, question the sense of timelessness that is often ascribed to religious learning. For instance, in his 1965 book Education in Israel, Joseph Bentwich, a former assistant director of education for the Government of Palestine, offered a conventional view of Jewish education through the ages: the medieval school (ḥeder) gave way to modern ones founded by European maskilim, which in turn yielded to the Zionist school system and that of the State of Israel. Extending the historical arc back in time, Bentwich explained that Jewish education for boys already existed on a widespread, if not universal, level by the fourth century CE. A parallel account of the history of Islamic education written by Abdul Latif Tibawi—who was, incidentally, Bentwich’s colleague in the Department of Education during the Mandate period—appeared in 1972. Though in many ways a thoughtful and nuanced account, the text nonetheless presents a similar evolutionary trajectory that links the medieval madrasa of al-Ghazali’s time to the educational reforms of Muhammad ‘Ali and the eventual founding of national school systems in postcolonial Arab states.

As evidenced in these works, it can be tempting to narrate the history of Jewish and Islamic education from a communal to state concern as an unbroken chain. Yet we would be well served by pausing to question this presumed continuity between classical, medieval, and modern forms of schooling. Certain features, such as the texts studied, seem to support the argument that contemporary Jewish and Islamic schools are the natural progeny of those that preceded them. Yet these narratives seem to take for granted what are, to my mind, radical differences in terms of the purpose, structure, and content of education that render the modern school something very different from the medieval ḥeder or kuttāb. As Jonathan Berkey has argued in his study of the madrasa, education in the premodern world was conceived of as “a pillar of stability rather than as a force for change.” Thus, while institutionalized learning had a long history in both Jewish and Islamic contexts, it is doubtful whether what occurred in these places was “education” in our contemporary sense of the term. In approaching religious education in twentieth-century Palestine, we must therefore first appreciate the extent to which it represented a modern innovation despite obvious points of continuity with premodern practices.

With this in mind, I argue that the growing consensus throughout the nineteenth century of education as a state, rather than merely communal, concern had significant implications in regard to creating institutions for Jewish and Islamic learning in the years that followed. Appreciating the novelty inherent in mass, publicly funded religious instruction requires us to take stock of three important conceptual pivots: first, the shifting relationship between state and subject; second, the hardening boundaries between “religious” and “secular” concerns and the corresponding interests associated with each; and third, the rise of mass politics, which I argue provided opportunities to link religious knowledge to political activism in new ways. I deal with each of them in turn, as they collectively provide the theoretical foundation for my discussion of discrete educational practices in Mandate Palestine. 

The idea that the primary purpose of education is moral fashioning, or in a more contemporary idiom, character development, has found widespread acceptance in contexts ranging from classical Athens to medieval Baghdad and contemporary America. That the responsibility for such education was historically conceived of as belonging to the child’s immediate community is also clear enough. In the Jewish context, the catalyst for education can be traced to the biblical commandment for a father to instruct his children in the laws of Israel. The modern Hebrew term for education, inuch, does not appear in the Hebrew Bible; there, words derived from the same root mean ”to dedicate,” “to initiate” or (less frequently, as in Proverbs 22:6), “to train.” By contrast, one “learns” Torah (from lilmod), and even in contemporary usage the act of studying Jewish texts is referred to as “learning.” Given this etymology, I prefer conceptualizing inuch as a form of initiation, suggesting that it was through inuch that the child assumed his full role in the community. If one remembers that learning to publicly read the Torah was a necessary stage of preparation for the bar mitzvah (literally, one who has reached the age of obligation for religious commandments, i.e., adulthood), the notion ofinuch as a form of initiation is even more compelling.

The system of learning that Jewish modernists would later denounce—with the ḥeder and talmud torah at its base and yeshiva at its apex—was already well established by the medieval period. The ḥeder (literally “room”) was a private school, run by an individual teacher to whom parents paid a fee. Children traditionally began at age three by studying the Hebrew alphabet and quickly moved onto the Torah, the Mishnah (the basis of the oral law), and the practical halachot (laws) that they would need to function in the community in which they lived. The talmud torah was identical to the ḥeder in terms of subject matter but was maintained by the community at large to serve children whose parents could not afford the fees associated with the latter. Only the most gifted students continued their studies beyond the elementary stage in the yeshiva, where learning and debating the legal disputations contained in the Talmud consumed the bulk of their energy.

Within the Islamic textual tradition, one can point to numerous hadiths that implore the believer to educate himself or herself. Famously included among the sayings of Muhammad are, “The quest for learning is a duty incumbent upon every Muslim, male and female,” “Wisdom is the goal of the believer and he must seek it irrespective of its source,” and “Seek knowledge even if it be in China” (a weak hadith, though this has rarely stopped reformers from quoting it). The maktab or kuttāb were communal schools in which the child learned to read, recite, and write using the Qur’an as textbook – the terms maktab and kuttāb being related to the Arabic verb “to write” or “to inscribe.” Pointing to the distinction between these institutions and the modern school in his study of colonial Egypt, Timothy Mitchell has argued, “Education, as an isolated process in which children acquire a set of instructions and self-discipline, was born in Egypt in the nineteenth century. Before that, there was no distinct location or institution where such a process was carried on, no body of adults for whom it was a profession, and no word for it in the language.” Mitchell highlights that education in this modern sense (tarbiyya) must be differentiated from learning that “occurred within the practice of the particular profession,” which was more akin to a system of apprenticeship.

Until the early modern period, institutionalized learning in most Jewish and Islamic communities focused on acquiring literacy through the study of canonical texts, coupled with a practical understanding of the behavioral codes that ordered communal life. In its idealized form, education of this type was an inquiry into the sublime, and practically, it served as a process of socialization into the community in which the child lived. For example, no business partnership or marriage would be arranged without the parties reciting al-fātiḥah, the opening sura of the Qur’an. Similarly, it is hard to classify familiarity with the laws of kashrut, or Sabbath observance, as merely intellectual exercises—or worse yet, “religious” duties—within the corporate structure of the medieval Jewish community. The fact that the ḥeder and kuttāb were useful to the communities they served was often overlooked in the modern period as Jewish and Muslim reformers came to echo the colonial distain for “literary” knowledge and to advocate an expansion of traditional curricula to include “practical” subjects. Yet it is likely that the narrow curriculum in these schools had less to do with an innate opposition to utility than with a unique understanding of what education as a practice actually entailed. 

[Excerpted from Mandatory Separation: Religion, Education, and Mass Politics in Palestine, by Suzanne Schneider, (c) 2018 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University (Published by Stanford University Press)].

 

New Texts Out Now: Mandy Turner and Cherine Hussein, guest eds. "Israel-Palestine after Oslo: Mapping Transformations in a Time of Deepening Crisis." Special Issue of Conflict, Security & Development

Conflict, Security and Development, Volume 15, No. 5 (December 2015) Special issue: "Israel-Palestine after Oslo: Mapping Transformations in a Time of Deepening Crisis," Guest Editors: Mandy Turner and Cherine Hussein.

Jadaliyya (J): What made you compile this volume?

Mandy Turner (MT): Both the peace process and the two-state solution are dead. Despite more than twenty years of negotiations, Israel’s occupation, colonization and repression continue–and the political and geographical fragmentation of the Palestinian people is proceeding apace.

This is not news, nor is it surprising to any keen observer of the situation. But what is surprising–and thus requires explanation – is the resilience of the Oslo framework and paradigm: both objectively and subjectively. It operates objectively as a straitjacket by trapping Palestinians in economic and security arrangements that are designed to ensure stabilization and will not to lead to sovereignty or a just and sustainable solution. And it operates subjectively as a straitjacket by shutting out discussion of alternative ways of understanding the situation and ways out of the impasse. The persistence of this framework that is focused on conflict management and stabilization, is good for Israel but bad for Palestinians.

The Oslo peace paradigm–of a track-one, elite-level, negotiated two-state solution–is therefore in crisis. And yet it is entirely possible that the current situation could continue for a while longer–particularly given the endorsement and support it enjoys from the major Western donors and the “international community,” as well as the fact that there has been no attempt to develop an alternative. The immediate short-term future is therefore bleak.

Guided by these observations, this special issue sought to undertake two tasks. The first task was to analyze the perceptions underpinning the Oslo framework and paradigm as well as some of the transformations instituted by its implementation: why is it so resilient, what has it created? The second task, which follows on from the first, was then to ask: how can we reframe our understanding of what is happening, what are some potential alternatives, and who is arguing and mobilizing for them?

These questions and themes grew out of a number of conversations with early-career scholars – some based at the Kenyon Institute in East Jerusalem, and some based in the occupied Palestinian territory and elsewhere. These conversations led to two interlinked panels at the International Studies Association annual convention in Toronto, Canada, in March 2014. To have two panels accepted on “conflict transformation and resistance in Palestine” at such a conventional international relations conference with (at the time unknown) early-career scholars is no mean feat. The large and engaged audience we received at these panels – with some very established names coming along (one of whom contributed to this special issue) – convinced us that this new stream of scholars and scholarship should have an outlet.  

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures do the articles address?

MT: The first half of the special issue analyzes how certain problematic assumptions shaped the Oslo framework, and how the Oslo framework in turn shaped the political, economic and territorial landscape.

Virginia Tilley’s article focuses on the paradigm of conflict resolution upon which the Oslo Accords were based, and calls for a re-evaluation of what she argues are the two interlinked central principles underpinning its worldview: internationally accepted notions of Israeli sovereignty; and the internationally accepted idea that the “conflict” is essentially one between two peoples–the “Palestinian people” and the “Jewish people”. Through her critical interrogation of these two “common sense” principles, Tilley proposes that the “conflict” be reinterpreted as an example of settler colonialism, and, as a result of this, recommends an alternative conflict resolution model based on a paradigm shift away from an ethno-nationalist division of the polity towards a civic model of the nation.

Tariq Dana unpacks another central plank of the Oslo paradigm–that of promoting economic relations between Israel and the OPT. He analyses this through the prism of “economic peace” (particularly the recent revival of theories of “capitalist peace”), whose underlying assumptions are predicated on the perceived superiority of economic approaches over political approaches to resolving conflict. Dana argues that there is a symbiosis between Israeli strategies of “economic peace” and recent Palestinian “statebuilding strategies” (referred to as Fayyadism), and that both operate as a form of pacification and control because economic cooperation leaves the colonial relationship unchallenged.

The political landscape in the OPT has been transformed by the Oslo paradigm, particularly by the creation of the Palestinian Authority (PA). Alaa Tartir therefore analyses the basis, agenda and trajectory of the PA, particularly its post-2007 state building strategy. By focusing on the issue of local legitimacy and accountability, and based on fieldwork in two sites in the occupied West Bank (Balata and Jenin refugee camps), Tartir concludes that the main impact of the creation of the PA on ordinary people’s lives has been the strengthening of authoritarian control and the hijacking of any meaningful visions of Palestinian liberation.

The origin of the administrative division between the West Bank and Gaza Strip is the focus of Tareq Baconi’s article. He charts how Hamas’s initial opposition to the Oslo Accords and the PA was transformed over time, leading to its participation (and success) in the 2006 legislative elections. Baconi argues that it was the perceived demise of the peace process following the collapse of the Camp David discussions that facilitated this change. But this set Hamas on a collision course with Israel and the international community, which ultimately led to the conflict between Hamas and Fateh, and the administrative division, which continues to exist.

The special issue thereafter focuses, in the second section, on alternatives and resistance to Oslo’s transformations.

Cherine Hussein’s article charts the re-emergence of the single-state idea in opposition to the processes of separation unleashed ideologically and practically that were codified in the Oslo Accords. Analysing it as both a movement of resistance and as a political alternative to Oslo, while recognizing that it is currently largely a movement of intellectuals (particularly of diaspora Palestinians and Israelis), Hussein takes seriously its claim to be a more just and liberating alternative to the two-state solution.

My article highlights the work of a small but dedicated group of anti-Zionist Jewish-Israeli activists involved in two groups: Zochrot and Boycott from Within. Both groups emerged in the post-Second Intifada period, which was marked by deep disillusionment with the Oslo paradigm. This article unpacks the alternative – albeit marginalized – analysis, solution and route to peace proposed by these groups through the application of three concepts: hegemony, counter-hegemony and praxis. The solution, argue the activists, lies in Israel-Palestine going through a process of de-Zionization and decolonization, and the process of achieving this lies in actions in solidarity with Palestinians.

This type of solidarity action is the focus of the final article by Suzanne Morrison, who analyses the “We Divest” campaign, which is the largest divestment campaign in the US and forms part of the wider Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Through attention to their activities and language, Morrison shows how “We Divest”, with its networked, decentralized, grassroots and horizontal structure, represents a new way of challenging Israel’s occupation and the suppression of Palestinian rights.

The two parts of the special issue are symbiotic: the critique and alternative perspectives analyzed in part two are responses to the issues and problems identified in part one.

J: How does this volume connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

MT: My work focuses on the political economy of donor intervention (which falls under the rubric of “peacebuilding”) in the OPT, particularly a critique of the Oslo peace paradigm and framework. This is a product of my broader conceptual and historical interest in the sociology of intervention as a method of capitalist expansion and imperial control (as explored in “The Politics of International Intervention: the Tyranny of Peace”, co-edited with Florian Kuhn, Routledge, 2016), and how post-conflict peacebuilding and development agendas are part of this (as explored in “Whose Peace: Critical Perspectives on the Political Economy of Peacebuilding”, co-edited with Michael Pugh and Neil Cooper (PalgraveMacmillan, 2008).  

My first book on Palestine (co-edited with Omar Shweiki), Decolonizing Palestinian Political Economy: De-development and Beyond (PalgraveMacmillan, 2014), was a collection of essays by experts in their field, of the political-economic experience of different sections of the Palestinian community. The book, however, aimed to reunite these individual experiences into one historical political-economy narrative of a people experiencing a common theme of dispossession, disenfranchisement and disarticulation. It was guided by the desire to critically assess the utility of the concept of de-development to different sectors and issues–and had a foreword by Sara Roy, the scholar who coined the term, and who was involved in the workshop from which the book emerged.

This co-edited special issue (with Cherine Hussein, who, at the time of the issue construction, was the deputy director of the Kenyon Institute) was therefore the next logical step in my research on Palestine, although my article on Jewish-Israeli anti-Zionists did constitute a slight departure from my usual focus.

J: Who do you hope will read this volume, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

MT: I would imagine the main audience will be those whose research and political interests lie in Palestine Studies. It is difficult, given the structure of academic publishing – which has become ever more corporate and money grabbing – for research outputs such as this to be accessed by the general public. Only those with access to academic libraries are sure to be able to read it – and this is a travesty, in my opinion. To counteract this commodification of knowledge, we should all provide free access to our outputs through online open source websites such as academia.edu, etc. If academic research is going to have an impact beyond merely providing more material for teaching and background reading for yet more research (which is inaccessible to the general public) then this is essential. Websites such as Jadaliyya are therefore incredibly important.

Having said all that, I am under no illusions about the potential for ANY research on Israel-Palestine to contribute to changing the dynamics of the situation. However, as a collection of excellent analyses conducted by mostly early-career scholars in the field of Palestine studies, I am hopeful that their interesting and new perspectives will be read and digested. 

J: What other projects are you working on now?

MT: I am currently working on an edited volume provisionally entitled From the River to the Sea: Disintegration, Reintegration and Domination in Israel and Palestine. This book is the culmination of a two-year research project funded by the British Academy, which analyzed the impacts of the past twenty years of the Oslo peace framework and paradigm as processes of disintegration, reintegration and domination – and how they have created a new socio-economic and political landscape, which requires new agendas and frameworks. I am also working on a new research project with Tariq Dana at Birzeit University on capital and class in the occupied West Bank.

Excerpt from the Editor’s Note 

[Note: This issue was published in Dec. 2015]

Initially perceived to have inaugurated a new era of hope in the search for peace and justice in Palestine-Israel, the Oslo peace paradigm of a track one, elite-level, negotiated two-state solution is in crisis today, if not completely at an end.

While the major Western donors and the ‘international community’ continue to publicly endorse the Oslo peace paradigm, Israeli and Palestinian political elites have both stepped away from it. The Israeli government has adopted what appears to be an outright rejection of the internationally-accepted end-goal of negotiations, i.e. the emergence of a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital. In March 2015, in the final days of his re-election campaign, Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, visited the Jewish settlement of Har Homa in Palestinian East Jerusalem, which is regarded as illegal under international law. Reminding its inhabitants that it was him and his Likud government that had established the settlement in 1997 as part of the Israeli state’s vision of a unified indivisible Jerusalem, he promised to expand the construction of settlements in East Jerusalem if re-elected. And in an interview with Israeli news site, NRG, Netanyahu vowed that the prospects of a Palestinian state were non-existent as long as he remained in office. Holding on to the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt), he argued, was necessary to ensure Israel’s security in the context of regional instability and Islamic extremism. It is widely acknowledged that Netanyahu’s emphasis on Israel’s security—against both external and internal enemies—gave him a surprise win in an election he was widely expected to lose.

Despite attempts to backtrack under recognition that the US and European states are critical of this turn in official Israeli state policy, Netanyahu’s promise to bury the two-state solution in favour of a policy of further annexation has become the Israeli government’s official intent, and has been enthusiastically endorsed by leading ministers and key advisers.

[…]

The Palestinian Authority (PA) based in the West Bank also appears to have rejected a key principle of the Oslo peace paradigm—that of bilateral negotiations under the supervision of the US. Despite a herculean effort by US Secretary of State, John Kerry, to bring the two parties to the negotiating table, in response to the lack of movement towards final status issues and continued settlement expansion (amongst other issues), the Palestinian political elite have withdrawn from negotiations and resumed attempts to ‘internationalise the struggle’ by seeking membership of international organisations such as the United Nations (UN), and signing international treaties such as the Rome Statute, the founding treaty of the International Criminal Court. This change of direction is part of a rethink in the PA and PLO’s strategy rooted in wider discussions and debates. The publication of a document by the Palestine Strategy Study Group (PSSG) in August 2008, the production of which involved many members of the Palestinian political elite (and whose recommendations were studiously discussed at the highest levels of the PA and PLO), showed widespread discontent with the bilateral negotiations framework and suggested ways in which Palestinians could ‘regain the initiative’.

[…]

And yet despite these changes in official Palestinian and Israeli political strategies that signal a deepening of the crisis, donors and the ‘international community’ are reluctant to accept the failure of the Oslo peace paradigm. This political myopia has meant the persistence of a framework that is increasingly divorced from the possibility of a just and sustainable peace. It is also acting as an ideological straitjacket by shutting out alternative interpretations. This special issue seeks a way out of this political and intellectual dead end. In pursuit of this, our various contributions undertake what we regard to be two key tasks: first, to critically analyse the perceptions underpinning the Oslo paradigm and the transformations instituted by its implementation; and second, to assess some alternative ways of understanding the situation rooted in new strategies of resistance that have emerged in the context of these transformations in the post-Oslo landscape.

[…]

Taken as a whole, the articles in this special issue aim to ignite conversations on the conflict that are not based within abstracted debates that centre upon the peace process itself—but that begin from within the realities and geographies of both the continually transforming land of Palestine-Israel and the voices, struggles, worldviews and imaginings of the future of the people who presently inhabit it. For it is by highlighting these transformations, and from within these points of beginning, that we believe more hopeful pathways for alternative ways forward can be collectively imagined, articulated, debated and built.