In the midst of Israel's ongoing scholasticide in Gaza, this roundtable brings together four academics from Gaza to reflect on the present and future of higher education in the besieged enclave. It takes as a fundamental starting point the paradox that while Israel has systematically destroyed every university in Gaza, the work of education in those universities has persisted. Whether through distance learning on online platforms, or in-person instruction in displacement tents amid the rubble of their educational institutions, faculty in Gaza have never stopped teaching and students have never stopped learning. Joining their academic expertise with their ongoing lived experiences educating and surviving in Gaza, the contributors to this roundtable remind us that despite their remarkable resilience, educators and students in Gaza need our solidarity. Read their words and answer their calls.
This article investigates radical Palestinian epistemology through a tradition of literary knowledge production as a dynamic and generative field. Drawing on Edward Said's assertion that dominant narrative frameworks routinely render Palestinian existence illegible, the author argues that the struggle is not merely over narration or the right to narrate, but more fundamentally over the production and recognition of knowledge itself. Rather than simply reframing facts within new narratives, she contends that it is necessary to reconstruct the conditions of intelligibility, interrogating not only what is known, but also what is rendered knowable. This study approaches Palestinian Indigeneity (al-aslaniya), rootedness (al-judhuriya), and movement (al-haraka) as both political categories and epistemological premises, opening a space to examine how these concepts operate across diverse forms of cultural production.
A young writer and former journalist from Gaza shares why she has lost faith in journalism and the value of sharing the voices of Palestinians with the world since the genocide. Having left Gaza in September 2023 to pursue educational opportunities in the UK, the author describes how she spent more than two years writing, speaking, and protesting for Palestine to no avail, while her family remains in Gaza living through genocide. She reflects on her childhood growing up in Gaza under different forms of Israeli violence, and on her newfound conviction since the genocide in the futility of truth-telling and journalism in a world dominated by so-called democratic states committed to their geostrategic and economic interests over human life.
Drawing on their experiences as a student on the Barnard College and Columbia University campuses during the Gaza solidarity encampments, the author lays out the multiple fronts of struggle students have engaged as sites of liberation. Framed by abolitionist and anti-colonial thinking, the essay unveils the ways in which the liberal university's claims to recover and restore safety on college campuses in the wake of student escalations have been weaponized to justify the violent repression of a growing movement demanding divestment from the Zionist regime in the midst of its ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people. Despite having been brutalized by militarized police forces, barred from entry to campus and their dorm, and then expelled, the author questions a world that practices recovery while genocidal violence and racial capitalist legacies endure. They affirm their commitment to a revolutionary collective that rejects a definition of humanity devoid of resistance for collective liberation.
This article argues that the long-standing Zionist discourse of "self-defense" from "terrorism"-used to justify the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza-emerged in the late 1960s and escalated in the wake of the September 1972 Munich Olympics incident when Palestinian activists took Israeli athletes hostage. UN Resolution 3034, adopted that December, condemned attacks on civilians but also stressed that colonial domination breeds violence and that colonial violence itself constitutes terrorism. In response, Israel and Zionist groups in the US worked to reverse this by weaponizing the term "terrorism" as a means to delegitimize Palestinian struggles for self-determination. This article focuses on the 1970s, examining UN debates around international terrorism, laws and security policies enacted in the US, and The New York Times' coverage of terrorism to show how Palestinians and Arabs came to be legally, politically, and ideologically defined as terrorists by the late 1970s-a discourse that persists to this day.
Since October 7, 2023, it has become commonplace in Israeli public discourse to refer to Hamas as "Nazis." This analogy is germane to the Israeli death penalty because the only lawful execution in Israel's history was that of Nazi Adolf Eichmann in 1962. Now, amid Israel's genocide in Gaza, capital punishment is ironically mooted for Palestinian defendants, particularly for those allegedly involved in the October 7 attacks. This article contrasts contemporary Israeli death penalty discourse with the legal rhetoric that Israeli military courts employed in death penalty cases throughout the 1970s-80s. The author argues that the earlier discourse constructed a hierarchy of enemies in which Palestinian "terrorists" were lesser enemies, compared to German Nazis, portrayed as absolute enemies. This hierarchy spared Palestinians from the death penalty, while signaling Holocaust exceptionalism and underscoring Jewish victimhood. Today, however, conflating terrorism with Nazism casts Hamas as an absolute enemy to legitimize the death penalty while serving as a means of genocide denial.
In this essay, an organizer in the Freedom Flotilla Coalition reflects on why she continues to set sail to break Israel's illegal siege of Gaza despite repeated and increasingly violent Israeli assaults. She begins her reflection in 2008, with the first boats to ever break Israel's blockade; then recounts her harrowing experiences aboard the 2010 Freedom Flotilla, during which Israel killed ten activists. The narrative culminates in 2025, with the historic Global Sumud Flotilla and Israel's violent assault on hundreds of activists. The author concludes that she continues to sail to Gaza, not because boats alone can break a siege, but because sieges collapse when people refuse to be part of the machinery that sustains them.
In this essay, the author, a Palestinian academic, reflects on his detention and interrogation by US and Israeli forces during the Gaza genocide. Situating his experiences within the growing interconnectivity of border regimes-foremost among them being the US and Israel-he portrays an increasingly violent global order where information is shared, racialized bodies are arbitrarily denied entry and forcibly expelled, and international legal norms are routinely violated. He concludes that despite a multitude of oppressive policies targeting the mobility of Palestinians and their allies, transgressions do occur, signaling the precarity of these regimes of control.
This article examines how archival photographs of Palestine captured by orientalist and Indigenous photographers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries can act as tools of resistance against Zionist obfuscation and erasure of Palestinian existence by offering a view (manzar) that functions as an Indigenous claim for Palestinian belonging to the land. It explores how archives, approached as anti-colonial spaces, ensure access to these views (manazer) and make it possible to retrieve the Indigenous spectators and subjects from the landscapes depicted in early photographs from the region, thereby challenging Zionist attempts to obfuscate and erase Indigenous Palestinian existence from the land. Both the Indigenous and orientalist photographic views of Palestine afford the opportunity to develop the "civil contract of photography"-the mutually assured social contracts generated by the photographer, subject, and viewer-across time, despite ongoing settler-colonial occupation and genocide.
This essay is a reflection on the melancholic burden of reading during the ongoing genocide in Gaza. The author, a Palestinian from Gaza who has been in exile for two decades, offers sobering insights into what it means to read about the genocide, fear, and trauma while witnessing the destruction of his home and genocide of his loved ones in Gaza from afar. What was once one of his favorite hobbies has become a curse. Through his narration of losing family members in the genocide, and of Gazans' unique experiences of fear and trauma, he concludes that the genocide has not only turned Gaza into the state of exception to humanity, in the Agambenian sense, but has also rendered Gazans expendable prophets, living in isolation, too afraid to read.
This section lists articles and reviews of books relevant to Palestine and the Arab-Israeli conflict. Entries are classified under the following headings: Palestine in Global and Comparative Perspectives; Palestine and the Palestinians; Literature and the Arts; Middle East and the Arab World; Israel and Zionism; and Recent Theses and Dissertations.
