Abstract Edward Said, working through the Western interwar and postwar theoretical traditions, articulates existential homelessness/exility as a countering ideal to the rigid homogeneity of the nation-state. This essay emphasizes the need to reconfigure Said’s framework for theorizing Palestinian subjectivity within discourses privileging exility, because the theoretical space of exility itself is bound up with a Western theoretical preoccupation with anti-Semitism, Nazism, and Jewish redemption. It tangles constructions of the Palestinian as a partial, fragmented figure (archaeological, biblical, ahistorical, acultural), who lacks aesthetic capacity to travel, materially and symbolically, and thus to join the human march of culture and civilization. Beyond even these theoretical foreclosures, the current Gaza genocide exposes a need to move beyond the currently imagined basis for reconciliation, coming as it does from a specifically post-Holocaust Jewish rhetoric that universalizes the Jewish figure of the exile as a way of securing a path of assimilation and human transcendence.
Abstract This article examines Israel’s ongoing military operations in southern Lebanon as a deliberate and planned effort to obliterate life and reconfigure territory. It argues that ecological violence—understood as the disruption of human and nonhuman interrelations—is both a tactic of war and a strategy of territorial domination. The analysis explores how Israel has weaponized nature and the built environment, employing a scorched-earth policy that serves broader settler colonial goals. It also explores psychological warfare tactics aimed at demoralizing local populations and inducing displacement, alongside broader, slower, and less visible forms of violence that increase the risk of dispossession and permanent uprooting. In this vein, the article focuses on the historical and symbolic significance of the Hula Valley—originally part of Greater Lebanon—and the growing force of invisible violence embedded in nature protection narratives. In conclusion, it reflects on “eco-normalization” as a mechanism that obscures or legitimizes asymmetric power and raises broader concerns about how the politics of postwar recovery and reconstruction may entrench territorial control and displacement in southern Lebanese towns.
Abstract Against colonial unchilding—the stripping of Palestinian children from futurity—this article theorizes re-childing as ontological resistance in Palestinian literature. Through Kanafani, Daqqa, and al-Araj, the author argues that these writers reclaim the child as insurgent epistemology: a mode preserving wonder and prophetic imagination within catastrophe. Drawing on Benjamin’s messianic temporality, the article shows how Palestinian resistance operates through vulnerability as political faculty. The child and prophet converge as figures keeping the world open to revelation. Re-childing reorients resistance theory: to resist is to remain capable of astonishment, protecting tenderness within militancy while insisting the future breathes through language.
