Race & Class

Does the advent of Barack Obama as president of the US signal a change in US policy towards Israel/Palestine? The US has presented itself as the ‘honest broker’ in attempts at settling the crisis from the late 1960s on, as the history narrated here of these initiatives demonstrates, yet all have foundered, not least on the rocks of Israeli intransigence and US partiality. With Israel’s continuing punitive policy towards Gaza, and insistence, despite US caveats, on building settlements in Palestinian areas, and new housing in Arab East Jerusalem, this article argues that the Palestinians are undergoing a second Nakba, subjected to a process of erasure as a legitimate national entity. Whether Obama’s Cairo speech, in its even-handed approach to both Palestinian and Israeli aspirations, marked a new beginning is proving ever more doubtful. It is time for Palestinians to abandon the pseudo-diplomacy of the past and develop a grassroots-based political struggle.

In the hands of Palestinian artists, the concept of bearing witness not only serves as a means of recording a past tragedy but also involves a complex repertoire of strategies, including interrogating the past, recreating it and, most importantly, forging resistance against the assassination of liberation itself. This article examines how artists of resistance, such as Naji Al Ali, Mahmoud Darwish and Ghassan Kanafani, use the concept of bearing witness to tragedy as a tool of resistance and to guard against the idea of liberation itself dying. It is argued that the state of Israel has used assassination as a means of extinguishing the will of the Palestinian people to resist, targeting both political leaders of resistance movements as well as cultural and literary figures.

Exploring the unique ways in which the postcolonial and the colonial exist side by side in the West Bank, this article discusses the social and political meanings of traffic lights in Ramallah and Al-Bireh City (R&B), the main urban area under the Palestinian Authority (PA). The arrival of traffic lights signalled an attempt to re-organise the ‘organic modernity’ of Palestinian streets — and was resisted as such.

In this speech read out by his wife to the International Conference on Palestinian Prisoners, held in Jericho in November 2009, the jailed leader of the first and second intifadas calls for the issue of Palestinian prisoners to become central to the national liberation movement.

Beginning with a discussion of an exhibition of the creative work of former political prisoners in Khiam prison, South Lebanon, this article reflects on the unique capacities that former political prisoners have to transform the perceptions of others. It is argued that former political prisoners — whether they are Palestinians who were detained in Israeli prisons, or those detained at the behest of the US and UK governments in the ‘war on terror’ — have special gifts of authority and insight, which make them extraordinarily effective social workers in their own communities.

This article explores the tension between Israeli state power and its presentation to the West in ostensibly liberal terms. The historical dynamics of metropolitan sponsorship of Zionist settler colonialism are briefly discussed before focusing on the ways in which the politics of artificial demographic management and pan-Jewish entitlement to Palestine are twisted into a conception of Jewish national self-determination that serves as a liberal licence for Israeli state crimes.

The author, a choreographer, argues that for the artist the ‘tribe’ which controls artistic expression in Europe is that of large corporations, whereas in most Arab countries it is a more overt form of control by repressive regimes and clerical institutions. In Palestine ‘tribal’ bonds have also served to maintain cultural survival. ‘Tribes’ need to evolve so as to reconcile the community spirit with the right of freedom of expression for individuals.

The authors argue that to compare Islamophobia with anti-Semitism is not to equate them. But finding some parallels might help German society to combat a growing and dangerous anti-Muslim racism.

In a landmark case, defendants on trial for conspiracy to commit criminal damage to the premises of a UK factory supplying military components to the Israeli army, during Israel’s assault on Gaza (‘Operation Cast Lead’), were finally acquitted. Their defence, that, by decommissioning the manufacture of arms components destined for Israel, they had acted lawfully to prevent war crimes, was upheld. The background to the case, to the police operation surrounding it, and its progress through the court is examined here.