Some college students and faculty members are seeking space for nuanced perspectives on the Israel-Hamas war on deeply divided campuses.
The Future Is Peace: A Shared Journey Across the Holy Land
Two lifelong peace activists and guides to Israel/Palestine, both of whom have lost family in the conflict, take readers on a revealing life-changing journey across this holy, bloodstained land and discover the mythic, political, and personal history that divides but also binds them and their peoples
Where the Palestinian Political Project Goes from Here
For decades, Hamas and Israel have maintained a violent equilibrium. How will the war change that paradigm?
Habermas as an ethnic thinker Par Excellence: on critique, Palestine and the role of intellectuals
Taking Habermas’ 2023 statement on Palestinians-Israel as the point of entry, this article examines his concept of critique. Against the dominant view of him as a philosopher of ‘universalism’ and ...
Israeli Elections to Global Movements: Tariq Ali, Rashid Khalidi on New Book “The Neck and the Sword”
We get analysis of the Israeli elections, the upcoming U.S. midterms, the pro-Palestine movement and more from Palestinian American scholar Rashid Khalidi and Pakistani British writer Tariq Ali. They are co-authors of the new book The Neck and the Sword: Palestine’s Unfinished Struggle. The book, an extended conversation between Khalidi and Ali over two years, offers an overview of Palestinian intellectual and political history, drawing its title from a famous phrase used by the renowned Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani to describe the futility of “peace talks” between occupier and occupied, saying it was akin to a “conversation between the sword and the neck.” Kanafani was assassinated by Israel in 1972, “murdered simply because his words were too dangerous for Israel to tolerate,” says Khalidi. Public opinion about Israel has grown increasingly negative in the United States and across much of the world in the wake of the genocide in Gaza, and it’s “not going to shift back,” says Khalidi. “People have seen something that cannot be unseen. They’ve seen genocide. They’ve seen slaughter. And Israel has no defense.” “Even in countries with no history of a Palestine solidarity movement, suddenly the Palestine flag emerges,” says Ali. “Why? Because their governments are trying to stop dissent on this issue, so they are defying their governments.”
Using collective dialogues and AI to find common ground between Israeli and Palestinian peacebuilders
As part of the Digital Library's transition to Open Access, new features for researchers are available in the Premium Edition. Click here to learn more.
The Rise and Fall of the Palestinian-Arab Middle Class Under the British Mandate, 1920–39
The Palestinian-Arab middle class under the Mandate may be characterized as bourgeois and educated, similarly to bourgeois classes that have developed in the West in the Modern era. The bourgeois characteristics of the Palestinian-Arab middle class, and their influence on its historical trajectory during the Mandate era, have not been studied in depth yet. This article aims to focus on a local aspect of the rise of the middle class in the region in that period: the rise of the Palestinian-Arab middle class under the Mandate, until the Palestinian-Arab Revolt (1936–9). The main hypothesis is that particular bourgeois social and cultural characteristics prevented the middle class full incorporation into the Palestinian-Arab National Movement, and even led to estrangement between the middle class and the national leadership, as well as members of lower strata, especially the villagers. Members of the middle class, mostly Christians but Muslims as well, espoused in their daily life modern habits, ideas, and customs, as a means to distinguish between themselves and other classes, similarly to their parallels in the West, and like their contemporaries elsewhere in the Eastern Mediterranean, as has demonstrated by Watenpaugh. Those gaps reached their climax during the years of revolt.
The Hundred Years' War on Palestine
A landmark history of one hundred years of war waged against the Palestinians from the foremost US historian of the Middle East, told through pivotal events ...
The Civilizational Crisis in the Middle East and the Democratic Civilization Solution: Manifesto of the Democratic Civilization, volume IV
The global crisis of civilization is nowhere more visible than in the Middle East. Wars, authoritarian regimes, social fragmentation, and ecological collapse converge into a single, devastating picture. Abdullah Öcalan argues that the solution to this crisis must be found in the same place where centralized civilization first emerged 5,000 years ago. The fourth volume of Öcalan’s Manifesto of Democratic Civilization traces the region’s deep historical crises while highlighting the many traditions of resistance—religious, cultural, communal, and antiauthoritarian—that have survived despite millennia of state domination. These traditions, he argues, provide the building blocks for a future beyond capitalist modernity. Drawing on the theoretical framework laid out in earlier volumes, Öcalan offers a bold rereading of Middle Eastern history, revealing how patriarchy, hierarchy, and empire became entrenched, and how they can be dismantled. He presents democratic confederalism, a moral and political society, and an ecological, women-centered economic order as the essential pillars of a new civilizational model. In this volume, Öcalan emerges not only as a strategist for resolving the Kurdish question but as a visionary for democratizing the entire region. He closes with urgent questions that speak directly to our global moment: How should we live? What must we do? And where do we begin? Praise “Öcalan, from his cell, reminds us that freedom is not a point of arrival, but a living process, a weaving that is remade collectively, an ethical construction that challenges us in every decision, in every word, in every step. His thought, in dialogue with the rebellious spirit of the people, becomes a vital tool for thinking about emancipation beyond classical forms of politics. That is why reading his work is not only an intellectual act, but a profoundly political act.” —Rosario Aquím Chávez, Bolivian activist, poet, and educator “Öcalan’s works have played a key role in inspiring one of the most widespread movements of real-life revolutionary transformation in recent memory.” —David Graeber, author of Debt and The Dawn of Everything “One should conclude that Abdullah Öcalan is nothing less than a Kurdish Nelson Mandela.” —Slavoj Žižek, author of The Courage of Hopelessness “Öcalan’s utopia—as is soon discovered—is extremely concrete; it is embodied in the struggles and the order of the zones liberated by the Kurdish communist militias! A real utopia, the one that Öcalan supports, a precious gem that strongly opposes the rebirth, so common today, of national fascisms. The utopia of the democratic confederation of peoples embodies a real process that will win every battle.” —Antonio Negri “In these times of accelerating climate change and deepening crises, the product of centuries of imperialism and the past few decades of hyper neoliberalism and ecological destruction, your struggle for freedom and peace has become our struggle, and your example a beacon for untold millions who will yet follow.” —Barry Gills, professor of Global Development Studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki About the Contributors Abdullah Öcalan, the founder of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), is credited with developing the paradigm of Democratic Modernity. Since his abduction in 1999, he has been imprisoned on the island of Imrali in conditions of extreme isolation. During his time in prison, he has written over ten books that have transformed Kurdish politics. Writing extensively about history, philosophy and politics, he is widely regarded as a key figure in finding a political resolution to the Kurdish question. His writings have made significant contributions to discussions on freedom and outline proposals for non-state political systems in his theories on Democratic Confederalism. His most notable work is the five-volume “Manifesto for a Democratic Civilisation”. His works have been translated into over twenty languages. Leyla Güven is a Kurdish politician, co-chair of the Democratic Society Congress and former mayor of the municipality of Viranşehir in the Şanlıurfa Province of Southeast Anatolia of Turkey, where she represented the former Democratic Society Party. Click here for one-page information sheet on this product
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine | Oneworld
Renowned Israeli historian, Ilan Pappe’s groundbreaking work on the formation of the State of Israel. ‘Along with the late Edward Said, Ilan Pappe is the most eloquent writer of Palestinian history.’ NEW STATESMAN Between 1947 and 1949, over 400 Palestinian villages were deliberately destroyed, civilians were massacred and around a million men, women, and […]
The Palestinian Nakba and its Continuous Repercussions
Adel Manna', The Palestinian Nakba and its Continuous Repercussions, Israel Studies, Vol. 18, No. 2, Summer 2013, Shared Narratives—A Palestinian-Israeli Dialogue / Guest Editors: Paul Scham, Benjamin Pogrund, and As'ad Ghanem
The Iran War Is About Palestine
By helping Israel demolish what’s left of international legal constraint, the Iran war is hastening the dissolution of the Palestinian question.
Seven Theses Against Viewpoint Diversity
Demands for “viewpoint diversity,” a pillar of the Right’s strategy to remake higher education, collide with the pursuit of truth.
Opinion | The limits of the ‘Islamic’ label
Why the Islamic State exists, and who joins.
Meta: Systemic Censorship of Palestine Content
Meta’s content moderation policies and systems have increasingly silenced voices in support of Palestine on Instagram and Facebook in the wake of the hostilities between Israeli forces and Palestinian armed groups.
