Tag: Palestine

Imperial Theology, Colonization, Settler Colonialism, and the Struggle for Decolonization: A Review Essay

By Mehdi S. Shariati

This review essay introduces two books by Mitri Raheb which ground the contemporary predicament of Palestine in its historical and structural context. Raheb challenges the uncritical historical, theological, and ethnographic narratives regarding Palestine and its peoples. He delves into the history of Palestine showing it to be much older than the history of the Bible, and “Israel.” This version of history challenges the Eurocentric and deliberate misrepresentation and misreading of the bible by the traditional Christian theology, and variety of Christian and Jewish Zionists. As battleground between various empires for colonization, occupation, and control. Palestine as a multiethnic, multireligious, and multicultural land has survived the violence of competing empires and their theological constructs. The “Settler Colonial” design, however which began in the twentieth century with its own dehumanizing and demonizing language and analogies against the natives of Palestine is a refined version of the same script used by the Western colonial empires against Native Americans, and Africans, among other.

Read the essay here.

Personal Reflections on Israel’s War on Education in Gaza

By Mohammedwesam Amer

Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza has decimated its education sector, leaving not a single higher education institution standing and turning schools into shelters for the displaced. In this essay, the author, himself a professor, dean, and father of school-age children from Gaza, reflects on the physical and psychological impacts of Israel’s scholasticide in the besieged enclave. Writing from Cambridge, UK, where he fled from the genocide, the author shares his experiences teaching students in Gaza from afar, the hardships he and others experienced as educators even before October 7, and some thoughts on how Palestinians can plan for their future.

Read the essay here.

Palestine: Spaces and Politics

By Arab Urbanism (Dena Qaddumi, Nadi Abusaada , Majd Al-Shihabi , Ammar Azzouz , Samia Henni , Lana Judeh , Faiq Mari, Aya Nassar, and Omar Jabary Salamanca).

Palestine: Spaces and Politics (PSP) is an open-access project that offers resources for education and research on Palestine’s built and natural environments through a critical lens. This initiative is a response to the growing demand for grounded academic resources on Palestine that offer depth and context beyond immediate colonial destruction. 

The PSP Introductory Curriculum positions Palestine as a complex space inhabited by people who are producers of its own knowledge, rather than a mere object on which perpetual violence is inflicted. It situates Palestine as a conceptual site to reconsider core ideas in the fields of architecture, geography, urbanism, and planning. Particularly, by foregrounding Palestinian voices and perspectives, PSP presents substantive and vivid understandings of Palestine’s past, present, and potential futures. Ultimately, the curriculum considers Palestine as imperative for analyzing the critical intersections of spaces and politics at large. 

The bilingual curriculum comprises several themes that include an opening text, key questions, key cases, and open-access readings. We also provide further readings and audiovisual material and have aimed to include resources useful for both academic and non-academic users.

Access their site here.

Are hospitals collateral damage? Assessing geospatial proximity of 2000 lb bomb detonations to hospital facilities in the Gaza Strip from October 7 to November 17, 2023

By Dennis Kunichoff, David Mills, Yara Asi, Sawsan Abdulrahim, Bram Wispelwey, Osama Tanous, A. Kayum Ahmed, Weeam Hammoudeh, Nadine Bahour, Mary T. Bassett, and P. Gregg Greenough.

After attacks in Israel led by Hamas militants on October 7, 2023, Israel launched a major military campaign in the Gaza Strip that has featured an unprecedented scale of destruction. This has included the use of highly destructive weapons in a densely populated area. Mark-84 bombs (M-84s) are 2000 lb air-dropped explosive munitions with the capacity to damage infrastructure and kill or cause severe injury hundreds of meters away. This study examines the proximity of M-84 bomb detonations to hospital infrastructure in the Gaza Strip. This article combined geospatial data on hospital locations across the Gaza Strip with maps of the locations of M-84 bomb craters between October 7 and November 17, 2023, published by CNN and New York Times. This study then measured and summarized the proximity of the bomb craters to hospitals across the territory. This article identified 592 M-84 bomb craters. Of the 36 hospitals across the Gaza Strip, 25% (n = 9) had at least one bomb crater within the lethal range (360 m) and 83.3% (n = 30) within the infrastructure damage and injury range (800 m) of their facilities. The shortest distance of a bomb crater from a hospital was 14.7 m. Two hospitals had as many as 23 and 21 bomb craters within 800 m of their facilities and one hospital had seven bomb craters within 360 m. Thirty-eight M-84 bombs were detonated within 800 m of hospitals in the Israeli military defined evacuation zone. Given the known blast effect of these M-84 bombs, the impact from the bomb detonations near hospitals likely killed and injured people in and around the hospital area, which could include civilians and hospital staff, and likely damaged hospital infrastructure. The results of this study suggest indiscriminate bombing in dangerous proximities to hospital infrastructure, which is afforded special protection under international humanitarian law (IHL)

Read the article here.

Unbearable suffering: mental health consequences of the October 2023 Israeli military assault on the Gaza Strip

By Hanna Kienzler, Gwyn Daniel, Weeam Hammoudeh, Rana Nashashibi, Yasser Abu-Jamei, and Rita Giacaman.

The onslaught on Gaza is leading to catastrophic psychological consequences which will not be limited to the short term and to those directly affected, but will have long-term, intergenerational effects.

This commentary argues that to understand trauma responses among Gazans, we need to go beyond individual illness and, instead, link the biomedical sphere with the political sphere through the concept of social suffering and, thereby, expose the socio-political conditions of life and the collective trauma-inducing nature of the Israeli military occupation and repression.

Addressing these complex trauma responses requires approaches that bring together the political, social and personal-level components of mental health with a focus on three factors: safety and allyship; the right to agency and acknowledgement, accountability and reparations.

Read the article here.

    Palestinians’ mental and physical Health. An interview with Rita Giacaman.

    By Sélima Kebaïli

    While mental health is usually assessed using objective health indicators, these measurements fail to address the intricate impact of persistent violence on Palestinians’ lives.

    Rita Giacaman is the founder of and a professor at the Institute of Community and Public Health at Birzeit University. She has chronicled the effects of Israeli military occupation on the life and health of Palestinians under occupation focusing on the impact of chronic war-like conditions and exposure to violence on the health and wellbeing of Palestinians. Her focus lies also on the psychological and social well-being of adolescents, aiming to create methods for implementing health and welfare programmes in prolonged violent conditions.

    Read the text interview here.

    Incarcerated Childhood and the Politics of Unchilding

    By Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian

    Who has the right to a safe and protected childhood? Incarcerated Childhood and the Politics of Unchilding deepens understanding of children as political capital in the hands of those in power, critically engaging children’s voices alongside archival, historical, and ethnographic material in Palestine. Offering the concept of ‘unchilding’, Shalhoub-Kevorkian exposes the political work of violence designed to create, direct, govern, transform, and construct colonized children as dangerous, racialized others, enabling their eviction from the realm of childhood itself. Penetrating children’s everyday intimate spaces and, simultaneously, their bodies and lives, unchilding works to enable a complex machinery of violence against Palestinian children: imprisonment, injuries, loss, trauma, and militarized political occupation. At the same time as the book documents violations of children’s rights and the consequences this has for their present and future well-being, it charts children’s resistance to and power to interrupt colonial violence, reclaiming childhood and, with it, Palestinian futures.

    Read the book here.

    The Question of Palestine

    By Edward Said

    With the rigorous scholarship he brought to his influential Orientalism and an exile’s passion (he is Palestinian by birth), Edward W. Said traces the fatal collision between two peoples in the Middle East and its repercussions in the lives of both the occupier and the occupied–as well as in the conscience of the West. He has updated this landmark work to portray the changed status of Palestine and its people in light of such developments as the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the intifada, the Gulf War, and the ongoing MIddle East peace initiative. For anyone interested in this region and its future, The Question of Palestine remains the most useful and authoritative account available.

    Read more here.

    CURCUM’s Trees: A Decolonial Healing Guide for Palestinian Community Health Workers

    Co-authorship by Devin G. Atallah, Caesar Hakim, Hana R. Masud, Yousef al-Ajarma, Aya Darwish, Abeer Musleh, Rayyan Alfatafta, Nihaya Abu-Rayyan

    This workbook was designed to support community workers in Palestine towards deepening our understandings and our relationships for ongoing resistance and healing. There are five chapters, organized around a series of our beloved native trees and Indigenous knowledges rooted in our Palestinian lands and communities. 

    The authors hope you can utilize this workbook to engage in any activities that feel meaningful and supportive as you build communities of care and co-resistance. In particular, they hope that Palestinian community health workers (CHWs), organizers, health care providers, counselors/therapists, educators, and grassroots activists in Palestine and the Palestinian Diaspora will find their decolonial healing guide to be helpful in this time of impossible grief and colonial genocide by the Zionist settler nation-state. 

    They offer this workbook to Palestinian communities as an enactment of hope and decolonial love. We, as Palestinians, face massacre, apartheid, segregation, persecution, mass incarceration, and are condemned to annihilation in so many ways. 

    This current online version is NOT the final copy, but it is a draft that they wanted to share right now with the wider public because of the current situation of unspeakable settler colonial violence that our Palestinian people are facing.

    Resource available in English and Arabic here.

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