Palestinian futures: anticipation, imagination, embodiments. Introduction to special issue

Abstract

In After the Last Sky, a text written more than three decades ago, Edward Said (1986:158) wondered how 'most of us [Palestinians]', though never 'tired enough to give up entirely', 'rally to our cause even through a mixture of scepticism and fatigue (after all, how long can you go on losing?) breaks whenever a new campaign gets under way'. To a contemporary reader, it is the question of how long that engenders incredulity: while Said's words embodied a mood that led to the First Intifada (in the late 1980s) and the Oslo Accords that followed (mid-1990s), it is evident today, a full 35 years on, that "plans", from the Trump deal to Oslo -or further, such as the 1937 Peel Commission partition plan for British Mandate Palestine -have been a story of loss for Palestinians. Yet, retrospectively, these plans and proposals have not just imposed ever more rampant 'solutions' for Palestinians. They have also become a geopolitical performance, where the theatre of negotiations and agreements speaks the language of reconciliation and peace, while simultaneously serving to normalise colonial violence in practice. Indeed, the history of "solutions" is not only a history of loss and 'false hope,' as Lori Allen (2021) has recently written, but also a project of obfuscating the violence on the ground -of taking the expanding forms of colonisation, enclavisation, strangulation and displacement as the new starting point for each new plan, proposal and "peaceful" solution.As these opening lines indicate, the collocation of Palestine and "future" conjures vivid but in many ways problematic, even pernicious images. First, and in a normative sense, a Palestinian future is tied to prolonged (and by now somewhat staid) debate around "conflict" resolution, be it one-or twostate. In an important sense, discourses around state-level solutions (and dissolutions) function at the level of thought experiment; there is little realistic prospect of Israeli acquiescence to a Palestinian state of any kind -again raising the question of the role played by geopolitical theatres. The importance of this question is redoubled when one recalls the measures introduced by Israel that have proliferated alongside these geopolitical performances: home demolitions, military campaigns, settlement expansion, land appropriation, mobility restrictions, mass incarceration, an apartheid wall -to name just a few. We see not just a history but a future of continued and entrenched colonialism of the most violent sort: a colonialism camouflaged by a pretence of temporariness (of "occupation", "siege", "interim agreements") and carried out in full view of an indifferent international community that -at the very most -repeats and repeats the importance of continuing the performance, the "peace dialogue". In many ways, therefore, the future is already entrenched into the spatialities of Palestine/Israel, delineated by checkpoints, walls, settlements and less visible forms of subjugation that Palestinians must contend with everyday. These spaces speak: "no solution".The b...

Paths of Erasure and Trails of Resistance in aNeo‐Settler‐ColonialCity

“…The article therefore wishes to contribute to an important body of literature that demonstrates how sites of settler‐colonial violence—such as checkpoints and the separation barrier—manifest and are also shaped by indigenous agency, ranging from spatial tactics that sustain mobility and liveability to embodied direct action (Amir and Kotef 2015; Griffiths and Repo 2021; Hammami 2019; Joronen et al. 2021). As Mark Griffiths (2017) illustrates in his analysis of political tours in Hebron, Palestinian agency repatriates the violent effects of occupation, such as fear and “political depression”, towards resistance based on “critical hope”.…”