This is a special edition of the POMEPS Middle East Political Science Podcast. Our program typically hosts conversations with scholars about recent books and academic publications. But the ongoing war in Gaza and the broader political crisis among Israelis and Palestinians impacts so many members of our scholarly field and the people and communities we study that we felt both an intellectual and a moral obligation to put together something different: a special edition of the podcast featuring short research based conversations with a wide range of scholars from within the POMEPS network.
The conversations range across a multifaceted Israeli-Palestinian crisis, which cannot and should not be reduced to a war between Israel and Hamas. The immediate crisis began with protests against Israeli seizures of homes in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in Eastern Jerusalem, and quickly spread into a wide-ranging Palestinian mobilization across the West Bank, Jerusalem, and – remarkably – into Palestinian communities inside Israel. Those protests spiraled into communal conflict across Israeli cities. The crisis then evolved into war as Hamas fired rockets into Israel and Israel carried out a massive, and as of now still ongoing, bombing and artillery campaign against Gaza which has taken a devastating human and material toll. Even if a ceasefire takes hold, this promises little more than a return to a deeply problematic and increasingly unsustainable status quo.
In 2014, during the last Israeli war on Gaza, I asked how and where scholarship and political reality might change in its aftermath: “Will we soon look back at the long years of relative stagnation in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as something akin to the false stability of Arab authoritarian regimes circa 2010?” The events of the last few weeks show the urgency of grappling with both how much and how little has changed, and the urgency of the political and ethical dilemmas this status quo raises. This special episode of the podcast features my short conversations with sixteen scholars, many of whom contributed to last year’s POMEPS STUDIES 41 Israel/Palestine: Exploring a One State Reality. We discuss a wide range of issues, ranging beyond the immediate crisis to probe the deeper structures of Israeli occupation, Palestinian dispossession, political stalemate, shifting political identities and patterns of mobilization, and the modalities of Israeli control over the population and territory of a de facto single state.
Marc Lynch
The podcast includes contributions from the following scholars. For more from these scholars, see below:
Yousef Munayyer, University of Maryland and Arab Center Washington – “There Will Be a One-State Solution But What Kind of State Will It Be?”
Dana el-Kurd, University of Richmond – Polarized and Demobilized: Legacies of Authoritarianism in Palestine
Nadav Shelef, University of Wisconsin –Evolving Nationalism: Homeland, Identity, and Religion in Israel, 1925–2005 and Homelands: Shifting Borders and Territorial Disputes
Maha Nassar, University of Arizona – Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Arab World
Nathan Brown, George Washington University – The Old Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Is Dead—Long Live the Emerging Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
Tariq Baconi, International Crisis Group and University of Western Cape – “Gaza and the One-State Reality” and Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance
Imad Alsoos, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology – “What explains the resilience of Muslim Brotherhood movements? An analysis of Hamas’ organizing strategies” and “From jihad to resistance: the evolution of Hamas’s discourse in the framework of mobilization”
Abdalhadi Alijla, Orient Institute in Beirut – “Gazzawi as bare life? An auto-ethnography of borders, siege, and statelessness” and “Palestine and the Habeas Viscus: An Auto-ethnography of Travel, Visa Violence, and Borders”
Diana Greenwald, City College of New York – “Military Rule in the West Bank”
Yael Berda, Harvard Kennedy School Middle East Initiative – Living Emergency: Israel’s Permit Regime in the Occupied West Bank
Noura Erekat, Rutgers University – Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine
Nadya Hajj, Wellesley College – Protection Amid Chaos: The Creation of Property Rights in Palestinian Refugee Camps and “Networked Refugees: Palestinian Reciprocity and Remittances in the Digital Age“
Marwa Fatafta, Access Now
Gershon Shafir, University of California, San Diego – A Half Century of Occupation: Israel, Palestine, and the World’s Most Intractable Conflict and Being Israeli: The Dynamics of Multiple Citizenship
Michael Barnett, George Washington University – The Star and the Stripes: A History of the Foreign Policies of American Jews
Music for this season’s podcast was created by Feras Arrabi. You can find more of his work on his Facebook and Instagram page.
You can listen to this week’s podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or SoundCloud: