Palestine Studies, Knowledge Production, and the Struggle for Decolonisation

Abstract

This article traces the evolution of Palestine Studies from its nascent stages in the 1960s to its current status as a recognized and integral part of global academic discourse. It highlights the field’s vital role in dissecting the multifaceted structures and functions of Israeli settler colonialism, and standing firm amidst well-funded and systematic counter-efforts to delegitimize it. The ensuing discussion foregrounds Palestinian scholarly achievements in advancing their narrative and countering marginalization, particularly within the academic institutions of the Global North. By examining the political dynamics shaping research methodologies in Palestine Studies, this article elucidates how the field has emerged as a legitimate academic discipline, offering new pathways in graduate education. In asserting that Palestine Studies is inherently linked to activism, aiming for transformative change, decolonization, and liberation, this article underlines the contribution of the field to challenging dominant colonial epistemologies and methodologies and reshaping power dynamics. Thus, Palestine Studies not only elucidates the realities faced by indigenous Palestinian populations but also vocalizes their struggles and aspirations, positioning itself as a critical lens to understand, and engage with, Palestinian scholarship and its broader anti-colonial implications.

Keywords:

• Activism
• decolonization
• knowledge production
• Palestine studies
• settler colonialism

This article traces the evolution of Palestine Studies from its nascent stages in the 1960s to its current status as a recognized and integral part of global academic discourse. It argues that Palestine Studies emerged as an antinode to Zionist, and later Israeli, academic enterprises that were part of the eliminatory nature of the settler colonial project in Historical Palestine. Over the years, it has withstood well-funded and systematic counter-efforts by Zionism, and later Israel, to delegitimize it. The greatest achievement of Palestine Studies is that it became a pathway for postgraduate studies on Palestine, a development that fitted very well the aspiration of most universities in the world to associate their academic excellence with their research capabilities and production. Almost equally important is the link that will be unfolded in this article between activism and professional academic acumen, which provides a model of ethical inquiry that transcends Palestine Studies on the one hand, while intersecting it with areas of inquiry, such as Indigenous and Subaltern Studies, on the other.

The article starts with an Introduction providing contemporary illustrations of the challenges faced by Palestine Studies, before moving to the historical context of their emergence. This rather uncongenial trajectory is one that seems to be ‘part and parcel’ of Palestine Studies, as the ‘here and now’, being so dramatic and drastic, always seems to be the focus of attention. That is, the historical context of current developments on the ground, which mainstream media and academia fail to provide, and their pro-Israeli sections refuse to provide, is often overlooked. This oversight and neglect of context is particularly crucial because it would, in more ideal circumstances, enable us to closely follow the complicated relationship between Palestine Studies and Settler Colonial Studies, a field that burgeoned in the mid-1990s. In the course of their subsequent interaction, efforts to define the Palestinian struggle have been somewhat complicated; nonetheless, researchers from both fields have, by engaging the nature and objectives of the Zionist movement, clearly demonstrated that it fits the settler colonial template.

Silencing Palestine Studies

Israel’s genocidal campaign against the Gaza Strip following the October 7^th events has dramatically affected, and further diminished, academic freedom and freedom of speech in Western universities on a much larger scale (Economist 2024). The attack on Palestinian academic activism and voices has essentially transformed higher education into an anti-Palestine battleground, tethering academic discourse and its expression to the foreign policies of governments and the agendas of pro-Israel lobby groups. Major universities in Western countries, most notably the US, UK, Germany and Canada, have imposed punitive measures on both faculty members and students who express solidarity with Palestinian rights and call for a ceasefire. In this heated context, misleading and spurious allegations of antisemitism have invariably led to the suspension of professors, the cancelling of scholarly events, the withdrawing of funding from noncompliant universities, and the suppression of pro-Palestine student groups.¹

The personal experience of two co-authors of this article at the University of Exeter sheds light on how this institution’s stance on the genocidal war on the Gaza Strip closely mirrored the British government’s guidelines. Students and Palestine Studies academics demanded that the University issue a statement calling for an immediate ceasefire. The University, however, insisted on acting within the law and aligning itself with the government’s position. The war on the Gaza Strip evoked other issues and controversies related to Palestine, including the endorsement of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and the ‘appropriateness’ of scholarly use of concepts and terminologies to describe the situation and its different aspects, including genocide and ethnic cleansing.

The chanting of the ‘from the river to the sea’ slogan by Palestinians and solidarity groups caused tension and controversy on campuses and more generally within the UK. At the University of Exeter, it was part of a debate between management and scholars researching Palestine. As part of this debate, researchers urged the university management to listen to experts in the field of Palestine Studies, to protect academic freedom and even use their research to challenge government foreign policy. While the University management was receptive to some of these demands, they refused to issue a statement calling for a ceasefire. And while the University stopped describing the war as a conflict between Hamas and Israel, (now instead referring to a ‘Palestine–Israel War’), it did not however accept the demand, asserted with expert support, to revise its cooperation with the Prevent programme or to reconsider its acceptance of the IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) definition of anti-Semitism. More broadly, students also called on the University to act as it had done when Russia invaded Ukraine, by issuing a statement that committed to provide continued support to those affected by violence.

This situation at Western universities is not novel. Rather it should be examined in the wider context of previous pro-Zionist efforts to silence the Palestinian narrative. Going back further, the latitude originally granted to Zionism occurred at a time when Western colonialism approached its apogee, drawing strongly upon intellectual currents flowing in nineteenth century Europe. In the latter half of the twentieth century the Israeli state became an integral component of America’s political and cultural fabric, becoming inextricably interwoven into the country’s sense of itself and its place within the world.

Izzat Tanous,² a member of the Arab delegation that negotiated with Britain during the 1936–1939 Arab Revolt in Palestine, explains how media and publishers refused to publish news or any material that reflected Palestinian views, and specifically attributes the difficulty he encountered in generating media interest in a 1939 Arab delegation to Zionist influence on the British media (Tanous 1988, p167). He also refers to the case of J.M.N Jeffries, the Daily Mail correspondent who spent a decade writing a book defending Palestinian rights, focusing specifically on his struggle to find a publisher for his book. Tanous recalls meeting the director of Longmans, Green and Company publishing house, who eventually agreed to publish the book on two conditions. The first was that he would read the book and provide the publisher with a written declaration that he believed the book to be correct; the second was to buy 500 copies in advance (Tanous 1988, 210). The book was eventually published in 1939, with the title Palestine: The Reality. Edward Said was one of the few Palestinian voices in the West that sought to rectify such imbalances. He observes: ‘To the Palestinian, for whom Zionism was somebody else’s idea imported into Palestine and for which in a very concrete way he or she was made to pay and suffer, these forgotten things about Zionism are the very things that are centrally important’ (Said 1979, 10-11).

This was again shown when UK universities later sought to engage with the question of Palestine. The European Centre of Palestine Studies (ECPS) at the University of Exeter was founded in 2009 as the first-ever Palestine Studies academic unit in a Western university. Since its establishment, it has faced increased, intense and well-funded efforts to present distorted versions of historical events in Palestine, with the Yossi Harel Chair of Modern Israeli Studies, established at Sussex University in February 2012, playing a key role in such activities. The Chair was created as part of an initiative undertaken by the late Lord Weidenfeld, a committed Zionist and former chef de cabinet of Chaim Weizmann, the former Israeli president. Since its foundation, the Chair has benefitted from the financial support of a variety of foundations known to be pro-Israeli. Lord Weidenfeld reportedly told the Jewish Chronicle that extending this example to other key universities across the UK was a vital part of the fight against anti-Israel (Jewish Chronicle 2012). This and other developments further underline the importance of the ECPS’s work in researching and publishing the truth of what is happening in Palestine.

Some of the sensitivities that surround this issue were illustrated on October 2015, when a conference (entitled ‘Settler Colonialism in Palestine’), jointly organised by graduate students and academics and intended to apply setter colonial perspectives to Palestine, was scheduled to be held at the University of Exeter under ECPS auspices. The event was not widely publicised, with its promotion consisting of a small announcement on the university website and individual invitations being extended to potential presenters, including Ilan Pappé and Lorenzo Veracini.

The pro-Israeli lobby, led by the Jewish Leadership Council (the main body of the Anglo-Jewish community) and the Jewish Chronicle, which positioned itself at the forefront of the ensuing media offensive, then sprang into life, condemning the University for hosting this ‘anti-Semitic’ conference and demanding that it be cancelled (Jewish Chronicle 2015). The Board and other parts of the lobby then entered into lengthy negotiations with the University that ended with a compromise, in which two pro-Israel academics were given permission to participate in the conference. This controversy was the first time that most members of the British public became aware of Palestine Studies.

The University did not give way to this pressure and the conference papers were later published in a special issue of Interventions, the leading journal in Post-Colonial Studies.³ This was the first time the University had to defend the academic validity of Palestine Studies in the face of external pressure, including from high political places. Other universities across the world have had to repel similar pressures every day, in order to ensure Palestine Studies remains an irreversible and organic part of Western academia. This important achievement is due in no small part to the settler colonial paradigm providing a scientific framing, or scholarly scaffolding, for Palestine Studies and solidifying it as an independent academic pathway.

More controversies arose in relation to another academic conference (‘International Law and the State of Israel: Legitimacy, Responsibility and Exceptionalism’) proposed to take place at Southampton University. This conference did not challenge Israel’s right to exist, and did not seek a justification for such activity in the act that Palestinians are frequently obliged to defend their own existence. In April 2015, the University responded to growing controversy, including pressure from the Jewish Board of Deputies and the Zionist Federation, who objected that the conference had more in common with activism than with objective scholarship, by cancelling the conference. The Southampton conference organisers then issued a court appeal, which subsequently failed (Jewish Chronicle, n.d). The conference was then relocated to the University of Cork and rescheduled (Oryszczuk 2017) before this alternative arrangement was itself then cancelled, in response to concerns about security and insufficient venue space (Roche 2017). However, even this outcome did not satisfy Baroness Ruth Deech (a prominent academic and first-ever academic adjudicator) whose claim that the universities of Exeter and Southampton were now, amongst other things, ‘no-go zones for Jews’ (Turner 2016). After both universities, and even the Union of Jewish Students (UJS), rejected her claims (BBC 2016), Deech then implied that universities were reluctant to address anti-Semitism because they were afraid of offending Gulf Arab patrons (one can only imagine the response if a pro-Palestinian activist had made similar allegations about the undue influence of wealthy Jewish donors on British universities).

The Historical Narrative as Battlefield

To understand the context of these events, it is important to appreciate the role of scholarship, and specifically Palestine Studies, in the struggle between the Zionist settler colonial enterprise and Palestinian anti-colonial nationalism over the years. Scholars of colonialism and settler colonialism have written extensively about how the colonialists produced and sustained colonial imaginary during the displacement and replacement of the indigenous people, including David Carr, who observes how these narratives played a very important part in constructing individual and collective settler identities (Carr 1991, 73).

At the outset of their encounter with the settler colonial movement, the colonized indigenous people did not need to construct a clear counter-narrative, let alone provide scholarly scaffolding for it, as this only became necessary when the settler narrative challenged their very existence. This existential threat was manifested, inter alia, in the attempt to dis-indigenize them. With this purpose in mind, settler colonialists produce master narratives that deny and erase the Native’s historical imprint and narrative. This has been shown by Natsue Taylor Saito who, in referring to the American settler colonial experience, demonstrates how the settlers constructed a master narrative of American history that ‘depicts the triumph of ‘civilization’ over ‘savagery’, with Anglo-American settlers braving the wilderness to assert their ‘right’ to establish a state over which they exert complete control’ (Saito 2020, 25).

While Zionists also invoke this fable of the burden of ‘the white people’, it is only marginal in the Zionist master narrative: Zionists did not see themselves as entering a wilderness as such but rather something that belonged to them and that was indeed civilization itself before it was destroyed or, to adopt Zionist jargon, ‘usurped’ by non-native nomadic Arabs, who represented the ‘local’ version of savages. For Zionists, the act of settlement was therefore simultaneously an act of redemption and return.

Master narratives, to borrow Saito’s term, have different versions that alter according to circumstances and historical developments. Thus, for instance, the Zionist narrative later depicted Palestinians as terrorists rather than savages. Master narratives are prone to be institutionalized in academia, amongst other places, as occurred when a new area of study, known as ‘Israel Studies’ appeared first in Israel and then spread all over the world. For many years it was called the ‘History of Eretz Israel Studies’, before being adapted to the American example and becoming ‘Israel Studies’. It has its own international society and journal and, in its more recent development, has contributed to the establishment of centres for Israeli Studies in the West, and also beyond. In other places, the promotion of Israeli settler colonialism and Zionism are a prominent part of the academic program in Jewish or Hebrew Studies (Pappé 1997).

The ethos behind this scholarly development was quite paradoxical (Pappé 1997). While all these departments and the academics working in them were supposedly unequivocally committed to objective and unbiased academic research, they simultaneously declared that only Zionist scholars would be regarded as qualified to work within this new field of inquiry. The purpose of this academic development was to provide scholarly scaffolding for the Israeli Zionist narrative about both past and present realities in Palestine (Pappé 2016). The attempt to scholarly validate the main Zionist argument that Palestine was a land without people waiting for the return of its original people was an integral part of the Zionist project from its very beginning.

Early Zionist scholars envisaged a de-Arabized Palestine even before they had the power to implement such a vision. After their movement partly succeeded in doing so, through both the Nakba and Israel’s subsequent ethnic cleansing policies, the scholarly effort was recruited to further indigenize the Jewish settler colonial project and de-indigenize Palestinians. The attempt to physically expunge the Palestinians from Palestine was reflected both by their absence and the denial of their rights and indigeneity in the Israeli and pro-Israeli scholarly works that were sponsored and produced in these specific academic departments. This was another dimension of what Wolfe (2016) called the ‘elimination of the native’ logic, which is typical of most settler colonial projects in the world. The Native is reimagined and excluded in the colonial discourse, which denies the colonial political reality altogether, as recognised by Memmi, who observes that the coloniser ‘…falsif[ies] history, he rewrites laws, he would extinguish memories—anything to succeed in transforming his usurpation into legitimacy’ (Memmi 1974, 52).

Palestine Studies in many ways emerged as an antidote for this project of denial. It was pushed forward, not exclusively but mainly, by critical engagements with the paradigm of settler colonialism from as early as the 1960s. This was a project of writing the Palestinians back into the history of Palestine (Doumani 1992), in response to a situation where, as Jamil Hilal explains, ‘[t]he Palestinian historical narrative on how Palestinians tell their history, define their homeland and conceptualize their collective rights has been subjected to systematic distortion and misrepresentation’ (Hilal 2015, 2).

Although many of us are familiar with, and perhaps impressed by, the adage that ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’, it is clear that the battle of narratives, in both past and present Palestine, is not as crucial as the imbalance of military, economic, and political powers that enabled the Zionist movement to first set foot in Palestine, commit the 1948 ethnic cleansing of the country, and then proceed to take over the rest of Historical Palestine in 1967. The Israeli/Zionist narration of these actions, and the motivations and the aspirations behind them, are nonetheless an important part of Zionism’s attempt, as a settler colonial movement, to maintain its hold on Historical Palestine. Similarly, counter narration emerged as an important part of the struggle of the Palestinian liberation movement more generally, which is one of the reasons why, to take one example, Israel continues to seek to discredit the Palestinian narrative by targeting Palestinian textbooks (Naser–Najjab and Pappé 2016). From a Palestinian perspective, this is not merely a case of engaging in, and hopefully winning, an argument; rather, it is an existential war they have to wage if they want to liberate themselves from Israeli apartheid and continued colonization.

Their total economic, military and political dominance in Historical Palestine notwithstanding, it is possible that this sense of an existential struggle also motivates academics on the Israeli/Zionist side, including those who are part of Israel Studies, both within Israel or further afield. This may at least go some way to explaining the bitterness and fierceness of the battle of narratives. This same point was acknowledged, and indeed elegantly argued, by Hawari and his fellow authors:

Knowledge production in, for and by settler colonial states hinges on both productive and repressive practices that work together to render their history and present ‘normal’ by controlling how, where, to and through whom they tell their story. This makes the production and dissemination of knowledge an important battleground for anti-colonial struggles. (Hawari, Plonski, and Weizman 2019, 155)

Areej Sabbagh–Khoury, in making the same point, instead speaks of a phenology of Palestinian positionality, asserting that ‘[a] critical potential for decolonizing the settler colonial structure and exclusive Jewish sovereignty, [is] to consolidate a field of study that shapes not only research in the Israeli case but [also] approaches to decolonization and liberation’ (Sabbagh–Khoury 2021, 44).

Narratives, sustained by academic work, play a role in influencing school curricula, mainstream media discourse and reporting, cultural production of all kinds and, eventually, policy making. Hence, the energy and resources that Israel has invested in trying to validate its claim to Palestine, and also efforts to justify its present policies that lay claim to being ‘scientific’ academic work. This is in many ways a zero-sum game, as an acceptance of these and other claims undermines the Palestinian challenge and counter-narrative; in opposing such representations, efforts to validate Palestinian rights have, over the years, emerged as an important means for galvanising global public opinion in supporting and sustaining Palestine’s liberation struggle.

Palestine Scholarship

It was clear from the very early stages of the Palestinian national struggle that Zionist leaders attached great importance to the scholarly validation of their settler colonial project. Thus, alongside the practical settlement of Palestine, they established an academic infrastructure that would help to sustain it, in the form of two higher education institutions, namely the Hebrew University and the Technion. A similar Palestinian effort to establish a university, was defeated by the British Mandate authorities (Pappé 2022). However, the Palestinian political and intellectual elite found other ways to establish the foundation for such an enterprise, through institutions such as the Arab college in Jerusalem. However, the Nakba rattled every one of these embryonic scholarly and academic structures that emerged during the mandatory period, along with other aspects of Palestinian life, meaning that after the Nakba there was a need to rebuild again.

By the mid-1960s, a group of Palestinian scholars had gathered around the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Research Center that was established in Beirut in 1965. Scholars, including Fayez Sayegh, the first director, laid the foundations for what later would be known as Palestine Studies, introducing concepts such as settler colonialism to the definition of Zionism and stressing the anti-colonial character of the Palestinian struggle (Sayegh [1965] 2013). The center started to publish the Shuun Filastiniyyah (‘Palestinian Affairs’) journal in March 1971, which was a platform for Palestinian and Arab writers and intellectuals to present scholarly views on different issues related to political developments in Palestine. A total of 40 researchers produced the first 300 publications that were the first trove of Palestine Studies; however, many of them were not in the English language, a lingua franca important for reaching wider audiences in the world. Alongside this, an Institute for Palestine Studies branch emerged in Washington DC, US which established a publishing house and published the Journal of Palestine Studies and other journals, such as the Jerusalem Quarterly. These were the first safe, scholarly, academic venues where articles and monographs could be published, free from the political bias that might have prevented them from even being considered elsewhere. Nur Masalha and Martin Prior later founded the Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies, providing a further safe venue.

The PLO sought to align the Palestinian struggle with global anti-colonial revolutionary movements (Chamberlain 2012), leading a group of anti-Vietnam War activists to establish The Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP) in Washington DC in 1971. Palestinian intellectuals influenced this group, and the leftist Lebanese historian Fawwaz Traboulsi’s 1969 article in the New Left Review had a particularly strong influence on it (Rabbani, 2021). In this important contribution, Traboulsi framed the Palestinian cause as an anti-Zionist and anti-imperialist struggle for the national liberation of the Middle East and North Africa (Rabbani 2021; Trabulsi 1969). MERIP recognised the centrality of Palestinian cause regionally and internationally, while also focusing on Palestinian resistance to Israeli policies in the oPt, as acknowledged by Rabbani, who observers that ‘[a]t a time when most analysis of the Palestinian national movement was highly focused on the PLO in exile and Palestinian communities in the Arab diaspora, MERIP distinguished itself with a regular focus on Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and within Israel’ (Rabbani 2021).

In this period, Palestinian resistance, along with international solidarity movements, sought to challenge global powers. Palestinian scholars, historians and intellectuals therefore focused their analysis on broader issues related to Palestine and Palestinian struggle. In part, this was a reflection of the fact that a colonial analysis of the Palestinian issue is therefore predisposed to trace Zionism back to imperial power, and to even see the two as inseparable. Palestinian research has therefore repeatedly reiterated how imperialism has actively enabled and facilitated Zionism (Derek 2004, 79; Hilal 1976; and Sayegh [1965] 2013), including as far back as 1968, when the PLO denounced Zionism as the product of an ‘imperialist invasion’ (Musleh 2018, 9).

The Israeli assault on Beirut in 1982 destroyed the research center and the Israeli army ransacked invaluable material that was crucial for continuing research of Palestine. Although the Israeli authorities claimed the material was eventually returned to the PLO, the Israeli historian Rona Sella has established that much of it is still in the IDF archives, and is therefore off-limits to Palestinian scholarship (Sela 2017). Israel confiscated another Palestinian archive in Orient House in Jerusalem, which was built by Sabri Jiris and Faysal al-Husayni. These destructive actions further undermined the historical research of Palestine. However, these and other setbacks did not deter successive generations of Palestinian historians and scholars from reconstructing the past and analysing contemporary realities.

The emergence of Post-Colonial and Cultural Studies complimented more Left-leaning academic work on Palestine that challenged the old-fashioned orientalist approach that had previously dominated Western scholarship on the country. Up until the 1980s, Israeli academics had exploited this hegemonic Orientalism to effectively determine the orientation of the research agenda on Palestine. Edward Said’s seminal Orientalism was an important landmark in this regard as it contributed conceptually to the deconstruction of the Zionist narrative, while locating it within a wider world of colonial and imperial discourses that sought to justify (past and present) oppression. The pendulum in this battle of narratives would now dramatically swing from one side to the other.

Palestine Studies is now a recognised area of inquiry in a growing number of academic centers around the world. The settler colonial paradigm, which is now, as before, the theoretical backbone of contemporary academic research, has now given rise to a new critique of the limitations of the paradigm’s applicability, which has fed back into the development and reorientation of Settler Colonial Studies elsewhere.

Palestine Studies in the Twenty First Century

After the collapse of the Oslo Accords, the political reality and Israel’s ongoing expansionist activities exposed the limited applicability and relevance of conflict resolution frameworks to the study of Palestine, and this led scholars to engage and apply alternative theories, with the aim of better explaining the settler colonial nature of the Zionist project (Naser–Najjab 2020; Pappé 2018). This was acknowledged by Raja Khalidi (2016, 7), who observed how Palestinian scholarship in the post-2010 period ‘challenged the prevailing narratives of so-called peace building, including the neoliberal economic policies that underpin much of the post-Oslo literature on Palestinian development.’

In the period 2010–20, centers, units, and projects of Palestine Studies were established at Brown and Columbia Universities (in the US) Cambridge University, Oxford University, SOAS University, and the University of Exeter (all UK) and the University of Waterloo (in Canada). Both in this period and later, similar organizations emerged in Qatar, Malaysia, Mexico, Colombia and Argentina, reflecting the growing interest in the Arab world and in Palestine in particular. In various universities across the West and South America, modules and courses focusing on Palestine also featured in Area Studies, Politics, International Relations and Middle Eastern Studies curricula. Previously these courses or modules were strictly defined as part of conflict studies; they were, at best, part of Middle Eastern Studies departments or, at worst, part of Jewish and Israel Studies.

Palestine is now discussed within clusters that examine decolonization, the exclusion and marginalization of indigenous communities, international law and even genocide. This growth is reflected in the Annual Palestine Forum, organized by the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies and the Institute of Palestine Studies, which has become a cornerstone event, promoting innovative research and discussions on a wide array of Palestine-related topics by hundreds of scholars, experts, and activists from around the world.

This finding of new disciplinary homes and venues did not only rest on an intellectual decision to extract Palestine from other areas of inquiry, such as Conflict Studies’, but also had a moral foundation. It was an act of rectification involving the decolonization of the Western production of knowledge, which was intended to challenge distortions and biases that had previously masqueraded as ‘scientific’. This rewriting of Palestine’s history was part of a wider movement that sought to challenge dominant knowledge and re-narrate the history of anyone who was not part of a white male establishment that dominated scholarly research, including African Americans, Native and indigenous people, colonized African people, women, children, and workers, along with others who struggle to salvage voices and correct misrepresentations (Abu-Saad 2008, 1907; Smith 2012).

Within this decolonization of Western knowledge production, Palestine stands out as an object of inquiry in one particular aspect: namely, as the only part of the decolonising knowledge project that is constantly undermined by governments and parliaments, as well as by mainstream academia, who either intimidate victims into silence or genuinely lead them to believe this decolonization effort is anti-Semitic and/or akin to holocaust denial.

In such instances, applying the settler colonial paradigm helps observers to understand that Zionism’s erasure project does not just involve the elimination of the population and the appropriation of their history, but also the invalidation of their anti-colonial struggle. This was ably described by the late and great Peruvian thinker and sociologist, Anibal Quijano, when he wrote about the comprehensive colonial and post-colonial erasure of the native through ‘repression […] over the modes of knowing, of producing knowledge, of producing perspectives, images and systems of images’ (Quijano 2007, 168). Thus, indigenising the Palestinian case study can also inadvertently dislocate it from the study of anti-colonial liberation movements. However, it seems that the present generation of scholars can quite safely navigate the pitfalls and ambiguities of this nexus between Palestine Studies and Indigenous Studies. Contemporary illustrations and examples of this dynamic include the work being done in the universities of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and also in NGOs, such as Mada al-Karmil in Haifa. The latter’s work also function as venues for teaching and researching under the banner of Palestine Studies and provides an additional and alternative home for Palestinian researchers who, as citizens of Israel and members of Israeli academia, are in many cases prevented from fully and independently researching the relationship between Zionism and settler colonialism.

Although the continuation of oral history projects previously undertaken by scholars, such as Rosemary Sayigh, developed and laid the foundation for the expansion of the rewriting of more recent history, Bashara Doumani’s call for more erudite scholarship on earlier periods has still not yet been fully answered, which perhaps reflects the fact that it demands the mastering of older languages and modes of writing, and gives rise to other challenges (Doumani, 1995). Once realised, it can help expand research of the Nakba beyond the forensic analysis of what happened, and instead encourage a focus on what was destroyed.

Complementary developments include efforts to build a solid archival infrastructure for future generations of scholars, including the Untold Story of the Palestinian Revolution project⁴ that was founded by Karma Nabulsi in Oxford, and Salman Abu Sitta’s Palestinian Land Studies Centre in the American University of Beirut (AUB) that was inaugurated at the beginning of 2022. The latter is not just a depository of knowledge but also encourages younger scholars to focus on a research agenda that it deems to be crucial for the future.

At the current time, it is intriguing to try to identify common features of this rich, exciting but nonetheless complex project of Palestine Studies that contains quite a few ambivalences—this reflects the orientation and interests of a younger generation of Palestinian (and non) scholars who work on Palestine with the intention of carving out a space for themselves and charting a possible map of study for the future. The new programs of Palestine Studies attracted a very large number of postgraduate students, quite a large number of whom became early career scholars who continued to focus on Palestine as their main area of inquiry. In some cases, they renounced a promising career that could have been obtained had they pursued a more conventional disciplinary orientation, while in other instances they even gave up careers in academia altogether, instead pursuing and developing their interests in a civil society context.

The Novelty of Palestine Studies in the Twenty First Century

In this section, we will trace particular features and contributions of the new phase in knowledge production related to Palestine throughout the second half of the twentieth century up until today, identifying several and novel of this area of inquiry.

Legitimising and Validating Palestine Studies

The coherent bodies researching and teaching Palestine Studies today are an integral and organic part of the academic institutions that host them. For the first time, Palestine Studies has been recognised as a field of inquiry or a pathway within these institutions, and has therefore achieved a structural reality that was previously only available to Israel Studies, Jewish Studies, Eretz Israel Studies and the like in the previous century.

Integration into academic structures recognized in the West hugely impacts the way that a researcher’s scholarship is presented to the public, which brings us to the second feature of the expansion of Palestine Studies in this century, in which the emphasis migrated from the domain of polemics or politics into academic fields of inquiry. Claims made by Palestinian politicians, activists, and pro-Palestinian solidarity movements over the years, including that Israel is an apartheid state and Zionism is a settler colonial movement, are now presented as frameworks or references that emerged from scholarly research, and are not therefore seen as assumptions based on faith, ideological belief or a political point of view.

The end product of academic research neither makes its way to non-academic venues nor impacts public discourses on issues (such as Palestine), as has proven to be the case in Settler Colonial Studies. However, the settler colonial reality and the apartheid nature of the Israeli rule, both in the occupied territories and inside Israel, did attract the attention of international human rights bodies, scholars and activists, who employed the same paradigm and language to study Historical Palestine. One actor of particular interest in this transition from activism to academia (and back again) is the South African government, which in 2009 commissioned a group of scholars to examine whether Israel is an apartheid state (Tilley 2009), and then answered in the affirmative sense. The UN Economic and Social Council for West Asia (ESCWA) and then B’Tselem (2016), the Israeli human rights organization, reached the same conclusion, followed by Human Rights Watch (2021) and then Amnesty International (2022), which had waited on scholarly confirmation before adopting this position.

The growing application of settler colonial perspectives to Palestine was not a surprising development. A few years ago, Ilan Pappé, one of the co-authors of this article, toured the Galilee and gave lectures in cultural clubs in various locations to a general audience, and soon found that settler colonialism, as an analytical, descriptive, and even prescriptive tool, is one of the few scholarly paradigms that can easily be popularised in a conversation with those who are not conversant in the academic discourse or do not employ the theoretical vocabulary in their day-to-day work. A discussion of Zionism that draws on theories of settler colonialism and engages with Palestinian communities on the ground establishes a basis for reciprocal relationships that will, in the case of historians, enable them to leave the ivory towers behind and become the people’s historian, and not only the historian of the people.

This fusion of scholarship and activism is not new in the study of Palestine, but is now integrated, albeit to a greater extent in some places than in others, into the mission statement of postgraduate studies on Palestine. This requires a navigation between a total commitment to professionalism and scholarly expertise on the one hand, and an equal commitment to the cause of Palestine, on the other. This twin allegiance enhances, rather than impedes, academic quality, and underlines that Palestine Studies is predisposed, and indeed committed, to challenge objectivity in research. Thus, it is regarded as courage to state positionality and to go beyond analysis and offer prognostics, with both positions enormously enriching Palestine Studies. Palestinians and natives have insisted their positionality is a significant part of their research, including the Palestinian Al-Hardan, who explains that in her research it features as ‘[…] the truth that was prioritized, in view of the ongoing Palestinian national struggle for liberation’ (Al-Hardan 2014, 66). Andrea Smith also explains that ‘[Natives] have a different epistemological tradition [that] frames the way we see the world, the way we organize ourselves in it, the questions we ask and the solutions we seek’ (Smith 2012, 187–188).

There is now a propensity to academically contribute to outstanding problems that preoccupy Palestinians wherever they are, and to participate in, and contribute to, discussions about the future orientation of the liberation struggle, which is why there is such huge interest in decolonization as an object of inquiry. Works with a strong prognostic or prescriptive dimension reveal a wish to produce an antinode to the political disunity within the Palestinian national movement that has evolved over the years. Such disunity has been perpetuated by Israel’s geographical bisection and fragmentation of Palestinians, as Rema Hammami (2020) strongly asserted in her keynote speech to a conference on knowledge production in Vienna.

The prognosis does not involve dramatic and epic visions of future liberation but is also about resilience, particularly daily resistance, and the need to insist on the joy of life, and especially instil a sense of all these things in young scholars. Sumud has therefore reappeared as a new focus of present-day scholarship and has in progressing beyond its (original and brilliant) treatment of Raja Shehadeh back in the 1980s (Shehadeh 1982), become genuinely multidimensional, as shown by Ali’s (2018) and Hammad and Tribe’s (2021) work on Palestinian citizens in Israel, and new PhDs on Sumud in Lebanon’s refugee camps.

Artists who are also academics have particularly energised Palestine Studies and their artwork, exhibited and analysed within creative studies disciplines, has vivified the craving for normality in the most abnormal realities (Abbas and Abou-Rahme 2022; Alloul 2016; Hawari 2017). There is a sense that these collective efforts will be a future model for artistic groups, along with collective projects that combine fiction, oral history, culture and activism, on the model of the ‘Storytelling in Shatila’ project (Mitchell 2015). Another relevant example is ECPS at Exeter University, which organises meetings and workshops to connect post-graduate students with Palestinian students, artists and activists, helping them exchange knowledge in a way that benefits research.

The Globalization of Palestine Studies

The third feature of Palestine scholarship is the contextualization of case studies in Palestine within a wider chronological or comparative framework, which then feeds back into some of the concepts used to analyse the case studies.

One of the most prominent examples is the discussion around the settler colonial paradigm. After being an integral part of Palestinian scholarship on Palestine in the 1960s and early 1970s (Sayegh [1965] 2013; Jabbour 1970; Sayigh 1979; Abu-Lughod and Abu-Laban 1974; Hilal 1976; Rodinson 1973), the concept of settler colonialism was absent from the research of Israel/Palestine for four decades. This resulted from the hegemony of the Zionist narrative in the field of Middle East Studies, and the PLO’s later commitment to negotiate a ‘resolution; of the ‘conflict’ on the basis of UNSCR 242, which, in turn, led scholars to increasingly draw on conflict resolution frameworks when seeking to understand political developments in Palestine. However, the political realities of the post-Oslo period then intruded, clearly conveying their limited applicability and relevance to this context, and bringing to mind Veracini’s observation that ‘systematic disregard of the colonially determined characteristics of the Palestinian struggle contributes to a specific interpretative deficiency’ (Veracini 2006, 28).

Since 2000, the settler colonial paradigm has been increasingly used by scholars working on Palestine. It reappeared in Settler Colonial Studies, a new journal with a keen interest in Palestine that devoted several special issues to it, expanding the study of Palestine beyond the deconstruction of Zionism or the reframing of Israel and its policies. A new generation of scholars provided analysis by applying an interdisciplinary approach to examine the settler colonial nature of the Zionist state in an age of advanced global technology, while seeking to develop and adapt decolonising tools to confront it. These scholars referred to and engaged a global neoliberal context that both maintains and enforces the Zionist settler colonial state, with the aim of envisioning and realising liberation and decolonization.

For instance, Hani Awad (2023) examines how Palestinians adapted their methods of resistance by following the genealogy of different colonial rule forms, explaining the nature of the Zionist settler colonial project in the wider context of a global neoliberal age and the development of the country’s military industry and associated technologies. Ali H. Musleh, meanwhile, informs us that technological progress is not just a process but is deeply inscribed in the goals that Israel seeks to achieve:

[T]o Israel, weapons design is a practice involved in erasing Indigenous presence from the land and indigenizing the settler. A whole arsenal of geographical and racial imaginaries, images of enemy-others, and narrative myths are brought to bear on the design process, including ‘research,’ ‘proto-typing’, ‘testing’, and so on, whereby these practices come to index experiences of weakness and ultimate historical triumph concordant. (Musleh 2018, 36)

Awad (2023) also asserts that the Palestinian struggle is part of the international movement for decolonization and associated solidarities, which overlaps with the work of Dana and Jarbawi (2023), who develop a conceptual framework to analyse the innovative mechanisms of control that Israeli settler colonialism uses, including the establishment of a ‘colonial extraterritorial autonomy’ embodied in the reinforcement of the Palestinian Authority (PA). They explain this is an interim measure intended to facilitate the legal and physical segregation of Palestinians from their territories, and a preparatory phase for subsequent episodes of ethnic cleansing, in anticipation of realizing the Zionist agenda of establishing Jewish exclusivity over Palestinian lands.

The new generation of scholars had two major reservations about the application of the settler colonial paradigm to Palestine. First, they argued that earlier contributions had been ignored by scholars in the field, including some Palestinian scholars. This point has been repeatedly made, most recently by Lila Abu Lughod who, lamenting the disregard for this earlier work, referred to the (insufficiently acknowledged) contribution of her father, Abu Lughod (2020). This neglect has also, for example, given rise to the misconception that Jamil Hilal first applied the paradigm to Palestine in 1976, a premise that immediately falls away when it is acknowledged that Palestinian scholars, including Abu Lughod, actually originally applied it in the preceding decade. The ‘new generation’ has however at least partially compensated for this oversight by reproducing some of these works in Settler Colonial Studies, a new journal.

Another of the main critiques of the application of the old-new paradigm to Palestine Studies focuses on the conceptualization of Palestinians within this framework, and stresses the need to reflect more deeply on this point. While it is important to identify the analogy drawn between Palestinians and Native Americans within the settler colonial paradigm, it also suggests a predetermined outcome of displacement and erasure. Azmi Bishara’s (2022) argument that Israel represents ‘the world’s last remaining unresolved instance of settler colonialism’ should, from this perspective, therefore be accompanied by an acknowledgement of its individual attributes, including its distinctive, unresolved nature, which clearly distinguishes it from completed or ‘transformed’ settler colonialism in North America, Australia, and New Zealand. The assertion that Israel’s efforts to displace and replace Palestinians have not yet reached their intended conclusion is affirmed and further elaborated by Dana and Jarbawi (2017). While they describe the Zionist project as complex and hindered by the tenacious presence and resistance of Palestinians, they also present an intricate struggle in which the colonizers are confronted by significant barriers that have, at least until now, prevented them from achieving their ultimate goals (Dana and Jarbawi 2017).

This, in addition to the Palestinian scholars and scholars on Palestine who have applied indigeneity as a concept, Elia Zreik (2016) has introduced some correctives to general scholarship’s engagement with the question of settler colonialism, and influenced debates about the general study of settler colonialism and also the debate (among academics and activists) about the meaning of liberation and decolonization that has made a vital contribution to the expanded scope of Indigenous Studies.

A similar advantage has also been produced by the critical engagement with International Law by quite a few Palestine Studies scholars who, in working within an interdisciplinary framework, successfully built upon the work of scholars in Indigenous Studies highlighting the Euro- and Western-centric character of the study of international law. The Palestinian contribution breathed new life into this discussion, which had hitherto been closely preoccupied with decolonising Western knowledge production related to human rights laws in the Global North, and challenging related attitudes towards refugees, former imperial subjects and other minority groups. This discussion was informed by a clear sense that decolonization was not just incomplete in the former colonies of the West but also in the West itself. Fine Palestinian critiques that both developed and critiqued this position were provided by Nadine El-Enany (2020) and Noura Erakat (2019).

Other Palestinian contributors drew on critiques of neo-liberalism to understand the political economy of international aid to Palestine and local urban developments (Hanieh 2008; Dana 2015; Khalidi and Samour 2014). Tartir, Dana, and Seidel (2021), for example, envision decolonization by insisting on the need to historicise and (re)politicise the economy by applying an interdisciplinary approach that explains the situation within settler colonial and neoliberal contexts.

In the context of Palestine Studies, Gender Studies has emerged both as a specific research preoccupation and as an accompaniment to, or dimension of, other enquiries. Gender is not an entirely novel of inquiry, as it emerged as a major research topic after the First Intifada: current research contributions therefore essentially build upon this sound foundation, appearing as a continued and more expanded effort in the same direction. Gender has, to take a few examples, been considered in terms of its place within the Nakba, and also its impact on national resistance, refugee life and the right of return. In being positioned as part of the struggle against the ‘twin oppressions’ of patriarchism and Zionism, it is an ever-growing part of Palestine Studies (Nashef 2021; Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Otman, and Abdelnabi 2018)

In a context where Palestine Studies has been globalised and contextualised in wider comparative study, Gender Studies has also been more generally applied, including in decolonial feminist theory and Ethnography (Peteet 1991; Harker, Sayyad, and Shebeitah 2019; Richter-Devroe 2018). This has in turn opened up space for a significant discussion of the intersection between LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer) Studies within the realm of Palestine Studies. Walaa Alqaisiya, for example, challenges the Western-centric framework of queer theories, advocating a ‘decolonial queering’ that contextualizes Zionist settler colonialism within the Palestinian liberation struggle. She critiques the Zionist narrative by revealing how the claimed protections of Israeli liberalism and democracy are predicated on the ongoing colonization of Palestinian territories and the negation of Palestinian existence and rights of return; in its place, she proposes an indigenous approach to queering that situates Palestinian experiences at the forefront of academic inquiry (Alqaisiya 2020, 91–2).

A similar dialectical relationship between studies focused on bio-politics and necropolitics has also helped in explaining the role of our bodies in relation to the cultural, economic, social, and political realities we live in Hamdan (2019; Naser–Najjab 2024). One of the more profound articulation of biopolitics is provided by case studies of the hunger strikers and young Palestinians involved in daily resistance in the occupied territories, who quite often pay with their lives in the struggle for liberation (Ajour 2021; Shwaikh 2022).

On the basis of the mission statements of quite a few respectable publishing houses committed to Palestine Studies, we can expect much more in the future. California University Press has, for example, affirmed its commitment to the continued globalization of Palestine Studies in a new series entitled, ‘New Directions in Palestine Studies’, which promises many more monographs on related topics in the future. It can be expected that case studies from Palestine, contextualised within a conceptual, theoretical and sometimes comparative discussion, will play a particularly important role, with their explanation feeding back into concepts, theories or other case studies. The work of Nadera Shalhoub–Kevorkian is a good example of how this can be achieved. Developing and applying concepts, such as the ‘colonization of the senses’, ‘unchilding’ and ‘security theology’, she has also analysed Israel’s treatment of dead bodies and children in East Jerusalem, as well as the expansion of colonization beyond its physical manifestation into colonized minds (Shalhoub–Kevorkian 2015).

Conclusion

The ongoing production of knowledge on Palestine is part-and-parcel of the human capital Palestinians have accumulated over the years, some of which was lost irrevocably during the Nakba. This knowledge will play a huge and important role in the decolonization effort and even more so in the building of a liberated and post-colonial Palestine. Given this, it will be interesting to consider areas of Palestine Studies that will continue to expand in the future. Palestine is both a unique and comparable case study and it cannot struggle alone. In the distant future, as noted at the beginning of this article, a country would not normally be treated as a discipline or as a separate area of inquiry, raising the possibility that eventually there will no Palestine Studies as such, and it will attain its rightful academic places among recognised disciplines, as part of the history of colonialism and racism, and more specifically the struggle against them. But there are still challenges that confront academics working on Palestine, including ongoing efforts to silence the Palestinian narrative, which cannot be ignored. Protecting academic freedom is a crucial part of Palestine Studies and can only be properly achieved with the protection of an umbrella host institution that repels attempt to suppress academic freedom. As academics, we have a responsibility, both to ourselves and to wider society, to ensure that we uphold an environment conducive to free academic enquiry. This freedom is needed not only to push forward new research but also to protect the fruits of the erudite and profound scholarship, including those contributed by Palestinians in the past. This should be part of a continued effort to use scholarly research to validate the Palestinian struggle.

Acknowledgements

Open Access funding provided by the Qatar National Library.

Disclosure Statement

The contribution of co-author professor Ilan Pappe is based on his contribution to the Stanford Law Review.

Notes

1 On this precise topic, see also the upcoming Special Issue of Middle East Critique 33:3 titled ‘The Academic Question of Palestine’ guest-edited by Drs Walaa Alqaisiya and Nicola Perugini.

2 Izzat Tanous was a Palestinian medical doctor and politician who was a member of the Arab delegation and representative of the Palestine Arab Higher Committee at the United Nations General Assembly in the British Mandate. He founded the Arab Office in London in the 1936-39 Arab Revolt.

3 See Interventions: Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Special Issue, ‘Settler Colonialism in Palestine’, 21 (4) (2019).

4 For further insight into the Oxford project, see https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2017-01-30-online-teaching-resources-%E2%80%98-untold-story-palestinian-revolution%E2%80%99; and for further insight into the Beirut counterpart, see https://www.aub.edu.lb/plsc/Pages/default.aspx.