Maura Finkelstein
I am still haunted by the stolen homes I encountered in East Jerusalem in June of 2018. I was in Palestine for two weeks, traveling through the region with 12 other American academics, all interested in learning about the occupation through a settler colonial framework. One day, we wandered through the labyrinthine of lanes of the old city as Mahmoud, our guide, pointed out the Stars of David affixed to Palestinian homes and the signs in Hebrew that marked these doors as twice-stolen land. Pointing to one door he said, “This family left for a wedding in Jordan, only to come back to settlers occupying their home.” He pointed to another: “That family was simply pushed out, while Israeli soldiers kept watch over the theft by Americans, recently naturalized as Israeli citizens.” Our group was — justifiably — horrified. And yet Mahmoud simply shrugged and explained how common these acts of theft were. He told us many families simply chose not to travel, not to leave their homes. Even so, their continued presence was no guarantee that their house would not be stolen right out from under them.
In early 2020, Israeli courts ordered the eviction of 13 Palestinian families in Sheikh Jarrah, a neighborhood in occupied East Jerusalem. When I began writing this essay in mid-May of 2021, the neighborhood had become a space of protest and international attention, as residents feared this would become an acute manifestation of the ongoing Nakba (the Arabic word for “catastrophe”). This is the name used by most Palestinians to describe the forced removal of Palestinians from Palestine, begun in 1948, as the State of Israel emerged through the destruction of villages, the theft of land and the displacement of 750,000 Palestinians. It continues to the present.
This displacement and erasure is not simply the eviction of residents and the demolishment of homes; it is also the destruction of a story, proliferating through “both sides” discourse. When Israeli forces invaded the Al Aqsa Mosque and fired on worshippers during morning prayers on Monday, May 7, 2001, this massacre was renamed a “clash” and broadcast around the world. As Israeli mobs chanted “Death to Arabs” and Israel ramped up its ongoing siege against Gaza, the U.S. mainstream corporate media reported on the violence in Palestine as “very complicated”: an “escalating conflict” and “growing crisis” beyond our own comprehension.
But this is far from a complicated story. I am an anthropology professor at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania. When I teach my course on Palestine, I tell my students that this story is actually chillingly simple: when we turn on our televisions or open our newspapers, we are watching the unchecked oppression and violence of a settler colonial genocide play out before us, funded by the most powerful country in the world, the United States.1
Image 1. Settler-claimed Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem (photo by author).
Image 2. “Ghetto”: the Partition wall outside Ramallah (photo by author).
Image 3. Al Aqsa Mosque (photo by author).**************
Over the past year, I have listened as anthropologists and other academics have called for us to “decolonize” our discipline and our institutions. Though I believe it is impossible to decolonize a colonial institution, anthropologists can and should build movements that are transformative in the spaces where we hold the most creative power and long-term impact: our classrooms.
In May 2021, the urgency felt by escalating violence played out across social media, through protests around the world and in the hand-wringing of many Americans, who were no longer able to look away from the always-ongoing, often exploding, genocide that the United States funds through $4 billion in annual aid to Israel. Friends and colleagues began reaching out to me, asking me what they could do. I sent them news articles and urged them to write letters to their congressional representatives and for- warded links to humanitarian organizations and urged them to donate. And I told other teacher-colleagues, “Talk to your students. Teach them about this story. Don’t let the ‘it’s complicated’ narrative shut you down.”
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I think of those stolen houses in East Jerusalem all the time. After I returned to my own home (ironically, I lived at the time in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, a Palestinian-named town in another settler state), I developed a course about Palestine, focusing not on the “Israel-Palestine conflict” but instead on occupied Palestine as a place in and of itself. For the first two weeks of the course, my students and I read scholarship about settler colonialism from North America. A key take- away was the idea that settler colonialism is a structure, not an event. We then read Palestinian scholars who use this framework to understand their own experience in Palestine — to borrow from and critique a model that helps shift the frame from “conflict” to “occupation.” I always begin this section of my class with pictures of the homes I saw in East Jerusalem — it’s so obvious, the violence of these seizures, the theft inherent to colonization. My students are horrified, both by what they see happening in Palestine and what they now understand has been happening here, in the United States, for hundreds of years. We sit with all that messiness, all that grief and guilt. We learn about stolen land while occupying stolen land. And we do not look away.
Image 4. “Trump Make Israel Great” 2018 Billboard, occupied West Jerusalem (photo by author).When I do this work in the classroom, I am exhausted and sometimes scared. But when I feel overwhelmed by this fear, I remember that my own discomfort or concern that I “do not know enough” is nothing in comparison to what my Palestinian students and colleagues deal with every day. I feel a responsibility as a teacher, as an anthropologist and as an anti- Zionist Jew to push myself into this space of discomfort whenever the opportunity arises. Plus, I know that, by giving my students space to question the skewed reality they were born into, I might be part of a ripple that becomes a life-altering wave, one that can reverberate to their friends, their family, their future lives and jobs and work in the world. Perhaps that ripple will start in my classroom.
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My own rising tide, born from a ripple, began when I was a 16-year-old senior in high school, in the fall of 1996. I enrolled in a one-semester course on the history of the Middle East with a teacher named James Biedron. Mr. Biedron believed in experiential learning, which is something I now know is called “live-action role playing,” or LARP. It was the 1990s and so Mr. Biedron’s approach to LARP was organized around the (re)creation of Middle East “peace” talks, with groups of students assigned to different countries, depending on the power of the state (or non-state) involved. Americans were still feeling the numbing seduction caused by the 1993 photograph of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yaser Arafat shaking hands on the White House lawn, a smiling Bill Clinton raising his arms across their shoulders like a benevolent Moses, leading his people into the promised land.
Image 5. A benevolent Moses (photo in public domain).
I can no longer remember all of the countries present in Mr. Biedron’s classroom or the number of students assigned to each nation, but I’m pretty sure both the United States and Israel were represented by seven or eight students. I was assigned to Palestine and was the sole student in this marginalized role. I was terrified, overwhelmed, furious. And this profoundly unfair arrangement radically altered my life.
In the early age of dial-up Internet, I spent that semester struggling to find information on Palestine. Very little seemed available on the history of the region, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and the political makeup of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah party. As a Jewish teenager, I found my requisite religious education tedious and synagogue services incredibly dull. As a reaction to my own alienation, I already bristled against the expectation to feel love and affinity with Israel, but this was not initially a political orientation. Instead, I simply rejected everything expected of me as I grappled with the question of what kind of person I wanted to be in the world. Israel never meant anything to me other than another distant country engulfed by war.
When I was Bat Mitzvah’d, relatives sent me cards about trees planted in Israel in my name. As a budding environmentalist, I thought the gesture was sweet. I knew nothing of the Jewish National Funds’ (JNF) participation in colonial genocide by planting deciduous trees over razed Palestinian villages and olive groves. I didn’t think about those trees again for years, until I saw the documentary The Village under the Forest, a film about the JNF’s tree-planting project, made by a Jewish South African woman.2 With the recent history of South African apartheid hanging over her head, the filmmaker traveled to Palestine to see the “South African forest,” built by the JNF. I watched her realize the work being done in her name, with her own money. In turn, I sat with the realization that the same work had been done in my name, with money donated by friends and family. Now I show this film to my students. We watch it together.
In 12th grade, before I knew about the JNF but while I was enrolled in the History of the Middle East course, Mr. Biedron also introduced me to Karl Marx. I was simultaneously enrolled in his AP European History class and I found myself reading The Communist Manifesto while also looking up information about the Oslo Accords. Serendipitously thinking these two stories alongside each other, I could see something was very wrong in the world that had been built around me. When I came to class in a kufiya and argued that any decision made between the State of Israel, the United States and the unrecognized and occupied territory of Palestine would be inherently unfair, Mr. Biedron gave me an A on the assignment and an A in his class. I like to think he was proud of me. I like to think he was proud of himself. His classroom started a ripple that has turned into a wave running through me.
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This classroom encounter was formative and life-changing, but I struggled with how much I didn’t “know” about Palestine for decades. This fear was often weaponized against me in ways that felt debilitating. This started to change in 2018 when I traveled to Palestine and saw the occupation up close — in crossing through checkpoints, hearing firsthand about life under occupation from Palestinian activists and academics and encountering Israeli soldiers and emboldened settlers. I realized that the absences and gaps in my knowledge of a messy historical timeline had nothing to do with my ability to look at settler colonial apartheid and call it settler colonial apartheid. I knew what I saw and what I saw was quite simple: I saw the occupier and I saw the occupied. I saw the colonizer and I saw the colonized. Nothing about this felt complicated. And I knew I had to pass this framing on to my students. I wrote about that trip, the way the experience of “being there” inspired me to develop a course on Palestine.3
When I put together any syllabus, I do not think about a canon. Instead, I think about lineage and what kind of intellectual community I want to build with my students. That compelled me to ensure that my syllabus on Palestine was made up mostly by Palestinian thinkers, writers and artists and entirely by thinkers, writers and artists actively engaged in life in the region and not the defense of a framework active or complicit in oppression and erasure. I am not interested in “both sides” discourse. I am interested in speaking truth to power. My knowledge about the region comes first and foremost from my Palestinian colleagues and students and their allies. By reading and teaching their work, I ensure that my outrage emerges from a sense of equality, respect and solidarity and not from one of pity.
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In addition to teaching a class about Palestine through a settler colonial framework, I am unapologetically outspoken on the powerfully Zionist campus where I teach anthropology. The sociology and anthropology department where I teach happens to share the same building with Hillel. Founded in 1923, Hillel International has grown into the world’s largest Jewish campus organization. According to their website, over 16,000 students have traveled to Israel on Hillel-led trips in the last three years. The organization sends “Israel fellows,” who are often former Israeli soldiers, to over 100 college campuses across the United States. These 75 fellows, one of whom serves the Hillel on my campus, literally above my head in the building we share, have “engaged” 17,235 students. Through the work of these fellows and fully funded trips to Israel, Hillel works to center Israel in all of their work, despite their origin being rooted in Jewish life, which should never be equated to Zionism. On their website they explain:
Israel is at the heart of Hillel’s work. Our goal is to inspire every Jewish college student to develop a meaningful and enduring relationship to Israel and to Israelis. Whether they want to engage in deep dialogue or are politically active in mobilizing others to support Israel, we enable students to share a rich connection to Israel and to each other as a people. Engaged and educated students can become committed Jewish adults who are passionate supporters of Israel.4
In my third year at Muhlenberg, I brought a dear friend and brilliant scholar, Sa’ed Atshan, to speak on my campus. Though I was not entirely naïve, I asked Hillel whether they were interested in co-sponsoring the talk, because Atshan was a professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at Swarthmore College. I thought I was being strategic. Not only did Hillel tell me no but the director then tried to censor Atshan’s talk and control the way attendees would have access to his lecture through concerns over safety and security. The director was also adamant that I ensure that Atshan would not mention BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions). I refused both censorship and security, later realizing that not only was the director of Hillel concerned about a Palestinian scholar speaking about the occupation on campus but he was also concerned for the security of his own job. On Hillel’s website they explain their “Standards of Partnership”:
Hillel welcomes, partners with, and aids the efforts of organizations, groups, and speakers from diverse perspectives in support of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. Hillel will not partner with, house, or host organizations, groups, or speakers that as a matter of policy or practice:
• Deny the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish and democratic state with secure and recognized borders;
• Delegitimize, demonize, or apply a double standard to Israel;
• Support boycott of, divestment from, or sanctions against the State of Israel;
• Exhibit a pattern of disruptive behavior to- wards campus events or guest speakers or foster an atmosphere of incivility.5
When Atshan came to campus, students from Hillel lined up to challenge him before applause from the talk was even over. Though his talk was framed through his own experience as a Palestinian Christian growing up in occupied Palestine, the questions and comments were organized as an attack, challenging both his own experience and data from the various United Nations agencies he cited throughout his presentation. There was no room for dialogue but instead a steady stream of Hillel-affiliated students, contesting Atshan’s own experiences through their own defense of the Israeli state and the Israeli military. The attack was dizzying, but when I asked him about it later, he laughed sadly and shook his head and said, “It’s always like this.” I think often of his grace and generosity in the face of students attempting to deny him his own existence. I shudder when I think about how this is something he con- tends with every day.
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During the six years I spent as a tenure-track assistant professor, senior colleagues and friends warned me to be careful, to keep my mouth shut until I was tenured, to be strategic. To protect myself. I was not tenured when I brought Atshan to campus and I was not tenured the first two times I taught my class on Palestine. Despite my outspokenness and threats from certain students and several colleagues, I was granted tenure in February of 2021. This could be — in large part — because I am Jewish and because I am White. And so, despite my research and scholarly writing lying elsewhere, my Jewishness and my Whiteness compel me to teach about the region. This is in part because I know that my identity likely protects me in ways my Palestinian, Arab, Muslim and Black colleagues are not.
Even so, I worry about the way many educators are silenced before tenure. Certainly Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Arab, Palestinian and Muslim faculty have good reason to be concerned about the repercussions of speaking up and out as an untenured professor.
This is especially worrisome at institutions notorious for denying tenure. Famously, Steven Salaita was fired from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign over tweets that were critical of Israel.6 More recently, Nikole Hannah-Jones’s denial of tenure at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill is a reminder of how many faculty of color, particularly Black faculty, are punished for existing in an institution rooted in White conservative intellectual reproduction.7 But many of us — especially those of us who are White and those of us who teach at institutions without histories of tenure disputes — need not be silenced by these fears. If we are silent for six years, we will become comfortable with and in that silence. That is, after all, how institutions work.
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I am still terrified each time I teach my class on Palestine. If I am an “expert” in any region (and I reject this narrative of mastery, even as I play into it in academic circles where we are constantly justifying our knowledge and our scholarship) it is South Asia, specifically urban India and most specifically Mumbai. My first long-term research project, which began as my Ph.D. research and dissertation and developed into my 2019 monograph, The Archive of Loss: Lively Ruination in Mill Land Mumbai, looks at the structural violence of deindustrialization — how job loss, precarity and residential displacement impact older mill workers, clinging to the last industrial jobs still lingering in the city center.8 I know much less about Palestine than I know about Mumbai but I think of my long-term research on structural violence and I know there is a connection to be made, a thread of knowledge and expertise that links the two regions, the two stories. But I often trip over facts. For instance, I often have to remind myself of 20th-century timelines and critical events in Palestinian history. I often get confused over the differences between Areas A, B, and C resulting from the Oslo Accords. My students — particularly my Pal- estinian students — often correct my history and clarify details about the first and second intifadas. I am grateful for these opportunities to learn from my students. My own pedagogy is rooted in a desire to teach beyond my own comfort level, to ask my students to join me in the realm of the unknown, to embrace the opportunity to learn together.
But somehow this is scarier when it comes to Palestine, because lack of historical knowledge is often weaponized: “do not speak about that which you have not mastered.” And yet this seems to be unique to the region. I never hesitate to tell my students, brows furrowed with confusion, that I don’t actually understand Hegel, either. I laugh when I tell them that no matter how many times I read Jose Esteban Munoz, I catch things I never saw before, learn something I didn’t know previously, and find myself baffled by a sentence I never thought about previously. I relish the opportunity to show them that I don’t understand everything either. That I never will. That this is part of the fun, the gift of a life dedicated to learning. That leaning into the unknown, of embracing the opportunity to learn together, is the best part of teaching for me. I am grateful when I learn from my students. I am lucky when I can teach a course in which I, too, am learning.
When I teach my course on Palestine, I try to remember this. I try to remember that I do not have to have mastery over history to know that injustice is wrong. I do not have to have an exhaustive knowledge of statecraft in order to recognize apartheid when I see it. After my students and I read about North American settler colonialism and the ways in which Palestinian scholars draw from this literature, we dive into the messy history of the past 100 years. I am not a historian and so this is more of a crash course, an attempt to sketch out a timeline. Mostly, I want my students to understand how recent this history is. I grew up in a Zionist bubble that framed the occupation as a historical conflict between people who have always hated each other, an animosity so old it resisted logic or resolution. My goal is to dispel this myth for my students, to show the seams of a story rooted in xenophobia and Islamophobia, which is also the other side of the Zionist coin.
In revealing the seams of this story, I show my students Sut Jhally’s documentary, Reel Bad Arabs, as a way of understanding this creation.10 Jhally shows how the presence of the “Arab (and/ or Muslim, and/or Palestinian …) terrorist” — a blood-thirsty, irrational, monstrous figure — was ubiquitous in American films from the 1980s and 1990s. I remind my students how much of our reality is constructed by popular culture. My students and I also watch the documentary The Occupation of the American Mind, about Israeli Public Relations control over corporate mainstream media.11 I urge my students to think about how narratives are not natural but instead constructed. “Who has controlled and created the stories you have consumed?” For the rest of the semester, I try to ensure that most of those stories are created by Palestinians. “Authorship matters,” I tell my students.
But there is another tension. I want them to not only see the violence and the horror; I also want them to see the rhythms of every-day life. When we learn about Gaza, I have them watch Noura Erakat’s short film, Gaza in Context. But I also have them watch Flying Paper, which tells the story of kite making and kite flying in Gaza.9 The occupation is present; the violence is still there. But the life of children playing, laughing and making art is central. The two realities exist side by side. I am often trying to escape the violence while also ensuring that I do not erase it. What is daily life without the occupation? I want my students to struggle with this question.
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Across the United States, discourse around Palestine is shifting. I take comfort in seeing the work being done by organizations like Jewish Voices for Peace, Students for Justice in Palestine and Open Hillel. For many years, my campus felt like a conservative holdout, but even here the tide is shifting. More and more of my students seek me out with their questions. They want another way of thinking about something they once understood to be as real as gravity. Now they see Zionism and unquestioned support for Israel as a glass jar, surrounding them, suffocating them. They ask me to help them find a way out. And so we talk. They feel the rim above their head, they feel the lid turn. Isn’t that why we teach? To help our students free themselves from the narratives that bind them? To find better stories? Mr. Biedron was the first person who showed me that work in action, who turned his classroom into a revolutionary space where I could unlearn the stories that bound me to a place I no longer wanted to inhabit. I think of him every time I enter the classroom.
On May 20, 2021, as I was finishing this essay, a ceasefire quieted the headlines, as the spectacle of rockets settled back to the ongoing violence of settler colonial violence. In early August, as a revise this, Sheikh Jarrah residents continue to fight back against the “compromise” pushed on them by the Israeli court, which denied their claims as homeown- ers and codified them as tenants, renting from Israelis given control of the land. As the court battle burns on, the Israeli military continues to murder Palestinian civilians. Nothing has changed in Palestine, not really, and this is ex- actly what the Israeli government wants — return to an ongoing, incremental genocide. We cannot look away. As teachers, now is the time to become louder in our classrooms. Now is the time to tell this story to our students. Now is the time to write Palestine into our syllabi. Our students deserve the opportunity to unlearn what they have carried with them to college, the baggage of “both sides” that so many of them are desperate to unlearn. What a gift to be a teacher who tells the truth about the world to our students, who helps them cause their own ripple, their own rising tide.
Notes
1. I use this term very intentionally and draw my definition from the United Nations General Assembly. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (9 December 1948) which defines genocide as:
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
a. Killing members of the group;
b. Causing serious bodily or mental harmto members of the group;
c. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
d. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
e. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
2. Kaplan, Mark J., dir. The Village under the Forest. Journeyman Pictures, LTD, 2013. https:// www.journeyman.tv/film/5897/the-village-under- theforest.
3. Finkelstein, Maura. What is a Classroom For? Teaching the Anthropology of Palestine. So- ciety for Cultural Anthropology (2019). https:// culanth.org/fieldsights/what-is-a-classroom-for-teaching-the-anthropology-of-palestine.
4. Hillel & Israel. Washington D.C.: Hillel In- ternational, 2021. https://www.hillel.org/jewish/ hillel-israel.
5. Hillel Israel Guidelines. Washington D.C.: Hillel International, 2021. https://www.hillel.org/ jewish/hillel-israel/hillel-israel-guidelines.
6. Abunimah, Ali. University of Illinois fires professor Steven Salaita after Gaza massacre tweets. The Electric Intifada (2014). https://elec- tronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/university- illinois-fires-professor-steven-salaita-after-gaza- massacre-tweets.
7. Robertson, Katie. “Trustees at North Caro- lina Grant Tenure to Journalist, Ending Weekslong Dispute.” New York Times (New York City, NY), July 1, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/19/ business/media/nikole-hannah-jones-unc.html.
8. Finkelstein, Maura. The Archive of Loss: Lively Ruination in Mill Land Mumbai. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.
‘9. Erakat, Noura and Dia’ Azzeh, dir. Gaza in Context. Status Audio, 2016 and Sawhaney, Nitin and Hill, Roger, dir. Flying Paper. Journeyman Pic- tures, LTD, 2015. http://flyingpaper.org/about/.
10. Jhally, Sut, dir. Reel Bad Arabs. Media Edu- cation Foundation, 2006.
11. Waters, Roger, dir. The Occupation of the American Mind. Media Education Foundation, 2016.
Suggestions for Further Reading Introducing Palestine
Abdelrazaq, Leila. Baddawi. Washington, DC: Just World Books, 2015.
Abu Saif, Atef. The Drone Eats with Me: Diaries from a City under Fire. Manchester, UK: Comma Press, 2015.
Atshan, Sa’ed. “The Anthropological Rise of Palestine.” Journal of Palestine Studies.
Beinin, Joel, and Lisa Hajjar. Palestine, Israel, and the Arab/Israeli Conflict: A Primer. Washington D.C., Middle East Research and Information Project, 2014. https://merip.org/palestine-israel- primer/.
Bishara, Amahl. “Driving While Palestinian in Israel and the West Bank: The Politics of Disorienta- tion and the Routes of a Subaltern Knowledge.” American Ethnologist 42, no. 1 (2015), 33–54.
Erakat, Noura. Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019.
Hammami, Rema. “Destabilizing Mastery and the Machine Palestinian Agency and Gendered Embodiment at Israeli Military Checkpoints.” Current Anthropology 60, suppl. 19 (2018): S87–S97.
Jabary-Salamanca, Omar. “Assembling the Fabric of Life: When Settler Colonialism Becomes Development.” Journal of Palestinian Studies 45, no. 4 (2016): 64–80.
Johnson, Penny, and Eileen Kuttab. “Where Have All the Women (and Men) Gone? Reflections on Gender and the Second Palestinian Intifada.” Feminist Review, 69, no. 1 (2001): 21–43.
Malek, Cate, and Mateo Hoke, eds. Palestine Speaks: Narratives of Life under Occupation. New York: McSweeney’s, 2014.
Matar, Dina, and Helga Tawil-Souri, eds. Gaza as Metaphor. New York: Hurst, 2016.
Said, Edward. The Question of Palestine. New York: Vintage, 1992.
Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Nadera, and Sarah Ihmoud. “Exiled at Home: Writing Return and the Palestinian Home.” Biography 37, no. 2 (2014).
Shehadeh, Raja. Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape. New York: Scribner, 2008.
Spangler, Eve. Understanding Israel/Palestine: Race, Nation, and Human Rights in the Conflict. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2015.
Taraki, Lisa, ed. Living Palestine: Family, Survival, Resistance and Mobility under Occupation. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2006.
Recent Ethnographic Monographs
Abufarha, Nasser. The Making of a Human Bomb: An Ethnography of Palestinian Resistance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009.
Atshan, Sa’ed, with Katharina Galor. The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis, Palestinians. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020.
Atshan, Sa’ed. Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020.
Bishara, Amahl A. Back Stories: U.S. News Production and Palestinian Politics. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012.
Stamatopoulou-Robbins, Sophia. Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019.
Settler Colonial Studies and Solidarity
Atshan, Sa’ed, and Darnell Moore. “Reciprocal Solidarity: Where the Black and Palestinian Queer Struggles Meet.” Biography 3, no. 2 (2015): 680–705.
Barakat, Rana. “Writing/Righting Palestine Studies: Settler Colonialism, Indigenous Sovereignty and Resisting the Ghost(s) of History.” Settler Colonial Studies 8, no. 3 (2017): 349–363.
Bishara, Amahl. “Sovereignty and Popular Sovereignty for Palestinians and Beyond.” Cultural Anthropology 32, no. 3 (2017): 349–358.
Dabashi, Hamid. “Black Lives Matter and Pales- tine: A Historic Alliance.” Al Jazeera, September 6, 2016.
Hill, Marc Lamont, and Mitchell Plitnick. Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics. New York: The New Press, 2021.
Jabary-Salmanca, Omar, Mezna Qato, Kareem Rabie, and Sobhi Samour. “Past Is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine.” Settler Colonial Studies 2, no. 1 (2012): 1–8.
Krebs, Mike, and Dana M. Olwan. “‘From Jerusa- lem to the Grand River, Our Struggles Are One’: Challenging Canadian and Israeli Settler Colonialism.” Settler Colonial Studies 2, no. 2 (2013): 138–164.
Nakano-Glenn, Evelyn. “Settler Colonialism as Structure: A Framework for Comparative Studies of U.S. Race and Gender Formation.” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 1, no. 1 (2015): 52–72.
Qumsiyeh, Mazin B. Popular Resistance in Palestine: A History of Hope and Empowerment. Lon- don: Pluto Press, 2010.
Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Nadera. Security Theology, Surveillance and the Politics of Fear. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Whyte, Kyle. “Settler Colonialism, Ecology, and Environmental Injustice.” Environment and Society 9, no. 1 (2018): 125–144.
Films and Documentaries
Alatar, Mohammed, dir. Jerusalem, The East Side Story. Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committees, 2007.
Erakat, Noura and Dia’ Azzeh, dir. Gaza in Context. Status Audio, 2016.
Burnat, Emad and Davidi, Guy, dir. Five Broken Cameras. Kino Lorber, 2012. http://www.pbs.org/ pov/watch/5brokencameras/.
Sawhaney, Nitin and Hill, Roger, dir. Flying Paper. Journeyman Pictures, LTD, 2015. http://fly- ingpaper.org/about/.
Israel & Palestine: An Animated Introduction. The Jewish Voice for Peace, 2012. https://www.you- tube.com/watch?v=IklocPTBcP8.
Omeish, Sufyan and Omeish, Abdallah, dir. Occupation 101: Voices of the Silenced Majority. Seven Star Studio, 2007. https://topdocumentaryfilms. com/occupation-101/.
Sansour, Leila. Open Bethlehem. Planet Bethlehem Production, 2016. https://vimeo.com/onde- mand/openbethlehem.
Someone Like Me. United Nations Relief and Works Agency, 2011. https://www.unrwa.org/ newsroom/videos/someone-me-part-13.
Beddegenoodts, Jan, dir. Thank God It’s Friday. Cameltown and New Impact, 2014. https://elec- tronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/watch-thank- god-its-friday.
Kaplan, Mark J., dir. The Village Under the Forest. Journeyman Pictures, LTD, 2013. https://www. journeyman.tv/film/5897/the-village-under-the- forest.
Cowan, Paul and Shomali, Amer. The Wanted 18. Bellota Films, 2014. https://mubi.com/films/the- wanted-18.
Waters, Roger, dir. The Occupation of the American Mind. Media Education Foundation, 2016.
Weizman, Eyal, dir. Rebel Architecture: The Archi- tecture of Violence. Al Jazeera, 2014.