Month June 2016
In Israeli political discourse, the issue of African asylum seekers and the question of Palestine are largely seen as disconnected from one another. Yet the contours of Israel’s asylum regime and, by extension, its anti-Blackness and mistreatment of African migrants, cannot be understood in isolation from the Nakba and its laws.
How can one think productively about the Holocaust and the Nakba together? Political theorist Bashir Bashir argues that confronting this question is necessary in order to develop a new approach to decolonization in Israel/Palestine. Bashir agreed to discuss the project of engaging the Holocaust and Nakba together in a recent interview with The Nakba Files.
Israel has long been accused of partially or incrementally annexing territories seized through war and subject to settlement, especially the West Bank and Golan Heights. Here is a breakdown of the different instruments by which Israel has applied parts of its domestic legal system to the territories occupied in 1967, with the ultimate effect of creating a segregated regime of unequal laws for Palestinians and Israelis.
Terms like “creeping annexation” are used to convey disapproval at Israel’s refusal to respect the Palestinian right to self-determination or — more often in the case as used by Israelis — a warning about a future undetermined point when partition will no longer be seen as a viable option. Far less clear is when one can say that annexation is no longer merely “creeping” or “de facto.” How does one know if the “window for the two-state solution,” in peace process-speak, has definitively closed?
The Nakba Files is pleased to welcome our new contributing editor, Emilio Dabed.
Suhad Bishara: Israel has not merely limited the freedom of speech – it has done so in a specific way, allowing some “liberal” forms of dissent while strictly regulating those it sees as mounting ideological challenges to Zionism.
Emilio Dabed: No Palestinian leader has ever had the powers concentrated today in Abbas’ hands. To maintain this state of affairs or to secure the same powers for his successor, the Constitutional Court stands ready to help.
On May 25, the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem hosted a day-long conference under the title. “To Whom Does the Past Belong? Archive and Society in Israel.” Three historians involved with the event — On Barak, Liat Kozma, and Avner Wishnitzer — shared their thoughts with the editors of The Nakba Files.
Mezna Qato: In recent months, Israeli and Middle East Studies historians, particularly those outside Israel, have responded with indignation, frustration, and general discontent, at the Israel State Archive’s plans to restrict access to their records in the name of “digitisation.” Palestinian historians and archivists, however, have pointed out that this access was never afforded to Palestinians to begin with.