Palestine/Israel Review

02/24/2026

We are pleased to share a new publication in Palestine/Israel Review featuring Marah Sarji’s review of Munther Isaac’s 2025 book Christ in the Rubble: Faith, the Bible, and the Genocide in Gaza. In her review, Sarji presents Isaac’s work as a powerful theological intervention that confronts the moral and interpretive frameworks through which many Western Christians have engaged the genocidal violence in Gaza. Writing from his position as a Palestinian Christian pastor and theologian, Isaac challenges readings of Scripture that have been mobilized to legitimize colonialism, dispossession, war, and even genocide, advancing instead a contextual and liberationist theology that locates Christ amid the suffering and destruction experienced by Palestinians. As Sarji notes, “Isaac contributes to Palestinian decolonial efforts in asserting Palestinian agency on narrative telling, by recounting the story from Palestinian eyes while not compromising on his ethical nonviolent stances. He does well in asserting original Palestinian theological interpretation, as he pastorally speaks to Palestinian sorrow while many religious leaders remained silent in naming the horrors in public.” Link in the first comment

02/24/2026

We are pleased to share a new publication in Palestine/Israel Review featuring Manar Makhoul’s article, Reclaiming Narrative Authority: Esoteric Resistance in Emile Habiby’s The Pessoptimist. In this study, Makhoul analyzes how Emile Habiby’s The Secret Life of Sa’id, the Ill-fated Pessoptimist deploys secrecy as a political and narrative strategy within the context of post-1967 Palestinian literature. The article examines secrecy as a response to Zionist–Israeli epistemic erasure as well as to internal Palestinian debates over forms of resistance, tracing how the novel employs secrecy as an individual, familial, and collective device under conditions of surveillance. By exploring how secrecy shapes questions of identity, continuity, loyalty, and resistance, Makhoul situates Habiby’s work within broader debates over overt and covert forms of political agency among Palestinians in Israel. Link in the first comment.

01/28/2026

We are happy to announce the publication of this article in Palestine/Israel Review - authored by Shoshana Madmoni-Gerber, it makes critical connections between the Palestinian Nakba and ongoing Nakba and the systematic kidnapping of "non-normative" Jewish babies by the Israeli government in the 1950s

Abstract. This article employs an intersectional feminist lens to examine the Yemenite Mizrahi and Balkan Babies Affair, the abduction of hundreds of babies from immigrant families in Israel between 1948 and the early 1950s. It situates the affair within broader settler-colonial practices, drawing p...

04/28/2025

We are happy to share the newly published articles in Palestine Israel/Review (PIR):

* Gaza Changed US—Now, Let’s Change the World by Yasmeen Daher. In her piece, Yasmeen reflects on the systematic erasure of Palestinian history and the epistemic violence used to deny Palestinians their right to narration. Situating this erasure within a broader history of colonialism and resistance in the region and the Global South, it emphasizes that political agency, not historical study or the drawing of analogies, is what is needed for freedom and justice (Article in the first link).

* ’48 Palestinian Creatives: Fostering Emancipation, Imagining Decolonialism by Himmat Zoubi. In her article, Himmat explores contemporary manifestations of the municipal settler-colonialism of Haifa, where Zionist territorial dominance is advanced under the guise of urban development, erasing the Palestinian history and identity of the city. Despite efforts to de-Palestinize Haifa, however, a Palestinian cultural scene flourished there during the 2010s and early-2020s, fostering an urban subjectivity that counters the settler-colonial narrative and challenges ongoing practices of erasure (Article in the second link).

* Interview with Ruba Salih. On the occasion of publishing a special issue of PIR on the decolonization of the city of Haifa, PIR interviewed Ruba Salih, a professor of anthropology at the Department of Arts, University of Bologna. Ruba herself is the daughter of a Palestinian refugee from Haifa, and her mother was born in Yafa/Jaffa. PIR held an interview with her to talk about her work and her own experience of refuge as a descendant of Palestinian refugees from Haifa. Nadeem Karkabi and Sonia Boulos conducted the interview for PIR (Interview in the third link).

04/25/2025

NEW ARTICLE ALERT: "The Three Languages of Right-Wing Zionist Radicalism: Politics of a Comparative Gaze."

In this article, Arie Dubnov examines the radicalization of “maximalist” Revisionist Zionists from the late 1920s to the 1940s, aiming to fill a gap in the contextualization of the Zionist Right’s ideological historical development. Employing an intellectual historian’s approach, it reconstructs the political language and ideological borrowings of second-tier authors and activists, highlighting their eclectic incorporation of various strategies. At first, the article focuses on “Brit Habiryonim,” tracing its transition from Leninist admiration to Italian fascist support. Next, it explores the role of lesser-known Betar movement activists in Italy, who facilitated connections between Palestine-based radicals and Mussolini’s regime. In the third section, amid rising anti-British sentiment, Jewish insurgents draw parallels with Irish Republicans and Sinn Féin. This article argues that the maximalist imagination emerged from a “remix” of diverse European ideas, fueling paramilitary actions of groups like the Irgun and Lehi. It suggests that borrowing from fascist and anticolonial sources reflects intellectual adaptation, revealing the logic of mimicry even in the semiotics of violence.

See the full article:

https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/psup/pir/article/doi/10.5325/pir.2.2.0005/397683/The-Three-Languages-of-Right-Wing-Zionist

03/04/2025

Palestine/Israel Review is an open access journal that provides a platform for exchanging knowledge, scholarship, and ideas among scholars who share the relational, integrative, and holistic approach to the study of Palestine/Israel.

In approaching Palestine/Israel, the journal is committed to the following basic principles of international law:

The International Court of Justice has pronounced that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip is a wrongful act of a continuing character, which violates the prohibition on the acquisition of territory by force and the right to self-determination of the Palestinian people. Therefore, Israel is under the obligation to bring an end to its illegal presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory as rapidly as possible, including the obligation to dismantle settlements and the segregation wall. International law also considers the Syrian Golan Heights as occupied by Israel, the colonization of which must end too.

International law requires granting Palestinian citizens of Israel full equality, both on an individual level and as an indigenous group.

The right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN resolution 194 is an imperative of core international law norms.

01/24/2025

PIR's Book Review Editor, Ian Lustick, just published a new article in IJMES. Read it here:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journal-of-middle-east-studies/article/israel-annexation-and-sovereignty-within-the-green-line-and-across-it/67CA56433697F023BE3307E41F4AF74E?utm_campaign=shareaholic&utm_medium=copy_link&utm_source=bookmark

01/24/2025

We are now on the other social media app, where the sky is blue.
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Palestine/Israel Review is an open-access journal that provides a platform for exchanging knowledge, scholarship, and ideas among scholars who share the relational, integrative, and holistic approach to the study of Palestine/Israel.

01/16/2025

Call for Submissions for a special issue, “From Nakba to Genocide,” in Palestine/Israel Review, edited by the two prominent guest editors Dr. Maha Nassar and Dr. Raz Segal

With news of a ceasefire agreement, Israel’s 15-month-long genocide in Gaza warrants greater scrutiny. Official UN figures put the number of Palestinians that Israel has killed so far above 46,000. The actual number is likely far higher—a recent article in The Lancet argues that Israel had killed over 64,000 Palestinians by the end of June 2024, and 99 doctors and other healthcare workers who have worked in Gaza since October 2023 wrote in a letter to US President Biden in October 2024 that Israel may have killed over 120,000 Palestinians. Israeli attacks have also injured more than 110,000 people and have forcibly displaced multiple times nearly all 2.3 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Even if the ceasefire leads to the end of Israel’s genocide, Palestinians in Gaza will continue to die as a result of the atrocious conditions that Israel has intentionally created, including starvation policies, and the unprecedented destruction means that it will take decades to remove the rubble and rebuild.
Israel has crossed all red lines in its genocidal assault on Gaza: it has killed over 16,000 children; destroyed most of the hospitals; demolished all the universities and most of the schools. More journalists, aid workers, and health care personnel have been killed than in any other war or state violence in the 21st century. All this is supported by explicit Israeli political, media, and social discourses that celebrate genocide, as evidenced by the thousands of mass atrocity videos that Israeli soldiers and officers in Gaza have proudly uploaded to social media.

This livestreamed genocide has not led most Western states, primarily the US, to reconsider their unconditional military and diplomatic support for Israel. Yet people around the world have responded to this Israeli-Western genocide through mass demonstrations, hundreds of pro-Palestine campus encampments, and a significant increase in BDS initiatives. It is no accident that a Global South state, South Africa, brought the charge of genocide against Israel in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in December 2023, and the International Criminal Court (ICC) finally issued arrest warrants in November 2024 against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.

The Palestine/Israel Review’s special issue, “From Nakba to Genocide,” planned for late 2025 or early 2026, will include research articles (6,000-7,000 words), shorter reflection pieces (approx. 3,000 words, which may include discussions of visual art or other creative works), and poetry. It will address the incessantly accumulating evidence for Israel’s “genocide as colonial erasure,” situating it within the broader history of the 1948 Nakba and the 76-year-old ongoing Nakba of Israeli settler-colonial violence against Palestinians. This includes Israel’s military regime over Palestinian citizens until 1966; the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip after 1967; the systematic “unchilding” of Palestinian children; the mass imprisonment and torture of Palestinians; the system of apartheid; and the 17-year-long siege on the Gaza Strip—the longest in modern history.

We seek articles that engage with international law, the legal struggle to stop Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and the urgency of genocide prevention in relation to the escalating Israeli settler-colonial violence in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and against Palestinian citizens of Israel. Other topics we seek to address include: Nakba and genocide denial; firsthand accounts by Palestinians;
resistance against Israeli settler colonialism (including through international solidarity efforts); and sumud, including the persistence of Palestinian artistic expression and education in Palestine and beyond in the face of unprecedented cultural destruction and scholasticide. We are particularly interested in articles and poems that center the voices, knowledge, and perspectives of Palestinians. Inspired by Palestinian physician and poet Fady Joudah’s argument that “Palestine will be liberated in Arabic,” the co-editors of the volume will publish some of the articles and poems in both English and Arabic.

Please send abstracts (approx. 350 words) and short bios (approx. 200 words) for research articles and reflections pieces or drafts of poems in Arabic, English, or other languages (including translated pieces) to the co-editors of the special issue: Dr. Maha Nassar ([email protected]) and Dr. Raz Segal ([email protected]).

Abstracts are due in Feb 15, and final submissions on May 15.

12/22/2024

The Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies and the Middle Eastern Studies Forum at Stanford Global Studies invite qualified candidates to apply for the inaugural Palestinian Studies Postdoctoral Fellowship.

This fellowship is for a two-year term, beginning in Fall 2025, with the possibility of a third-year extension. The inaugural Palestinian Studies Fellow will be hosted by one of the following units of Stanford University: the Department of Anthropology, the Department of History, the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages (DLCL), or the Department of Political Science. We welcome applications from scholars in the disciplines represented by these units, and whose work promises to make significant contributions to Palestinian studies.
Applicants must have been awarded their PhD by August 31, 2025 and may not be more than three years beyond receipt of their doctoral degree at the start of the fellowship.

The postdoctoral scholar will teach one course each year in their host department: an undergraduate-level course in the first year, a graduate-level course in the second year, and a course of their choice in the third year (if extended). Fellows are required to reside in the Stanford area during the appointment period and expected to contribute to the intellectual community and academic programming of their host department, the Abbasi Program, and other relevant units.

The fellowship includes a funding package with an annual amount ranging from $85,000 to $95,000 for 2025–2026, eligibility for employee benefits, a research account of $6,000 per year, and a one-time funding of $9,000 to offset moving expenses and new equipment purchases. The pay offered to the selected candidate will be determined based on factors including (but not limited to) the qualifications of the selected candidate, budget availability, and internal equity.

Application Process: The application deadline for the 2025-2026 academic year is Friday, January 31, 2025, 11:59 p.m. PST.
To apply, candidates must create an account on Slideroom, the application platform used by the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, and upload the following materials in PDF format:
1. Cover letter
2. Curriculum Vitae (CV)
3. Research statement (up to two single-spaced pages)
4. Writing sample (dissertation chapter or other paper, up to 30 double-spaced pages)
5. Proposed undergraduate syllabus
6. Two letters of recommendation, which must be uploaded directly by recommenders to Slideroom.

https://islamicstudies.stanford.edu/opportunities/palestinian-studies-postdoctoral-fellowship

11/01/2024

Ian Lustick, a PIR Editorial Board member, did an interview recently with the Andrea Mitchell Center at the University of Pennsylvania. It focuses on the reinforcing afflictions of McCarthyist vigilantism by so-called pro-Israel advocates and rising anti-Semitism. He also discusses tensions within the Biden administration over its disastrous and cowardly policies toward the forever war in Gaza.

Check it out in this link:
https://mitchellcenter.libsyn.com/episode-65-ian-lustick-on-israel-gaza-and-the-united-states

10/13/2024

Tomorrow!

The Department of History and Palestine/Israel Review invite the public to Prof. Rashid Khalidi's presentation on October 14 at 5:30 pm. The event is in person and will not be recorded.