Sponsored by the Palestinian American Research Center, this panel explores how (prior to the advent of the 1968 Palestinian Revolution) Palestinians peacefully invoked their right to self-representation at “home” and in the world. In the process, it demystifies the powerful notion that, between 1948 and 1967, Palestinians helplessly sat beyond the borders of the local, national, regional and global processes of Palestinian decolonization and thus self-consciously relented (and lost) agency at the hands of Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, the Arab League, as well as international actors like the United States. Far from being relegated to a permanent, subsidiary state of helplessness, despair, and exclusion, Palestinians at this time worked within contemporary circumstances to represent themselves and make their voices heard in the hope of initiating political, socio-economic, and cultural change. Rather than take refuge and merely seek solace, post-1948 Palestinians actively entrenched themselves within the politics of municipal governance, the columns of national presses, regional education systems and curriculum development, as well as international relations, in order to overturn discriminatory perceptions and representations. Nakbah and ensuing mystifications aside, this panel asserts that Palestinians willingly acted independently in the name of decolonization by examining ensuing struggles over self-representation and overturning the myth of Palestinian exceptionalism.
This panel, as a result, unearths four different ways in which Palestinians actively sought to overcome dispossession, displacement, and disenfranchisement. The first presentation analyzes how Palestinian Nazarenes experienced (and thereafter politically situated themselves within) the colonial transition between the British mandate and Israeli military rule. Despite their formal exclusion as colonized peoples from self-governance, post-1948 Nazarenes developed strategies in order to preserve Palestinian rights. The second presentation explicates the ways in which Palestinians nationalists and communists challenged an Israeli colonial discourse that essentialized (and thus misrepresented) the “Arab woman” during the period of military rule (1948-66). From there, the third presentation explores the formation of the Arab Palestine Refugee Office in New York City in 1954 and its subsequent attempts to overturn anti-Palestinian prejudices in the United States. Finally, the fourth presentation examines how Palestinian refugees in Jordan used education and the classroom as spaces to mobilize themselves, enact their right to self-representation, contest regional politics, and engender decolonization.
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Dr. Mezna Qato
In the aftermath of the 1948 war, and the dispossession of the majority of Palestinian refugees into Jordanian territory, a massive educational infrastructure was developed to accommodate the needs of refugee students. This educational system provided the newly-expanded Hashemite regime with a tool by which they hoped to reproduce and consolidate a state narrative that could de-nationalise Palestinian youth, and implicate them into Hashemite legitimacy. Through curricular and instructional alterations and interventions, an impenetrable school inspection and surveillance system, and the cooperation of international donors and organisations, the Jordanian regime endeavoured to contain the potency of pedagogical space for its own ends. Concomitantly, however, Palestinians too came to regard education as a vehicle for mobility and security in precarious times. By the late 1960s, education was being touted in glossy UN public relations material as a marker of Palestinian ‘success’ in exile.
This paper zooms in on the everyday workings of schooling in the refugee camps in Jordan at a moment of particularly heightened popular mobilization in the Kingdom, and education’s role in transforming the political-economic and social capital of refugees. It will unpack the ways in which education came to be understood, framed, and enacted as a potentially liberatory exercise. In doing so, it attends to the ways in which interior debates on curriculum, pedagogical practices, educational built environments, all came to embody the high stakes of representational power and decolonial possibility. Weaving these debates and practices by students and teachers with those of UN and government bureaucrats, development interlocutors, and intelligence officials and inspectors, however, aims against nationalist teleology and triumphalism by grounding Palestinian educational history in the sometimes contradictory stakes of liberatory potential and social aspiration and class mobility. Through the use of UN and government archives, memoirs, oral histories, lesson planners, curriculum guides, statistical datasets, debates in party newspapers, and intelligence reports and files, this paper asks, what precisely did education do, and what was done with it?
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Dr. Leena Dallasheh
This paper explores Nazareth’s experience of colonial transition—from the British Mandate to the Israeli state—as part of a singular history, an important yet often neglected part of Palestinians’ experience of stalled decolonization. Analyzing the city’s interactions with the central government throughout the 1940s and 1950s, this paper highlights the colonial nature of Palestinians’ encounter with the state, first in its Mandate incarnation and then immediately afterwards, in its Israeli one. I thus argue that 1948 should be understood not as a rupture but as part of a partial decolonization process: although the end of British colonialism dramatically changed the social, political and economic structures in the new nation-state, significant colonial features remained, as Palestinians continued to be excluded from power in the new self-defined Jewish state. I argue for the importance of continuities and differences in Palestinian reactions to the ruling state across the colonial transition. Nazareth residents built on their experiences under British colonial rule, refining their previous strategies to cope with their new reality under Israeli control. Nazarenes’ social and political mobilization allowed them to utilize the space made available through citizenship in Israel to negotiate their rights. At the same time, they were also unable to overcome the exclusions inherent to a political system that maintained the dominance of a Jewish majority. By showing how Palestinian activists utilized a range of strategies in their efforts to maintain their rights, I challenge the common resistance/collaboration dichotomy in analyzing Palestinian responses to the founding of the Israeli state. Situating this history very clearly in the context of oppressive, colonial state control, I show that even when undertaking actions regularly described in the literature as collaboration, including engaging with Israeli officials and playing by their rules, these Palestinians were neither duped, nor helpless, nor collaborators. Rather, they were conscious agents who sought to advance their individual and collective interests as best as they could in the context of military government and an exclusionary state.
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Dr. Maha Nassar
Recently great strides have been made in scholarship that elaborates upon the ways in which Palestinian citizens of Israel were subjects of a "liberal settler" state, as well as in scholarship that recognizes the ways in which, globally, both colonial and anticolonial discourses have elided women’s voices. However, studies that bring these two lines of inquiry together are still in their early stages. This is especially true for the period between 1948 and 1966, when Palestinian women in Israel were largely absent from the public sphere due to Israeli military rule, sparse educational and employment opportunities, and rural cultural norms.
In this paper, I trace the debates regarding Palestinian women in Israel during the period of military rule in order to interrogate this aspect of colonial and anticolonial discourses in Israel. I do so through a close reading and analysis of this topic in six major Arabic publications in Israel: three pro-government (al-Yawm, al-Mujtama‘ and Kalimat al-Mar’a) and three critical of the government (al-Ittihad, al-Jadid and al-Fajr). I argue that Israeli establishment figures, and their loyal Palestinian supporters, followed the classic colonial formula that portrayed an essentialized “Arab woman” as shackled by the conventions of Arab tradition and in need of the state’s modernizing projects in order to be liberated. In contrast, Palestinian nationalist and communist activists in Israel actively subverted such claims, not only by pointing out the ways in which Israeli policies disadvantaged Palestinian women, but also by printing news and views of women from around the region and around the world. They sought to have Palestinians in Israel look beyond the borders of the state for inspiration and for solidarity-building opportunities with Arab and third world women. While less patronizing than the pro-government writers, the nationalist and communist writers nonetheless paid little heed to the voices and perspectives of the very Palestinian women that they, too, sought to uplift.
By shedding light on colonial and anticolonial discourses as they pertain to Palestinian women in Israel, this paper elucidates the strategies employed by Palestinian activists in Israel to undermine Israeli colonial narratives, while also shedding light on the shortcomings of these strategies. Tracing these debates also draws attention to the parallels between the political formations of Palestinians in Israel and of Arabs more broadly at a time when the Palestinian minority was still politically and geographically isolated from the region.
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Dr. Maurice Jr. M. Labelle
Palestinians have long struggled to have their voices heard in the West. Long the subjects of an inequitable international system that perpetuated racial discrimination to their detriment, Palestinians gradually concluded that in order to decolonize themselves, they also needed to invalidate imperial culture. The birth of neighbouring Arab nation-states, ensuing European transfers of power, and public declarations of national independence would not naturally engender Palestinian self-determination. The globalization of Palestinian perspectives, many leaders tragically determined after the nakbah, would serve as a key anti-colonial tactic vis-à-vis Zionism and advance the ongoing process of decolonization by further humanizing Palestinians, while simultaneously decolonizing Western ways of seeing and representing the Arab world. The United States, given its global status as a political, economic, and cultural superpower, as well as its nascent “special relationship” with Israel, thus became a central site whereby Palestinians actively enacted a global anti-Orientalist project and invoked what Edward Said later referred to as the Palestinian “permission to narrate.”
This paper explores the activities of the New York-based Palestine Arab Refugee Office (PARO), the first unofficial Palestinian-led organization that defended the Palestinian human right to self-determination in the United States following the establishment of Israel. Based mainly on the private papers of PARO public relations officer Sami Hadawi, the memoirs and writings of PARO President Dr. Izzat Tannous, as well as numerous APRO publications (such as its monthly newsletter), it examines how this small, two-person operation attempted to culturally decolonize Americans, and thus Palestinians in the process, from its creation in 1955 to the formation of the Palestine Liberation Organization. More specifically, it unearths the ways in which the PARO opened the way for its successor, the PLO, to become the first non-governmental observer to speak at a plenary session of the United Nations General Assembly. The APRO, this paper argues, was crucial in the formation of an Arab-led, transnational anti-Orientalist project that united peoples in both the Arab world and the United States in order to: 1) to overturn anti-Arab prejudices; 2) improve U.S. diplomatic relations with Arab peoples and states; and 3) promote Arab human rights in the world.
