This paper critically engages with the lived experience of the concepts ‘unity’ and ‘fracture’ among diverse, self-ascribed Palestinian resistance groups. While social movement and resistance theory conceptualizes fracture (division in political discourse, contentious repertoire and space) as negative and thus as something to be overcome, and unity as positive and thus as something to strive for, I argue that the interplay between fracture and unity constitutes a foundational aspect of contemporary Palestinian resistance. Based on nineteen months of anthropological fieldwork in Palestine-Israel, encompassing annexed Jerusalem and besieged Gaza, along with digital ethnography, this paper links the Unity Intifada (2021) and Operation al Aqsa Flood (2023), contextualizing both within a broader socio-political continuum of resistance. Prioritizing the lived experience of contemporary Palestinian resistance fighters, both armed and non-violent, this paper first demonstrates how Israel’s varied oppressive practices engendered spatial fractures, political discourse divisions, and fractured contentious repertoires among ’48 Palestinians, Palestinians from the West Bank, Gaza, as well as between them and Palestinians in the diaspora. Second, it will be argued that merely conceptualizing these fractures as divisions, needing to be overcome to reach Palestinian unity, fails to capture the complexity of Palestinian resistance. Finally, the argument posits that the current 'unity' among Palestinian resistance is not based on overcame fractures in space, political discourse, or contentious repertoires. Rather, it is grounded in acknowledging and emphasizing differences based on fractured everyday experiences. This unity rests on accepting and encouraging a multitude of resistances stemming from these fractured everyday experiences of oppression. This paper makes a substantial contribution to Palestinian resistance and broader resistance studies in three key ways. Firstly, it critiques the prevailing discourse on cohesion within contemporary resistance movements, contending that unity and fractures are intricately interwoven in everyday experiences. By emphasizing interaction, it advances theoretical understanding. Secondly, it presents an ethnographic study of Palestinian resistance that transcends geographic divisions, encompassing Gaza, West Bank, '48 territories, and selected diaspora, offering a holistic analysis grounded in ethnographic description. Thirdly, the paper delves into the description, analysis, and discussion of two recent periods of heightened contention—the Unity Intifada and the 2023-24 Israel-Gaza conflict—within a socio-historical framework, emphasizing the complexity of current events. In doing so, it fosters debate and bridges the often artificial gap between academic discourse and political opinion.

This paper seeks to chronicle the history of the globalization of the Palestinian struggle based on its organizational self-descriptions (pamphlets, newspapers, and magazines). It first details the pre-global phase, when the liberatory horizon of the Palestinian struggle was still submerged within Nasserism and pan-Arab nationalism. This period extends until 1967, even though there were a number of noteworthy attempts to globalize the struggle already in the mid-1960s. That includes the opening of the Fatah bureau in Algiers in 1963 which resulted in forging ties with other liberation struggles (and friendly governments) based there. Then on January 1, 1965, Fatah engineered the relaunch of the Palestinian revolution with the "firing of the first bullet". These were part of a concerted effort to globalize the Palestinian struggle before the watershed moment of the June 1967 war, an important phase that has not yet been explored by the scholarly literature. The June war finally brought the Palestinian factions to the fore like never before, setting off a flurry of publishing activity on the part of the guerilla factions hitherto unprecedented. I finally move on to the main part of the paper which explores the main organs of the Palestinian factions, namely al-Hadaf (PFLP) and ath-Thawra al-Filastiniyyah (Fatah), as the basis for charting the semantic forms their global imaginations took. While Thomas Chamberlin undertakes a tremendous task in this regard, his book only surveys a highly selective part of that literature.

Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran has strategically employed revolutionary politics to amplify its power and influence throughout the Middle East. A cornerstone of this strategy has been the formation of the Axis of Resistance, which emerged in the mid-2000s and includes both state and non-state actors. As the war in Gaza enters its fourth month, Iran has reasserted itself as a leading advocate for the Palestinian cause, revitalizing the Axis of Resistance in the process. This research delves into the dynamics between Iran and its proxies against the backdrop of the Gaza conflict, with a specific focus on the relationship between the Islamic Republic and the Houthis. It seeks to understand how an aspiring regional hegemon leverages local proxies to advance its foreign policy objectives and examines the limitations of such alliances. The Houthis, a relatively recent addition to the Axis, have swiftly emerged as a significant regional player, evidenced by recent developments in the Red Sea region. While maintaining their autonomy from Tehran, the Houthi attacks in the Red Sea align with their strategic calculations aimed at bolstering their leverage in the ongoing negotiations concerning Yemen's future (Thamer and Akkas 2024). Concurrently, by aligning themselves with the Resistance Axis, they bolster their own regional standing while furthering Iranian interests, affording Tehran plausible deniability for any actions attributed to Iran (Zalayat 2021, O’Connor 2021). How does Iran exploit its ties with the Houthis and capitalize on regional developments to expand its influence? Moreover, what implications do these developments hold for Iran’s involvement in Gaza, and where do the Houthis fit within the broader Axis of Resistance? Employing proxy theory, this paper analyzes the evolving relationship between Iran and the Houthis in recent years, assesses the Yemeni rebels’ position within the Axis, and examines recent tensions in the Red Sea in relation to the Gaza conflict. The central thesis statement of this paper asserts that a regional actor often utilizes its proxy relationship with local entities to advance its foreign policy goals. Yet, in this particular case this dynamic is mutually beneficial, and the Houthis wield significant agency in their dealings with Iran. By shedding light on the evolution of a local actor into a regional revolutionary force, this paper elucidates the impact on the regional power balance and the transforming dynamics between the sponsor state and its proxies.

For over 100 years, Palestinians have faced violent settler colonialism featuring land theft, ethnic cleansing, and Indigenous annihilation, both epistemic and physical, and which has centered settler, rather than Indigenous, futurity and security. While this settler colonialism resembles that faced by Indigenous peoples across the globe, the specific anti-Palestinian racism (APR) undergirding it differs. Contemporary scholars conceptualize APR as including violent attempts to silence, deny, and punish Palestinian dissent to their dehumanization, displacement, and dispossession, particularly after the Nakba. The world has seen APR writ large since Israel began bombing Gaza in October 2023. States, public and private institutions (including colleges and universities), and police forces across the “west” have mobilized to both deny the genocidal violence occurring and simultaneously silence, dehumanize, and punish Palestinians and their allies demanding an end to it. This silencing of Palestinian voices articulating specific grievances against real and well-documented assaults on their lives and livelihoods is rooted in nearly a century of Zionist efforts to obfuscate, deny, and racially gaslight Palestinians challenging their ongoing dispossession and murder. Guided by Palestinian scholars addressing APR, and Palestinian history and epistemologies more broadly, alongside Indigenous, critical race, and settler colonial theories, this paper identifies and elucidates the historic precursors to both contemporary APR and its significant violent material consequences for Indigenous Palestinians as they were articulated in the US between 1917-1948. Data for this paper is extracted from multiple local, national, and international Zionist organizations across the US and housed at the American Jewish Archives (Cincinnati, OH), Center for Jewish History (NYC), Wyner Family Jewish Heritage Center (Boston), and New York Public Library. In addition to explicitly racist tropes about Palestinians appearing throughout the archival materials, I focus on discursive constructions of Palestinians in discussions of Zionist expansion of settlement colonies and migration, mobilizing a defense force, and arguing for an explicitly Jewish state, amidst both Palestinians’ resistance to these phenomena and international debates about the future of Palestine’s Mandate. Zionists’ multiple and overlapping discursive strategies, often relying on and resembling conceptions of Indigenous peoples on Turtle Island, featured settler futurity, security, and both featured and prefigured, Indigenous annihilation and, like contemporary APR, obscured, denied, and elided the violence already occurring in Palestine and presaging the Nakba. Understanding APR’s development and pervasive dissemination in media-based, political, and public discourses for Palestinian dispossession historically across Turtle Island, is essential to developing strategies challenging it to facilitate Palestinian liberation.

In this paper, I examine the relationship between Israel’s purported “War on Hamas” and the destruction of the educational landscape in Gaza. In the four months following Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, the Israeli military engaged in a full-fledged and unrelenting military assault on the Gaza Strip. The Israeli bombardment, which has been widely considered both disproportionate and illegal by international legal bodies and human right organizations, resulted in the full or partial destruction of 370 elementary and secondary schools, as well as all 12 of Gaza’s universities. In addition to formal schooling spaces, the Israeli military also damaged, destroyed, or plundered numerous cultural sites, archives, and museums. Among the more than 28,000 Palestinians who have been killed since 10/7, more than 4200 have been students and more 325 have been school teachers or professors. Of the more than 68,000 who have been injured since the beginning of the so-called-war, more than 700 are professional educators while more than 7800 have been identified as students. Such outcomes do more than spotlight the material consequences of State violence in general, or imperial warfare in particular. In addition to evidencing the necropolitical capacity of the modern nation-state, the violence wielded against Palestinian educational institutions and communities also provide an example par excellence of what Karma Nabulsi calls scholasticide, or “the systematic destruction of Palestinian education.” This paper builds on Nabulsi’s definition by situating the term within a more expansive and robust analytic framework that lends insight into how scholasticide operates as a form of Israeli statecraft and settler-colonial violence. In particular, the paper shows how, since October 7th, the Israeli government has engaged in three scholasticidal tactics: 1) destroying built environments; 2) erasing sites of public pedagogy; and 3) surveilling and killing students and educators. The paper also shows how, rather than denying the use of such tactics, the Israeli government has appealed to a range of moral, political, and juridical discourses as a means of sanitizing and normalizing scholasticide as a morally and legally legible form of statecraft. These appeals, as well as the scholasticidal tactics themselves, have enabled the Israeli state to reinscribe the Palestinian educational landscape as a site of both pedagogical and literal violence within the public imagination. Such efforts help to advance Israel’s longstanding settler-colonial commitment to reinscribing collective memory, undermining indigenous sovereignty, and ensuring premature death.

Over the last few years, there has been a notable rise in social and political activism within sporting spaces, in which numerous athletes have taken a proactive stance, using their positions to elevate and draw awareness about various social and political issues. With social media’s contribution to the growing awareness of the hardships Palestinians incur under the Israeli settler colonial occupation and, in this dismal moment in which there is an ongoing genocide in Gaza, the connection between sport and politics has become more prominent in sporting spaces. In this paper, we delve into the significance of the keffiyeh and the Palestinian flag, both symbols of Palestinian resistance that have become a prominent feature in the world of sports. We analyse social media posts with a specific focus on the Palestinian cause within the sporting context. In our analysis, we find that athletes and fans from diverse disciplines and accomplishments are incorporating the keffiyeh and the Palestinian flag to express solidarity and advocate for social and political change. Additionally, we acknowledge the backlash and risks athletes and fans have faced when speaking out about Palestine. The fact that the keffiyeh and flag have become symbols adopted by athletes and fans worldwide is a testament to the peaceful resistance Palestinians have long championed to secure their freedom. We conclude by acknowledging the critical role that athletes and fans play in representing the Palestinian symbols of resistance, encourage others to join the solidarity movement and call out the hypocrisy in media reporting and by sports bodies that have attempted to censor and/or demonize the keffiyeh and flag.