Abstract
This article examines a decolonial approach to teaching a course on Palestine/Israel involving experiential travel to the region. A decolonial syllabus studies absences, erasures, the multiple intersecting mechanisms and matrices of violence, and alternative futures as they inhabit subordinated pasts (histories) and the present in various activist spaces. We expand on other decolonial learning-in-context by underscoring the need for religious literacy. This is especially urgent because the land is a destination for apocalyptic, messianic, and birthright tourism designed to confirm and reinforce people’s redemptive scripts and fantasies about the land. The objective of the decolonial approach is not “metaphorical.” It is to dismantle the oppression of Palestinians, institute mechanisms for restorative justice, and draw ethical political maps. It is also hermeneutical, denoting the urgent need to dezionize Jewish consciousness. This article centers on those dimensions of our work that engage with pathways for decolonial Jewish political ethics in Palestine.
In June 2023, we sat on the ground floor of an inconspicuous Jerusalemite synagogue in West Jerusalem. It was early in our learning-in-context segment of a course titled “Narratives of Displacement and Belonging: The Case of Palestine/Israel.” A diverse group of graduate students from Harvard who had already traveled through a semester-long syllabus filled with readings and films before “touring” the actual landscape for its absences, crimes, laments, and hopes sat in pensive attentiveness. They listened to our two religious Jewish Israeli interlocutors who shared how their religiosity led them to criticize Zionist claims of sovereignty to the land. Such claims, which deploy the Bible as a land title, reveal Zionism’s modernity and embeddedness in Western Christian Europe as an interrelated set of colonial, genocidal, political, intellectual, and theological projects. In the view of the Israeli Jewish scholar Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, Jewish Zionism internalized Christian theological accounts of Jewish return to the land and biblical literalism together with antisemitic motifs that located the Jews of Christian Europe as not from Europe, but from the ancient Middle East.1 The Christian–Zionist or restorationist imagination emerged as part of the story of European Christian modernity and the formation of Protestant traditions. Their critique of clericalism and Catholic accounts of Christianity led to the consolidation of a presumably literal biblical imagination and the emergence of Christian eschatology instrumental to the Jewish settler colonial project in Palestine. Unlearning Zionism, therefore, amounts to unlearning Christian European modernity and reimagining Jewishness outside a settler colonial frame. The objective of the decolonial approach is not “metaphorical.” It is to dismantle the oppression of Palestinians, institute mechanisms for restorative justice, and draw ethical political maps. It is also hermeneutical, denoting the urgent need to dezionize Jewish consciousness.2
At the same time, while religious dimensions are always interlaced, Palestinian freedom is not dependent on excavating a particular Muslim or Christian counterscript, but rather on the absence of the ethnoreligious grids of oppression imposed on every facet of Palestinian lives. Our in-context learning approximates Palestine solidarity tours when, for instance, we tour occupied East Jerusalem with Grassroots Jerusalem or hear about cultural resistance in Yabous Cultural Center, walk through the parking lot that covers up the massacre in Tantura, or walk through the streets of Aida refugee camp and visit Adalah in Haifa or Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights in Bethlehem or the Military Court in Offer Prison near Ramallah. This article, however, centers on the work we do that engages questions about pathways for decolonial Jewish political ethics in Palestine.
Our religiously informed syllabus expands on the decolonial work of other scholars, such as Lubin et al.3 Facilitating learning-in-context tours in Palestine/Israel, they deploy what they call an “archeology of the present,” which is “the practice of recognizing the presences of the Palestinian past, which Israel has worked so assiduously to erase or assimilate, in the present, thereby affirming the existence of a different, Palestinian geography and landscape that continue to exist notwithstanding the Israeli national-colonial project.” Lubin et al. detail their encounters with Palestinian interlocutors across the fragmented landscape, but their decolonial itinerary precludes Jewish–Israeli margins and absences. Why should they look for such margins? Because without such a religiously and historically literate archeology of Jewish debris and counter-archives in the present, their architecture of a Palestinian future liberation could be interpreted as metaphorical, dualistic, and utopian.
We do not open our article at the ground floor synagogue to center on (Israeli) Jews but to recognize how decolonial futures after the dismantling of the settler colonial frame may include them too. Our anti-occupation interlocutors there, a modern Orthodox man and a feminist Haredi woman, told us about their hermeneutical or interpretive recovery work, excavating the threads of the Jewish tradition eclipsed by Zionism. They spoke about how prayers and liturgical praxis mobilize their anti-occupation and broader social justice work against the racialized logic structuring the entire geopolitical space of Palestine/Israel. “At the end, God, the sovereign, will be my judge, and I cannot imagine God wants me to dominate others,” one of them shared while reciting multiple rabbinic sources, revealing her dedication to hermeneutical praxis as the essential mechanism to produce historically embodied Jewish meaning. In a context beholden to settler colonial Zionism, uncovering Judaism hermeneutically, through interpretive labor, becomes a necessary noneliminative decolonial move.
As our learning in context proceeded through the realities of occupation and apartheid, the students recalled our two Jewish interlocutors. Their words and actions challenged binary and sectarian visions. One Muslim-American student remarked repeatedly during bus rides and debriefings about how deeply she connected to our interlocutors’ account of their religiosity. Their spirituality disrupts the violence that seeks to define and script them. “This is the kind of religion and spirituality I love in my own [Muslim] community,” she said. Other Jewish American students became overwhelmed with their sorrow at how the Jewish tradition has become indistinct from a settler colonial nation-state project. They aspire to extricate themselves from such a conflation, which implicates them in atrocities. As we walked a few days later, on Shabbat, through the horrors left after the settlers’ pogrom in the West Bank Palestinian village of Turmus Ayya, these same students deepened their determination to reclaim their Jewishness as a critical process of accountability to Palestinians. Rather than seeking a presumably Archimedean ethical ground outside Judaism, the students noted the religious activists’ ability to sit on the literal and metaphorical ground floor of the synagogue and go deeper into the tradition to unlearn its weaponization and rekindle ethical sources for political praxis of nondomination and ethical accountability. Religion, therefore, becomes a key site for decolonial potentiality concretely relevant to Palestine/Israel because a critical, constructive, relational, and historical account of religion challenges the colonial, segregationist, and sectarian legacies that have shaped the modern history of Palestine. Disrupting the conflation of political and religious identities with one another amounts to a decolonial move that illuminates the potential for reconstituting other forms of solidarity and political visions or what Ussama Makdisi calls an “ecumenical frame.”4
We base our analysis of the aspect of our decolonial syllabus dedicated to touring Jewish margins, absences, erasures, and activist potentialities on first-hand experience with a broader curriculum as part of the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative at Harvard Divinity School (2019–2023). Our positionalities are pivotal for the analysis. One of us, most centrally dedicated to shaping the in-context itinerary, is a Palestinian whose father was uprooted from Lydda in 1948 and who grew up in Ramallah, with the years of the first intifada being formative in her political consciousness. Her colleague is an Ashkenazi Israeli–Jewish American scholar. A queer Christian social ethicist and expert in the public understanding of religion also joins us in shaping critical pedagogies in the study of religion. This article is authored by one of us. However, it reflects our shared ongoing project. Over the span of five years, our cross-learning deepened due to our intersectional learning in context together and with the students and our interlocutors on the ground, along with various ghosts whose stories persist despite erasures and denials. The fact that we come to this differently situated does not mean that our ethical visions differ, nor do we partake in identitarian silos.
Our context and situatedness matter.5 Increasingly, our students who are sensitized on the issue of Harvard’s crimes against Indigenous peoples and who also reckon with the legacies of slavery and ongoing anti-blackness as well as other forms of bigotry cannot bracket their sensibilities concerning how one case relates to another.6 They become attuned to their situatedness and implication in various historical and ongoing injustices.7 They also see the links between the depopulation of Palestine and the legacies of settler colonialism in North America and understand that while the stories are distinct, they share common origins in European Christian modernity. These sensibilities invite a global decolonial pedagogical lens for which the case of Palestine/Israel elucidates the study of coloniality/modernity zooming in on critical religious literacy and diasporic reading.8
Religiously Literate Diasporic Reading Methodology
To integrate religion robustly into a decolonial outlook does not mean simply to reclaim “good” and “authentic” religion to counter “bad” and “perverted” forms. Rather, it is to undo conceptually and sociologically the colonial reduction of communities to their presumed religious belonging, thereby deflating broader cross-cutting socioeconomic and political visions. “Religion” was initially deployed to authorize colonialism through the Doctrine of Discovery, rendering Indigenous peoples as “without a soul” and thus as having no religion, less than human, and targets for “saving” or erasure. This was accomplished first through explicit deployment of a Christian cosmology and later using other “good news” such as progress, civilization, and development.9 “Religion” in later modernity became a comparative racialized anthropological category pivotal for colonial taxonomies that are integral to “divide and rule” policies.10 For the cultural anthropologist Talal Asad, what came to be defined as “religious” and its presumed “secular” binary convey intra-European and intra-Christian theological and intellectual developments projected as “universal” in the context of imperial expansion and the production of liberal citizenship in the West.11 Other critical scholars of the modern secular West continued in this vein, arguing that secularism reconstituted a Eurocentric Christian (and a “Judeo-Christian”) political theology that effected epistemological and political forms of violence and governmentality.12 What came to be defined as “religious” and “secular” is not innocent or self-evident but rather a product of power undergirded by orientalist discourses. The taxonomic deployment of religion in the service of empire has entailed defining complex sociological realities reductively by religious belonging. For example, people who for centuries were Baghdadis all of a sudden became “Jewish.” This remains an undying colonial legacy even in how “religion” turned into a depoliticizing peacebuilding instrument, a “soft power” deployed in reconfiguring realities of domination.13 This legacy is at the center of our case study of Palestine/Israel.
Palestine studies, in conversation with broader scholarly trends, rearticulated in the early decades of the twenty-first century the relevance of a settler colonial analytic framework that, while rooted in an older genealogy,14 finds novel expressions attuned to settler colonial studies, Indigenous studies, intellectual sovereignty, and epistemological resistance15 as well as the study of whiteness and racial colonialism.16 We add to this scholarship links to the critical study of religion, which traces the colonial manufacture of “religion” as a technology of control and racialization. At the same time, we expand beyond critique. Critics of the modern/secular teleology, such as the late Saba Mahmood, offer demystifying counter-hegemonic critiques befitting from their location in the Islamophobic terrains of the Euro-American empire.17 Ironically, this positionality lands them in a heteropatriarchal and modernist discourse about religious authenticity.18 For us, religious literacy builds on the indispensable intersectional critique of religion and (settler) colonial violence. Because we seek to identify where and how Jewish meanings, in this case, are reconstituted ethically and politically, our religiously literate decolonial pedagogy is also hermeneutical, doing an archeology of Jewish pasts in the colonized present. This is what we mean by the methodology of critical religiously literate diasporic reading.
The Arab–Jewish scholar Ella Habiba Shohat articulated a nonreductive global perspective regarding the interconnected geographies of dislocation in her field-shaping method of “diasporic reading.” Diasporic reading as a methodology, Shohat writes, is the decolonial praxis of “transcend[ing] essentialist nationalist paradigms”19 and “stretching and broadening notions of belonging.”20 Shohat begins her “Taboo Memories, Diasporic Visions: Columbus, Palestine, and Arab-Jews” with the material and metaphorical story of how Lord Cromer (the British Administrator of Egypt in 1879) facilitated the removal of the Geniza (essentially the archive of the Jewish community of Cairo dating back to 1025).21 For Shohat, the theft of the Geniza (enabled by Ashkenazi elites close to the British administration) conveys how the erasure of a different narrative of Jewish life in the region is integral to the construction of Jewish Zionist ideology and how both connect to colonial forces and patrons and the Palestinian catastrophe.
Shohat’s diasporic reading articulates a relational approach to identity, which seeks to unsettle temporal, spatial, and ideational segregations. This is why she begins by recounting the targeting of Muslims and Jews in Spain and Portugal in the fifteenth century and linking it to the “discovery” of the Americas and practices of forced conversion there. While these communities were subjected to “the same inquisitional measures,”22 their histories are delinked as an outcome of intentional discursivity and Zionist and Eurocentric historiography. This discursive violence that “subsumed Islamic Jewish history into a Christian Jewish history”23 subordinates the multiplicity of Jewish histories “into a ‘universal’ Jewish experience.”24 For Shohat, the year 1492, therefore, interlinks geographies of displacement. Unlike Judith Butler,25 whose relational ethics leads them to reclaim the “diasporic” as an ethics of nonbelonging and alterity inhospitable to collective conceptions of home and belonging, Shohat reclaims the syncretic interlinking of geographies of dislocation to recover archives of belonging in the region outside a settler colonial paradigm. Therefore, her intervention sheds light on why a decolonial syllabus needs to travel not only physically to the location of acute and material violence, but also historically and discursively into other forms of erasure. This is not a museum tour of relics from the past. It is an in-context syllabus designed to disrupt and unlearn the ontologized constraints imposed on political and cultural imaginations. Therefore, the decolonial diasporic reading of 1492 offers a particular (rather than abstract) counter-archive of meanings for reimagining Jewish belonging to the region through a decolonial register.
Shohat’s relational methodology of diasporic reading (to be distinguished from the diaspora as a place outside the home country) also connects to methodological assumptions and critical analytic frameworks informing our understanding of religion. Diane L. Moore articulates a religiously literate approach to understanding violence and justice-oriented peacebuilding. She writes, “Promoting a nuanced and capacious understanding of religion provides tools to mitigate the destructive power of religion and enhance its ability to generate compassion, beauty, and just peacebuilding.”26 A capacious approach to religion debunks assumptions regarding who can speak authoritatively about religion as a historically contested, culturally plural, and diverse phenomenon rather than an ahistorical or transhistorical essence and set of prescriptions.27 What Shohat challenges in her diasporic reading is the colonial instrumentalization of religion to impose a sectarian logic that erased the cultural embeddedness of Jews within Arab and Muslim cultures and sociopolitical milieus. It also illuminates an exit from the risks of terminal and reactionary conservative critique of the modern/secular. Moore’s methodological intervention complements Shohat’s diasporic reading by empowering the religiously literate reader to “critically interrogate how religion manifests in cultural and historical contexts.” Suppose Shohat requires centering an analysis on colonial violence and Zionist discursive erasures. In that case, Moore’s method facilitates an examination of how Jewish claims are narrated and why and by whom, therefore connecting the syllabus to Jewish critical works interrogating Zionist construction, such as those of Shohat and others.28 Our religiously literate diasporic reading posits that if a particular hegemonic, messianic, and racialized reading of Jewish meaning, history, and destiny is pivotal for the colonial forms of violence and how they are authorized in Palestine, then hermeneutics also becomes a site for decolonial work and requires “traveling” through religiously literate relational diasporic readings to trace and undo what Hagar Kotef interprets as the colonizer’s constitutive violence.29
Palestine/Israel Beyond the Gaze
“I cannot unsee what I saw” is what our students frequently express upon their return from a learning tour of Palestine/Israel. Seeing with one’s eyes most often than not entails seeing invisiblized communities. Edward Said proclaimed that the Palestinians do not have “permission to narrate”30 and that their stories are denied and erased through the technologies of settler colonialism, including orientalism and Christian fantasies about Jewish history and destiny,31 in their philo- or antisemitic modalities. Indeed, despite the massive archives of evidence Palestinians amassed about their displacement and their Nakba or catastrophe as an event in time, as well as their ongoing realities, there is still a persistent need to bring people (tourists) to “see for themselves with their own eyes.”32 What such visitors see are the forms of routine and systemic violence and displacement that the Palestinians endure, the traces of the Nakba covered up by non-Indigenous pine trees, and the remains of lost worlds, such as in the ruins of Lifta in the area of Jerusalem, one of the first Palestinian villages to be depopulated by the pre-state Jewish militias during the events of the Nakba in 1948. The students’ tour of Lifta includes absences, erasures, and current Jewish Zionist violence. The students encounter the dilapidated remains of magnificent architecture covered with hateful graffiti, including the old mosque. They imagine the pool in the middle of the village as a vibrant community place, the aromas emanating from the taboun and the olive oil press, and they read the testimonies of Palestinians who escaped Lifta in a hurry, never to be permitted return. They also see clues (such as an old protest banner against their eviction) to the resettlement of Arab-Jews, dislocated from Arab and Islamic lands, in Lifta shortly after the Nakba. Arab-Jews eventually became targets for eviction when the “security” configurations shifted after 1967 to gentrification mode. The Mizrahi presence there is now also erased and cannot be seen without having prior knowledge of the intersecting yet distinct experiences of Palestinian and Mizrahi dislocations within the context of a racialized Zionist nation-state. Indeed, “seeing” in Lifta would mean interrogating erasures and imagining what is no longer there.
Hence, simply seeing is partial and points to the need for deeper learning beyond the gaze and the physicality of being there, smelling the smells, hanging out, and listening with an acute sense of our privilege to people’s vulnerabilities, pain, and oppression and their steadfastness and refusal to be defined and erased by the violence that seeks to eliminate them.33 We tour Lifta to learn about and imagine all those whom Israeli Zionist history sought to erase and whose stories collected in archives refuse their erasure, even if and when Lifta’s tour is a tour of absences surrounded by built Jewish Zionist spaces (henceforth “Judaized”). Our June 2023 tour of Lifta also signaled further erasures. Upon entering the path to the village’s ruins, a Hebrew sign stood for “Lifta Boutique,” a luxurious hotel “at the heart of a nature reserve,” as its promotional material conveys. The Lifta Boutique’s website describes the hotel as an opportunity to “travel back in time” to reconstructed structures in a “magical abandoned village near Jerusalem.” “Traveling back in time” where to? The brochures and social media of the Lifta Boutique imply that customers/visitors will be transported to ancient Jerusalem represented by “ruins” perhaps from Roman or Byzantine times. What we observe in our tour, however, is a Nakba gravesite.
When we walk through Lifta with our Palestinian–Israeli tour guide from the Israeli organization Zochrot (whose own positionality is a product of colonial fragmentation and racialization) we see manifestations of violence, not only in the old traces of erasure or in the sight of state-orchestrated violence embodied in encroaching greenwashing “national parks.”34 We also see religious men bathing in the pool and loudly interacting with one another. Everything about their demeanor conveys “ownership.” They walk around the erased village as if it were their home, just like settlers walking around the West Bank, hanging out with their military, which we also see when we walk through Shuhada Street in Hebron with the Israeli organization of veterans, Breaking the Silence on our way to visit Issa Amro from the Palestinian Youth Against Settlement. The men reverberate variations of the Israeli cabinet member Itamar ben Gvir’s repeated phrase “We are the landlords,” which he utters upon visits to the Haram al-Sharif to justify his violent presence there. As we zoom out, we see how intricate systems of zoning and maneuvering by the Jewish National Fund and other mechanisms define the space as “Jewish,” continuously promoting policies of Palestinian displacement and erasure.35 Simply walking through Lifta without the benefit of a counter-hegemonic archive leaves much outside the lens and its situated observer with their uninterrogated baggage of assumptions.
Students underscore, “I cannot unsee what I saw” and “I need to act on it.” The fact is that what they understand themselves as seeing is informed by the readings and films assigned for the course. One student remarked, “The readings show you how intentional it is. And when you walk around [in the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem], you see art on the walls, and you see photos of martyrs, and you call back to the fact that this martyrdom is structural, and it’s intentional. So, it provides a really good framing.”36 It is also the case that other visitors embedded in Jewish and Christian Zionist mythologies rationalize the violence they see. Itineraries in this region constitute theopolitical plans crafted intentionally to entrench rather than disrupt people’s fantasies about the “holy land.” The upshot is that seeing is not a demystifying magical wand, but only one facet of sustained decolonial pedagogies. Seeing as a form of unlearning mythologies, obfuscations, and forms of discursive denial is not instinctual, but rather the product of cognitive processing.
Seeing as Unlearning?
Unlike Lifta, which manifests as “ruins,” Ein Hawd in the Haifa district is an entirely “Judaized” space. Ein Hawd is now an artists’ colony called Ein Hod. Visiting the village using the lens of settler colonialism clarifies the cultural, symbolic, and epistemic violence of the settlers’ replacement of the natives, which is one of the pivotal characteristics of settler colonial logic.37 Next to Ein Hod is the Palestinian community established in 1948 by uprooted survivors of the Nakba in Ein Hawd. They are the “present absentees,” which is Israel’s macabre legal definition for those displaced within the 1948 confines.38 If visiting Ein Hod tells a story of replacement and cultural appropriation, other tours reveal the ongoing dimensions of the Nakba through different prisms. Certainly, the tour of Lifta is a journey through absences and erasures,39 which is the definition of Zochrot (literally “they remember”) as an organization challenging the carefully crafted and discursively backed up Israeli Jewish and Zionist amnesia.40 This is seeing that does not and cannot rely on sight alone but rather on counter-archives that the realities on the ground deny and obscure. Other tours in our itinerary show past and ongoing violence endured by Palestinians. These include tours clarifying the systems of closures, fragmentation, and settler encroachment and vandalism and pogroms. They also include interrelated tours that capture the experiences of incarceration, refugees, Palestinian citizens of Israel, and patterns of displacement in occupied East Jerusalem, underwritten by the weaponization of biblical archeology.41
There are multiple traps in this touring, including becoming caught in a voyeuristic valorization of suffering. A recent wave of scholarship, drawing on a critique of the colonial underpinning of tourism, interrogates Palestinian solidarity tourism with attention to the agency of Palestinian tour guides and other interlocutors for their acts of anti-colonial resistance within a neoliberal political-economic discourse.42 Indeed, many Palestinians refuse to perform their subjectivization.43 Yet their anti-colonial counter-narration is imperative in a context structured by other scripted itineraries that reinforce Christian Zionist eschatological fantasies and Jewish ideological and messianic scripts. Traveling to the “holy land” has a long history entangled in theologies and orientalist/colonial agendas. Mahmood Mamdani captures the radical shift from a long history of spiritual journeying to the land to a Jewish settler colonial project under the auspices of imperial patrons.44
Bypassing the settler colonial conditions characterizes the ideological and theological tourism industry designed to solidify rather than disrupt narratives. Itineraries constitute political forms of storytelling and narrative framing even when, on the surface, they are “religious,” “spiritual,” or “historical,” bracketing the “geopolitical nuisance.” It is shocking to spend a day engaging with Palestinians and anti-occupation Israeli activists who offer a protective presence in the south Hebron hills, learn about the everyday struggles against settlers’ violence, and then return to see the Christian pilgrims gather with us in the same buffet lines in the hotel’s restaurant. From their chatter we gather that their visit follows a mythological and theological (and often apocalyptic) script that obscures the political and historical realities into which these pilgrims are stepping. These myopic Christian pilgrimages and apocalyptic/messianic tourism of Christian Zionist, Jewish Zionist, and “Birth Rights” tours are designed to show a redemptive secular/messianic/utopian narrative of biblical reenactment. They sell an orientalist story of triumph in “the wilderness,”45 taking “tourists” and potential citizens/settlers through biblical archeology deployed as proof or evidence for Jewish “indigeneity.” This is where a restorative decolonial human rights’ lens critically exposes wrongs done in pursuit of a “Jewish” script with an unacceptable disregard to Palestinian lives and their human and political rights.46
These myopic Christian pilgrimages and the apocalyptic/messianic tourism of Christian Zionist, Jewish Zionist, and “Birth Rights” tours contrast with counter efforts coordinated by Palestinians. For example, Sabeel is a Palestinian Christian organization that embraces a liberation approach. Through trips entitled “The Contemporary Way of the Cross,” Sabeel illuminates the concrete life under occupation that Palestinians (Christians, Muslims, and others) endure under Israeli occupation.47 Sabeel and other Christian Palestinian interlocutors enact a religiously literate theological reclaiming and subversion of ideological formations. They are always integral to our learning-in-context. A decolonial human rights normativity seeks to redress the legacies of dehumanization and violence.
Unholy Land
Because the land is a destination for apocalyptic, messianic, and ethnoreligious tourism designed to confirm and reinforce people’s redemptive scripts and fantasies, centering on critical religious literacy is especially urgent. Massive amounts of resources are invested by the Israeli government, Zionist organizations, individual megadonors, and philanthropic foundations in free “birthright” tourism for young Jews to solidify their love of Israel. Likewise, “end time” tours congeal Christian eschatologically driven support of Zionist agendas.48 In this context, a counter form of Palestine solidarity tours offers a glimpse into Palestinian steadfastness in historical time so that tourists can witness and return to their communities to exercise pressure on policymakers who underwrite Israeli aggressions. For example, the mother of a martyred two-year-old Palestinian boy invited us into her home, offered us water and tea, and shared her horrific story of military violence in the village of Nabi Saleh. It was the case not only that her baby was shot indiscriminately, but also that she was not able to reach him at the hospital in time due to an intricate regime of identification cards and checkpoints. “Now that you’ve listened to my story, what are you going to do?” she asked us. Palestinian interlocutors repeatedly asked us this question during our learning-in-context.
If normalizing occupation, apartheid, and settler colonial violence define (and enable) Christian and Jewish Zionist tourism, modes of solidarity tourism, such as the Dream Defenders and other Black–Palestinian bidirectional exchanges, center on settler colonialism, necropolitical violence, and a global critique of White supremacy and coloniality/modernity, with a focus on its manifestations in the United States and Palestine. Accordingly, the solidarity tourism of Black Americans focuses on identifying the patterns of violence and how they boomerang globally (e.g., police training by the Israeli military force).49 Critically, delegations of Black Americans to Palestine have realized the bidirectionality of such encounters where they not only come to witness, but also share their own stories with Palestinians (and seek advice from them).50 This genre of tourism deploys an intersectional critique and decolonial human rights normativity, focusing on a global analysis of racialization and, to this extent, it connects with Shohat’s diasporic reading that relinks geographies of dislocation. We expand on this necessary critique by asking where and how Jewish meanings can be rescripted and likewise liberated from Judaism’s settler colonial captivity.51
In an attempt to avoid attributing causality to Judaism and “the Jews,” the solidarity touring of settler colonial violence often unintentionally traffics in an authenticity discourse about “real” or “false” Judaism. To the degree that violence is articulated through Jewish claims, this articulation is rendered as a perversion. This discourse of authenticity that coalesces with the aforementioned critique of modern/secular teleology’s conservative ramifications precludes a religiously literate diasporic reading. We saw such a reading in the hermeneutical praxis on the ground floor of a Jerusalemite synagogue in the illustration we offered at the beginning of this essay. Our interlocutors sought to reimagine Jewish political and ethical meanings in Palestine. Such a praxis exemplifies what decolonial theorists call “double critique”52 of empire’s weaponization of the tradition while also internally contesting what “real” Jewishness means historically to concrete political agents, including in the margins of the community itself. An abstract account of violence generates an abstract script that renders “bad” Judaism as complicit, but “good” Judaism as irrelevant to articulating political emancipatory visions. Since Jewish scripts (themselves a product of Christian European modernity) underpin the violence, they also have to participate in reimagining through centering on historical accountability and an ethics of relationality as we identified in our opening vignette. Our decolonial syllabus, therefore, is religiously literate because it refuses an authenticity discourse. However, it is not surprising that justice-focused students who are attuned to the entanglement of religion in empire and the deployment of religion to deny, destroy, displace, and dominate pronounce the land “unholy” and their touring “political.”
“I’m Muslim. I went to al-Aqsa mosque. I went in hoping to feel some sort of spiritual elevation. I thought it was going to rock my world. But I just couldn’t get into it . . . I was suffocated by images of suffering and torment. And I just really—I couldn’t get in that head space . . . I just couldn’t turn on that spiritual mode. Yeah. It just wasn’t there.” These are the words of a Muslim American student in response to a question in a “report back” (March 2023) event. An audience member asked the panelists, students who took our experiential learning course in June 2022, to reflect on what, amid our ethical tourism, the religious significance of the land meant for them, if anything at all. Another Jewish student who identifies as anti-Zionist remarked on their horror at how the sacredness of Shabbat is deployed as yet another mechanism of state oppression and violence constraining the movement of Palestinians. Yet another Christian Black student shared that she felt nothing in spiritual terms. She traveled to clarify a global logic of epistemic, structural, and political forms of violence and see how White supremacy operates “in the same way” in the United States and Palestine. She sought to consolidate her understanding of Black–Palestinian solidarity and these communities’ common struggles, even if their liberations may not look the same.
The puzzle regarding whether an in-person experience merely confirms preconceived narratives or allows learning and unlearning remains. For his part, the American Muslim student could not extricate the spirituality of al-Aqsa from its violent political geography, even if a critical historical account of religion has shown that no sacred space exists outside relationships of violence and political power. With such representative reflections regarding how touring confirmed scripts about the land as unholy, the question is how learning in context can be transformative, constructive, and decolonial. The connection we made between Shohat’s diasporic reading and its generative openings toward deontologizing “Jews” and “Arabs” and Moore’s critical intersectional and historically grounded methodology to study religion, violence, and peace praxis point toward decolonial horizons precisely by disrupting hermetic accounts of identities and decontextualized accounts of liberation and justice.
Decolonial Visions
Palestinian decolonial imaginations draw on “positive” cultural resources other than those explicitly understood as “religious.” For example, they include the praxis of sumud or steadfastness,53 to articulate both resistance and connectivity to the land. Sumud links to transnational currents of Indigenous resurgences and is likewise reclaimed by Indigenous efforts to decolonize Palestinian liberation theology,54 whose anticolonial aspiration nevertheless relies on colonial theological epistemologies and Western audiences.55
Sites of sumud become stops in our itinerary. We visit in person or learn otherwise, for example, about the praxis of DAAR or decolonizing architecture art research, which has constructed theoretically robust justice-oriented artistic research practice. DAAR’s art exhibitions produce new political imaginations through architecture.56 To illustrate, DAAR’s Refugee Heritage is a book dossier that intentionally misuses UNESCO World Heritage guidelines by focusing on the refugee camp, not as a target of erasure and lack of history and future. Instead, the project “seeks to narrate refugeehood beyond suffering, displacement, and humanitarianism and to articulate ‘exile’ as a new perspective from which social, spatial, and political structures can be imagined and experienced, beyond the ideal of the nation-state.”57 The decolonial move of DAAR is to challenge UNESCO’s colonial definitions of heritage by mobilizing architecture.58
Another stop in the syllabus is the Palestinian Seed Library and similar efforts to reclaim Indigenous intellectual and food sovereignty, recover connectivity to the land, and retell the stories of the seeds and the people and animals they have nourished and the historical memories inscribed in them, along with their potentialities for future yields amid literally invasive species and colonial violence concretely embodied in the environmentally catastrophic pine trees.59 The rootedness in seeds as Indigenous knowledge, like DAAR’s interventions, disrupts a modernist clinging to the nation-state construct and the violent logic of neoliberalism entrenched through the Oslo “peace” paradigm’s emphasis on the illusion of economic growth under persistent occupation.60
A robust analysis of neoliberalism leads Palestinian activists at the Sakiya Farm to articulate their decolonial interruption intersectionally, focused not only on anticolonial liberation from Israel, but also on undoing Palestinian dislocation from land-based knowledge and practices. Sakiya’s vision is “Liberation through a society whose confidence is rooted in traditional and contemporary ecological practices, whose tolerance echoes nature’s diversity, whose generosity springs from collective labour, whose creativity is enriched by the intersections between art, science, and agriculture and whose prosperity is shared beyond boundaries.” Located in a nature reserve in Ein Qiniya on the outskirts of Ramallah, Sakiya includes structures from the Ottoman and British eras and Maqam Abu El-Ainain, a sacred shrine dating back to the Ayyubid period. On the path to the hilltop and the fresh spring lies an ancient tree, Um al-Uyoon, known for its magical qualities, which attracted pilgrims over the centuries. Sakiya rewilded the hillside and created, using an ecosystemic approach, a permaculture farm yielding an array of fruits, vegetables, and herbs. Through land-based pedagogies, the farm constitutes a decolonial resistance to the dislocation of Palestinians from their lands and knowledges. Sakiya intentionally seeks to reclaim Palestinian biodiversity with foresight directed at climate change. A syntropic farm consisting of multiple trees and vegetables that coexist and enhance one another rather than unitary crops as per industrial farming, Sakiya is “also a ground for learning (and unlearning), a way of coming together across generations and a means to create new rituals to preserve and protect local, traditional and sustainable farming practices and knowledges that would otherwise be lost.”61
This decolonial move confronts neoliberalism. When one of our students asked during our visit to Sakiya in June 2023 if the syntropic farm could be “scaled up” and integrated into international channels of investment via the massive universe of development agencies and international nongovernmental organizations, our host resisted the premise of the question. They underscored that the farm rejects the neoliberal frame that, as part of the economic discourse around the Oslo Accords, devastated Palestinian food sovereignty and augmented economic dependency. For example, increased restrictions on Palestinians prevent them from cultivating their lands, and this, coupled with settlers’ pollution of their water sources, severely diminishes Palestinian capacity for food sovereignty. Sakiya’s decolonial interruption grounds itself in land-based knowledge and practices, echoing other Indigenous struggles against epistemicide. Religion is not pivotal for this decolonial unlearning of Palestinian alienation from their lands. Instead, the decolonial move is a reclaiming of food sovereignty, health, and life-creating historical knowledges, memories, and praxes in the face of ever-encroaching settler colonial violence and the logic of Indigenous erasure and capitalist exploitation.
Certainly, the sites of Palestinian decoloniality recounted above reclaim Indigenous knowledges, praxes, and links to a global Indigenous resistance. The question posed to the aforementioned students’ panel is, however, important to address because Palestine/Israel’s location as the “holy land,” a site of pilgrimage, longing, and apocalyptic fantasies, still prevails discursively, leading those attuned to the profundity of the violence that defines the place to declare that there is absolutely nothing holy there. Crucially, religion too enters Palestinian anticolonial resistance and resilience as a subversive and empowering discourse, as in Sabeel’s “Contemporary Way of the Cross,” as a mobilizing force62 for violent and nonviolent resistance or a source of sustenance and interpretive frame for enduring but not accepting the abuses of Christianity and suffering under occupation.63 Concurrently, Jewish people need to imagine different ways of being Jewish in the space.64 Therefore, our religiously literate diasporic reading and travels mean that we foreground the need to decolonize Judaism because the “Question of Palestine” is a “Jewish question”65 and a European question about the Jews that needs to be unmasked and unasked.66 Thus, we deploy a diasporic reading and a religiously literate methodological approach to challenge epistemological and ontological certainties. Hence, decolonial pedagogies on Palestine/Israel require not only an analysis of the matrices of violence and racialization in all their forms, which tours’ itineraries are designed to show along with the sites of co-resistance, Indigenous struggles, and sumud, but also hermeneutical and historical tours to sketch how and why Zionism as a form of biblical reenactment constitutes a departure from some strands of Jewish ethics and a destruction of Jewish worlds, such as the Cairo Geniza.
Traveling to History’s Hermeneutical Debris
Raz-Krakotzkin is propelled by Walter Benjamin’s interpretation of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, in which the Angel of History’s “face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet . . . The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. The storm is what we call progress.”67 In his excavation of the wreckage, Raz-Krakotzkin juxtaposes Zionism with Safed of the 16th century (a city in northern Palestine), a place that centered on Mishnah rather than biblical Jewishness. The Mishnaic model of Safed, for Raz-Krakotzkin, offers a glimpse into noncolonial ways of Jewish inhabiting of the space.68 Further, as elsewhere in the Ottoman landscape, Safed saw communities’ pluralistic interweaving. This “ecumenical frame”69 can only be toured through a counter-archival investigation outside the legacies of the colonial production of sectarianism. The actual Safed of today is thoroughly “Judaized” and ethnically cleansed. Therefore, the memory of Safed as an alternative Jewish modernity constitutes historical debris and a resource for a decolonial reading or seeing through Zionist erasures.
Deploying diasporic reading also leads to other counter-historical potentialities. For example, our historical travel through the syllabus takes us to sites of Mizrahi resistance within the pre-state and Israeli racialized framework.70 There we learn about erased Arab-Jewish worlds, how Mizrahi Jews became integrated into a settler colonial frame, and the moments of protest and irruptions when Mizrahim disrupt their ontologized racialized boundaries.71 Therefore, our decolonial syllabus explores in history’s debris how Christian European modernity/coloniality remains an inescapable analytic focus. This returns us to Shohat’s methodology of diasporic reading. Diasporic reading disrupts methodological nationalism through cross-border perspectives and an anti-essentialist triangulation of geographies of dislocation. Shohat’s diasporic reading and account of identity as a relational, mobile, and shifting signifier desubjugate Jewish histories (in the plural) from Eurocentric and modernist epistemology and Jewish History (capital J, capital H). This desubjugation illuminates denied Jewish histories and their intricate relations to the manufacture of “religion” as a colonial technology of division and domination. Shohat’s diasporic reading exposes the entanglements of Jewish histories with the denial, erasure, exile, and fragmentation of Palestinian narratives and gestures, through critical religious literacy, toward alternative reparative futures of rebelonging outside a colonial frame. To this extent, religion is pertinent to the material and conceptual itinerary of decolonial experiential learning in context. If “religion” is complicit and implicated in the conditions of unholiness and violence that define every facet of Palestinian life and death, what might be its role in imagining and shaping decolonial futures?
Potential Futures
In addition to historical and hermeneutical debris, our physical travel takes us to marginal sites of radical imaginations in the present. We draw on Gil Hochberg’s notion of an archive for/of the future as a historical rupture in the present and thus as potentially producing liberatory future possibilities disentangled from colonial spatial and temporal formations.72 For Israeli Jews, such a radical imagination for/of the future requires decolonizing Jewishness in embodied and particularized ways rather than through abstractions. Thus, the hermeneutical/historical travels to recover other Jewish registers are generative for relational conceptions of historical, reparative, and transformational justice.
The way we apply religiously literate diasporic reading to our travels leads us to meet with certain interlocutors. These include the anti-occupation religious left activists, Bnei Avraham, with whom we opened this article. Our interlocutors also include the Mizrahi civic democratic collective that grounds itself in the intersections of struggles and a vision for equity and equality, Ethiopian activists, and scholar-practitioners and activists such as those affiliated with Zochrot, focusing on learning the Nakba and making its invisiblization intolerable, unlearning colonizers’ consciousness, and imagining Palestinian return and life concretely outside a settler colonial paradigm. When our class met with Bnei Avraham in the summer of 2023, the group’s members spoke honestly about the fantasies of revenge interlaced into the written traditions of historically oppressed Jewish minorities and the need to interrogate this inheritance in a moment of Jewish power and domination. This reflection exemplifies a critical religious literacy that refuses an authenticity discourse and owns up to hermeneutical, ethical, and historical baggage.
If this refusal leads Bnei Avraham to solidarity in anti-occupation actions with Palestinians in Hebron, one cultural Ethiopian leader we engaged with told us about her journey into political consciousness. She exclaimed that when she learned about the plight of the Arab-Jews in Israel and their alienation from their language and culture, she understood “what it was all about”—a violent erasure and displacement to which her community’s struggle against racism, police brutality, poverty, and marginalization connects, albeit differently. “We did not know we were Black when we came here, we thought we had a room here because we were Jews,” the Ethiopian activist underscored. Her ability to link her struggle to Mizrahi and Palestinian experiences and then to a Zionist ideology born in Europe (with all of Europe’s ills) amounts to a decolonial move that rejects the negation of the East, Palestinians, and the logic of racialization that stratifies the entire geopolitical space of historic Palestine. She and Bnei Avraham embody two grassroots nodes of a radical Jewish ethical imagining of an alternative political future of re-belonging, requiring unlearning Europe and critical diasporic religious literacy.
Indeed, retraining the political imagination, as scholar–activist Norma Musih shares with the students, cannot traffic in generic images, but needs to be anchored in Palestine/Israel (rather than transporting paradigms from elsewhere, even while a global analysis of modernity/coloniality clarifies the common grammar of violence).73 A central praxis of reimagining political spatiality and temporality revolves around unlearning the past.74 Unlearning the past rearticulates our understanding of the present and visions for the future dialectically. Musih suggests digging into the historical debris, which means a counter-archival praxis of unlearning Zionist teleology and its conflation with Jewish history. Refusing a settler colonial toponomy75 through digital remapping or cartography of “Judaized” spaces, such as in decolonial tours of Lifta and other depopulated geographies, or reinserting Palestinian street names into the physical “Judaized” spaces trains the political imagination. Such practices populate the political map with images that allow the past to come through in the present in ways generative of future re-spatialization and redress. Finally, activism itself shapes the political imagination in the present. Therefore, our decolonial syllabus involves traveling to counter-archives, alternative hermeneutics, and activist spaces.
In the Rubble
As we conclude this article, thousands of Gazans are still decomposing under actual debris and over 38,000 Gazans were murdered in the course of a genocidal Israeli response to the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023, which also amounted to crimes against humanity. At the same time, under the fog of the “war on Hamas,” patterns of ethnic cleansing and incarceration accelerated in occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank. The relentless violence exposed that the war is against Palestinians as such (with Israeli leaders declaring that “there are no civilians in Gaza” or that they are “human animals” and that “accuracy” is not the objective76), augmenting the prolonged over-century-long settler colonial process of maximizing and “Judaizing” land and minimizing Palestinian presence on the land.77 The images of forced evacuation, rubble, and utter destruction in Gaza constitute genocidal mass atrocities, on top of the previously established charge against Israel of committing the crime of apartheid and violations of multiple facets of the Geneva Conventions.78 The images of the debris caused by Israeli state violence reveal an eliminative zero-sum vision of a future “Judaized” geography increasingly reliant on a messianic Zionist racialized ideology. The eliminative logic is signaled in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s deployment of the biblical archetype of Amalek, a dog whistle to the messianic settlers’ bloc, which has a long legacy of deploying this archetype to denote Palestinians. Amalek features as interchangeable with the image of the Nazi or ISIS, thereby activating a spectrum of Islamophobic tropes and ahistorical civilizational hyperboles.79 The deployment of the Amalek archetype, the “eternal enemy” and subject of destruction, aims to sanction the carnage against Palestinians and to perpetuate an Israeli/Zionist Manichean ethos of a perpetual war that coheres with and emboldens the equally eliminative Christian Zionist scripts and agendas. The discourse shifts from the political and historical levels of analysis to reductive civilizational and religious explanatory terrains. This abstraction renders geopolitical and historical context irrelevant. Accordingly, seventy-five years of Nakba, fifty-six years of military occupation, and sixteen years of siege on Gaza are bracketed in favor of vague religious and civilizational arguments.
Moore’s critical religious literacy is pivotal for combating such dualistic rhetorical reductionism. Concurrently, a relational diasporic reading reclaims, as Shohat shows, decolonial counter-archives of Jewish historical meanings and experiences that relink Jews to the region, not as oppressors but as neighbors within interwoven intercommunal tapestry. Likewise, her relational methodology, centering on the pivotal year of 1492, relinks (without equating) Jewish, Palestinian, and other Indigenous geographies of dislocation. The question for a critical religiously literate syllabus deploying a relational diasporic methodology, therefore, is how to shape itineraries in Palestine/Israel that will also travel into erased histories such as the Cairo Geniza and will not confirm zero-sum preconceived narratives about the past, present, and aspirational future (messianic, apocalyptic, anticolonial utopian). As Zreik writes, the colonized Indigenous Palestinians have no obligation to imagine a place for their oppressors in their future liberation.80 Still, the decolonial moment, if not itself eliminative, will also rely on reimagining Jewishness in the land and possibly through the nonutopian category of political citizenship.
Our syllabus also includes an itinerary that travels through activist margins where individuals unlearn and disrupt the scripts that they were socialized to perform and, in the process, write new scripts, relationally. Thus, our syllabus points to how an anti-colonial and decolonial emancipatory remapping has to rely on archeology of the Palestinian present and critical religious literacy and diasporic reading of Jewish pasts in the historical present. Our course is decolonial because it intervenes not only on epistemological, but also on theopolitical levels, and to this extent, it is also global, while being laser-focused on Palestine/Israel. Therefore, a Palestine/Israel decolonial pedagogy shows students what was there but is not now and what is there, on the margins, inhabiting potentialities for other futures.
Notes
Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, “Secularism, the Christian Ambivalence toward the Jews, and the Notion of Exile.” In Secularism in Question: Jews and Judaism in Modern Times (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 276–98.
The word “metaphorical” refers to the often-quoted essay by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity,” Education and Society 1, no. 1 (2012), 1–40. There are critics, too, who highlight important oversights in Tuck and Yang’s formulation. For example, see T. Garba and S. Sorentino, “Slavery Is a Metaphor: A Critical Commentary on Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s ‘Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,’” Antipode 52, no. 3 (2020), 764–82. For concrete and noneliminative efforts to articulate a decolonial frame in Palestine/Israel, see, for example, Bashir Bashir and Rachel Busbridge, “The Politics of Decolonisation and Bi-nationalism in Israel/Palestine,” Political Studies 67, no. 2 (2019), 388–405.
Alex Lubin, Les W. Field, Melanie K. Yazzie, and Jacob Schiller, “The Israel/Palestine Field School: Decoloniality and the Geopolitics of Knowledge,” Social Text 117, no. 31.4 (2013), 79–97, 82.
Ussama Makdisi, Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2021).
See Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988), 575–99, and Diane L. Moore, “Methodological Assumptions and Analytical Frameworks Regarding Religion,” Religion and Public Life (2022), https://rpl.hds.harvard.edu/what-we-do/our-approach.
See Cara J. Chang, “Harvard Holds Human Remains of 19 Likely Enslaved Individuals, Thousands of Native Americans, Draft Report Says,” The Harvard Crimson (1 June 2022), https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2022/6/1/draft-human-remains-report/.
Michael Rothberg, The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019).
For an early articulation of coloniality/modernity as constitutive, see Anibal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” Napantla: Views from South 1, no. 3 (2000), 533–80.
For example, Rámon Grosfoguel, “Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political Economy: Transmodernity, Decolonial Thinking, and Global Coloniality,” Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 1, no. 1 (2011), http://escholarship.org/uc/item/21k6t3fq.
For critical engagement with religion and coloniality and the shift to an ontologized or racialized account of religion at the outset of European Christian colonialism, see, for example, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “AAR Centennial Roundtable: Religion, Conquest, and Race in the Foundations of the Modern/Colonial World,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 82, no. 3 (2014), 636–65. For an account of the instrumentalization of religious taxonomies in colonialism, see, for example, David Chidester, Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1996) and his Empire of Religion: Imperialism and Comparative Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). For the nineteenth century’s production of the concept of “world religions” and its embeddedness in orientalism, see Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). For the entanglement of religion, racialization, and Christian modernity, see, for example, Gil Anidjar, Blood: A Critique of Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).
For example, Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003).
For example, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, The Politics of Secularism in International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).
For a broader analysis of the industry of religion and peacebuilding, see Atalia Omer, Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023).
For example, Maxime Rodinson, Israel: A Colonial-Settler State? transl. David Thorstad (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1973), and Settler Regimes in Africa and the Arab World: The Illusion of Endurance, ed. Ibrahim Abu-Lughod and Baha Abu-Laban (Wilmette, IL: Medina University Press International, 1974).
For example, Rana Barakat, “Writing/Righting Palestine Studies: Settler Colonialism, Indigenous Sovereignty and Resisting the Ghost(s) of History,” Settler Colonial Studies 8, no. 3 (2018), 349–63; Lila Abu-Lughd, “Imagining Palestine’s Alter-Natives: Settler Colonialism and Museum Politics,” Critical Inquiry 47 (2020), 1–20; Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, “Tracing Settler Colonialism: A Genealogy of a Paradigm in the Sociology of Knowledge Production in Israel,” Politics and Society 50, no. 1 (2022), 44–83.
For example, Noura Erakat, “Whiteness as Property in Israel: Revival, Rehabilitation, and Removal,” Harvard Journal of Racial and Ethnic Justice 31 (2015), 69–103.
Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).
For such a critique of the critics, see Rochelle Terman, “Islamophobia, Feminism and the Politics of Critique,” Theory, Culture and Society 33, no. 2 (2016), 77–102. For a powerful engagement with the “empire of critique,” see Sa’ed Atshan, Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020).
Ella Habiba Shohat, On the Arab-Jew, Palestine, and Other Displacements: Selected Writings (London: Pluto, 2017), 21.
Shohat, Selected Writings, 22.
Shohat, Ella, “Taboo Memories, Diasporic Visions: Columbus, Palestine, and Arab-Jews,” Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices, ed. Caren Kaplan and Robyn Wiegman (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 201–32.
Shohat, “Taboo Memories, Diasporic Visions,” 212.
Shohat, “Taboo Memories, Diasporic Visions,” 213.
Shohat, “Taboo Memories, Diasporic Visions,” 214. See also Santiago Slabodsky, DeColonial Judaism: Triumphal Failures of Barbaric Thinking (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
Judith Butler, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).
Moore, “Methodological Assumptions.”
See also Atalia Omer, “Religion and the Study of Peace: Practice without Reflection,” Religions 12, no. 12 (2021), 1069, and “The Intersectional Turn: Theories and Practices for Understanding Religion and Peace,” Wiley Blackwell Companion to Religion and Peace, ed. Jolyon Mitchell, Suzanna R. Millar, Francesca Po, and Martyn Percy (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2022), 49–62.
For example, Daniel Boyarin, The No-State Solution: A Jewish Manifesto (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2023); Atalia Omer, Days of Awe: Reimagining Jewishness in Solidarity with Palestinians (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019).
Hagar Kotef, The Colonizing Self: Or, Home and Homelessness in Israel/Palestine (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020).
Edward Said, “Permission to Narrate,” Journal of Palestine Studies 13, no. 3 (1984), 27–48.
Saree Makdisi, Tolerance Is a Wasteland, 1st ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2022).
For an incisive analysis of this epistemic issue, see Jennifer Lynn Kelly, Invited to Witness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022).
Kelly, Invited to Witness.
Nur Masalha, The Palestine Nakba: Decolonising History, Narrating the Subaltern, Reclaiming Memory (London: Zed Books, 2012).
Uri Davis, The JNF/KKL: A Charity Complicit with Ethnic Cleansing (London: Middle East Monitor, 2019).
“Video: Displacement and Belonging in Israel/Palestine,” a public event at Harvard Divinity School, Religion and Public Life (29 March 2020), https://rpl.hds.harvard.edu/news/2023/4/8/video-displacement-and-belonging-israelpalestine.
Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006), 387–409.
Lana Tatour, “Citizenship as Domination: Settler Colonialism and the Making of Palestinian Citizenship in Israel,” Arab Studies Journal 27, no. 2 (2019): 8–39.
Rana Barakat, “Lifta, the Nakba, and the Museumification of Palestine’s History,” Native American and Indigenous Studies 5 (Fall 2018), 1–15.
Seth Anzika, “The Erasure of the Nakba in Israeli Archives,” Special Document File, Journal of Palestine Studies, 49, no. 1 (2019), 64–76.
See Nadia Abu El-Haj, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self Fashioning in Israeli Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
For example, Emily Schneider, “It Changed My Sympathy, Not My Opinion: Alternative Jewish Tourism to the Occupied Palestinian Territories,” Sociological Focus 53, no. 4 (2020), 378–98.
Jennifer Lynn Kelly, “Subjection and Performance: Tourism, Witnessing, and Acts of Refusal in Palestine,” Feminist Formations 32, no. 2 (2020), 79–110.
Mahmood Mamdani, Neither Settlers Nor Natives: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2020).
Shaul Kelner, Tours That Bind: Diaspora, Pilgrimage, and Israeli Birthright Tourism (New York: NYU Press, 2020).
We recognize the critique of the human rights discourse itself as embedded in modernity/coloniality but also the fact that this recognition does not preclude a decolonial approach to human rights. See, for this “post abyssal” approach, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, “Human Rights as Emancipatory Script? Post-abyssal Conception of Rights,” Another Knowledge Is Possible: Beyond Northern Epistemologies, ed. Boaventura de Soussa-Santos (London: Verso, 2007), 3–40.
Atalia Omer, “The Cry of the Forgotten Stones: A Palestinian Liberation Theology and the Limits of a Theology for the Oppressed as a Peacebuilding Method,” Journal of Religious Ethics 43, no. 2 (2015), 369–407.
Christian tourism and Christian Zionism are not necessarily grounded in eschatological end time prophecies. Christian Zionism comes in multiple converging shapes including the “compulsory Zionism” of post-Holocaust mainline liberal churches and the exploitative dynamics of the prosperity gospel, as well as cross-fertilization with racialized Christian populist discourses. Such critical issues and distinctions are beyond the scope of this article. See Mitri Raheb, Decolonizing Palestine: The Land, The People, The Bible (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2023) and Umayyah Cable, “Compulsory Zionism and Palestinian Existence: A Genealogy,” Journal of Palestine Studies 51, no. 2 (2022), 66–71.
For example, Edith Garwood, “With Whom Are Many U.S. Police Departments Training? With a Chronic Human Rights Violator – Israel,” Amnesty International (25 August 2016), https://www.amnestyusa.org/updates/with-whom-are-many-u-s-police-departments-training-with-a-chronic-human-rights-violator-israel/.
Ahmad Abuznaid from U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, remarks during Black Studies and Palestinian Studies: Convergences and Divergences, Emory Conference (14 May 2023).
See also Atalia Omer, “Restorative Justice Pathways in Palestine/Israel: Undoing the Settler Colonial Captivity of Jewishness,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 41, no. 2 (2023), 154–85.
For example, Santiago Slabodsky, “Christian Hegemonies: Evolutionism, Analectics, and the Question of Interreligiosity in a Decolonial Philosophy of Religion,” unpublished, and Santos, “Human Rights as Emancipatory Script?”
Rana Khoury’s webinar, “Expressions of Sumoud in Palestinian Higher Education,” Religion, Conflict and Peace Initiative at Harvard Divinity School, Religion and Public Life (26 April 2022), https://rpl.hds.harvard.edu/news/2022/04/26/video-Expressions-of-Sumoud-in-Palestinian-Higher-Education.
Raheb, Decolonizing Palestine.
John S. Munayer and Samuel S. Munayer, “Decolonising Palestinian Liberation Theology: New Methods, Sources and Voices,” Studies in World Christianity 28, no. 3 (2022), 287–310.
DAAR, “About” (n.d.), https://www.decolonizing.ps/site/about/.
DAAR, “About.”
Alessandro Petti, Sandi Hilal, and Eyal Weizman, Architecture After Revolution (London: Strenberg Press, 2013). See also Gil Z. Hochberg, Becoming Palestine: Toward an Archival Imagination of the Future (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021), and Yara Sharif, Architecture of Resistance: Cultivating Moments of Possibility within the Palestinian/Israeli Conflict (New York: Routledge, 2017).
Vivien Sansour, “To Eat Alone Is to Die Alone: A Voyage into Lives of Seeds and Their Communities,” webinar (29 March 2022), Religion, Conflict and Peace Initiative at Harvard Divinity School, Religion and Public Life, https://rpl.hds.harvard.edu/news/2022/03/29/Video-To-Eat-Alone-Is-to-Die-Alone.
For example, Toufic Haddad, Palestine Ltd.: Neoliberalism and Nationalism in the Occupied Territory (London: Tauris, 2016).
https://strugglesforsovereignty.net/sakiyas-syntropic-forest-farm-ein-qiniya-ramallah-palestine/. Accessed August 2023.
Khaled Hroub, “Palestinian Nationalism, Religious (Un)Claims, and the Struggle against Zionism,” When Politics Are Sacralized: Comparative Perspectives on Religious Claims and Nationalism, ed. Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 365–86.
Naim Stifan Ateek, Justice, and Only Justice: A Palestinian Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1989).
Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, “The Zionist Return to the West and the Mizrahi Jewish Perspective,” Orientalism and the Jews, 1st ed., ed. Ivan Davidson Kalmar and Derek Jonathan Penslar (Waltham, MA, Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 2005); Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, “Fifteen. Exile Within Sovereignty: Critique of ‘The Negation of Exile’ in Israeli Culture,” The Scaffolding of Sovereignty: Global and Aesthetic Perspectives on the History of a Concept, ed. Zvi Benite, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Nicole Jerr (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 393–420.
Ra’ef Zreik, “The Palestinian Question Is a Jewish Question,” an event at the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative at Harvard Divinity School, Religion and Public Life (23 March 2023), https://rpl.hds.harvard.edu/news/video-palestinian-question-jewish-question.
Bashir Bashir and Amos Goldberg, eds., The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019). Brian Klug, “Unasking Europe’s Jewish Question,” Contending Modernities (16 September 2021), https://contendingmodernities.nd.edu/theorizing-modernities/unasking-europes-jewish-question/. Bashir Bashir and Leila Farsakh, eds., The Arab and Jewish Questions: Geographies of Engagement in Palestine and Beyond (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020).
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, transl. Harry Zohn (New York: Mariner Books, 2019 [1968]), 201.
Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, Mishna Consciousness, Biblical Consciousness: Safed and Zionist Culture (Jerusalem: Van Leer Institute Press 2022), in Hebrew.
See Makdisi, Age of Coexistence.
See also Avi-Ram Zoref, Kedma Mizraha: R. Benyamin, Binationalism, and Counter Zionism (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar, 2023).
Yehouda A. Shenhav, The Arab Jews: A Postcolonial Reading of Nationalism, Religion, and Ethnicity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 104; Smadar Lavie, “Mizrahi Feminism and the Question of Palestine,” Journal of Middle East Women Studies 7, no. 2 (2011), 56–88.
Hochberg, Becoming Palestine.
Norma Musih, “Political Imagination,” Mafteah 18 (2023), 47–63 [in Hebrew].
See also Ariella Aisha Azulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (London: Verso, 2019).
Masalha, The Palestine Nakba.
For an example of an analysis of the dehumanizing and genocidal language used by Israeli leaders (circulating in broad public discourse as well) see Raz Segal, “A Textbook Case of Genocide: Israel Has Been Explicit about What It’s Carrying Out in Gaza. Why Isn’t the World Listening?” Jewish Currents (13 October 2023), https://jewishcurrents.org/a-textbook-case-of-genocide.
See Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2020)
For example, Human Rights Watch, “A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution” (27 April 2021), https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution.
Noah Lanard, “The Dangerous History Behind Netanyahu’s Amalek Rhetoric,” Mother Jones (3 November 2023), https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/11/benjamin-netanyahu-amalek-israel-palestine-gaza-saul-samuel-old-testament/.
Raef Zreik, “When Does a Settler Become a Native? (With Apologies to Mamdani)” in Rachel Z. Feldman and Ian McGonigle, eds. Settler-Indigeneity in the West Bank (Montreal, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023): 222–52.
