Lori Allen

The Polyvalent Politics of Martyr Commemorations in the Palestinian Intifada

During the second Palestinian intifada (uprising), which began in September 2000, martyr funerals and posters were the most predominant form of memorialization. These practices did not constitute simple expressions of nationalist sentiment; they created a public sphere in which participants and observers were hailed as national subjects, while simultaneously generating a forum in which public political debate occurred. This article explores the tensions among different visions of the Palestinian national project that appeared through these commemorative practices as the normative effects of martyr memorialization dissolved into criticism, cynicism and apathy.

Determining Emotions and the Burden of Proof in Investigative Commissions to Palestine

The conflict in Palestine has been the subject of numerous international investigative commissions over the past century. These have been dispatched by governments to determine the causes of violent conflicts and how to resolve them. Commissions both produce and reflect political epistemologies, the social processes and categories by which proof and evidence are produced and mobilized in political claim-making. Using archival and ethnographic sources, my analysis focuses on three investigative commissions: the King-Crane (1919), Anglo-American (1946), and Mitchell (2001) commissions. They reveal how “reading affect” has been a diagnostic of political worthiness. Through these investigations, Western colonial agents and “the international community” have given Palestinians false hope that discourse and reason were the appropriate and effective mode of politics. Rather than simply reason, however, what each required was maintenance of an impossible balance between the rational and the emotional. This essay explores the ways that affect as a diagnostic of political worthiness has worked as a technology of rule in imperial orders, and has served as an unspoken legitimating mechanism of domination.

The scales of occupation: ‘Operation Cast Lead’ and the targeting of the Gaza Strip

This article analyses the role of scalar politics in the 22-day Israeli assault on the occupied Gaza Strip that happened in the winter of 2008–9, and argues that practices of organizing and representing different kinds of scale have helped normalize occupation violence. Israeli regulatory mechanisms and a variety of scalar narratives of the occupied Palestinian territory constructed geographical, material and sensorial aspects of space and scale in a way that allowed the Israeli ‘Operation Cast Lead’ to stand out as anomalous, when it was in fact part of an ongoing, systematic military occupation. The ways that space and scale have been constructed throughout the occupied Palestinian territory in many ways echo modes of fragmentation and social segregation that enable forms of violence seen in enclaved cities around the globe. The Palestinian case calls for additional attention to the imbrication of different kinds of scale – density, distance, time and destruction – as they are shaped militarily and discursively.

Studying Human Rights in the Middle East: Lingua Franca of Global Politics or Forked Tongue of Donors?

The study of human rights has gone through many phases, and the boom in the scholarly industry of human rights studies has yielded many subspecialties, including human rights in particular regions and the intersections of human rights with different religious traditions. One principal area of discussion likely to be of interest to readers of this journal has been the question of Muslim womens human rights and the role of religion in this respect. The problem was often presented as primarily an ideological one, a conflict between a local tradition, Islam, and the global demands for human rights.

Finding indigenous critique in the archives: Thoughts on Didier Fassin’s ‘The Endurance of Critique’

Attending to the production and reception of critique produced by anthropologists’ interlocutors, in the field and in the archives, can help shore up the project of critical ethnography called for by Didier Fassin. A comparison of two moments of critique initiated by Fayiz Sayigh on behalf of Palestinians struggling against Israeli colonialism highlights the ways that the same kinds of critique of power gain traction in different institutional and historical contexts. The expansion of critical ethnography to include a historical ethnography of critique itself, tracing the effects of critique or its dissipation in the past, would yield further insights into the nature and power (or weakness) of the practice of critique today.

Sincerity, Hypocrisy, and Conspiracy Theory in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

Concerns about lying and sincerity in politics are common in most societies, as are concerns about conspiracy theories. But in the occupied Palestinian territory, these concerns give rise to particular kinds of effects because of the conditions of Israeli occupation. Political theorists often interpret opacity claims and conspiracy theories as responses to social disorder. In occupied Palestine, disorder and instability are standard. Opacity claims and conspiracy theories therefore require a different kind of analysis. Through an examination of the semiotic ideology of sincerity, especially as it has emerged in the conflict between Fatah and Hamas, this article argues that opacity claims act as a form of nationalist pedagogy, at once reinforcing the basic principles of sincerity of action and word, and encouraging a wariness of political spin.

What’s in a Link?Transnational Solidarities across Palestine and their Intersectional Possibilities

This essay analyzes some key moments of transnational Palestinian solidarity politics as a basis for considering the possibilities for challenging the status quo ignited by the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement. Throughout modern Palestinian history, political efforts have been built on nationalist identifications and the nation-state as a goal. Alongside the nation as reference point, transnational and intersectional movements and objectives have also animated Palestinian politics, including pan-Arabism, pan-Islamism and the human rights movement. The BDS movement has re-ignited transnational Palestinian solidarity, and drawn into the struggle for Palestinian liberation black activists in the U.S., including members of the prison abolition movement. The Black-Palestinian solidarity movement is still in a nascent stage, and the constituent struggles remain based in nation-state imaginaries. The links that participants in the BDS and Black-Palestinian solidarity movements are fostering are not based on shared identities, however. Instead, they have developed out of shared recognition of the transnational dimensions of the experiential, rights-based, and systemic contiguities among their conditions.