The Two-Pronged Palestinian Response to Exclusion Within Israel
Palestine/Israel Review 1, no. 2 (2024)
The Palestinian leadership within Israel has undergone a series of political–organizational transformations since 2015, oscillating between cohesive and fragmented mobilization. Why did the leadership fragment, despite both structural and electoral pressures to maintain unity? What explains the rapid nature of these transformations? Relying on 35 interviews with activists and politicians, I argue that declining political opportunities and mounting threats led the Palestinian leadership to pursue unity as a strategic choice in 2015. Crossing a threshold, however, the perception of further diminishing opportunities for change elicited divergent strategic responses between a group that I label “hegemonic-accommodationist,” spearheaded by Mansour Abbas’ United Arab List, and a group that I label “hegemonic-rejectionist,” representing the rest of the Palestinian political leadership. Overall, this study suggests that unity and disunity within ethnopolitical movements are linked to leaders’ perception of opportunity (and the lack thereof).
https://doi.org/10.5325/pir.1.2.0007
Contaminating National Identity Through Intercultural Intimacy: (Im)purity and the Pandemic
Rida Abu Rass and Adan Jerreat-Poole. Journal of Critical Race Inquiry 10, no. 2 (2023): 46-67
This paper brings together the threads of contagion, intimacy, and national identity in an exploration of border crossings. Framed through the COVID-19 pandemic and the rise of vaccine nationalism, we interrogate the discourse of contagion and impurity and trace the ways it has been used by self-interested elites to advance ethnonational, exclusivist agendas. Using the authors’ relationship as a jumping off point for critical and cultural analysis, we use intimacy, affect, and illness as hinges between bodies, identities, and geographies. We argue that non-traditional, queer, cross-cultural relationships and encounters are sites through which to interrogate the violence of borders and to subvert the exclusion and hierarchy inherent to nationalism as a political project. We offer an experimental model for performing political and cultural research across disciplinary boundaries, advancing knowledge dissemination between and across fields.
https://doi.org/10.24908/jcri.v10i2.16049
The Fourth Phase of Palestinian Arab Politics in Israel: The Centripetal Turn
Oded Haklai and Rida Abu Rass. Israel Studies 27, no. 1 (2022): 35–60.
The article argues that the politics of the Arab minority in Israel has entered a new phase since the mid-2010s: centripetalism. Whereas the preceding two decades or so (the third phase) were characterized by claims in the name of Palestinian nationalism and organizational fragmentation, the centripetal phase is characterized by (1) a decline in the political salience of minority nationalism and a shift in focus to social and civic issues; (2) an aspiration to move from the fringes of politics; and (3) greater organizational convergence, eclipsing intra-communal ideological divisions in the service of shared objectives. The advent of this phase is attributed to unintended consequences of changes in the electoral rules (specifically the 2015 rise in the election threshold) combined with pressure from the electorate, empowered by the raised electoral threshold