Thinking Palestine

This book brings together an inter-disciplinary group of Palestinian, Israeli, American, British and Irish scholars who theorise 'the question of Palestine'. Critically committed to supporting the Palestinian quest for self determination, they present new theoretical ways of thinking about Palestine. These include the 'Palestinization' of ethnic and racial conflicts, the theorization of Palestine as camp, ghetto and prison, the tourist/activist gaze, the role of gendered resistance, the centrality of the memory of the 1948 Nakba (catastrophe) to the contemporary understanding of the conflict, and the historic roots of the contemporary discourse on Palestine. The book offers a novel examination of how the Palestinian experience of being governed under what Giorgio Agamben names a 'state of exception' may be theorised as paradigmatic for new forms of global governance. An indispensable read for any serious scholar.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements Introduction: Thinking Palestine - Ronit Lentin Part I: The Palestinianization of Race 1. Racial Palestinianization - David Theo Goldberg 2. Globalizing racism and myths of the other in the war on terror - Gargi Bhattacharyya Part II: Palestine: Biopolitics and States of Exception 3. Bio-power and thanato-politics: The case of the colonial occupation in Palestine - Honaida Ghanim 4. Palestinian Refugee Camps in Lebanon: Laboratories of State-in-the-Making, Discipline and Islamist Radicalism - Sari Hanafi 5. Sovereignty and the state of exception: al-Ansar mass detention camp in Lebanon - Laleh Khalili 6. The ghettoization of Palestine - Alina Korn 7. The persistence of the exception: Some remarks on the story of Israeli constitutionalism - Raef Zreik 8. The Mukhabarat State of Israel: A State of Oppression is not a State of Exception - Ilan Pappe Part III: Palestine: Contested Representations 9. Palestinian 'Munadelat': Between Western Representation and Lived Reality - Nahla Abdo 10. Authenticity and political agency on study trips to Palestine - David Landy 11. The contested memory of dispossession: Commemorizing the Palestinian Nakba in Israel - Ronit Lentin 12. The state, the text and the critic in a globalized world: The case of Edward Said - Conor McCarthy 13. Understanding the present through the past: Between British and Israeli discourses on Palestine - Anaheed Al-Hardan

About the Author :
Dr Ronit Lentin, senior lecturer in Sociology, is the director of the MPhil in Ethnic and Racial Studies, and the coordinator of the Global Networks project at the Institute of International Integration Studies, Trinity College Dublin. She has published numerous articles on racism and immigration in Ireland, gender, the Holocaust, and Israel-Palestine. Her books include Conversations with Palestinian Women (1982), Gender and Catastrophe (1997), Israel and the Daughters of the Shoah: Reoccupying the Territories of Silence (2000), Racism and Anti-racism in Ireland (2002), Women and the Politics of Military Confrontation: Palestinian and Israeli Gendered Narratives of Dislocation (2002), Re-presenting the Shoah for the 21st Century (2004), After Optimism? Ireland, Globalisation and Racism (2006), Race and State (2006), and Performing Global Networks (2007). Dr Ronit Lentin, senior lecturer in Sociology, is the director of the MPhil in Ethnic and Racial Studies, and the coordinator of the Global Networks project at the Institute of International Integration Studies, Trinity College Dublin. She has published numerous articles on racism and immigration in Ireland, gender, the Holocaust, and Israel-Palestine. Her books include Conversations with Palestinian Women (1982), Gender and Catastrophe (1997), Israel and the Daughters of the Shoah: Reoccupying the Territories of Silence (2000), Racism and Anti-racism in Ireland (2002), Women and the Politics of Military Confrontation: Palestinian and Israeli Gendered Narratives of Dislocation (2002), Re-presenting the Shoah for the 21st Century (2004), After Optimism? Ireland, Globalisation and Racism (2006), Race and State (2006), and Performing Global Networks (2007).

Review :
The book should be read closely by serious pro-Palestinian activists wishing to sharpen their conceptual tools in the ceaseless battle against Zionist propaganda. This book presents us with sharp critical thinking about everything from the applicability of Agamben's concept of the "state of exception" or Foucault's theory of modern "biopower" to Israel's control over Palestinians in prisons, camps, and ghettoes, to the specific dynamics of racialization, colonial violence against, and appropriation of Palestinians, even by the well-meaning. Both theorizing and chronicling the varied forms of Israeli power, these provocative essays are grounded in details that can still shock. This timely volume provides a fresh epistemological framework to think Palestine in the context of the Israeli colonial occupation of its territories as well as of its dispersed populations. It shifts the center of gravity from the temporal dimension of 'state of exception' to its spatial as well as its racializing features. The book makes an important critical contribution to political theory and deserves to be read by anyone concerned with the question of Palestine.