Amahl A. Bishara, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Tufts University, and author of Back Stories: U.S. News Producation and Palestinian Politics, discusses her book Crossing a Line: Laws, Violence and Roadblocks to Political Expression. The book looks to sites of political practice, such as journalism, historical commemorations, street demonstrations, social media, in prison, and on the road, to analyze how Palestinians create collectivities in circumstances of constraint. Drawing on firsthand research, personal interviews, and public media, Crossing a Line illuminates how expression is always grounded in place, and how a people can struggle together for liberation even when they cannot join together in protest.
The discussion was moderated by Raef Zreik, Religion and Public Life Visiting Scholar in Conflict and Peace. The event was co-sponsored by The Center for Middle Eastern Studies Harvard University.
Full Transcript:
HILARY RANTISI: Welcome, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. It's wonderful to see many friends here and also some new faces, so welcome. I'm delighted that you're joining us today for this very important discussion. I feel also, with all the news that's happening, it's also very important and relevant for our discussion and for us also to be together.
My name is Hilary Rantisi, and I'm the associate director of the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative, which is a part of the program of Religion and Public Life here at Harvard Divinity School.
Our work at the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative centralizes an analysis of structural injustice, violence, and power, and examines how a more capacious understanding of religion can yields fresh insights into contemporary challenges and opportunities for just peacebuilding.
The primary case study for our work is on Israel-Palestine. And our aim is to stretch the scholarly discourse around religion and the practices of peacebuilding, and to examine the decolonial potentialities of art, religion, and identity transformation.
Today's event on Professor Amahl Bishara's latest book, Crossing a Line-- Laws, Violence, and Roadblocks to Palestinian Political Expression, is co-sponsored by the Middle East Forum at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard. And I'm delighted that professors Amahl Bishara and Raef Zreik are with us and will introduce us to the main themes of the book and lead us into a discussion.
Professor Amahl Bishara is associate professor of Anthropology at Tufts University and a noted scholar of Israel-Palestine, Palestinian diaspora, media studies, and cross-border engagements. Her first book is entitled Back Stories-- US News Production and Palestinian Politics, published in 2013. And today, we hear about her latest book.
Professor Raef Zreik is the Religion and Public Life Visiting Scholar in Conflict and Peace this semester with us here. Professor Zreik specializes in philosophy of law and political theory. And he publishes on topics of historical justice, settler colonialism, theology of Zionism, and the ethics of the intellectual in philosophy and social criticism. His book on Kant's struggle for autonomy has just been released.
As you can see, the work of both professors Bishara and Zreik provide avenues for new insights into our work through their own impressive scholarship. Professor Amahl Bishara's latest book, Crossing a Line, provides a critical approach to considerations of belonging and separation among Palestinians who are citizens of Israel and those who are residents of the occupied Palestinian territories.
How they connect in different situations of state and military control and forms of violence is a central issue of examination in her text. This important book sheds new light on identity, belonging, the role of structural violence in upending and sometimes entrenching notions of Palestinianese.
So without further ado, I'm going to invite Professor Bishara to introduce us to the main themes of the book. Then we'll hear from professor Raef, and we'll open it up for questions. So thank you all for joining us. Please join me in thanking Professor Bishara.
[APPLAUSE]
AMAHL A. BISHARA: OK. Thank you all for joining us here today. Like many of you, I'm humbled and overwhelmed by the ongoing events. But it does feel like that is so often the case for those of us who are working on these issues.
And in that vein, I really want to send a huge thank you to Sarah Roy, and Hilary Rantisi, and Diane Moore, who have been bravely cultivating learning for so many of us at Harvard and beyond, in Boston, working in a difficult atmosphere with dignity, wisdom, and fortitude. And a big, big thank you to the whole incredible team, who's made all of that work possible and their vision, Reem Atassi and Atalia Omer.
And a huge thanks to Harvard Divinity School and CMES, two esteemed institutions I'm so grateful to visit. A very, very big thanks to Raef Zreik for being in conversation with me today. His work has been a beacon and a compass for us for decades. And Hilary, you can signal me when I'm going too long because there's-- you can imagine there's kind of little things that I can put in and take out.
As Hilary mentioned, this book is about the different pressures on political expression experienced by Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinian subjects of military occupation in the West Bank. I looked at the different but related environments for expression for these two groups as they take shape in various kinds of political action.
Before diving into some of the main themes of the book, I want to take a few minutes to tell you how I came to explore this topic. So one day-- I'm going to take you back. It's too bad you're missing the view from my aunt's veranda in Tarshiha because this is a little bit not as vibrant as it is on the screen.
One day, back in the fall of 2003, just months after I had arrived for my PhD research in the West Bank about Palestinian journalists, I was visiting my family in the far northern Galilee. Here's a little map to give you a sense of where Tarshiha is way up near the border with Lebanon. We looked out-- I'm sorry.
We looked out to the neighboring village of Mi'ilya. We looked over at the City of Ma'alot, officially part of the same municipality of Tarshiha but dwarfing it in size and physically and demographically separate as it was established as a Jewish town the first years after 1948. Beyond that, we saw the hills of Lebanon.
So my aunt said, tell me what's going on in Jerusalem. Now, I have been doing research for a month or two. 1 didn't speak to an Arabic I wondered what could I possibly tell her about Jerusalem, a city she'd lived a few hours away from her entire life. But I knew she was thinking about the Intifada or uprising that was ongoing-- the protests, the checkpoints, the bombings, the arrests.
I realized that it all seemed far away. In the coming months and years, more small moments sparked my interest in the relationship between Palestinians in the West Bank and Palestinian citizens of Israel, who also sometimes called themselves 48 Palestinians. And you'll hear me use both of those terms today.
I noticed, for example, that some people in the Galilee tended to ask me when I was going to Jerusalem even though they knew that I was living in Ramallah, perhaps referencing Ramallah felt just slightly risky.
On the other hand, when I married a man from the West Bank and he was unable to come to Tarshiha without a permit-- and you never got permits-- I winced when someone in Tarshiha asked if I wanted him to contact someone he knew in the security services who might help us get a permit. No, thank you. In the West Bank, my friends have already connections to Israeli security at all costs.
So I was realizing that being Palestinian could be unnerving on two sides of the Green Line. But the moments of anxiety were slightly different. At the same time, of course, I was touched when a relative saw my husband's brother, a released prisoner, on Palestine TV and called very excitedly to tell me about it.
I was amazed, though certainly not surprised, at the tremendous generosity with which my family in Tarshiha hosted my family and friends from the West Bank when they did manage to come up to Tarshiha.
Another point of curiosity that bridges my two book projects was that I noticed that there are a lot of Palestinian citizens of Israel, especially women, who had seem to find meaning as journalists, perhaps because that work, in fact, demanded that they crossed the Green Line. It was one of the few kinds of work at the time that demanded that they across the Green Line.
So all of this sparked my curiosity. But what made me start writing the grants to study the relationship between Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinians in the West Bank was my sense of the political situation as a whole. I was one of relatively few Palestinians who could and did easily across the Green Line.
The West Bank was the clear center of Palestinian politics, especially during the Second Intifada. It was the base of the Palestinian Authority. We can talk about that more later if you're interested. And Palestinian citizens of Israel had been pushed to the periphery of Palestinian politics since Israel's establishment. And yet they had led brave moments of opposition to Israel's apartheid rule.
It seemed clear to me that their proximity to Israel's centers of power was an important tool. Palestinian political movements on two sides of the Green Line converged more and more often. And yet researchers tended to study either in Israel's 1948 territories or in the occupied territories. And I'm, again, happy to discuss the reasons for that later if you're interested.
So I thought I was on the right track by 2017 when I read the very beginning of Richard Falk and Virginia Tilley's report entitled Israeli Practices Towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid, written for the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia.
They begin, "The strategic fragmentation of the Palestinian people is the principal method by which Israel imposes an apartheid regime." Very, very clear. Then I knew I was on the right track when the US insisted that this report be rescinded.
As I was finishing this book, a new Palestinian uprising reasserted Palestinian unity. In May 2021, the dignity and hope manifesto read in part, "The story of truth is a simple one in our land. The truth is that Palestinians are one people, one society.
They tried to turn us into different societies, each living apart, each in its own separate prison, some of us caged in the Oslo prison in the West Bank, some in the citizenship prison in part of Palestine occupied 1948, some of us isolated under the systematic Judaization campaigns on the Jerusalem prison, and some isolated from Peloton altogether, dispersed across all corners of the globe."
Very, very powerful words to think with here. To me, the legal and political analysis of the Tilley and Falk report-- and others like it, many have followed-- and the bold proclamations of the dignity and hope manifesto invite a scenography, up close looks at the everyday challenges presented by geopolitical fragmentation as well as careful and perhaps even loving attention to moments of opening and connection, despite it all.
So my book, Crossing a Line, is about laws, violence, and roadblocks, Palestinian political expression-- yes, that is a pun, roadblocks. Yeah, good laugh. No, I'm just going. It's about the distinct environments for political expression and action of Palestinians who carry Israeli citizenship and Palestinians subject to Israeli military occupation in the West Bank.
These are two societies differently ostracized and endangered by Israeli settler colonialism and militarism and differently impacted by displacement and empire and racism. Palestinian geopolitical fragmentation is the result of processes of dispossession under settler colonialism, with the big dates-- as I think this crowd knows very well-- being 1948 and 1967.
Two dates that are so formative that indeed they have created identity categories-- people who call themselves 48 Palestinians, people who call themselves 67 Palestinians. And we also know that there's been, again, a fragmentation of so many different Palestinian identities here.
I'm not going to go through them. But this just gives you a sense of people with different legal statuses and also other kinds of political positions that Israel has imposed upon people in many cases. Now, as an ethnographer, there's absolutely no way that I could study fragmentation across these many locations.
And so again, I chose to look at two groups under Israeli sovereignty-- living under Israeli sovereignty, Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinians in the West Bank, because of my particular positionality. But I think there are other questions we can ask about Palestinian fragmentation if we look at this-- look at a Palestinian map slightly differently.
And as a result of these forms of division and fragmentation, Palestinians forms of appeal and resistance have diverged. And you could also say that subtle tensions have arisen between these groups. So to get-- I think we don't necessarily need this. But you can think about the differences in political, access to political participation, population numbers, access to social services, and relationship to Israeli racism.
It's different to live with Israeli racism that kind of will encounter you every day at work or in your schools or in any possible daily interaction than to have a little bit of distance from it, although obviously, Israeli racism also colors and structures the military violence that we see every day in other forms of violence as well, of course, and a different relationship to the Palestinian national movement as well.
We tend to think about closure. This is an iconic map for me as somebody who began my scholarship during the Second Intifada. And I know you can't see the details. But this is an [INAUDIBLE] map of closure and fragmentation. And there are so many forms of closure and fragmentation.
We tend to think of them within the West Bank. But again, what happens when we think on a broader geography? And what happens when we think about that geography as fragmentation as not being about only limitations on economic action or movement but on political expression and action?
So if you've spent time in the West Bank, some version of this sign is probably familiar to you unless you're only in the settlements or the main roads. "This road leads to area A under the Palestinian Authority. The entrance for Israeli citizens is forbidden, dangerous to your lives and against Israeli law."
So a real threat, a threat that reminds any Palestinian citizens of Israel going to PA areas that they are breaking the law. And then they know that they're already a population that is threatened by the state.
OK. So I do try to think about the ways in which this work will speak beyond the Palestinian context in a few different ways. One is the ways in which not just in the Palestinian context, settler colonialism has produced geopolitical divisions that make it difficult for groups with similar stakes to struggle for liberation together. But the legal and geographic divides actually produce subtle cultural differences. And that, again, is why ethnography is such a crucial tool.
And my book embarks on the idea that expression is always grounded in place, in the body, and that recognizing this is especially crucial under conditions of militarized settler colonialism. Happy to talk more about that idea as well. At the same time, many Palestinians are recognizing that the threats that Israeli settler colonialism poses to them are more alike than they like to realize.
Palestinians are always looking over their shoulder at other kinds of violence, knowing that something they see over there could happen to them. 48 Palestinians see protesters being shot and killed regularly in the West Bank. And they know that while this is perhaps more rare in [INAUDIBLE] or in the Galilee than it is in the West Bank, it has happened to them and can happen to them.
Palestinians in the West Bank watch the bombs fall on Gaza in war after war. And many will remember the F-16s flying over their cities, shooting missiles during the Second Intifada. They know that violence could return to them.
Perhaps all they're thinking is about the mass dispossession of Palestinians in 1948, looking at refugees outside of Palestine, and knowing that this kind of dispossession is not unthinkable either, especially as Israeli politicians threaten new nakbas. We also see obviously the intensifying threat of settler violence that also has happened on both sides of the Green Line.
But my book also embarks from a sense of the deep value of nationalism. I think of this first in terms of the Palestinian national movement, which has failed to secure the most basic needs for Palestinians like safety and land, and second in terms of nationalisms in general, which have racist, patriarchal tendencies across so many settings.
So I conducted research with methods that I hope would envision Palestinian collectivities that were not based on homogeneity and allegiance, but on a multiplicity of smaller connections on what I think about as emergent intimacies. From impromptu performances to protest signs, to artwork, and solidarity with prisoners, I kept my eye out for forms of intimacy, love, and connection that were, if you will, kind of the nationalism.
I kept my eye out for graceful sidelong or even anxious challenges to the fragmentation dispossession and perhaps even shame that troubles so many Palestinians at this long nature of our liberation movement. And I just want to say that when I think about these places-- the West Bank and Palestinians inside 48-- it's very important to recognize that those two places, if you will, are made up of many, many more places. I don't want to erase that diversity.
And that's something that I experienced firsthand as I saw how different, for example, Nakba Day commemorations are when they're in Ramallah organized by the PA as opposed to in Al Walaja co-organized by [INAUDIBLE], or when I took in some Palestinians in Jaffa I have much less exposure to the Arabic language than do my relatives in Tarshiha, or when I thought about the relative neglect of stories of Palestinians in the Naqab, who faced their own ongoing nakba that is distinct from the ongoing nakbas that we see in other places.
So my book is primarily made up of explorations of different sites or practices of political expression. I think of them as each having their own environment for expression, shaped by laws and the possibility of violence as well as by Palestinian traditions of expression and activist determination and creativity.
The first book is about the meaning of the word "Palestine" itself, which shifts in its significance across contexts. If you think about it, the word "Palestine," as it's used by PA officials or in certain kinds of advertisements or the word "Palestine," as it's used in a more revolutionary sense, at protests.
After that one chapter, I do begin to look at each of these environments of expression across the Green Line. So I write about brave-- two different kinds of brave Palestinian protests that I witnessed in 2014 in response to Israel's war in Gaza.
And Israel's 1948 territories, Palestinians chanted poetry in the streets no matter who is looking on, evoking decades of political tradition. While in the 1967 occupied territories, Palestinians engaged in direct confrontation with the Israeli army with stones, Molotov cocktails, and more. If they had tried to use chants, no Israelis would have heard them.
And so part of what I'm trying to explore here is the way in which what is looked at and is obviously brave and eloquent in one community, might sort of seem to fall short from the perspective of the other community. And yet the practices did share chants and goals in common.
I attend commemorations of the Nakba on two sides of the Green Line. On these days, Palestinians established practices of gathering and learning about specific stories of dispossession and ongoing dispossession. They connected historical loss to contemporary restrictions.
I also had a lot of fun organizing a photography exchange between two Palestinian communities, one in Jaffa and one in Aida, refugee camp in Bethlehem to understand how Palestinians in each place see and experience place and how they might put these two very different communities in relation. This was my chance to explore the politics of place.
But one thing I discovered was that it was very hard. It was harder to begin this conversation in part because of the fact that I was, in fact, the only person able to easily move across these spaces to get the full 360 experience of both of them. But that itself, sometimes fieldwork and its pitfalls are themselves extremely rich and educational.
And we did have a photography exhibit in which we made a collage of graffiti magnets. And so they said Jaffa loves Aida Camp. And somebody put that together in a little magnetic collage. So-- I also looked at how Palestinian practices of mourning on Facebook mirrored practices of grieving offline.
I thought about the long lists of [NON-ENGLISH] as a kind of digital condolence line. These practices of offering these condolences absolutely do not erase the Green Line. But they do allow people to explore the common threats of Israeli violence across these spaces.
And finally, I examined carceral politics on both sides of the Green Line. I looked at what kinds of statements can get one arrested in Haifa as opposed to in [INAUDIBLE] and how Palestinians think about arrests and political activism differently whether they are citizens or subjects of military occupation. I analyzed a few cases as of the [NON-ENGLISH] and also considered what it meant that many cases in the West Bank seemed to invite much less exposition.
In addition to these chapters, I also included interludes between the chapters that describe specific journeys that I've taken over almost 20 years of fieldwork anywhere but especially in Israel-Palestine.
To be on the road is to be in direct contact with the state. Wheels on a road can make the road feel smooth or bumpy, safe or unsafe. The paths can be direct or indirect. We encounter soldiers and police officers.
To be on the road is to be in a social relationship with other passengers, as on a bus, for example, and even with those in other cars, as I found. To be on the road is also an affectively rich experience. So the road is ripe with possibilities of danger, frustration, and pleasure. And this tunes the senses, as well as our political sensibilities.
So as a person who's interested in these kinds of fleeting collectivities that emerge and could be seeds for liberation, it's really important to think about what happens among different passengers on a bus, for example. Writing about my own mobility is also a way of recognizing the advantage and privilege, with which I absolutely approach this project, as a person with US and Israeli passports that give me the ability to move across the Green Line.
I could go places some of my dearest friends and family members could not. Honestly, this made it very important for me to make my trips worthwhile. Likewise, in one of the passages, I write about some of the travel that broke Israel's apartheid laws. Maybe that's essential, too. So maybe we should-- I'll start to wrap up.
I could talk a little bit more about some specific things. But I'm going to move towards something else. I was going to talk about this March of Return in Libya and how people gathering sort of evoked the return of all the Palestinian refugees through their presence as internally displaced people in Libya, very near Tiberius.
But I'm going to move forward for now. So one way to begin to wrap up is to consider where we can find emerging practices of liberation in these circumstances. I've talked about some of this. But I want to underscore that the answer is not always unity but rather generative ways of speaking together, of finding a way to bring in a voice that wouldn't be heard or available otherwise.
And creativity and fun can be ways to do that and also ways to confront oppression in other ways. It's also, I found, very productive to look to the peripheries-- the geographic peripheries, but also sort of the peripheries the before and after of events. The long dominant vision of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict-- that's between quotes there-- located the Palestinian national struggle primarily in the occupied territories and saw discrimination against Palestinians in Israel as a minor internal issue.
This view serves both Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Israel portrays the conflict as being about security, conflict with an external enemy. The Palestinian Authority, nominally in charge of some small areas of the occupied territories, claims its power and legitimacy there. Reframing the boundaries of political discussion demonstrates how Israel's settler colonial project is and has been unified across all of historic Palestine.
Looking at these two Palestinian geographies together exposes how Israel's systems of separation multiply oppression for all Palestinians. More generally, the approach moves us beyond state-centered definitions of politics, and challenges methodological nationalism. Looking at commemorations, protests, comedy sketches, cartoons, we can find elements of Palestinian political heritage that link practices across the Green Line.
Ethnography also reveals what impedes these two groups of Palestinians from speaking to and acting with each other. But this is not just a book about the conditions for speaking together. Just as important, I want to interrogate the model of political expression in which political speech should have one clear center.
And I recognize the contradiction there. And that I am definitely the-- right now, currently anyway-- the center of the stage here. Grassroots Palestinian action can enable us speaking together on key Palestinian priorities like the right of return and right to equality. But that doesn't have to mean speaking in unison.
Political expression that thrives in its multilocality, it aims to enable other Palestinian expression that is rooted in place and community experience, even as it is connected to a broader Palestinian narrative of dispossession and struggle for liberation, is something that I try to investigate and hold up.
Modeling how to look for political expression, it helps to renew collectivities or create other kinds of collectivities, is a contribution that I hope can inform Democratic movements and practice well beyond the intra-Palestinian conversation. When Palestinians make an effort to nurture creative and curious connections with each other that challenge settler colonial lines of division, new visions of liberation can emerge, I hope. Thank you all.
[APPLAUSE]
RAEF ZREIK: Good afternoon, everybody. I guess I'm being heard. Thank you, Amahl. And thank you, Hilary for inviting me. I like book events because this is one way you force yourself to do something that you like, if it's not contradiction in terms. And I really like to be invited to book events.
And this book is one of those events that, in particular, I enjoyed reading, especially as a lawyer because this book is written completely in a journal that lawyers didn't write. And thanks god that not all the universe is lawyers.
[LAUGHTER]
Because this is a completely nonformal, nonlegalistic way to speak about-- I don't want to use the word [INAUDIBLE] about situations. And the worst thing-- if you want to know the reality of one group is just to read the Constitution or the legal cases. It doesn't tell you anything from the story. It doesn't say enough. Usually, you're missing a lot if you just read the laws or the Constitution or legal cases.
And this books is really a great way actually to give you the sense of the lived life of experience of the Palestinian because law feeds on abstraction. And what this book does is just go from the abstract to the concrete, to the particular, to the lived experience.
One of the things that the book does without using this terminology is moving-- there's a distinction that sometimes we use, we all have in mind but probably not the vocabulary. It's the distinction between expression-- freedom of expression to express one idea and expressing oneself.
Most of the time, we express ourselves not through ideas. When we dance, we expressing ourselves. In love, we express ourselves. If we go to a concert for U2 and we shout, we are expressing ourselves. We go to the graduation of our daughter, that the moment of expressing ourselves.
And one of the greatest moments of expressing oneself is when you live in a society that is an extension of some of your sort of efforts or desires or ways or aspiration. So in this way, society and state is, in a way, an extension-- an extended part of yourself. And that's why the idea of freedom of expression in itself, it doesn't say much.
And this book moves actually between expressing oneself and expressing the idea because it blurs the background material conditions, the environmental conditions. And the use of environment in this book is really fascinating-- environments of struggles, which is-- it's reminds me of structures of feeling. You use structure feeling as well.
AMAHL A. BISHARA: A little bit, yeah.
RAEF ZREIK: Yeah. And then these ideas, which are not completely determinant, are not completely loose so that different struggles actually converse with each other. They don't copy each other. They're not separated from each other. But they can create a certain environment.
So in this sense, this book is a must for those who really want to know about how Palestinians feel, experience their situation in Israel-Palestine. And only if you have extra time, read legal books on that matter.
Now, one of the really good thing about this book, its subtlety that I like pretty much. And this is-- and that brings at the same time the Palestinian experience as a totality but doesn't overlook the differentiation within the totality. So there's a frame. But the frame has different parts. But the parts are part of the frame
And the idea of a framing is extremely important, extremely important for so many things. But one of the things that it is important and which this books bring to the fore-- and this is probably your ideas working on the idea of fragmentation.
He's doing his PhD at the law school. There's something in fragmentation using the frame. By using the frame, there are certain kind of arguments that are lost with losing the frame because the frame allows you to see certain losses that if you overlook the frame, you don't see them as a loss.
For example, if I'm a Palestinian in Israel, I start the conversation by making appeals sort of to equality, for example, legal rights. What doesn't count in the conversation, that the moment I enter the conversation, I've already lost half of Palestine. I've already lost the fact that once I was the majority, now I'm a minority, the fact that I am separated from most of my relatives.
So the fragmentation creates a truncated legal discourse that doesn't allow you to see what you've already lost. And the power of the frame is to bring that actually, to allow you to see what's already outside the frame as part of the conversation, as constitutive of the conversation.
Now, regaining the frame-- and this is the thing that the book-- which Amahl actually emphasized-- that to regain the frame is not blind sort of preaching for unity as the solution. The book is very subtle on that because it sees we should see the continuities.
We should see that there is a certain commonalities between how modes of expression are being suppressed on two parts of the Green Line. And sometime in Jerusalem is different from the West Bank, West Bank different from Gaza, Gaza different from Nazareth. Sometime within Palestinians in Israel [INAUDIBLE] is different from Haifa and Haifa different from the [INAUDIBLE].
So it's important to see that commonality, that there is one-- because there is one sovereign, which is the Israeli State, manifesting itself in different ways of suppressing Palestinians. So this is very important to understand where you are and what are the forces.
So the unity is the unity of the oppressor. The differentiation is in the methods that are being practiced. But that doesn't mean immediately that one should just preach unity as the solution.
So in that sense, I think that there's something in that book that while it's a very nuanced, sophisticated critique of fragmentation, it doesn't use the idea of unity in the prospective sense that, OK, we can overcome it by simply-- by creating one unity.
And in this sense, it doesn't fall into unitarian national discourse that-- in philosophy, we say, the night where all cows are black. This is a great way to stop seeing the differentiations. The night that all cows are black. So this is-- I think it's very well said in the book. And it's very strong emotionally.
Now, I want to finish politically because I do basically legal theory. So we're kind of completely from different training, though I have lots of literary sensibilities and I very much admire this kind of work that is-- it really traces the curves of the everydayness issues, the everydayness like.
And this is actually counter to my first thesis about the loss of the frame, something is lost and that the fragmentation is a continuation of war through other means in many ways. So define and rule, not divide and rule.
Our friend, Mahmood Mamdani, wrote a book. It's called Define and Rule. When you create categories, so the mind divides and rule, as the government divides and rules. So there's different modes of control. Now, the question, in the case of Palestine, I found it a little bit worth complication in this regard-- and probably this could be a way to start the conversation-- is the following.
So the idea that Palestinian Israel is imprisoned in citizenship, I think it's true. But it's always half true. In one sense, it's a restricting condition and it's enabling condition at the center. And as the Israeli citizen, for example, puts certain limits on the things, ways, imagination, and legal action or political modes of political protest that Palestinian in Israel can do, we shouldn't forget that it puts limits on the Israeli government as well.
So it's a double-- sort of double infliction. One, it's enabling-- and it's constraining and enabling. And for the state of Israel, it's enabling and constraining.
So it's more complicated, especially in a situation-- and this becomes very clear, given the so many endless proposals for many Israeli governments actually to give back the triangle to the Palestinian Authority to become-- so that's, in a way, why Israel doing that because actually they think that citizenship under certain circumstances is constraining on the Israelis.
And it gives something to the Palestinians to fight with. So it's just to complicate the pictures of the fragmentation. And it's double-edged. It's double-edged and it's an open-ended. It's an open-ended. So I just can only recommend the book. I have the pleasure to read it. And thank you. And we're waiting for your next book.
[LAUGHTER]
I would stop here. And if you want to comment on some of these ideas, and then we'll open it to the audience.
AMAHL A. BISHARA: Thank you so much. I am grateful for your reading and engagement. [INAUDIBLE] this mic now. I'm so grateful for that. You all hear me that way? Yeah, thank you for reading and engaging. Yeah, I think I learn a lot from lawyers. But I'm sure not-- I'm sure that I have a lot more to learn as well as from philosophers. And that's something that I would like to do more as I move forward.
And the idea of being imprisoned in citizenship, I think you make a really great point, that citizenship is both enabling and restricting. I think the imprisoned in citizenship also comes from the dignity of-- Manifesto of Dignity and Hope. And I think it's really interesting to think of citizenship as a prison or constraint and also to continue thinking about where that feels to be a possibility or it feels to be a constraint.
Like when does US citizenship feel like a constraint, if ever, right? And sometimes it does. We know that. Some of us have had experiences of that. And I think it's a great point also that citizenship is both limiting and enabling for Israel.
In some ways, I think that Palestinian citizens-- I have to say that one of the surprises of doing this work-- and you mentioned, of course, you're literary. But you also have-- you've lived this experience obviously much more deeply than I have, so acknowledging that certainly as well. But one of the things that surprised me during the course of this research is that actually some of the forms of violence actually mirror each other much more than I had expected.
Some of the modes of arrest-- they are more frequent in the West Bank. But the violence against people as they're being arrested, it gets-- the same forms of violence happen against Palestinian citizens of Israel when they're being arrested for political protest. And I think that's because you've got the laws. And the laws do constrain certain things.
But on the other hand, you have this deep culture of militarization and of racism and racialization of Palestinians that it's certainly not a full stop break for the police officers who are arresting somebody at a protest in Haifa. Unfortunately, I think-- yeah, in the last years, we've seen kind of even a more convergence of those forms of violence both state and nonstate violence.
As somebody who has been a great admirer of the work of Adalah and so forth, thinking about the different ways in which that legal work crosses the Green Line and explores the Green Line has been a big inspiration for me as I do this work. And I think that's evident through the text I think, as well.
But so maybe I should stop there. And I'm grateful for this and looking forward to talking more.
RAEF ZREIK: Yeah. [INAUDIBLE]
HILARY RANTISI: So we're recording. Do you mind using the mic?
AUDIENCE: Sure. Just retired from Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture here at Harvard. Thank you, Amahl. I have not read your book. That's why I have a couple of questions. One, since it figured in your talk, to what extent did your own direct participant observation play a role in how you structured your book?
And two, given everything that we are confronting here in the United States, to what extent does the experience of African-Americans, in reference to all-- various orders of policing, in any way, inform how you look at what is happening in Palestine?
AMAHL A. BISHARA: Thank you. Those are two questions that get to the heart of things in so many ways. So I don't-- the story about being on the veranda is not in the book. I don't talk so much about family. But certainly, almost-- the whole book is-- very much of the book is about participant observation and going to commemorations and protests across the Green Line.
And again, that movement across the Green Line itself-- driving or in cars-- or in buses and so forth-- is sort of the real-- it's the material of the book, the soil of the book, if you will. So I learned a lot through that and through pushing myself into different spaces.
The question of-- a number of things, one is the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement as I was writing this book, in a way. And second of all is sort of a re-engagement or deepening of a conversation about indigeneity and settler colonialism, and a sense of comparison between US settler colonialism and Israeli settler colonialism, and then also conversations about the relationship between Black American experiences of racism and Indigenous experiences of dispossession and racism-- and obviously, also Black experiences of dispossession in this country.
I think that they are-- anthropology is-- I am so grateful that I'm an anthropologist. I love the work I get to do. I think that one of the things that-- one of the ways it sometimes limits me is that it doesn't encourage me to jump back into a conversation about US settler colonialism because I feel that the book is really grounded in one place.
I do-- I am committed to the idea that that place is worth its own book. You know what I mean? And many others-- and that it kind of-- and that is distinct and deserves the distinction of ethnography about it. On the other hand, as a person who is a US citizen-- I live and teach here-- thinking about the resonances is both absolutely important to me in my teaching and also formative of my ideas about Palestine.
So I do talk a little bit about-- 2014, I was in-- in the book, I talk about in 2014, I was in Palestine during the summer and the war in Gaza. So I went, ended up going to protest inside Israel and in the West Bank. And I came back. And then I was in Black Lives Matter protest in this country. And it happened that I was one in DC.
And it was really mind-blowing to think about the different forms of violence and freedom that underwrite protest in each of these places, depending on your own positionality, of course, and the positionality, of course, of the people around you in a protest as well as the specific places where you're protesting.
I was not in a protest in Ferguson or in Baltimore. I was in a protest in DC Downtown. And I felt very safe compared to what I had felt not very safe in outside of-- in Bethlehem, for example. So I think it's really important to let those experiences resonate off each other.
I do hope that the book opens up ways for thinking about settler colonial representation in other places. And maybe I hope to push myself in the direction of thinking more concretely about those connections, not letting it sort of be, as it is in most of the book, kind of abstract or floating above. Yeah, thank you for those questions.
HILARY RANTISI: Do you have a question?
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AUDIENCE: It's all right. I'm behind you, you couldn't see. Thank you so much for your talk. And I was really struck by your emphasis on fun and creativity and specifically poetry as a part of the political expression of the Palestinian people. And not having seen your book yet, I don't know how far you go into the poets and the words of the poetry or if you have an appendix about it. Can you tell us more please? Yeah.
AMAHL A. BISHARA: Sadly, there's not so much poetry. But there is fun. And I am committed to fun. And I've definitely learned that from my Palestinian-- my Palestinian friends who are in Israel-Palestine, not necessarily from-- it's not an internal obvious thing to me. It's not like me.
And I think the reason that fun is important is because it's generative and playful. And if you look at what's in front of us, the everyday experiences are not easy.
And yet I, in my experience, again, the gift of ethnography is to get to spend time with people over a very long time and see how they kind of persevere in loving each other and making jokes and teasing me about my privilege and a million other things that actually open up new routes of knowledge and new possibilities.
And if we didn't have those, we wouldn't have a future in front of us. And I'm speaking as a Palestinian. It's literally creative in that sense of actually creating possibility. I think it can be in a protest sign or in a small performance. Or it can be in-- it can be through NGOs.
NGOs can sometimes be a really stultifying side of politics. But they can also be-- it's a space where things can happen. It becomes a public space where action can happen. So that's something that I'm interested maybe in looking at even more in our next project moving forward. Thanks.
AUDIENCE: Amahl, thank you. You made me all the more eager to actually take the book out of myself and start reading now. It's probably going to be also very central to my work about fragmentation, which is about the legal part of it.
Now, that's why I'm asking, how do you understand the law-- because I saw it in the title as well, right? How do you approach the law in this context? And perhaps, again, maybe I'm asking something that's something that is not what you pick because you're comparing perhaps-- or not comparing.
You're studying both Palestinian citizens in West Bank, why these two in particular? Why not how, in this framework, for example, Jerusalemites fit? And interestingly, when I was thinking about what you were saying about this fragmentation, why the Green Line is a useful terminology in this context at all.
And interestingly, I think diaspora here also features-- there's a lot to cover. I'm not expecting you, of course, to do all of that. But I've been thinking about how suddenly Palestine becomes whole only in the minds and experiences of diasporic communities sometimes while it is left as fragmented on the ground.
So coming from both, holding these both kind of categories of citizen in there and in the US, how do you see that? I'll be curious. Thank you.
AMAHL A. BISHARA: I think my understanding of law-- I think in the end that one of the key things that distinguishes Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinians subject to military occupation is their legal status. So I am grateful for your work and for the work of other incredible legal scholars, who are really [INAUDIBLE] tackles disposition, fragmentation through legal basis, from whom I learn all the time.
Just a shout out, your colleague and my cousin, [INAUDIBLE] Bishara, who has just finished work on this as well. But I think it can't be but about some of these legal statuses that-- for example, boycott is a great example.
To adhere to the boycott in Bethlehem is like-- I guess it's difficult to not buy Israeli dairy. That's true. You have to make a little bit of an effort not to buy Israeli products. But certain forms of boycott are very easy because it's not-- no one's inviting you to speak at Israeli institutions. You are isolated. It has been imposed upon you. It's also not legally risky at all.
For Palestinians inside Israel, boycott politics is a much more complicated thing. It's legally sanctioned by Israel. Commemorating the Nakba is something that is-- it's not at all-- it's something you do. But it's not controversial in the West Bank. It can lead to legal sanction inside Israel.
So the law conditions what can be said. That's sort of-- and I leave the great in-depth analysis to you all. You know what I mean? But even, for example, support for Palestinian political prisoners-- in the West Bank, it's like prisoners hit people, hit almost-- maybe almost every household in a different way.
But to go to a prisoner's solidarity tent is not pushing yourself because the prison issue hits you every day. But being among your-- other mothers suffering is not dangerous. To be in solidarity with Palestinian political prisoners in Haifa is much more risky-- legally and otherwise. So that's some of the ways in which, I think, the law structures that.
I do try to think about the places within the places. And Jerusalem is something-- it's a sort of a distinct place a little bit. I guess why-- Jerusalem is in the book in some ways, I think.
Again, I kind of needed to choose two bigger categories to work with and to shade in Jerusalem as, of course, part of the occupied territories of 1967. But a place that is under certain-- as in some ways, part of the Israeli-- more incorporated into the Israeli State. So I try to do that.
The diaspora is really interesting. Yeah, it's true. Sometimes I do a project that I think is about 48 Palestinians and 67 Palestinians. And I realize it's very much coming from a Palestinian-American perspective.
But one thing I will say is that as a Palestinian-American American who's not there so much-- and I don't have a fulltime job there. I really think that fulltime job, family, kids, it makes you committed to a place. And it makes it harder to across the Green Line. Do you know what I mean?
So people are like, look at her. She's just gallivanting about. Do you know what I mean? She's doing whatever she wants. Because when I'm there, that's my goal. But here, I don't get to go to all the protests I want to go to because I also have a 9-to-5 job.
So I think that that's something that colors-- not that I get to do everything I want there either because-- but the point is that I think that that is one way in diaspora comes in. And I think there are other ways as well.
I'll just say one more thing about fun. Even the fun stuff can be risky. So for example, one of the things I write about is we had this meetup between the photographers in Jaffa and the photographers in Aida. And it was in Aida.
And I know that the people from Jaffa were reluctant about coming to this place where the militarization is very intense. You heard this big bang at one moment. And it was like all supposed to be really fun. But the bang was like the pot of maqluba, the dish, coming over onto the metal tray.
That's not to say that there weren't other things going on that day. In fact, there was militarized explosive noises that day from the Israeli army. But even the fun moments are tense, illuminating. And by illuminating, what is more Palestinian than sharing maqluba, sharing makloubeh? Nothing, really. But even that is a moment of tension, if you will.
So that's how fun, I think, is-- also, the laughter that came after we all realized it was just the makloubeh, was a little bit of a liberating laughter. We can laugh together about that. Thank you for that question.
HILARY RANTISI: Maybe last question here.
AUDIENCE: I have two here.
HILARY RANTISI: Oh, you have two. OK.
AUDIENCE: I will start here and then we'll go back to you.
RUSLAN: Thank you so much. My name is Ruslan, [INAUDIBLE] postdoctoral fellow at the Weatherhead, studying militarisation of multiculturalism in Xinjiang. China. So I come from a different perspective but the questions really resonate with me.
And I was wondering if you can comment a little bit on the comment that you gave about the implications of your own family. I was wondering when kind of when-- sometimes when we deal with the issues of law, in a way, it applies to them as individuals.
So I was wondering what role does the family ties of the people who are separated, live in a different borders of the Green Line, but that family ties that unites them all-- to what extent the being embedded as a Palestinian subject in the family that is divided, the role that the family ties play in the practices of political activism that you're exploring? Thank you so much.
AMAHL A. BISHARA: That's a great question. One person who's written in a way a bit more about this, his name is [INAUDIBLE]. He writes about al-Lid and a refugee camp in Ramallah area that I'm forgetting the name of. It's rural, the slightly more rural one.
Anyway, she's written a little bit more about the kinship elements. I think one really important thing to underscore is that Israel is, in fact, trying to tear apart those kin relations by not allowing people to marry, not allowing Palestinian citizens of Israel to marry people from the occupied territories, or allowing them to marry but forbidding family reunification, forbidding them from living legally together.
So I think there are family ties. But in some ways, Israel is trying to diminish those ties over time. And I think that that is a topic that, in some ways, I didn't pursue as much as I could have because I was looking at these sort of spaces of political expression. But yeah, that's a great question.
AUDIENCE: I have here-- wow, this is a loud microphone. [LAUGHS] I have a sort of process question. I'm curious as a regretful law student who once thought she was going to be an ethnographer. One of the beautiful things I think about ethnography is that your project is shaped by your interlocutors and your experience and your own identity.
So much happened over the course of your research, including the Intifada, which was a cataclysmic moment for a movement. And I'm curious, what project did you set out to write? And how did that-- if there was something in mind, and how did that change over the course of your process, and why?
AMAHL A. BISHARA: So one thing is-- that was 2021. My book, I believe, was already-- it was already to the-- it had already been reviewed. And then I did some revisions that summer.
So I think these academic projects are so long, we just have to put a point to them. I did mention that in the conclusion, but it's not something that I got into. What did I think? I thought, frankly, that I was going to be writing more about actual spaces of interaction and engagement. And the book reads more like a multisided ethnography of many places across the Green Line.
So that is maybe what-- a different ethnographer might have found different spaces of connection. But I'll be honest with you that some of those spaces of connection were ones that I felt that I would be a little bit of an outsider in. And getting consent to write about them would have been complex, like the space where Palestinians-- citizens of Israel and Palestinians in the West Bank are engaging closely with each other.
Some of them felt-- even if I was a part of them, they felt like closed spaces that I wasn't going to write about. So I wrote more about public spaces. So I would say that's one thing that was a little different than I thought it would be.
HILARY RANTISI: I'm recognizing that we are-- we've reached the hour and above. But we can stay in the space more informally to continue this conversation. I'll just mention that this has been recorded, and we will be posting on our website. So you can share it with others.
But I cannot end this without thanking both Professor Amahl Bishara and Professor Raef Zreik for both introducing this excellent book to us and also leading us in discussion. And thank you all for joining us. And please thank our presenters today.
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