Researching Palestine

The Arab region is a focus of world politics, with authoritarian regimes, significant fossil fuel reserves and histories of colonialism and imperialism. It is also the site of potentially immense green energy resources. The writers in this collection explore a region ripe for energy transition, but held back by resource-grabbing and (neo)colonial agendas. They show the importance of fighting for a just energy transition and climate justice - exposing policies and practices that protect global and local political elites, multinational corporations, and military regimes. Covering a wide range of countries from Morocco, Western Sahara, Algeria and Tunisia to Egypt, Sudan, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Palestine, this book challenges Eurocentrism and highlights instead a class-conscious approach to climate justice that is necessary for our survival.

Acclaimed exploration of the political space created by Israel's colonial occupation This new edition of the classic work on the politics of architecture--and the architecture of politics--appears on the fiftieth anniversary of the Six-Day War, which expanded Israel's domination over Palestinian lands. From the tunnels of Gaza to the militarized airspace of the Occupied Territories, Eyal Weizman unravels Israel's mechanisms of control and its transformation of Palestinian homes into a war zone under constant surveillance. This is essential reading for those seeking to understand how architecture and infrastructure are used as lethal weapons in the formation of Israel.

"I often come to walk in these hills," I said to the man who was doing all the talking and seemed to be the commander. "In fact I was once here with my wife, it was 1999, and some of your soldiers shot at us." "It was over on that side," the soldier pointed out. "I was there," he said, smiling. When Raja Shehadeh first started hill walking in Palestine, in the late 1970s, he was not aware that he was traveling through a vanishing landscape. In recent years, his hikes have become less than bucolic and sometimes downright dangerous. That is because his home is Ramallah, on the Palestinian West Bank, and the landscape he traverses is now the site of a tense standoff between his fellow Palestinians and settlers newly arrived from Israel. In this original and evocative book, we accompany Raja on six walks taken between 1978 and 2006. The earlier forays are peaceful affairs, allowing our guide to meditate at length on the character of his native land, a terrain of olive trees on terraced hillsides, luxuriant valleys carved by sacred springs, carpets of wild iris and hyacinth and ancient monasteries built more than a thousand years ago. Shehadeh's love for this magical place saturates his renderings of its history and topography. But latterly, as seemingly endless concrete is poured to build settlements and their surrounding walls, he finds the old trails are now impassable and the countryside he once traversed freely has become contested ground. He is harassed by Israeli border patrols, watches in terror as a young hiking companion picks up an unexploded missile and even, on one occasion when accompanied by his wife, comes under prolonged gunfire. Amid the many and varied tragedies of the Middle East, the loss of a simple pleasure such as the ability to roam the countryside at will may seem a minor matter. But in Palestinian Walks, Raja Shehadeh's elegy for his lost footpaths becomes a heartbreaking metaphor for the deprivations of an entire people estranged from their land.

Waste Siege offers an analysis unusual in the study of Palestine: it depicts the environmental, infrastructural, and aesthetic context in which Palestinians are obliged to forge their lives. To speak of waste siege is to describe a series of conditions, from smelling wastes to negotiating military infrastructures, from biopolitical forms of colonial rule to experiences of governmental abandonment, from obvious targets of resistance to confusion over responsibility for the burdensome objects of daily life. Within this rubble, debris, and infrastructural fallout, West Bank Palestinians create a life under settler colonial rule.