Since the beginning of Israel’s war on Gaza in October 2023, a rich body of legal scholarship has tackled various legal issues arising from Israel’s overall military conduct. One issue that has received very little attention is Israel’s destruction of Palestinian cultural heritage. In this article, I demonstrate how Israel’s systematic destruction of Gaza’s cultural heritage has been facilitated through reliance on sources and language of law. Considering this unprecedented level of destruction, I examine the role of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), and the International Criminal Court (ICC) in applying protection and accountability measures in response to the ongoing destruction of Palestinian heritage. I suggest that these three organizations provide the State of Palestine with an entry point to demand recognition, protection, and accountability for the destruction of this heritage. Rather than approaching each organization as an end in itself, I propose engaging with the three organizations simultaneously as tools to be utilized.

War is a lucrative business for the military industry, particularly in contexts of mass and structural violence, extensive violations of international law and genocide. For economically advanced states, the profits generated by military businesses are often seen as beneficial under the dynamics of the military-industrial complex. Israel’s genocide in Gaza, which has caused untold suffering that has ‘scarred the consciousness of humanity’, aptly illustrates this dynamic.

In such a context, states and corporations arguably have a duty under international law not to contribute to or benefit from the war economy of the state committing such violations. In practice, however, adhering to these obligations conflicts with the lucrative economic and geopolitical opportunities that this war economy provides. This essay reflects on the argumentative techniques used by states and corporations to justify continued military support for Israel, despite its clear contradiction with their international legal obligations.

This article reveals late Ottoman (1876–1908) debates over agrarian policy in the empire’s Arab provinces that set the parameters for a fully articulated discourse of national economy emerging after the constitutional revolution of 1908. Debates between imperial officials, regional capitalists and foreign consular agents produced protectionist restrictions on the newly constructed agrarian land market, especially in an extended geography encompassing Palestine and the Hijaz Railway. Ottoman officials viewed the Arab provinces both as an untapped resource and as a possible alternative base in the event of Anatolia’s occupation. Restrictions on the land market constructed Muslim cultivators as ideal landholders and non-Muslim subjects, both Christian and Jewish, as potentially suspect and unfit for landholding. Protectionist and exclusionary agrarian policies responded to a wider context of imperial capitalism in which Ottoman officials occupied a subordinate, but still sovereign, position. These policies had an unrecognized legacy in the colonial and postcolonial Middle East, creating a durable state domain that aimed to shield large swaths of land as territory from foreign investment and occupation. The much-discussed work of Frederick List on national economy focused on practices of import substitution and tariffs with empirical examples culled mainly from the United States and Germany. In the Ottoman Empire, in contrast, agrarian policy played a crucial role in practices of national economy because of the urgent prerogative to maintain territorial sovereignty in the face of imminent colonial expansion. The article suggests a reappraisal of the contributions of Ottoman policy debates to the broader history of capitalism.

What does the academic boycott of Israel and the larger BDS movement look like from the perspective of a liberated Levant and dismantled Israeli state, where a new land and system of governance is formed? What sort of lessons can we learn by speaking to someone in the future about the process of liberation and the role of the BDS movement? In this article, I answer these questions by recounting my conversations with one interlocutor that I met while doing research around 10 years after the liberation of Palestine and the Levant. I begin with a brief history of the BDS movement and then show how present ideas are mobilized successfully in the future and current debates are resolved to achieve liberation.

This study examines the mediating roles of dehumanization and humiliation in the relationship between political violence and mental health outcomes characterized by depression, anxiety and stress among Palestinians. This cross-sectional quantitative study was conducted in October 2024 with 633 Palestinian adults from the West Bank. The sample was recruited online through convenience sampling. Participants completed Arabic versions of the Exposure to Political Violence Scale, the Experience of Dehumanization Scale, the Humiliation Inventory and the Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scale-21. All measures were culturally adapted and validated. Ethical approval was obtained from the An-Najah National University, and informed consent was obtained. The findings revealed that political violence is positively associated with stress (r = 0.38), anxiety (r = 0.35) and depression (r = 0.34; all p < 0.01). Additionally, structural equation modeling revealed that political violence predicted higher stress (β = 0.66), anxiety (β = 0.83) and depression (β = 0.77), with significant indirect effects through dehumanization and humiliation (β range = 0.21–0.28; p < 0.01). Findings highlight the strong associations between exposure to political violence and poorer mental health, particularly when accompanied by experiences of humiliation and dehumanization. This research highlights the importance of developing culturally tailored, community-based mental health programs in Palestine that address the psychological effects of these experiences and promote resilience and recovery.

The Israeli genocide against Palestinians has revealed a new phase in global imperial politics. Western universities have become key sites at the center of these politics, necessitating new modes of scholarship and engagement with ongoing struggles for liberation. In this article, I outline the process of analyzing a dataset of the hashtag campaign #tweet_like_it’s_free from the 2021 Unity Uprising, where I turn the dataset into a poem. I propose the term “felt analysis” to describe both the sensorial attunement to the tweets and the tactile and embodied component of analyzing them. I investigate the relationship between conducting research during, about, and for a particular moment, attending to the questions: What does it mean to research digital culture in a moment when it is mobilized for resistance as well as oppression? How can we engage in scholarship around technology and resistance that not only documents and understands social movements but also creates opportunities to feel for the moment and help endure and survive it? By weaving the tweets into a poem, I document a feeling from 2021 in 2024, sharing the defiant dreams from a liberated Palestinian future to confront the violence of the present and create an opening toward liberation.

This study examines the direct and indirect effects of corporate social responsibility disclosure (CSRD) on profitability, with a focus on the role of company size as a mediator. The impact of CSRD and company size on profitability and CSRD on company size was examined using panel data regression for 48 companies listed on the Palestine Stock Exchange between 2012 and 2023. In addition, Baron and Kenny’s method was used to evaluate the mediation effect. The analysis was repeated using the one-step generalised method of moments to address potential endogeneity issues. The results reveal a significant positive relationship between CSRD, company size, and their impact on profitability, as well as a significant positive correlation between CSRD and company size. Furthermore, the findings show that the relationship between CSRD and profitability in Palestinian companies is partially mediated by company size. The research outcomes are significant for experts and policymakers on corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure policies and profitability. The positive results may lead to enhancing CSR disclosure policies within Palestinian companies and adopting sustainable practices that benefit society and the environment. This, in turn, may increase the chances of Palestinian companies of attracting investments.

This article advances a story-driven, theoretical exploration of how entanglements of agony, exile and Land relations can reconfigure understandings of justice. Opening with autobiographical vignettes of “in-betweenness”, the article illuminates the unfolding of exilic life between Palestine and North America, naming the ruptures of writing about Palestine from afar as an ethical site of dwelling in the middle. Drawing on relational ontology, Indigenous and decolonial scholars, alongside posthumanist and new materialist thinkers, the article highlights convergences and dissonances in conceptualising Land as more than property: as kin, teacher and agentive being. From such relationality, this article argues that Land-bodied rights offer a framework for rethinking justice and education beyond the abstract, hierarchical assumptions of universal human rights, grounding learning in human and more-than-human relations. The final section explores diffractive pedagogies, suggesting that storytelling and more-than-human educational entanglements can foster an ethic of reciprocity and accountability towards the more-than-human justice. In envisioning rights through rupture, environmental education can become a site where ecological and decolonial justice are rethought and enacted through relational, Land-based and story-driven pedagogies.

Scholars are increasingly interrogating distinctions between ‘war time’ and ‘peace time’, but what happens when time itself becomes a weapon of war or, even, a model of conflict response. Focusing on the case study of the first armed UN mission, the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) to Sinai and the Gaza Strip during the 1956 Suez Crisis, I examine the mission’s attempt to replace the Israeli invasion and establish an open-ended international administration on the Gaza Strip. Using archival documents and photographs, this paper explores how UN operations in Palestine shaped temporal assumptions about the population and the conflict. I argue that the Suez Crisis ruptured an UN-managed temporal paralysis on the Gaza Strip which opened up opportunities for new futures in Gaza, as well as anxiety to return to controlled paralysis. Examining both Palestinian and international reactions to the UN occupation, I show how the ‘Gaza exception’ policy transformed international perceptions of the region – its past, present, and future. Thus, by focusing on the moment of the brief UN occupation, I argue that this international intervention shifted global perceptions of the strip from a ‘frozen’ site of past conflict into a space of unfinished ownership and future potentiality.

For the Palestinian people, psychic life is just as much a site of struggle for liberation as social life. Palestinians are persistently refused psychological amplitude, characteristics easily granted to those who are never worried they might fall out of what is constituted as the category of the human. Abdaljawad Omar’s writings in English published since October 7, 2023 (as well as writings by other Palestinians, other Arabs, and those of Palestinian descent) offer means of understanding material resistance in relation to the terrain of the psyche. Omar offers distinctive accounts of mourning, loss, and ruins, as well as of how settler colonialism reorganizes experiences of time and relations between past, present, and future. The article reads Omar’s writings against other accounts of mourning and of psychic phenomena that are indebted to psychoanalysis. Omar’s analyses of Palestinians’ resistance to unfreedom and annihilation open up other ways of understanding the psychic vicissitudes of those who suffer, grieve, and struggle to exit a colonial condition characterized by the colonizer’s repeated attempts to break psychic worlds as well as erase bodily life. Understandings of psychic life that do justice to how Palestine is redrawing the world are central to the work of ‘cracking history open’.