An international Conference | 4-5 October 2025 | University of Macedonia | Thessaloniki - Greece
Israeli leaders have in recent years spoken much about the prospect of “peace” and “normalization” between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Not only is “a deal” said to be imminent, but has also been touted as politically and culturally transformative. In the words of Benyamin Netanyahu: “It will encourage other Arab states to normalize relations with Israel. It will enhance the prospects of peace with the Palestinians. It will encourage a broader reconciliation between Judaism and Islam.” (Speech to UNGA, 2023). Seemingly, Saudi Arabia holds the key to the Arab world and Islam. However, Saudi recognition of Israel remains elusive. Saudi Arabia has spoken out against it and fielded other proposals: The Arab peace initiative of 2002, as well as recent statements insisting on a Palestinian state as a precondition for accepting Israel. Yet, the mirage of imminent “normalization” persists, surviving wars, governments and presidencies. In Israeli political thinking, the establishment of relations with Saudi Arabia appears less like a political prospect than a political imaginary: a projection of long held wishes and aspirations. This paper historicizes the Israeli understanding of Saudi Arabia by going to the origins of Saudi- Zionist diplomacy in the colonial Middle East. In the 1930s, Zionist leaders used British imperial networks to establish clandestine contacts with envoys of Saudi Arabia the hope of striking a deal over Palestine. Among their proposals were the transfer of Palestinians to the Arabian Peninsula, paying the King to give them Palestine, and even to plant trees, making the desert kingdom bloom like a Zionist moshav. None of these ideas came to fruition. However, as historical comparisons, they offer tremendous insight into Zionism’s understanding of Saudi Arabia. By drawing on Saudi, Israeli and British documents, this paper proposes new historical parallels and offers much-needed cultural context to modern-day Israel’s understanding of Saudi Arabia. In doing so, it engages with IR literature,1 as well as historical accounts produced in Israel and Saudi Arabia.
In recent years, the Palestinian solidarity movement has emerged as a significant pillar of leftist organizing worldwide. Worldwide, a mass movement innovated in its support for Palestine, ranging from direct actions to encampments to boycotts to mass protests. Drawing on a diverse range of sources from around the world, this paper aims to examine the growing support for Palestine. In this paper, I argue that the Palestinian solidarity movement today builds upon the past, which envisioned a militant struggle to liberate Palestine, to today’s model of civil engagement that centers the Palestinian struggle within liberal and leftist discourses of liberation, situated in the future. The reinvigorated pro-Palestine movement builds upon earlier movements in the 1960s and 1970s, a period in which the Palestinian movement entered leftist organizing spaces. While the movement in the 1960s and 1970s drew its support from students, leftist militant groups, and artists, the newer iteration shifted away from militancy to a spectrum that included students, artists, and activists. While the movement differed significantly from earlier models, it reflected the historical changes within the Palestinian movement itself. This paper engages with and builds upon a body of work on the Palestinian solidarity movement from the 1960s to the present day. It approaches this question from a transnational perspective, centering first and foremost on the Palestinian voices demanding their liberation from occupation. I engage with a corpus of materials to excavate the history of Palestine solidarity movements and how past iterations influence contemporary ones. For the twentieth century, I look at magazines, pamphlets, flyers, and posters to engage with the rich history of Palestine solidarity. Palestine solidarity in the present era has reached new levels of engagement through the power of social media, enabling Palestinians both within and outside historic Palestine to connect with people worldwide. For the twenty-first century, I use similar sources and add the important inclusion of social media posting and other digital media.
The explicit and ostentatious support shown for Israel by European far-right parties has caught the eye of academics and commentators alike. Indeed, to see far-right parties, some with a well-documented history of anti-Semitism, align themselves with Israel is both a perplexing and counterintuitive development. Clearly, this was not always the case, and my paper traces the shifts and changes that have taken place within the West European far right vis-à-vis Israel/Palestine. Through analysing European Parliament (EP) debates related to Israel/Palestine between 1979 – the first year Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) were directly elected – up until the end of the most recent EP parliamentary term in 2024, my paper shows how an ambiguous if not hostile position has turned into outright if not fanatical support for Israel over recent decades. This shift has occurred in unison with attempts by some far-right parties to ‘de-demonise’ their image and present a more respectable face, targeting instead a more suitable enemy in the form of ‘the Muslim’. This has been coupled with an attempt to essentially outsource anti-Semitism onto the Muslim ‘other’ and re-signify anti-Semitism as a uniquely Muslim problem. However, my paper also shows how this shift has been partial, with parts of the unreformed and traditional extreme right remaining firm in their rejection of Israel. The paper thus shows how support for Israel is not an inevitable outcome for all far-right parties, as some display much less interest in such a transformation. Ideological and strategic divisions within the far right, in other words, determine the degree to which far-right parties decide to support and defend Israel.
The present paper shifts focus from the broader geopolitical dimensions of the war to the discursive and ideological battlegrounds that surround it—specifically, the instrumentalization of narratives around victimhood, identity, and legitimacy. In particular, it critically examines the role of the Israeli Embassy in Athens, Greece, and the Central Israeli Council of Greece in appropriating the rhetoric of "victimhood nationalism" as a central pillar of a wider disinformation strategy. Rather than merely a reactive communication strategy, this rhetorical posture represents a systematic and proactive campaign to frame public discourse, both locally and transnationally. Drawing on the concept of alethocide—the deliberate destruction of truth—as articulated by Marc Owen Jones (2025), to frame its central argument. If, as the adage goes, truth is the first casualty of war, then disinformation—understood as the intentional dissemination of falsehoods (Wardle and Derakshan, 2017)—is not simply incidental; it is a weapon deployed to obliterate truth, distort perception, and engineer consent. In this sense, disinformation is not peripheral to state violence but constitutive of it. Employing a mixed-methods approach that combines cross-media ethnography with theoretical frameworks from colonial, settler colonial, and genocide studies, this research interrogates a series of media outputs—including official statements, public speeches, opinion pieces, and social media campaigns—produced by the aforementioned Israeli institutions in Greece. Through detailed analysis, the paper reveals a strategic disinformation campaign marked by the dissemination of atrocity propaganda, the systematic dehumanization of Palestinians, and the delegitimization of humanitarian organizations and their work. These efforts are not only designed to justify Israel's military actions but also to shape Greek public opinion in ways that align with the state's political objectives. Furthermore, this paper argues that such disinformation campaigns do more than merely obscure the realities of state violence—they play a constitutive role in the construction of alternative epistemologies that normalize, rationalize, and ultimately legitimize genocidal practices. In this way, disinformation becomes both a mask and a mechanism of state violence: it conceals atrocities while simultaneously building the discursive scaffolding that renders them politically and morally acceptable to target audiences.
This paper examines antisemitism in Greece in the context of the 2023 Gaza incursion, based on an original mixed-methods research project. It combines data from 252 structured online questionnaires (conducted between 20 December 2024 and 13 January 2025), seven semi-structured interviews with academics and international relations analysts (12–28 December 2024), and a content analysis of electronic media during the same period. The study explores how international events influence Greek attitudes toward Jews and Israel, and how local media either reinforce or deconstruct related stereotypes. Special attention is placed on the historical high levels of antisemitism recorded in Greece, which remain among the highest in Europe. The paper traces the historical roots of antisemitism—from medieval religious hostility and 19th-century racial theories to the Holocaust—and situates current attitudes within the framework of “new antisemitism,” often linked to criticism of Israeli state policies. Findings highlight the influence of religious narratives and conspiracy theories about Jewish power in shaping antisemitic beliefs in Greek society. A notable contradiction emerges between the small size of the Jewish community in Greece today and the intensity of negative rhetoric directed against it. At the same time, historical instances of Jewish rescue and solidarity are acknowledged, illustrating the complex and ambivalent relationship between Greek society and its Jewish element. Methodologically, the study triangulates quantitative and qualitative data to ensure reliability and depth. Questionnaire responses reveal that Middle East conflicts can exacerbate antisemitic attitudes, particularly among individuals prone to conspiracy thinking or with limited historical knowledge. However, many respondents distinguish between criticism of Israeli policy and generalized prejudice against Jews. Interview insights and media analysis show that coverage of the Gaza conflict often plays a significant role in shaping public perceptions, either by amplifying stereotypes or promoting balanced narratives. In conclusion, the paper argues that antisemitism in Greece remains a complex phenomenon shaped by historical, political, religious, and media-related factors. It calls for ongoing research, the promotion of intercultural and interfaith dialogue, and longitudinal studies to track the evolution of public attitudes toward Jews over time.
This paper examines how the British and Greek Left responded ideologically and discursively to the rise of Hamas and Islamist politics during the first Palestinian intifada and the Oslo Accords (1987–1995). Despite the global focus on Palestine at the time, academic research has largely overlooked leftist reactions to the emergence of political Islam. The paper argues that these responses were shaped by a mix of ideological commitments, geopolitical concerns, and shifting attitudes toward Islamism. While the Left traditionally supported the Palestinian cause as a secular national liberation movement, the appearance of Hamas complicated this stance by introducing religion into revolutionary resistance. This challenged the Marxist-secular frameworks that had long defined leftist thought, prompting internal debates and reassessments. Using a political-historical approach, the study analyzes a range of primary sources—party publications, internal memos, media articles, and archival materials—from key British and Greek leftist groups, including the Labour Party, SWP, KKE (Interior), and other communist parties. These sources reveal that leftist responses were far from unified. Some viewed Hamas as a regressive force incompatible with secular values, while others saw it as a justified reaction to the failures of secular Palestinian leadership and the Israeli occupation. The ambiguity deepened during the Oslo process, which many leftists suspected of serving Western rather than Palestinian interests. By exploring how different leftist currents interpreted Hamas, this paper sheds light on the broader tensions between Western leftist movements and political Islam. It aims to offer a more nuanced understanding of how ideological solidarity and geopolitical realities intersected during a critical moment in Middle Eastern and global political history.
The aftermath of October 7, 2023, marked a pivotal shift in global political discourse surrounding the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, with Germany emerging as a critical site of contested narratives. This paper is part of an independent research exploring the intensification of Islamophobia within Germany’s socio-political landscape through the theoretical lens of critical discourse analysis (CDA), especially through the model of Norman Fairclough, and attempts to critically examine the German political discourse of the dominant parties in the German parliament (CDU, SPD, AFD) and their stance on the Palestinian Question after October 2023. The analysis begins by tracing historical parallels between antisemitic narratives of the 20th century and contemporary Islamophobic discourse, and explores how Jews were historically cast as outcasts. In addition, it delves into the newly emerging notion of “imported antisemitism”, which has been increasingly invoked in German public discourse and connected with the rise of the German far-right party AFD that uses it to attribute antisemitic attitudes to migrant communities. This narrative, while seemingly advocating for Germany’s historical responsibility towards Jewish communities after the Holocaust, often functions as an excuse to racialize and stigmatize Muslim populations in Germany, reinforcing Islamophobic tropes and viewing them as securitized threats. Furthermore, this post-nationalist discourse, echoing the theory of Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” is not an exclusively German phenomenon and draws parallels with the discourse of Marine Le Pen in France and of Donald Trump in the United States. The paper concludes by reflecting on the implications of this discourse for Germany’s democratic values and academic freedom. It argues that the rising suppression of dissident voices along with the creation of a climate of moral panic reinforcing Islamophobic tropes and anti-immigration policies constitutes a form of epistemic violence that undermines Germany’s “firewall policy”, the democratic ideals that the country has represented after WW2 and the very foundations of the European Union, as Germany remains one of its more prominent members.
This study explores how international political crises impact scientific and academic freedom with a particular focus on the implications of developments following October 7, 2023 in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict for academic exchange in Türkiye. It asks whether and how these developments have affected the ‘free, independent, and critical’ character of academic communication and deliberation. Based on semi-structured interviews with 58 subject-expert faculty members at universities in Ankara, Istanbul, and Izmir, the research pursues two core questions: first, whether the post-October 7 political climate has influenced how these academics interact with other university stakeholders (e.g. students, departmental boards, university admissions); and second, whether such changes reflect broader transformations in academic freedom and critical thinking, especially on politically sensitive topics like the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The October 7 aftermath has amplified the sensitivity of this conflict across global academic institutions, prompting administrative, bureaucratic, and societal interventions into scholars' engagements with the issue. These dynamics underscore the need to revisit the relationship between internationally sensitive political issues and academic freedom. Existing literature reveals that academic freedom is never absolute; its scope is shaped by the broader socio-political context, especially in times of crisis. Crises activate various political and intellectual actors—elites, media, the public—to delineate the acceptable boundaries of academic discourse. Academic freedom, therefore, emerges as both a norm and a site of contestation within shifting discursive milieus. Positioned within this theoretical framework, the paper examines Türkiye as a revealing case where state authoritarianism, ideological polarisation, and strong political consensus intersect. While deeply divided politically, Turkish society has coalesced around a strong pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli stance that cuts across secular, conservative, leftist, right-wing, Turkish, Kurdish, liberal, and nationalist lines. In a context where state control over traditionally independent institutions is increasing, this consensus may function as a mechanism that redefines the permissible boundaries of scientific debate. Türkiye thus offers a critical lens through which to understand how international crises reshape academic freedom in authoritarian and polarised settings.
This paper will examine how in the wake of October 7th 2023 and the start of the war in Gaza, certain terms and phrases became clear battle grounds for ideological and social positioning between religious communities in the UK. Terms such as ‘Zionist,’ ‘Fascist,’ ‘resistance,’ and ‘terrorist’ have lost their descriptive purpose, instead becoming increasingly markers of positionality within and between communities – indeed sometime the same term such as ‘Zionist’ have meant totally different things, with different connotations to different faith communities. Instead of being used as a starting point of discussions, such terms instead became a barrier to dialogue and a means of labelling and delegitimizing the views of others. This paper is based on research carried out over the last year with interfaith and faith groups in the UK as part of a research project at the Woolf Institute in Cambridge, entitled ‘How To Continue Talking.’ As part of this work, over 40 semi-structured interviews were held with participants to understand the impact of the current round of violence in Israel and Palestine has impacted interfaith communities in the UK. Additionally, a number of informal conversations, ethnographic engagement, a roundtable, and an interactive event allowed us to collect further data from communities. Engaging with the fields of sociolinguistics, conflict studies, as well as a burgeoning literature around interfaith relations, this paper would bring together several strands from these fields to aid our understanding of how language can be used and weaponised to shut down legitimate discussion and criticism of this most recent phase of the Israel-Palestine conflict.
In this paper, I work to understand the articulation and embodiment of sovereignty by way of social reproduction for those living under settler colonialism and military occupation in Palestine. The current scholarship on social reproduction focuses on women’s roles regarding childbearing and caring for children and/or the community. However, a different means by which social reproduction influences life and politics is through cultural continuity/preservation in the face of dispossession and erasure. In this paper, I look at the ways in which women, through their everyday practices of survival, create a politics of life, through social reproduction. I expand on Didier Fassin and Ilana Feldman’s work by focusing on social reproduction as a gendered politics of life, a politics that seeks to understand how ordinary women operate within their everyday lives and unintentionally “act politically.” I argue that this politics of life is an embodiment of a sovereignty not bound by borders and governments. Furthermore, that women’s work with Palestinian embroidery is a gendered politics of life and an articulation and embodiment of Indigenous Palestinian sovereignty. Indigenous and Global South scholars refer to Western sovereignty as Westphalian sovereignty because it erases Indigenous sovereignty that is not necessarily based on borders; instead the latter is focused on history, experiences, and traditions connecting Indigenous communities to their land and space. This paper examines the ways in which the cultural practice of embroidery has become the globally used representation of Palestine and is inherent within the Palestinian political consciousness producing a non-statist sovereignty. I have discovered that these women are embroidering the very cultural materials that hold up a nation and a fragmented people and it is in this way that they articulate sovereignty. The women who embroider the pieces that carry Palestine all over the world would not be considered politically active since they are unseen, their work is done in silence and at home, but their work is the backbone of Palestinian culture and heritage. Embroidery serves as material expression of Palestinian experience, history, and identity.
Drawing on the argument that political cartoons serve as a site of metaphorical struggle, where meanings are negotiated, contested and transformed, this paper explores the multimodal representation of Palestine in political cartoons disseminated on X (former Twitter) in October 2023. The Israeli War on Gaza has reignited global tensions, dominated digital discourses, and generated an overwhelming volume of visual and textual content. Conceptually, political cartoons fusing text and image construct complex sociopolitical narratives (Danjoux, 2018; Van den Hoven & Schilperoord, 2017; Dugalich, 2018), while they also serve as a form of political expression that is widely distributed from print to the web (Bourdon & Boudana, 2016). Given that visual and multimodal metaphors in political cartoons play a significant role in constructing powerful representations of the depicted actor (Kitsiou & Papadopoulou, 2021; Alousque, 2013), this paper seeks to explore how Gaza and the Palestinians are represented in such cartoons. Specifically, the paper investigates which verbal and/or visual metaphors are used to construct Gaza as a social actor. The corpus was created in June 2024 and was a larger study (see Koulianou, 2024; Koulianou, Kitsiou & Papadopoulou, forthcoming). Drawing on Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) and Critical Metaphor Analysis (Charteris-Black, 2004; Musolff, 2012; Van Leeuwen, 2014), this corpus-based analysis focuses on a sample of seven political cartoons collected from X under the hashtag #Gazagenocide. The analysis showed that various modes are used to construct Palestine and, more specifically, Gaza as an innocent, child-like, bleeding body; a blood pool; a death breakfast; and Palestinians as terrorists who attacked/bombed babies or children while depicting other countries’ indifferent stance towards the situation. The analysis highlights red color as a recurring symbol in the cartoons indexing blood in various metaphors (bleeding body, blood juice, blood pool, Gaza inscription in red, red bombing sky) that construct the sociopolitical situation in the aftermath of the events of October 7th, 2023, as a ‘genocide'. This paper contributes to the broader discourse of the power of visual metaphors in shaping public perception and political discourse, emphasizing the role of social media as a platform for visual resistance and metaphorical struggle.
Public commemoration of the dead is an established social and political practice across countries and nations. In most cases, monuments are raised by authorities for national heroes and figures who play an essential role in the construction and maintenance of national narratives. Over time, these monuments; busts, statues or murals become part of the cultural heritage of the city, and country. Public commemoration of the dead, however, is an equally prevalent practice amongst subordinate or marginalized social and political groups, that erect images of deceased persons of communal significance on the walls of their neighborhoods as an act of remembrance and of resistance to dominant (national) histories. Our paper discusses the self-authorized action of making a mural for Bashar and Haytham, two Palestinian brothers who were recently killed in Gaza, on a wall situated in the Athenian neighborhood of Exarcheia, in the spring of 2025. It reflects on the multiple ways that this mural can act politically, both locally in the area of Exacheia, and trans-locally, in the context of the international struggle against the genocide in Gaza and the wider movement of solidarity with Palestinian people, while also acting as a necessary place of mourning amidst the ongoing genocide.
The paper presents and discusses the project Mushtabik, which was born and developed in Palestine, in 2024-2025, during the war. Mushtabik is a multidisciplinary artistic and research project that explores the relationship between the body and the political event, reimagining how our lived experiences and stories can be articulated, especially within the context of Palestine. At its core, Mushtabik is an exploration of how the body, as a living archive, reflects the impact of ongoing colonial violence. The project challenges the conventional notion of the body as a passive recipient of violence, presenting it instead as a site of memory, resistance, and rapture. By examining how violence becomes embodied, Mushtabik interrogates how these events are sedimented into physical experience. The project does not rely on traditional documentary work; instead, it merges embodied experience with text, sound, image, and performance. We utilize a variety of sources and materials in our research and creative practice, including images and archives of violence, audio recordings, bodily experiments, movement, and performance. We engage with daily visual documentation, such as media coverage, social media posts, and surveillance footage, as well as testimonies gathered through interviews and group conversations. Our approach is hybrid and flexible, combining performance, music composition, image-making, and bodily improvisation. The project engages in the ongoing intellectual discussions about resistance, the intellectual war, the role of art in confronting oppressive systems, and the coloniality of knowledge. Mushtabik aims to be an active participant in the intellectual and cultural resistance against the oppression endured by the Palestinian people, offering a new form of interaction where the body becomes a site of memory and resistance. Through this, we seek to contribute to the ongoing debates, reframe how we think about resistance, the role of the body in wars, and the ways in which art can serve as a counter-narrative to media and historical distortion.
This article brings together settler colonial studies, political theory, and existentialist philosophy to introduce the concept of 'pessoptimist politics,' a distinctive mode of Palestinian resistance shaped by both historical struggle and political constraint. Drawing inspiration from Emile Habiby’s literary figure of the “pessoptimist,” this framework describes a political sensibility that avoids both despair and naïve optimism. Instead, it articulates a pragmatic yet principled response to global structures of injustice. Pessoptimist politics is defined by hesitant pragmatism—a form of resilience and strategic resistance under the harsh conditions of an anti-indigenous global order. Tracing the development of Palestinian political thought, the article examines a shift from an early revolutionary, Fanonian commitment to dismantling settler colonialism to a more cautious realism. This change, however, is not interpreted as ideological defeat, but as a necessary adaptation to asymmetrical power. Rather than abandoning decolonial aspirations, Palestinian thinkers and leaders recalibrate them through a sober recognition of their political circumstances. This reality produces what the article terms indigenous double consciousness: a condition in which revolutionary ideals clash with the survivalist logic of pragmatism. Unlike Du Bois’s Black double consciousness, which speaks to a psychic division within the self, the indigenous version reflects a strategic duality between anticolonial desire and political necessity. Here, compromise is driven not by ideological concession but by an attempt to limit harm. Using Brian Rathbun’s notion of pragmatic realpolitik, the article explores how this political logic plays out in the autobiographical and political writings of figures like Hanan Ashrawi and Sari Nusseibeh. Their reflections, especially around the Oslo Accords, highlight the tensions between visionary politics and survival-driven choices. In doing so, their work illuminates the form and function of pessoptimist politics amid the settler colonial impasse.
This paper reflects on the events of 7 October 2023 and the ongoing genocide in Gaza as historical ruptures that demand a critical re-examination of the paradigms that have dominated critical scholarship on Palestine over the last two decades: the frameworks of settler colonialism, indigeneity, and apartheid. The paper asks what these paradigms, which contributed to dislodge the problematic “conflict” lens, continue to offer, and what by contrast they elide. By situating the emergence of these paradigms in the post-Oslo historical context, the paper argues that they arose within a political landscape still dominated by the hegemonic project of the “peace process.” Such project, based on false notions of “compromise” and “dialogue,” was only abandoned as a result of Hamas’ Al Aqsa Flood operation. The paper argues that, as we now enter a new phase of the Zionist project in Palestine, we will see the emergence of new conceptual and analytical lenses. First, the paper traces the historical development of the analytical categories in question within knowledge production on Palestine, through an analysis of academic publications, human rights reports, and critical media coverage. Second, it asks which elements of these categories stand the test of time, and specifically the test of the historical rupture represented by Al Aqsa Flood. It ends with a reflection, inspired by the writings of Antonio Gramsci and Walter Benjamin, on the relationship between theory, politics, and historical transformation and its relevance for academic framings of the Palestine Question. In doing so, the paper advocates for a mode of critical scholarship that resists both co-optation and closure, remaining alive to the demands of justice in the face of ongoing dispossession.
For decades, the state of Israel has been said to face potentially imminent "destruction," a threat with wildly varying sources, all unquestioningly motivated by a shared, innate antisemitism. In this time of genocide — indeed, a time of unprecedented, actual destruction of Palestine — this paper explores how a settler moralization of nonviolence and conveniently defined notion of "destruction" serve as the foundation of an extremely influential peace orthodoxy, simultaneously laundering settler violence into non- or at least not violence and serving to foreclose even consideration of the only viable political solution in the region — decolonization. Drawing from Frantz Fanon's observation that "[the] native's work is to imagine all possible methods for destroying the settler," the paper insists on understanding the anti-colonial as encompassing but existing far beyond spectacular violence. In this sense, the project of 'destruction' Fanon evokes — so frequently distorted by critics and often inaccurately mobilized by the sympathetic — refers not merely to physical confrontation but to the comprehensive undoing of the colonial social order and the opening of new political futures. It is this possibility which undergirds the unspoken anxiety behind the Israeli “destruction” discourse — that what native resistance actually threatens to destroy is the position of domination that has come to be expected by Israelis. Ultimately, the paper calls for a reassessment of intellectual responsibility when engaging with colonial violence and anti-colonial struggle, emphasizing the necessity of frameworks that refuse settler colonial disavowal and that take seriously the radical, world-making potential embedded in the decolonial process unfolding in Palestine.
This paper engages with intellectual battles over the (often forgotten) Palestinian Bedouin community in the Naqab/Bi’r as-Saba’ region, Southern Historical Palestine, today’s Israel. While the community has received increased scholarly attention over the last decade or so, Orientalist, colonial and modernist legacies of Israeli anthropology and bedouinology (e.g. Bailey, 2002; Kressel, 1992; Marx, 1967; Meir, 1997) linger on, particularly in the literature on women and gender which struggles to overcome its modernist-developmentalist frame (e.g. Abu‐Rabia‐Queder, 2006; Abu-Rabia-Queder & Karplus, 2012; Degen 2003; Dinero, 1997, 2010; Pessate‐Schubert, 2004). Zionist and Israeli representations of the community continue to portray the Naqab Bedouin as ‘nomadic’, ‘backward’ and ‘distinct’ from the rest of the Palestinian community to support the settler-colonial claim that the Bedouin have no connections, claims or rights to the land (see Amara, 2016; Nasasra et al, 2014; Richter-Devroe, 2016). Here, I take the highly political field of the medical as a lens to unpack Israeli gendered representations of the Naqab Bedouin. Biomedicine is core to Israel’s modernization project: the native Palestinian Bedouin population is presented as in need of modernization, medicalization and hospitalization in order to cure them from their ‘pre-modern’ disease and assimilate them into modern nation-state structures. Biomedical discourse thus serves to surveil, control and construct the Palestinian Bedouin as ‘savage other’ while upholding the state’s claims of health equality (Razon, 2016). But in Israel, biomedicine is not only part of a nationalist-modernist project, it is also inherently settler-colonial: Israel needed to medicalize Bedouin women and men to gather medical knowledge on these ' foreign' colonized bodies, and their hospitalization served the Israeli project of settling Bedouin lands. Complementing a critical in-depth analysis of Israeli medical documents, policies and scholarship on Bedouin health with my own ethnographic material collected in eight months of fieldwork in the Naqab between 2014 and 2016, I argue in this presentation that Israeli medical modernist discourse functions as a discursive guise for land expropriation, forced displacement and reproductive control and, as such, is central to the settler colonial project of “eliminating the native” (Wolfe, 2016).
This paper examines how drone violence functions within a settler colonial framework, focusing on the case of Israel/Palestine. By 2013, Israel had become the world’s largest exporter of drones, with over $4.6 billion in sales in eight years. While much attention has been drawn to the US-led ‘War on Terror’ and the war in Ukraine, this paper centres Israel’s drone industry as a product of, and contributor to, settler colonial domination. Drawing on Wolfe, Veracini, Puar, and Pappé, this paper argues that drones are not merely imperial tools – they are central to the logic of elimination that defines settler colonial regimes. In contrast to colonial systems rooted in extraction and dependency, settler colonialism depends on the removal, displacement, or containment of Indigenous populations. Drones enable this through their ability to monitor and kill from a distance, without risking troops, legal accountability, or international oversight. Their development and deployment are closely tied to Israel’s military-industrial complex, where violence becomes not only a method of control but also a profitable export. Israeli drones are developed and deployed to manage, dominate, and subjugate racialised civilians. Their use reflects Foucault’s Panopticon and Eyal Weizman’s ‘politics of verticality’, where control is exercised not only on land but through airspace – rendering Palestinian life hyper-visible, vulnerable, and exposed to violence. In Gaza, drones hover constantly, enforcing apartheid, ethnic cleansing, genocide and transfer. In the West Bank, they are embedded within a matrix of walls, checkpoints, surveillance towers, and settlements aimed at dispossession. Finally, this paper introduces a Settler Colonial Approach to International Law (SCAIL), developed in the author’s forthcoming book (Routledge, 2025), as a theoretical framework that builds on TWAIL but centres settler colonialism’s distinctive legal and spatial dynamics. Drawing on human rights reports, court documents, ICC judgments, journalistic investigations, and autoethnography, it argues that international law not only fails to constrain such violence, but repeatedly legitimises and facilitates it. Ultimately, the paper contends that drones cannot be understood apart from the settler colonial project that designs, tests, and markets them. They are not deviations from international law, but instruments of it. They are targeted by design.
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The Israeli war on Gaza that began after the Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023, has made humanitarian law a subject of intense debate around the world. Efforts to use international law instruments and institutions (notably at the International Court of Justice) to alter the course and character of the war have had little immediate impact, but they may reshape international law. Palestine’s place as a crucial cauldron for understanding how humanitarian law operates and how life and death is regulated and directed under this law predates this war and will extend beyond it. The Palestine instance reveals with exceptional clarity the tendency of humanitarian law to operate through conjecture. That is, humanitarian law often operates through deliberation and discussion about how law might be applied and what might be its effect. Its decisions are conditional in multiple ways. Conjecture leads to a proliferation of legalities. It is key to what Ardi Imseis calls “rule by law” rather than rule of law, a process through which law is used to produce and sustain inequity. In a form of negative expansion, acting in flagrant violation of law can expand permissibility and the generation of new law, rather than triggering enforcement of existing legal frameworks. This practice has ramifying global effects. This paper will explore conjecture at multiple junctures in Palestinian history, and in relation to several formulations of humanitarian law. Conjecture is crucial not only to how humanitarian law is made, but to how people are engaged by and invested in it, despite its evident failures. The paper will draw on my long-term ethnographic and archival research on Palestine and Palestinians, as well as the vast scholarship on humanitarian law, both in and beyond Palestine, to consider how people live, and also die, in the realm of this law.
The destruction of Gaza’s society has been perpetrated through the deployment of extreme violence and dovetailed with attendant overt genocidal rhetoric against Palestinians. Alongside a racialised register of genocidal rhetoric, Israel has mobilised a particularly unusual form of humanitarianism. ‘Humanitarian zones’, ‘humanitarian corridors’, ‘humanitarian bubbles’ and ‘humanitarian solution’ are all framings that have come directly from the Israeli settler state and military since October 7. While there has been recent attention to the role of international law as a tool to justify military violence in Gaza, this article builds on and adds to recent scholarship an examination of the function of humanitarianism in enabling one of the most intense genocidal wars in recent global history. To do so, I draw from the field of critical humanitarian studies and literature on the colonial history of genocides. Empirically, the article examines the humanitarian discourse of the Israeli settler body politic, as well as the patterns of military conduct of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT). The article therefore sketches a typology of strategies Israel has adopted to enable a colonial war of elimination. First, Israeli government ministers have explicitly advocated for a ‘humanitarian solution’ to denote the mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians into Egypt and beyond. Second, the Israeli-designated ‘humanitarian zone’ of al-Mawasi on the southwest coast of Gaza became an operational instrument to legitimise genocidal violence through the internment of Palestinians. A third strategy has been the establishment of new maritime corridors, the use of airdropped food parcels, and the testing of ‘humanitarian bubbles’ for the provision of aid, which ultimately led to the creation of the ‘Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’. Drawing on this typology of tactics, Israel has sought to implement an assemblage of genocidal practices – mass killings, expulsion, and starvation – within a humanitarian ethos of protecting civilians in wartime.