Advocating for Palestine in Canada


Book Description

Why is it so difficult to advocate for Palestine in Canada and what can we learn from the movement’s successes? This account of Palestine solidarity activism in Canada grapples with these questions through a wide-ranging exploration of the movement’s different actors, approaches and fields of engagement, along with its connections to different national and transnational struggles against racism, imperialism and colonialism. Led by a coalition of students, labour unions, church groups, left wing activists, progressive presses, human rights organizations, academic associations and Palestinian and Jewish community groups, Palestine solidarity activism is on the rise in Canada and Canadians are more aware of the issues than ever before. Palestine solidarity activists are also under siege as never before. The movement advocating for Palestinian rights is forced to contend with relentless political condemnation, media blackouts, administrative roadblocks, coordinated smear campaigns, individual threats, legal intimidation and institutional silencing. Through this book and the experiences of the contributing authors in it, many seasoned veterans of the movement, Advocating for Palestine in Canada offers an indispensable and often first-hand view into the complex social and historical forces at work in one of our era’s most urgent debates, and one which could determine the course of what it means to be Canadian going forward.




The Hundred Years' War on Palestine


Book Description

A landmark history of one hundred years of war waged against the Palestinians from the foremost US historian of the Middle East, told through pivotal events and family history In 1899, Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, mayor of Jerusalem, alarmed by the Zionist call to create a Jewish national home in Palestine, wrote a letter aimed at Theodore Herzl: the country had an indigenous people who would not easily accept their own displacement. He warned of the perils ahead, ending his note, “in the name of God, let Palestine be left alone.” Thus Rashid Khalidi, al-Khalidi’s great-great-nephew, begins this sweeping history, the first general account of the conflict told from an explicitly Palestinian perspective. Drawing on a wealth of untapped archival materials and the reports of generations of family members—mayors, judges, scholars, diplomats, and journalists—The Hundred Years' War on Palestine upends accepted interpretations of the conflict, which tend, at best, to describe a tragic clash between two peoples with claims to the same territory. Instead, Khalidi traces a hundred years of colonial war on the Palestinians, waged first by the Zionist movement and then Israel, but backed by Britain and the United States, the great powers of the age. He highlights the key episodes in this colonial campaign, from the 1917 Balfour Declaration to the destruction of Palestine in 1948, from Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon to the endless and futile peace process. Original, authoritative, and important, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine is not a chronicle of victimization, nor does it whitewash the mistakes of Palestinian leaders or deny the emergence of national movements on both sides. In reevaluating the forces arrayed against the Palestinians, it offers an illuminating new view of a conflict that continues to this day.




Canada as a Settler Colony on the Question of Palestine


Book Description

Canada as a Settler Colony on the Question of Palestine explores Canada-Palestine relations through a settler colonial lens. The authors argue that there are direct parallels between Canada’s settler colonial project and its support for the Israeli settler colonial dispossession of Palestinians. Chapters reflect on community politics and activism, migration, orientalism, and critical race theory. Among its unique contributions, the volume provides a fresh look at Canada’s foreign policy as informed and shaped by its own history of settler colonialism. The collection also illuminates the breadth and depth of Palestinian life in Canada. Throughout, the chapters are connected by common themes of settler colonial destruction, dispossession, segregation, and otherness, as well as accounts of people challenging those processes in search of a better and fairer world. The book will be of interest to scholars in Indigenous Studies, International Relations, Peace and Conflict Studies, Canadian Studies, Palestine Studies, and beyond. Contributors: Samer Abdelnour, Nadia Abu-Zahra, Rachad Antonius, Lina Assi, M. Muhannad Ayyash, Peige Desjarlais, Randa Farah, Azeezah Kanji, Maurice Jr. Labelle, Nadia Naser-Najjab, Emily Regan Wills, Mira Sucharov, Jeremy Wildeman. Foreword by Veldon Coburn.




Palestine Peace Not Apartheid


Book Description

PRESIDENT CARTER'S COURAGEOUS ASSESSMENT OF WHAT MUST BE DONE TO BRING PERMANENT PEACE TO ISRAEL WITH DIGNITY AND JUSTICE TO PALESTINE




Except for Palestine


Book Description

A bold call for the American Left to extend their politics to the issues of Israel-Palestine, from a New York Times bestselling author and an expert on U.S. policy in the region In this major work of daring criticism and analysis, scholar and political commentator Marc Lamont Hill and Israel-Palestine expert Mitchell Plitnick spotlight how holding fast to one-sided and unwaveringly pro-Israel policies reflects the truth-bending grip of authoritarianism on both Israel and the United States. Except for Palestine deftly argues that progressives and liberals who oppose regressive policies on immigration, racial justice, gender equality, LGBTQ rights, and other issues must extend these core principles to the oppression of Palestinians. In doing so, the authors take seriously the political concerns and well-being of both Israelis and Palestinians, demonstrating the extent to which U.S. policy has made peace harder to attain. They also unravel the conflation of advocacy for Palestinian rights with anti-Semitism and hatred of Israel. Hill and Plitnick provide a timely and essential intervention by examining multiple dimensions of the Israeli-Palestinian conversation, including Israel's growing disdain for democracy, the effects of occupation on Palestine, the siege of Gaza, diminishing American funding for Palestinian relief, and the campaign to stigmatize any critique of Israeli occupation. Except for Palestine is a searing polemic and a cri de coeur for elected officials, activists, and everyday citizens alike to align their beliefs and politics with their values.




Burning Sugar


Book Description

In this incendiary debut collection, activist and poet Cicely Belle Blain intimately revisits familiar spaces in geography, in the arts, and in personal history to expose the legacy of colonization and its impact on Black bodies. They use poetry to illuminate their activist work: exposing racism, especially anti-Blackness, and helping people see the connections between history and systemic oppression that show up in every human interaction, space, and community. Their poems demonstrate how the world is both beautiful and cruel, a truth that inspires overwhelming anger and awe -- all of which spills out onto the page to tell the story of a challenging, complex, nuanced, and joyful life. In Burning Sugar, verse and epistolary, racism and resilience, pain and precarity are flawlessly sewn together by the mighty hands of a Black, queer femme. This book is the second title to be published under the VS. Books imprint, a series curated and edited by writer-musician Vivek Shraya, featuring work by new and emerging Indigenous or Black writers, or writers of color. This publication meets the EPUB Accessibility requirements and it also meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG-AA). It is screen-reader friendly and is accessible to persons with disabilities. A Simple book with few images, which is defined with accessible structural markup. This book contains various accessibility features such as alternative text for images, table of contents, page-list, landmark, reading order and semantic structure.




Systemic Islamophobia in Canada


Book Description

Systemic Islamophobia in Canada presents critical perspectives on systemic Islamophobia in Canadian politics, law, and society, and maps areas for future research and inquiry. The authors consist of both scholars and professionals who encounter in the ordinary course of their work the – sometimes banal, sometimes surprising – operation of systemic Islamophobia. Centring the lived realities of Muslims primarily in Canada, but internationally as well, the contributors identify the limits of democratic accountability in the operation of our shared institutions of government. Intended as a guide, the volume identifies important points of consideration that have systemic implications for whether, how, and under what conditions Islamophobia is enabled and perpetuated, and in some cases even rendered respectable policy or bureaucratic practice in Canada. Ultimately, Systemic Islamophobia in Canada identifies a range of systemically Islamophobic sites in Canada to guide citizens and policymakers in fulfilling the promise of an inclusive democratic Canada.




Resisting Domination in Palestine


Book Description

This meticulously curated edited volume presents an assemblage of insightful, critical, and contemporary perspectives on how Israeli domination has been sustained and reproduced in new forms and means using various mechanisms and techniques of control, coloniality, and settler colonialism. Based on original empirical fieldwork, the contributors to this book adopt interdisciplinary and decolonial approaches in their examination of the intricate functions and structures of domination that permeate Palestinian life by illuminating the power dynamics at play and revealing the mechanisms that sustain the settler-colonial regime. This book identifies sites of colonial control and domination exerted on Palestine by Israel, and demonstrates how these sites of control are also sites of Palestinian resistance. The first section explores the political sites of control by focusing on governmentality, institutions, and technologies and mechanisms of control including how Israel manages access to health, life and death. The second section examines the economic mechanisms of exploitation, dispossession, and de-development including banking, taxation and the relationships between finance capital, aid and military occupation. The third section turns attention to environmental sites of control, focusing on land, indigeneity, space and racial capitalism. Finally, section four scrutinizes the intellectual sites of control, highlighting how norms, narratives, and knowledge production perpetuate domination.




The One-State Solution


Book Description

"A clear, trenchant book on a topic of enormous importance . . . a courageous plunge into boiling waters. If The One-State Solution helps propel forward a debate that has hardly begun in this country it will have performed a signal scholarly and political function." ---Tony Judt, New York University ". . . a pioneering text. . . . [A]s such it will take pride of place in a brewing debate." ---Gary Sussman, Tel Aviv University "The words ‘The One-State Solution' seem to strike dread, at the least, or terror, at the most, in any established, institutional, or mainstream discourse having to do with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. . . . It therefore takes great courage---and I use the word literally---to title explicitly a book under that infamous label. . . . Virginia Tilley is blessed with such courage and complements it with the requisite academic erudition. . . . Weaving her way through the historical progression of Zionism and through late 20th century and current international and Middle Eastern politics, she shows how the additional, pernicious state of settlement expansion (abetted by other massive human rights violations that go with the occupation) has brought us to the point where only a one-state solution can provide a just peace (and not just a state of conflict management going under the misnomer of peace)." --- Anat Biletsky, Middle East Journal Recent events have once more put the Israeli-Palestinian issue on the front page. After decades of failed peace initiatives, the prospect of reconciliation is in the air yet again as the principal actors maneuver to end the conflict and---the world hopes---bring peace to the region. A one-state solution is a way toward that peace and needs serious, renewed consideration. The One-State Solution explains how Israeli settlements have encroached on the occupied territory of the West Bank and Gaza Strip to such an extent that any Palestinian state in those areas is unworkable. And it reveals the irreversible impact of Israel's settlement grid by summarizing its physical, demographic, financial, and political dimensions. Virginia Tilley elucidates why we should assume that this grid will not be withdrawn---or its expansion reversed---by reviewing the role of the key political actors: the Israeli government, the United States, the Arab states, and the European Union. Finally, Tilley focuses on the daunting obstacles to a one-state solution---including major revision of the Zionist dream but also Palestinian and other regional resistance---and offers some ideas about how those obstacles might be addressed. Virginia Tilley is Chief Research Specialist in the Democracy and Governance Division of the Human Resources Council in Cape Town, South Africa.




Solidarity Intervention


Book Description

All across the globe, individuals mobilize international support in defense of Palestinian rights and a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. However, these international activists are neither the beneficiaries of their efforts nor do they closely identify with the Palestinian population. Through an ethnographic analysis of social movement organizations and international activists active in the West Bank, this paper tries to understand the emergence of transnational collective action fighting for Palestinian rights since the second Intifada. To do so, this paper addresses structural as well as personal factors behind activists’ mobilization. Combining elements from social movement theory and Bourdieusian sociology, I conduct a meso-level inquiry of the principal solidarity organizations alongside a micro-level investigation of international volunteers participating in such organizational structures. Highlighting the specificity of transnational activism in the West Bank both in terms of opportunity structures and the lived experiences of international activists, I have tried to provide insight on how and why the Palestinian rights movement is able to gather so much international support.