Editor's Note

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/arabstudquar.38.4.0638
• Pages: 638-638
• Published date: 01 October 2016
• Date: 01 October 2016

www.plutojournals.com/asq/

EDITOR’S NOTE

This issue includes one article, an interview with the Palestinian poet Mourid

Barghouti, and a special Review Symposium of Elia Zureik’s new work on Israel’s

colonial project in Palestine. The article, review, and symposium remind us of the

centrality of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and emigration in times of crises and war.

Murat Agdemir’s “All Quiet on the Western Front: The Outcome of Israel’s

2015 March Elections and the Peace Process” discusses the prospects for peace

within the two-state framework. The author concludes that the extreme right-wing

make up of the recent Netanyahu government and the movement of the Israeli

public toward the right wing, dim the prospects for peace.

In Tahrir Hamdi’s “The Power of Poetry to Travel: An Interview with Mourid

Barghouti,” the Palestinian poet discusses the role of poetry in social and political

change: “poetry works like a slow-release medicine for the mind and the soul of

the receiver. It doesn’t have an immediate effect, but it stays there and then it trav-

els ... and then one hundred years later, the Tahrir Square in Egypt and the

Bourgeba Street in Tunisia are rocking with his ‘If the people one day will to live/

then destiny must respond.’” Barghouti discusses resistance, the works of other

writers and poets from Yeats to Kanafani, and how their works still influence gen-

erations after their passing.

A symposium on Elia Zureik’s “Israel’s Colonial Project in Palestine: Brutal

Pursuit (Routledge 2016), edited by Fouad Moughrabi, features comments by sev-

eral writers (Hamid Dabashi, Helga Tawil-Souri, Adi Ophir, Thomas Abowd,

Elaine Hagopian, and Magid Shihade) on the work with a rejoinder by Elia Zureik.

As Moughrabi states in his introduction to the symposium section, “[i]f there is

any doubt that a paradigm shift has occurred in the discourse on Israel/Palestine,

professor Zureik’s brilliant new book puts it to rest.”