Editorial Statement

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/bethunivj.36.2019.0073
• Published date: 01 January 2019
• Date: 01 January 2019
• Pages: 73-76
• Author: Jamil Khader

73 Bethlehem University Journal 36 (2019)

Editorial Statement

Whether Decolonization? Palestine, Shakespeare, Symbolic

Resistance

This special issue of the Bethlehem University Journal presents various articles

in the field of humanities, media and literary studies. The articles in this volume

offer important interventions in dominant historical, educational, media, and

literary discourses within both Palestinian and Israeli scholarly and institutional

practices in the context of the Ongoing Nakba (the Zionist project of ethnic

cleansing) in Palestine. The conversation among Palestinian scholars in this issue

centers not only around the dismantling and subversion of the founding myths

and ideologies of the Zionist settler-colonial project and Israeli occupation. As

equally important, the contributors to this volume also challenge and displace

some of the colonial structures of feeling and attitudes that have made their

way into Palestinian public discourses and networks of cultural production and

dissemination. They thus provide opportunities for self-critique, re-evaluation,

critical forms of cultural recovery, symbolic resistance, and the mapping of new

and alternative and counter-discourses and language. The current contradictions

that define the Palestinian condition thus require, more than ever, an engagement

with and interrogation of the actualized ideals and ideological underpinnings

of the narratives of liberation and decolonization, including the changing

relationship among knowledge, power, and the state.

In his article in this volume, Basem Ra’ad addresses in part the ways in which

ancient Palestinian history has been lost and destroyed by appropriative Western

and Zionist claim systems. These systems include falsified biblical narratives,

sacred geographies and Christian Zionist millennial prophecies. Although

these claim systems have been debunked by two centuries of scholarship and

archaeological discoveries, they still hold sway on the historical and archeological

establishment in Israel and the West. Nonetheless, Ra’ad notes, more recent

scholarship has shifted its focus from biblical archaeology and ancient Israel to

the history of Palestine.